^ THE ENGLISH DEMOCRACY ITS PROMISES AND PERILS THE ENGLISH DEMOCRACY L / ITS PROMISES AND PERILS zr. r.f. BY ARNOLD WHITE // AUTHOR OF PROBLEMS OF A GREAT CITY, ETC. LONDON SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO. PATERNOSTER SQUARE 1894 PREFACE POLITICAL power in the United Kingdom belongs to that portion of the population which contributes less than one-fourth of the total Imperial and local revenues, while the remainder contribute over three- fourths of the revenue, supply eleven-twelfths of the men who govern the Empire, and draw ninety-nine per cent, of the prizes of public life. Virtually a Re- public with an hereditary President, Great Britain lacks a written Constitution embodying the funda- mental principles of liberty, life, and ownership. The only existing safe-guard against despotism other than the racial common sense of the English people is a fragment of feudalism that has floated down from the Middle Ages to the edge of the Twentieth Century in the shape of an hereditary House, invested with legal power to oppose the will of an omnipotent, but never unanimous, proletariat. English democracy, having made goods and machinery for foreign nations during fifty years, acceded to power in time to discover that former customers have become its strongest rivals ; that in the lifetime of one man the mouths to be fed in Great Britain have increased from under eleven to nearly thirty-five millions ; that the Free Trade arranged in the interests of Capital that is poly- glot, mobile, and cosmopolitan, is not necessarily to the vi PREFACE. advantage of labourers chained to the spot by language, family, and circumstance. Politically omnipotent, the poorer classes in this country are directly responsible abroad for two hundred and ninety million inhabitants of a distant Empire : a burden never borne by Im- perial Rome in her prime, or by Russia to-day ; while at home democracy is horror-stricken by the spectre of want sitting permanently at the doorstep of in- numerable homes. While the avenues of subsistence are closing in every direction ; with the soil of the Colonial Empire, won by British blood and treasure, shut to the British pro- letariat ; our rulers are intent on achieving constitutional change in the shape of an incongruous system of lunar legislatures, that shall revolve without collision round the central planet of an Imperial Parliament. Although these changes are neither sought by the masses, nor calculated to feed the hungry or clothe the naked, the renewal of civil war is brought by them within the range of practical politics. Already on the edge of a precipice, statesmen continue to discuss without a smile new methods of voting, representation, and rating, as though there were virtue in such simples. All things are in the crucible. Opinions and prin- ciples, held by our fathers as settled forever, have lost all weight in losing the sanction of morality or religion. The decay of faith has raised physical comfort to the godhead, and while destroying the motive for resignation in trouble, has replaced belief in religion and duty, by an abiding sense of injustice against those who enjoy the good things of this life, and have leisure and imagination to cultivate the impression that beyond the grave their special destiny is to inherit eternal joy. PREFACE. vii The Church of England, torn with intestine strife, like other owners of property, is the object of ungovern- able greed, and the secular spirit of an ideal acknow- ledging neither God nor master, is ceasing to hold in reverence a priesthood it no longer dreads. Neither reward nor punishment beyond the grave retains its ancient power to deter men from evil, and to impel them towards good citizenship. A new social morality has accompanied the intro- duction of a new political economy. The socialism of Christ, which consisted in sharing with others, is re- placed by attempts to legalise spoliation ; and moral sanction is claimed for these efforts by spiritual leaders who, having lost control over the masses in the domain of theology, seek to recover influence over them in the dust and passion of party politics. Such are some of the conflicting currents through which English democracy is passing. Racial common sense ; the lives and examples of men who still prefer character to notoriety ; the increasing influence of good women ; the infusion of Jewish mind and thrift ; and the gradual recovery of reasoned conviction that the main lessons of our English Bible are true, and cannot be ignored with impunity by men or nations, are among the more hopeful elements in the prospect now opening before us. CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I. LOOKING BACK - 1 II. LOOKING ROUND 9 III. LOOKING FORWARD 22 IV. EXPERIMENTS - - 36 V. THE LEADERS OF DEMOS 63 VI. THE CROWN 93 VII. THE HOUSE OF LORDS - 103 VIII. THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 113 IX. THE PAROCHIALISATION OF INDIA 128 X. JEWISH INFLUENCE ON DEMOCRACY - {50 XI. THE OUTLOOK FOR WOMEN - 171 XII. THE MANUFACTURE OF THE UNEMPLOYABLE- 197* XIII. THE RELIGION OF THE IRRELIGIOUS - - 223. ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. CHAPTER I LOOKING BACK. THE inhumanity of man to man, and the selfish- ness of the governing classes, are no new in- cidents in the history of our country. When the King governed, Englishmen were subjected to a series of oppressive and grinding exactions, from which relief was obtained only by first reducing and then destroying the kingly power. Nor was the transfer of authority from the Crown to the men of family who controlled the destinies of this country for the period between the Revolu- tion and the first Reform Bill, marked by any increase in the altruism previously displayed by the ruling caste. The present generation has half forgotten the history of the Corn Laws, and 2 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. the struggle for their abolition is but an echo of the past. During the lapse of the half century when the middle classes were dominant, and the sway of machinery was firmly established on a profitable basis, under the influence of a school of economics more or less empiric in its teach- ing, selfishness was no less visible in the polity and under the administration of the Manchester School, than during the autocracy of the Tudors, or when political jobs were openly perpetrated by Walpole or the Grenvilles. Now that Demos has deposed his former masters, and, seated on the Throne, holds in his hands the power of unlimited experiment in social reform, there is no reason to believe that he will prove to be less self-centred than his forerunners. Democracy may become egotistic, venal, mercenary, and ungenerous, and still attain a higher pedestal of virtue than the dead lines of kings and states- men who have vanished from our ken. No looseness of morals, want of principle, or hardness of heart displayed by our rulers in the future, can exceed, even if they equal, the depravity and folly of our rulers in the past. If Demos be more cruel than those he has displaced, he has justifications they cannot plead. The statesmen of the eighteenth century plundered and op- pressed from ambition and cupidity ; not from LOOKING BACK. 3 the sting of want. If Democracy seeks to spoil the Classes of their luxuries in order to supply the Masses with essentials, it can at least offer the excuse that ransom is exacted for those who have no escape from want but by the exercise of political power only recently acquired. Since the Black Death of the fourteenth century, England has suffered no great calamity. It is unlikely that these islands will ever again become a mere pest house, or that in the face of sanitary science half the population will disappear in the course of an epidemic. If, however, the progress of knowledge has extended our dominion over certain natural forces, it is equally true that there have sprung into existence mysterious and hitherto unknown elements, the governing laws of which are at present unintelligible. We do not know enough to say with certainty whether the steam engine will prove a benefactor or not. Its advantages are obvious. Wealth by its means has obviously multiplied. But steam has done nothing towards the moralisation of wealth, and the problem of distribution seems to be more intractable and less capable of solution than ever. As long as foreigners were content to buy what England alone could manufacture, the fal- 4 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. lacies and baseless assumptions of Cobden and Bright were masked under a fugitive prosperity. But the time has arrived when not only the white races are our rivals, where formerly they were our customers, but Asiatics and even Africans successfully contest the field against us. In Japan there are upwards of sixty cotton mills, which are highly profitable to their owners. In Lancashire, profits from cotton mills are reduced to such a point that the creation of artificial scarcity by the stoppage in 1893 of 18,000,000 spindles, was scarcely resisted by the employers. Seeing that the Japanese, Chinese, and Hindoos are fast acquiring the in- dustrial skill formerly possessed by Lancashire alone, it does not require the gift of prophecy to perceive that, failing new markets or fresh inven- tion, the continuous decay, and even the final ex- tinction of the Lancashire cotton trade is but a matter of time. 1 That the process of extinction 1 Mr. S. Smith, M.P., in an address to his Constituents at Buckby on Jan. i5th, 1894, spoke as follows : A great portion of the machinery was wearing out. The employers were too poor to replace it with new machinery. It was gradually going down, and the best new machinery was going abroad to start industries competing with our own. He was told that only one-eighth of the machinery made in Lancashire was em- ployed in Lancashire ; the other seven-eighths went abroad to support industries competing with our own. His belief was that if they put to auction to-morrow all the cotton mills in LOOKING BACK. 5 may be retarded by the lessened cost of trans- port afforded by the opening of the Manchester Canal and the competition in rates begun by the railway companies, is highly probable. Im- proved machinery, greater economies, and suc- cessful lock-outs, may equally contribute to the prolongation of the struggle for existence. But manifest destiny cannot be dodged. The inex- haustible supply of voteless Hindoos, with wages of four annas for a twelve hours day and no holi- days, must in the long run ruin the Lancashire capitalist and his operatives, with the dead weight of their Living Wage, New Unionism, the Eight Hours Day, and the appreciation of gold continually increasing the burden of fixed charges. The tragedy that even now is rehearsing in the textile trade is likely before long to be played before even larger audiences. It is now too late to smash machinery. The folly and wickedness of those who destroyed the Spinning Jennies, the engines, and the printing machines at the time of their introduction, have been denounced with so unanimous a voice that it would be futile to sug- Lancashire, they would find that a very considerable portion of them were bankrupt. The consequence of this state of things was that in place of new capital coming into the trade it went to India, China, Japan, or South America. 6 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. gest that the ignorant peasants or delirious mechanics who obeyed the first instincts of their nature, were animated by a true sense of self- preservation, however careless they may have been of the future of the human race. The object of machinery is the saving of " hands." The Manchester Canal was excavated by five thousand men. Not less than one hundred thou- sand would have been required as the equivalent of the " steam navvies " and excavators which performed the main part of the work that has been so successfully and rapidly completed. It is largely owing to machinery that food and clothing are so cheap ; but never was there a time when many of those who famish for want of food and who shiver in rags were so numerous or so inno- cent of the causes that have thrust destitution upon them. The glutted market is the comple- ment of the empty stomach. Palliatives of Charity, Mansion House Committees, Parish Aid, State Aid, are still talked of as if there were hope in them. It cannot be very long before experiments will be tried that will dispel the illusion that any legislation or any outlay can change unfitness into fitness, or produce from the thistles of humanity the figs of industrial success. Disillusion might possibly result from small and tentative experiments, and it is therefore a matter LOOKING BACK. 7 for surprise that thoughtful men such as those who control the Charity Organisation Society, should use their influence to deter enthusiasts from attempting, on a moderate scale, relief works that will infallibly, and before long, be made a part of national policy, unless in the meantime wisdom is taught to our masters by less costly means. The enigmas of life introduced by the steam engine, have not been diminished by the start given to education. It seems to be an invari- able law that the manual work necessary in agriculture is never contentedly performed by educated people. In Ceylon, where sixty generations of cultivators have followed three o hundred generations of buffaloes in the same rice fields, vernacular education has snapped the chain that bound the Sinhalese for centuries to one ancestral calling. In India, the same phenomenon is observed. In the United States and in England, the more intelligent, the better educated the farmers' sons or the labourers may be, the more certain is it that they will forsake the old trade, and find in the great towns or across the sea, more congenial occupation than ploughing or ditching. Education and the labour of agriculture are as antipathetic as a horse to an elephant. Machinery, education, and the decay of faith, ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. all contribute to the development of selfishness in the dominant caste. Study of English history reveals the fact that, with insignificant exceptions, the ruling caste has consistently maintained the attitude dictated by self-interest. It is equally true that the new epoch we have entered is complicated by the existence of mysterious but unsolved problems undreamed of when the cen- tury was young, the solution of which is necessary unless men are to relapse into barbarism ; that unless invention, fresh markets, or a new organ- isation of Society, relieve the social pressure, physical distress is waiting round the corner of the century for millions of voters and their families who are innocent of the causes of their misery ; that education, while it has made the masses articulate, has indisposed them to partake in the manual labour, monotony, and loneliness of agri- culture, and has not made them unselfish ; and that we are probably on the eve of great experi- ments for bettering the lot of the destitute at the cost of the realised wealth of the kingdom. What those experiments may be, their results, and the personal, racial, sexual and religious influences that will accelerate or retard the pro- gress of democratic evolution, will be partly traced in the following pages. CHAPTER II. LOOKING ROUND. So numerous and popular are the anomalies that flourish on English soil, Saxon suspicion is apt % to be aroused by mere symmetry. Codified law and paper constitutions are constantly disparaged by capable men who have no interest in the maintenance of anomalies. During the discussion on Mr. Gladstone's second Home Rule Bill, it was not unusual to hear the famous tenth clause (admitting the right of Irish Members to control the details of English and Scottish affairs, while denying to English and Scottish Members recip- rocal power in Ireland) defended on the ground that it was an anomaly. The argument was as follows : Anomalies abound and work well in the British Constitution. The tenth clause is an anomaly. Therefore the tenth clause will work well, and should be adopted. We are the only civilised people in Europe io ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. without a written Constitution. Russia and Turkey are governed despotically, but they are not civilised. During the period of revolution and change that passed over Europe during the last century, the British Constitution was the admiration and envy of Continental observers. John Louis de Lolme said of our Constitution in 1784, that it was "a model of perfection." He was struck with admiration at the fine mechanism whereby revolution itself was on the side of law, and temperate reform replaced the wild impatience that convulsed the Continental nations, and diffused terror and calamity over Europe. For a thousand years our Constitution has been a growth. New desires and new interests on the part of the British people have gradually modified existing institutions. At no time have the primary prin- ciples upon which personal liberty and security to property depend been recorded in a verbal form. As the Duke of Argyll has said : " Their lives, their liberty, and their property depended on a code of accepted doctrines, which were nowhere recorded or expressed ; which were in fact like the air they breathed they were hardly conscious of it until it had been disturbed." The absence of a written Constitution, embodying the funda- mental principles of liberty, life, and ownership, which for so long has been the bulwark of the LOOKING ROUND. 11 race, is now our gravest danger. There is nothing to prevent a powerful demagogue in Parliament from passing, in a time of popular frenzy, a Bill declaring the abolition of the Crown, the establish- ment of a Single Chamber, the election of Judges. There is nothing in the British Constitution that would secure an appeal to the real conscience and judgment of the flower of the nation. Between the English people and anarchy there is nothing substantial but the proportion of power held by the owners of property, in excess of the power held by the destitute and disaffected. The form of government under which we live is of little importance compared with the spirit in which the administration of the laws is carried out. The ferment in our social condition, of which every observer is conscious, is largely the result of the fact that the real government of the country is no longer in the hands of those who nominally hold the reins of power. The Crown is obliterated as a Constitutional force. Such power as it still possesses is mainly personal to the present occupant of the Throne. The hereditary system of legislation in the Upper House is so far incongruous with democracy, that its very existence depends on its decisions concurring- with the opinions of a majority of the people. The first mistake made by the Lords as to the 1 2 ENGLISH DEMOCRA C Y. real feeling of the nation will be the signal for its death warrant. As regards the House of Commons, the de- gradation of the majority of the Members from the position of representatives to that of dele- gates, has weakened its authority, impaired its fame, and brought inextricable confusion into the Parliamentary system. The majority of the House of Commons, consisting of men of pro- perty, are no longer united in interests with their constituents, who are mostly wage-earners. The people accordingly retain in their own hands power that may be confided to representatives, but can never be trusted to delegates. The Roman people never allowed their tribunes to conclude anything definitely ; they, on the con- trary, reserved to themselves the right of ratifying any resolutions the tribunes might make. This was the very circumstance that rendered the institution of tribunes wholly ineffectual. When- ever a democracy wants to interfere with the resolutions of its representatives, and to maintain an appearance of sovereignty, they are obliged to act under the direction of others, and thus the wished for sovereignty is chimerical, and the responsible representatives who are known, are abased by the exaltation of irresponsible caucus leaders who are not known. Who is there to-day LOOKING ROUND. . 13 who dares to say to his constituents : " Tacete quseso Quirites ! Plus enim ego quam vos quid reipublicse expediat intelligo ? " There are, of course, other reasons for the degeneracy of the House of Commons. Of the fact of its decline in public opinion, the vulgar brawl of July, 1893, from which no political party, except the Labour Members, escaped without reproach, is sufficient evidence. The spectators in the gallery for the first time ex- pressed, by their hisses, the opinion of their fellow-countrymen as to the blight that has come over the House of Commons. Performing its duties under the fierce light of the Press, it is obvious that deliberation must in- evitably be replaced by oratorical display. What is not sincere has no life in it. So much of the House of Commons work is insincere, and is done for effect with an eye on the gallery, that deterioration in debate is a matter of course. What the House of Commons has lost, the Press, the Caucus and the Trade Unions have gained. The Press, the Caucus, and the Trade Unions are unknown to the Constitution ; but between them they wield the power that has been lost by the three Estates of the Realm. Fettered by no such considerations as must always check the impulses of truly Representa- I 4 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. live Assemblies, the rapid growth of party feeling is a natural consequence. Debate is now carried on in the newspapers. Few persons read the discussions in Parliament, nor are they, as a rule, reported in the newspapers read by the masses, except in some honourable instances. Parlia- mentary and extra-Parliamentary speeches are pictorially reported. Opponents are skilfully ridiculed, misrepresented, and defamed. The mistakes of friends are glossed over and ignored. The ablest efforts of opponents are minimised or perverted. There is not a single daily news- paper from which the inhabitants of another planet could obtain an accurate notion of what really takes place in English political life. Of the weekly papers, the Spectator alone attempts to give an impartial review of the political events of the week, and even the Spectator is impreg- nated with British aversion to the Celts, who now take the larger and more prominent part in political life, as might be naturally expected from the delegates of the inferior race. The Church of England, as by law established, is rent from the centre to circumference with internal feud. One section is bent on maintain- ing the principles and doctrines established at the Reformation, and on preserving the purity of Protestant worship ; in resisting innovations in LOOKING ROUND. 15 vestments, ornaments, gestures, or practices borrowed from Rome ; and especially in prevent- ing the idolatrous adoration of the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper ; to resist all attempts to re- store the use of the Confessional, and every exercise of that priestly authority which was put down at the Reformation. Another party in the Church, remarkable for their earnest and blameless lives, are equally strenuous in repudiating the Reformation, dis- claiming Protestantism, using vestments, restor- ing the Confessional, the Mass and priestly authority, and who are generally desirous of reinstating the Roman doctrine while repudiat- ing the authority of Rome. A third section secretly deny the Divinity of our Lord, laugh at the Athanasian Creed, sign the thirty-nine articles with large mental reserva- tions ; accept the conclusions of the Higher Criticism ; and attach more importance to the precepts than to the theology of religion. Rites, sacraments, and symbols are to them the para- phernalia of superstition. Grace is an obsolete term principally in vogue in the early Victorian era ; and conversion, justification by faith, and vicarious atonement are not taught by the leaders of the Broad Church party. The Evangelicals and the Broad Church are sensible of the 1 6 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. advance of the Ritualists, and have shown that tolerance is the only possible solution of the Ritual question. The position of the Archbishop of Canterbury was never more difficult to hold. The " Lincoln Judgment " of the Primate was a singular exhibi- tion of address and skill, that could not fail to remind beholders of the dexterity of one of the greater gods of Olympus, who managed to keep his balance on the top of Mount Parnassus while playing the lyre. Interesting to the persons concerned as are the internal conflicts in the Church of England, they excite but a languid feeling in the minds of the mass of the English people. The armies of the homeless and unfed, who are tending to become the arbiters of our destinies, have less concern in the colour of a cope or the cut of an alb, than in the certainty of a meal. A pound of steak has more vital interest to thousands of English- men than the Kingdom of Heaven. The in- testine troubles of the Church of England are immaterial to wage-earners who are hungrily watching for the loaves and fishes at present allotted by the State Church to those who are labouring in the vineyard for the Syrian Artisan. The majority of the clergy work hard and live hard. But the seat in the Lords, the LOOKING ROUND. 17 episcopal palaces, the incomes of four and five figures, the flowers, music, and society, the re- putation and the comfort in this world that are the appanage of the Bishops, are the chief elements that drag down the Church. Poor folk are unjust enough to think that eternal bliss in another world is sufficient reward for those who teach it. Plenty in this w r orld added to the sober certainty of eternal joy in the next, is too great a strain on the religion of the irreligious. The concordat established between the Ritualist party in the Church, and the Broad and Evan- gelical sections, occasionally show signs of break- ing down. A recent case at Portsea is a good example of the fact that the differences seething inside the 'Church of England are equal to any differences raging outside. The Bishop of Winchester, having had his attention called to a handbill, in which it was announced that the Rev. H. L. Young, vicar of St. John's, Portsea, would give an address at a " United Communion service," at the Presby- terian Church, Portsmouth, sent a letter to the rev. gentleman, in which the writer remarked, "It is my duty to explain to you that the giving of this address will involve an infraction of the Church Law, and I am sure that, on reflection, you will feel it right to withdraw from your B i8 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. engagement." Mr. Young, however, attended the service, and sent the following reply to the Bishop : " It is not my intention to commit an illegal act by any proceeding of mine, but it is sad to find that your Lordship can so promptly interfere with my Christian liberty, and that you have not merely allowed the Mass for the dead to be set up in this town, but you have also publicly patronised the promoters of this deadly delusion, which, in common with myself, you have sworn ' to be blasphemous fable and danger- ous deceit.' With all due respect, I cannot understand the equity of such proceedings." M. Jaure*s, one of the leaders of the Socialist party in the French Chamber, has stated with great force the reasons why the democracy of France attach such overwhelming importance to physical comfort. M. JaureY remarks apply no less to England than to France. " You have taken the Crucifix from the dying beds of the hospital patients ; you have destroyed our beliefs in religion, killed our faith, mutilated our ideals, upset the Throne, and driven us back on the comforts of material life in this world. These are all we have left, and material comforts we intend to have, whoever suffers and whoever pays." Democracies still retain the old terminology about tyranny and freedom. But the tyranny LOOKING ROUND. 19 from above is dead and gone. Tyranny from be- low is a danger that does not seem to occur to the leaders of the working classes. Tyranny of an ecclesiastical type is not dreaded, since the Anglican priesthood in great 'towns are mostly poor men who lead self-sacrificing lives. Non- conformist ministers are too dependent on the breath of popular applause to menace the comforts of the people. The new Savonarola is not likely to be a Baptist or Wesleyan. It is therefore probable that such hostility as now exists against the Established Church is directed rather towards her ownership of property, than upsetting a form of worship repugnant to the people. There is of course always present in the minds of political dissenters the social stigma still attaching to dissent. The resentment roused by the sense of social inferiority is the vital force in the attack on the Church made by dissenters, and there is no ground for thinking that it will cease to exist, should disestablishment be carried out. Money and comfort mean so much more, and are understood by the multitudes so much better than they were thirty years ago, the property of the Church is not likely to escape the attack now being made on all forms of property and its owners. The only restraint upon the masses in giving effect to their desires to seize, for their own purposes, 20 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. the property of others, is provided by the sanction of religion and morality that are inseparable from serious effort to do the will of God. When the decay of faith sets in, morality has no dogmatic foundation, and not seldom breaks down. The Churches of the Reformation recognised the Scrip- tures as the only source of knowledge as to the Christian faith. The orthodoxy of the seventeenth century was largely displaced in the eighteenth by the development of philosophical and histori- cal science, and in the nineteenth by new views as to inspiration and miracle, revelation and the trinitarian conception of the godhead. To-day, standing on the edge of the twentieth century, the vermiculation of sect and opinion has reached a point when most men despairingly inquire with Pilate, "What is truth?" So long as sacred significance is attached to everything contained in Biblical literature, faith lasts. The surrender of an outlying fort is but too often followed by the evacuation of the whole position. Heaven and hell, God and Christ, are so often and so com- pletely explained away, that the masses are as indifferent to, as they are ignorant of, dogma. Nothing remains to induce them to hold their hands from spoiling the Church, especially if in the name of raising those who are down, they can abase those who are not. Look where we will, LOOKING ROUND. 21 there is a troubled sea of strife in every direction. The old things are passing away, but there is nothing to show that the confidence of the new teachers is founded on exact knowledge. Evolution attains its end by the elimination or decimation of whole races with much pain to the eliminated and decimated. Irregularity and wreck are as universal as order and law, and in the ruin of those foundations of principle upon which the best individuals, families, and nations have hitherto based their progress, it is possible that, as in the case of the French Revolution, we may be ap- proaching a period of passion, crime, and suffer- ing, with the military despotism that is the invariable sequence. CHAPTER III. LOOKING FORWARD. OF all the proposals of the Newcastle Pro- gramme, the most important in the sense of the most far-reaching, is that dealing with the pay- ment of Members of Parliament. Such a measure is in itself a drastic Reform Bill. It transfers the balance of power from one class to another. Whatever may be said by moralists and theologians about the snares that lurk in the love of money, there can be no doubt that both temptation and fall are more common among those in needy, than those in easy, circumstances. No indictment against the poor as a class need be brought in order to forecast the certainty of human nature running true to itself if Mem- bers of Parliament cease to be chosen mainly from among well-to-do citizens. Many honest men will no doubt always remain to illuminate a corrupt Senate. But there is no reason to believe 22 LOOKING FORWARD. 23 that the texture of British morality would be tougher than French or American morality, if British political functions were generally exercised by the same class of persons as those who enter public life in France or the United States. Hitherto the British equivalents to Panama, however much they may have recently injured political Nonconformity, have remained aloof from the main body of the House of Commons. Some purists may regard as corruption Mr. Rhodes' payment of ^ 10,000 to Mr. Parnell, and his deft allotment of Char- tered Company's shares to Members of Parlia- ment, and to party organisers. The absence of concealment, however, decreases, if it does not completely remove the taint. Mr. Rhodes has entered a field over the hedge of which smaller men may not peep. He will be followed, no doubt, by others, who, no less astute, will be governed by less lofty ideas. In the private committee work of a paid House of Commons, we may reasonably look for corruption, and cer- tainly for imputations of undue influence, which will undermine the traditional reputation of the Select Committees on Private Bills. At everv afternoon sitting of the House, the chaplain prays to Almighty God that, " having Thy fear always before our eyes, and laying aside all private interests, prejudices, and partial affections, the 24 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. results of all our counsels may be to the glory of Thy blessed Name .... the public wealth, peace, and tranquillity of the realm, and the uniting and knitting together of the hearts of all persons and estates within the same in true Christian love and charity, one towards another." This prayer has not been vouchsafed a favourable answer from on high for many years, so far as regards " the hearts of all persons," and it is questionable if in a House of Parliamentary hire- lings, " private interests, prejudices, and partial affections " will be entirely excluded from the sort of temptation that will be offered on Select Committees by venal promoters of Private Bills, to the destitute judges who will then determine the expenditure of millions sterling. Keen as is the interest taken by the public in Parliamentary institutions, Private Bill legislation does not attract the attention due to its import- ance. Here the duties of Parliament are partly legislative and partly judicial. Public interests are promoted and private rights secured by Members of Parliament whose capacity and im- partiality have been, as a rule, beyond question. The vast industrial undertakings of the country canals, docks, harbours, railways, waterworks, gas, electric light, telephones, and any further inventions of commercial importance will in the LOOKING FORWARD. 25 future be confided to Members of Parliament, many of whom will be in straitened circum- stances, some of them in debt, and therefore in imminent peril of losing their financial chastity. The late Mr. Edward Stanhope, foreseeing the consequences of the payment of Members, declared that when stipends were paid to the representatives of the people, he himself would cease to be a candi- date for election. Mr. Stanhope expressed for his order the distaste and repugnance that would pre- vent them entering public life when statesmanship, wisdom, and patriotism, coupled with independ- ence of thought and action, were replaced by servile devotion to the moods of a caucus, and by necessary degradation in the office of Member of Parliament. Fewer men of Mr. Stanhope's type will consent to stand for Parliament, and still fewer will succeed in effecting an entrance. The extent to which the House of Commons is already under the influence of the Trade Unions, legislating and administrating in their interests, renders it probable that future historians will have to record an increase in the power and independence of the Unions, and a decay of the traditions and loss of standing of the House it- self. Payment of Members will enable the Trade Unions to start a candidate for Parlia- mentary honours in every industrial Constituency 26 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. in the kingdom, a course incompatible with the existence of Party Government as it exists. The death of the Liberal party, as John Bright under- stood it, is already an accomplished fact, although the Earl of Rosebery is Prime Minister of England. The Liberal party for nearly two hundred years has fought with strenuous persistence against prin- ciples which, under the Gladstonian metamor- phoses, the country is asked to accept in the name of Liberalism. Surrender to the Trade Unions in the case of the Contracting Out clause of the Employers Liability Bill may be wrong or right from a Party point of view. But this much is certain. The surrender in question is merely a foretaste of many future transactions of the same kind ; and whatever may be the subsequent effect on the nation, the extinction of individual liberty involved in the surrender is hostile to the main principle of historic Liberalism. The vast population brought into existence by the leading of Cobden and Bright, and the blind production of wealth by steam ; led by the New Unionists, who, powerful in Parliament, having superseded official Liberalism, daring all things, and wanting bureaucratic experience, will, never- theless, have a policy and a plan. What plan will be divulged ? What policy adopted ? LOOKING FORWARD. 27 The race inhabiting these islands is still so far from being under the domination of the fertile and imaginative Celt, no bloody revolution or outbreak of mob law is to be anticipated. Love of comfort, the decay of faith, and impatience of restraint are likely to lead the New Unionists or leaders of the destitute classes to concentrate their first efforts on the abolition of the Second Chamber. In the absence of successful foreign war, the struggle may be prolonged for many years, and the intestine strife that must always tear the new brotherhood of man while founded on the conception of mere material comfort, may be relied on to prolong the period of trial. Liberals of the school of J. S. Mill as a Party have disappeared. Conservatism is a misnomer for the leading idea of the Party that gave Free Education and Parish Councils to the country. The Parties of the future, under whatever name they may be known, will be essentially the Haves and the Not-Haves. The Haves will attempt to postpone the great catastrophe by expansion of Empire, throwing as few children as possible to the famished wolves in pursuit. The Not-Haves, with leadership out- side Parliament largely leavened by cosmopoli- tan aliens, will abhor the Imperial idea, and will look for ransom to the amassed wealth of the 28 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. propertied classes. Attention will tend to con- centrate itself more on the rights, and less on the duties of citizenship. The doctrine of noblesse oblige will recede into the background, as the doctrine of self-help is relegated by Collectivists to the region of exploded ideas. Charities will dwindle amid constant warring of classes. The grace of generous consideration of others' needs will vanish before the angry assertion of im- moderate claims. One political party will struggle to repel the assault which their opponent party con- tinually attempts to drive home. To realise the demands that will then be made, the constitution of society, with its base resting upon the doctrine of private ownership, will have to be changed. The relationships of private service must be abolished. Trades, markets, currency, credit, interest, and rent will be modified or replaced by the introduction of a system of public pay- ment for work performed, and the gradual sub- stitution of State control for private enterprise. The moral idea underlying all these fine things is a brotherly reciprocity which has hitherto never been realised by Collectivists or any other com- munity of men in daily life since the days of the Early Christians. Are we likely to find this moral idea in the New Unionism ? The earlier forms already taken by the ideas LOOKING FORWARD. 29 that are undermining previous conceptions of society are some guide as to their later developments. Already we have in our midst an army of the Unemployed, many of whom are the victims of the substitution of the impersonal State for the responsible parent. The existing Poor Law, which contented the country for precisely the same period of time as that during which power rested with the middle classes, is now de- nounced as obsolete, and has already received a serious blow in the abolition of ex-officio Guardi- ans. The existing Poor Law insures worthy and worthless alike against unavoidable misfortune, or the natural consequences of deliberate neglect. Gratuitous education, whatever may be the re- sults in other ways, has not only assisted in the decay of parental responsibility, but has led to a demand which cannot long be resisted, for the gratuitous sustenance of recklessly begotten and gratuitously educated children. The demand for enlarging the area of State control will receive powerful support by the classes interested in clamour for State employ- ment. Such enterprises as the municipalisation of the tramways, and the acquisition of the rail- ways by the State, will lead to an increase in the numbers, the importance, and the influence of the Civil Service. Members of Parliament paid at 30 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. the rate of three or four hundred pounds a year will not unnaturally regard with jealousy and dislike servants of the State whose salaries are in excess of that amount. To serve the State as a legislator involves the possession of capacity and intellect at least equal to the qualifications re- quired by the persons administering the service of the State, and no valid reason will be forth- coming why the remuneration of the servants should be greater than that of the masters. We may look forward, therefore, to a diminution in the rates of salary now given to the higher servants of the State, and to a consequent de- gradation of tone, and lowering of the standard of the Civil Service. With so little to expect, it is improbable that the ablest men will then look for a career in State employment. On the other hand, the assured pay and the attraction of escape from manual labour, will fill the public service with an inexhaustible supply of the same material as those who perform the mechanical work in our public offices. We have full experience of the process in India, the United States, Italy, and France. In 1840, official salaries amounted to ,5,759,000. In 1894 they have grown to nearly ^18,000,000. The political influence of the electors employed in the public service has increased in like proportion, and is likely to con- LOOKING FORWARD. 31 tinue its growth. Members of Parliament for the Dockyard constituencies are painfully aware how precarious is their tenure of those seats. Their constituents are governed by other con- siderations than the welfare of the State, the principles of liberty, or even the , interests of political parties. Using their political power as a fulcrum to exert pressure upon the Government of the day, constant change in the individuals returned is naturally followed by successive capitulation and surrender from rival candi- dates for Parliamentary honours. The creation of a numerous and powerful bureaucracy, enjoy- ing and exercising the same political privileges as their employers, is incompatible with freedom. Mill pointed out to the last generation the danger of such a tyranny. " If the roads, the railways, the banks, the insurance offices, the great joint- stock companies, the universities, and the public charities, were all of them branches of the Government ; if, in addition, the municipal cor- porations and local boards, with all that now devolves on them, became departments of the central administration ; if the employes of all these different enterprises were appointed and paid by the Government, and looked to the Government for every rise in life ; not all the freedom of the Press and popular constitution of the Legislature 32 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. would make this or any other country free other- wise than in name." 1 Every function superadded to those already exercised by the Government increases its in- fluence and converts a larger and larger number of the electorate into henchmen and hangers-on of the Government, or of those who wish to dis- place the Government with the object of succeed- ing to their positions. Among the educated natives of India, to be admitted to the ranks of the bureaucracy is practically their sole career and only aim and ambition. Even " failed B. A." is a title to fame and to State employ- ment. The conversion of England from a nation of self-reliant, resolute individuals, into a democracy consisting largely of Anglo-Saxon Babus, paupers, and unemployed, seems to be within a measurable distance. Russia is governed by a bureaucracy, and the Tsar himself is im- potent to reform it. He can send individuals to the Mines, but he cannot exile the system. A nation that has yielded to the parasitic clasp of a bureaucracy, has parted with liberty to reform. On every decree of change they have a tacit veto, if their leaders suggest that the proposal is con- trary to their interests. The only means of reform that is left is revolution, and in growing 1 Mill on Liberty, p. 65. LOOKING FORWARD. 33 numbers, waxing power, and deteriorated per- sonnel of the public servants, we have all the raw material of civil war. And even revolution is powerless to effect a change, since no one can replace the bureaucracy, as there is no class capable of doing their work. Where everything is done through the bureaucracy, nothing can be done to which, as Mill says, "the bureaucracy is averse." The influence of the Labour Department of the Board of Trade, with its political and partisan correspondents and its scarcely disguised partici- pation in the current fallacies fashionable with the New Unionists, is an example of a danger that is likely to increase. The more people are accustomed to manage their own affairs, the more they are prepared to resist the encroachments of tyranny. When, however, Government replaces individual effort, the desire to share in the general tyranny grows apace. We have seen of late the desire to extinguish the rights of minorities ad- vance in direct proportion to the expansion of governmental activities ; and, indeed, the relation between the New Tyranny and the growth of State interference is close and intimate. The outlook of England, in respect to an Oriental ap- petite for bureaucratic employment, is sombre indeed. It was observed by Locke that the love c 34 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. of dictation, and a forwardness to impress upon others the prescription of our own opinions, is a constant concomitant of a judgment biased by self-imposition. " Who can reasonably expect arguments and conviction from him in dealing with others whose understanding is not accus- tomed to them in his dealing with himself ? "* The members of the New Unionism, who will form the personnel of the New Bureaucracy, have already displayed in their conduct of strikes, as we shall see later on, all the domineering qualities of irremovable tchinovniks, impregnable to facts, reason, argument, or humanity. That an underpaid Civil Service, swollen in numbers and inflated in political importance, re- cruited from the classes educated by the State, will retain its general purity, is an assumption no prudent observer can make. Some of the persons employed in the Dockyards, the Supply Services in time of war, the Customs and Post Offices De- partments, are not even now so completely free from suspicion and taint as is desirable. There is a convention that everyone shall agree in lauding to the skies the financial purity of the servants of the Crown. Those highly placed, and entering the Service through the avenue of the 1 Locke on the Human Understanding, book iv., chap, xix., sect 2. LOOKING FORWARD. 35 Universities or the Civil Service Commissions, are, no doubt, of spotless reputation. But the Chiefs of Departments know better than to assert that, in those ranks not filled by English gentle- men, there is complete security against corruption. The one revelation and breach of faith that has occurred for years in the Foreign OfHce was the act of a person who fell before a temptation to which he should never have been exposed. Our foreign policy will be seriously affected by the democratisation of the Foreign Office and the Diplomatic Service. So long as our Continental friends and rivals utilise the labours of men of distinction and family, the omission to do so by Great Britain will inevitably be followed by diminished influence in the Councils of Europe. The United States of America for a hundred years have suffered under petty rebuffs and humiliations in their dealings with foreign powers, because they refused until 1893 to give to their chief agents the rank and pay of Ambassadors, to see that their envoys were properly equipped with linguistic and other attainments, and to recognise the fact that plain citizens who speak no French, and have but recently abstained from eating peas with a knife, are somewhat heavily weighted in European diplomacy. CHAPTER IV. EXPERIMENTS. THERE seems to be a general disposition among the propertied classes to look askance at the efforts of the New Unionists to raise and main- tain the rate of wages. If it be possible to es- tablish the " Living Wage " without creating more misery than exists already, it need hardly be said that the success of such a movement is to be welcomed. It is comparatively easy for the working-class electors of any democratic nation to succeed in diminishing the hours of labour in State employ, and in obtaining the same wages for less work. But when the Labour leaders and their word-serfs, the editors of the Socialist Press, attempt by legislation to carry the boon of the eight hours' day from Government to private employment, a collision at once ensues with the iron-clad law of demand and supply. Supply and demand affect Govern- 36 EXPERIMENTS. 37 ments less than the love of office, and Ministers sur- render public interests to the enfranchised labourers with a generosity they fail to exhibit in dealing with their own affairs. If a higher rate of wage be demanded than that which is fixed by the amount of circulating capital available for distribution among the entire working population, it can only be ob- tained by keeping a portion of the workers perman- ently unemployed. The American Congress as early as 1868 passed an Act providing "that eight hours shall constitute a day's work for all labourers, workmen, and mechanics now em- ployed, or who may hereafter be employed, by or on behalf of the Government of the United States." The example of the United States Government has been comparatively in- operative in respect to the action of private employers across the Atlantic. The carpenters of New York, it is true, have succeeded in ob- taining a limitation of working hours, but most of the labour organisations fear that the adoption of the shorter day will stimulate emigration, unless it should at the same time be adopted in Europe. 1 There is no reason to believe that the example of the British Government will prove more contagious to British employers than the. 1 Foreign Reports Royal Commission on Labour (c. 6795), p. 42. 38 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. example of the United States Government, which, during the last twenty-six years, has modified but slightly the working hours of American in- dustries. High wages, artificially maintained, involve the artificial curtailment of the supply of labour to the demand, and the maintenance of the surplus labour while unemployed. It may be noted that mosf of the employers in England who have adopted the eight hours' day are Members of Parliament, or candidates for that honour. The experiment of restricting the hours of labour and obtaining the same wages for less work will obviously be followed by a demand for considerable changes in the existing Poor Law. Workmen not in the employ of the State, and who are not included among the fortunate con- tingent protected by the Unions ; who are willing and competent to work, and untainted by disability either moral or physical, will naturally refuse to break stones or lose their citizenship under the " modified Workhouse Test order." Such men rightly and indignantly repudiate the need for a "test"; they scorn as insult lessons in providence from the tax-paying classes ; and they naturally decline to break up their homes if they can help it. Under existing industrial conditions, a nation where the population is growing and the trade diminishing ; where the traders and distributors EXPERIMENTS. 39 are more numerous than the aristocrats and food producers, and where the latter are in process of extermination, an unemployed workman not included in the class protected by his Union is forced to choose between one of three alterna- tives starvation, the workhouse, or revolt. He loves his wife and bairns, he hates the work- house ; he therefore revolts. The revolt of the excluded British workmen of the near future will probably take the form of insurrection against economic principles hitherto accepted as sound, rather than against constituted authority. We shall probably see in the next decade a wide development in the range of social experiments, which will receive the support of the employed workmen and the Trade Unions, on the same grounds that Irish Nationalist Members of Parliament press on the Imperial authority the claims of the evicted tenants. The only limits to these social experiments will be the check offered by other and hostile social forces operating within the ambit of the State. Among the earliest experiments that may be looked for will be fresh attempts to establish, per- haps under other names, the National Workshops that were tried and miserably failed in Paris in February, 1848. Nothing can persuade the unem- ployed classes that the Paris failure was due to the 40 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. inherent impossibility of any Government finding public employment without dislocating private industry. It would probably be a saving of money and life in the long run, if an object lesson were once more given of the inexorable consequences of the provision of work by the State for the purposes of relief. The price of an ironclad, and the loss of ten thousand lives, would possibly settle the question for another generation. Truth, like Indur, in Addison's tale, requires a new incarnation every thirty years. Experiments that will probably be made in the future will not be tried under conditions favour- able for the diffusion of truth. The trading and money-lending classes have made it impossible for British farming operations to pay, even where conducted with all the advantages of ample capital, adequate skill, and hereditary training. It is interesting, however, to note that amiable rather than competent citizens, who have the ear of Demos, with a faith that should remove mountains, propose to effect a success with un- skilled, needy, and debilitated town populations that which landowners, farmers, and labourers are unable to achieve, and this in the face of free trade ! In Home Settlements, a large portion of the urban community of theorists perceive a panacea for the evils which affect our underfed EXPERIMENTS. 41 masses. That it is possible to set the unemployed urban population upon the abandoned corn lands of Great Britain is obvious. But that needy and inexperienced townsmen with blistered hands can succeed where agriculturists born and bred have failed on all but the very best land, and near large cities, is contrary to human reason. Already those experiments are in process of demonstra- tion, and are pronounced successes or denounced as failures according to the theological and econ- omical standpoint of the critic. From the point of view of profit, none of these experiments have yet been proved to be established successes in this or any other country. A Mansion House Committee on the Unem- ployed, appointed in 1892, spent ,1,315 in help- ing 86 out of 365 workless Londoners, of whom, when helped according to the Honorary Secre- tary, Mr. H. V. Toynbee not more than 40 could be found who were permanently benefited by the action of the Committee. The cost of helping the 40 was ^32 153. each. Of the ,1,315 spent, ,732 was laid out in test work, that is to say, with the object of seeing whether the men to be helped were worthy of help. It follows, therefore, that ,8 is. 2d. was spent on each of the 86 men, with the result of finding that 40 of them were alone capable of being 4 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. permanently helped. The scheme was in ex- cellent hands, and was carefully carried out. It attracted much public attention, and on the ac- cession to office of a new Lord Mayor, it obtained his support ; and a fresh appeal to the public on its behalf was made, under the shelter of a report obsequious to Demos, prepared by the Labour Department of the Board of Trade. The curious part of the whole scheme was, that the desire of the public to- "do something" was gratified, not by helping an appreciable number of the helpless, but by wasting money like water. But such ex- periments as these are not to be deprecated. They will certainly be multiplied and repeated. The epileptics who have been formed into farm colonies in Germany, the Fredericksoord settle- ment in Holland, are already being copied by British philanthropists. The Rev. H. V. Mills has obtained a certain amount of pecuniary sup- port to his proposals, which are based upon the idea that the produce of half an acre of average British soil is sufficient to maintain one person. The most competent opinions lean to six acres, being the minimum required. ''Back to the land" is a cry that is associated more closely with a de- sire to expropriate than to till the soil. Hungry men, with children crying to them for bread, will not be very particular as to the means by which EXPERIMENTS. 43 food and raiment are obtained, especially when the relief they seek has its origin in the instinct of self- preservation, and is supported by a quasi-religious Press and a political Pulpit, both ignorant and cocksure. The constant increase in the number of the worthy unemployed, and the diminution in the comforts and luxuries of their lives, may be held for sufficient grounds for believing that the doc- trine of Protection will shortly be once more introduced experimentally in this country. The bitter remembrance and traditions of the suffer- ings of the people in the first part of the century will ensure that the food and raw material of the nation will not be tampered with at the out- set. Protection will probably begin by the re- striction of the incurable paupers who now have free entry into the country from other lands. Much to the credit of the Jews of Great Britain, upon whom the crushing burden of Jewish pau- perism entirely rests, the principal resistance to the stoppage of this class of immigration has hitherto arisen from their community. The number of Jews in London is probably not more than 70,000. In 1893, the Jewish Board of Guardians relieved 21,076 applications for relief, exclusive of fixed allowances and emigration cases. In 1890 they relieved 10,619 cases. From these figures it seems that Jewish poverty in 44 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. London has doubled in three years. (Thirty- fifth Annual Report of Board of Guardians for the Relief of the Jewish Poor, p. 33.) M. Leroy-Beaulieu has taunted the Jews with the fact that they have been outside the system of feudalism and chivalry, in which the modern conception of honour was chiefly formed. It would be difficult to discover a more chivalrous act in history than the manner in which the English Jews have resisted, almost ferociously, the persistent efforts made to arrest the immigra- tion of their unemployed co-religionists from Russia and Poland. But the figures I have quoted are irresistible. It is now understood that when the British democracy place themselves in line with the American Republic and the Anglo- Saxon colonies, by debarring destitute and ignorant aliens from free ingress to these shores, no active protest will be lodged by the Jewish community. Such opposition to the restriction of destitute alien immigration will not proceed from the main body of generous and enlightened English Jews. For they must plainly perceive that the recrudescence of anti-Semitism in Great Britain is a certainty, if the lower classes once form the habit of associating the presence of foreigners with the want of food. The principal resistance to the policy of restriction will not EXPERIMENTS. 45 come from the synagogues. It will come from those who have made broad the phylacteries of Free Trade for two generations. Whether foreigners come to England, and engage in manufactures here, or whether they remain abroad, and make their commodities in their own country, exporting them into England, is immaterial. If once a beginning be made by excluding paupers, diseased, aged, incapables, anarchists, and criminals, because they are alien, the less skilled labourer of England will not be long before he continues the process by excluding the able-bodied unskilled labourers of other lands. The next step is to exclude by taxation the com- modities and manufactured luxuries made by the aliens. It is unlikely that this step will be taken forthwith, but there seems every likelihood that Great Britain will revert to protection so far as concerns foreign manufactured luxuries, that are neither food nor half-manufactured material. We cannot fail to observe that every democracy in the world, is protectionist, with the excep- tion of ourselves. It is remembered that the forecasts of Cobden as to the international action on Free Trade have not been justified by the event. Men still live who repeatedly heard from the lips of both Cobden and Bright the prediction that ten years would not pass over their heads 46 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. before the civilised nations of the earth would agree in accepting the principle of Free Trade, and would apply it in their dealings with each other. The Trade Unions unanimously apply the principle of protection with desolating severity to their rivals in their own local and immediate interests. If the movement for restricting the immigration of destitute aliens has not yet received the vigorous and active support of the principal Trade Unions, it is because none but the weak Unions are touched by it. The incidence of misery in our country exists mainly among the population who are too poor to join, or too feeble to form, a Union. The competition of immigrant foreigners cuts deeply into trades requiring con- tinuous application of simple methods for pro- longed periods of time, rather than the exhibition of skill, or the display of strength. Accordingly, we find that the industries .affected by the com- petition of immigrant aliens are invariably infested with the disease of the sweating system, i.e., long hours, low pay, and subservience to the capitalist ; characteristics which are never found in the presence of a strong Trade Union. When a Union is strong, it may tyrannise ; when it is weak or non-existent, labourers in that trade are usually tyrannised over by small capitalists. It will be clear from these statements, all of which EXPERIMENTS. 47 are borne out by the voluminous evidence given before the Sweating Committee of the House of Lords and the Royal Commission on Labour, that the interests represented by the strong Trade Unions are not touched by the immigration of destitute aliens. A remarkable instance of the relation between strong Unions and the absence of alien labour competition, as contrasted with the presence of severe competition of foreigners when a Union is weak, is presented by the two branches of the Boot and Shoe Rivetters. The National Union, with its headquarters at Leicester, returns a membership of 43,000, has no foreigners in its ranks, and none with whom competition is carried on. In the lower branch of the trade foreigners abound. The weak Union, with its seat in London, has but 5000 members, while there are probably more foreigners, longer hours, lower pay, and worse conditions of sanitation and the general conditions of life in that department of the boot and shoe trade than in any large industry in the United Kingdom. When the strong Unions join the weak ones, and demand the cessation of the supply of indigent aliens, we may depend that the day is not far off when the entry of manufactured goods will excite the same hostility as the foreigners who now make them here. 48 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. Inevitable disappointment awaits the first attempts to revert to a protective policy. The consumers of food in the United Kingdom are so much more numerous than the producers that no immediate probability exists of raising the price of meal or corn for the benefit of the agricultural interests. Short of another Black Death, which, to be effective, should exterminate half the popu- lation of the United Kingdom, there does not seem to be any likelihood of the cultivators of land emerging from the lamentable position in which they find themselves placed in order to benefit traders, factors, and middlemen. For the interests of these classes, the food cultivators have been maimed and well-nigh destroyed. Of the .435,691,279 of imports, ^"157,000,000 are the value of the articles of food and drink, duty free, including living animals intended for food. Of the remainder, ^30,400,000 are already taxed, such as alcoholic drinks, tobacco, and taxed food, or the necessaries of the breakfast table. The metals, chemicals, dye stuffs, oils, raw materials for textile manufactures, and other raw material for other manufactures, account for the whole of the balance except a paltry 65,000,000 worth of manufactured articles, and about ^15,000,000 miscellaneous, including the parcel post. EXPERIMENTS. 49 It appears from these figures that, omit- ting food and raw materials, there remain but ,65,000,000 worth of manufactures, and ; 1 5,000,000 miscellaneous. To these two items in our list of imports we may expect to see the attention of Demos turned. The imposition of a tax on hundreds of imported manufactured articles will involve an increase in the staff of the Customs Department, thus still more strongly welding the chains of bureaucracy round the neck of the community. There is agreement among economists that the general position of free traders is sound, under the assumption usually made. It is as- sumed, for example, that labour and capital can, without great difficulty, be turned from an in- dustry in which foreigners excel to one in which the English excel the foreigners, and that if any home product be destroyed by foreign competi- tion, some other commodity can be made by the labour and capital displaced. For fifty years, it cannot be denied that the absorption of displaced capital and labour has not been attended by serious complications or delay. When Free Trade was adopted in England, it was adopted at the instance of the governing class for themselves and the labouring class. Employers determined the sort of free trade that was to be set up, and 50 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. in their decision the unenfranchised democracy had not a word to say. Capital is mobile, polyglot, and cosmopolitan. An English working-man, hampered with wife and children, speaking no language but his own, and without means of sub- sistence while he is searching for other employ- ment, is practically tied to his native land. Thus under the stress of foreign competition in the textile trades, a Lancashire manufacturer may transfer his machinery and capital from Man- chester to Bombay or Nagasaki, but the opera- tives thrown out of employment may sell matches in the street, or sink into the ranks of unskilled labour, without infringing any of the laws of Free Trade. In the lithographic trade, hundreds of skilled workers are tramping the streets, living from hand to mouth, and are ruined body and soul because the capital that formerly employed them is now transferred to the Continent in strict compliance with the laws of Free Trade. The migration of an industry from one part of England to another is not necessarily an un- healthy symptom of trade. From the workman's point of view, the migration of an industry from England to Asia cannot but be regarded as a deadly evil, as it diminishes the employment available for him in that particular trade, and he is fitted for no other. It is true that a decaying EXPERIMENTS. 51 industry such as the ribbon trade may occasionally be succeeded on the spot by a thriving manufac- turing business such as the cycle making enter- prise which revived the fortunes of the town of Coventry. Instances such as this are rare. It is more common for capital to take wing to a foreign country and to leave labour chained to the rock, without one shilling to chink against another. Adam Smith, who is now rarely mentioned in advanced political circles with approval, always insisted on the importance to a country of using its own capital, if possible, within its own bound- aries. The successors of Adam Smith, restricting their view to the profits on capital, and ignoring the equal interests of labouring men, have com- pletely omitted the element of nationality from their chain of reasoning. They forget that " somewhere else," however profitable to the higgler of the market, is sentence of degradation or death to the labourers employed. If all nations would be cosmopolitan as Cobden pro- mised, all would be well. But they will do nothing of the sort, and the tornado of tariffs that rages round the world leaves England shorn of power to make a bargain with a single foreign state. We may be satisfied that it will not be long 52 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. before the governing Trade Unions and the Legislature appreciate the fact that maximum cheapness to the consumer and maximum pro- fit to the capitalists, by no means exhaust the elements desirable in a national trade policy. Demos will see to it that England makes the best use of its resources in the interests of English working men. Protection to one in- dustry involves protection to all. A favoured industry where profits and wages are high will excite the clamour for equal favour from all other industries. The interference of Government once begun spreads with rapidity, a fact which has been illustrated in every protectionist country. The principal difficulty lies not so much in the selection of industries to favour, but in persuad- ing those who are unprotected to dispense with State assistance. Some of the old objections to protection have now lost weight with the democracy. Increase in the functions of Government is regarded as an advantage. No jealousy is felt of the growing power of officials. No fear is entertained by the new school of the restraint of personal liberty, which was the bugbear of the philosophical radi- cals previous to 1885. On the other hand, the interests of labour undoubtedly demand the in- stitution of some forms of specialised protection. EXPERIMENTS. 53 The medicine is not one that can be applied in small doses, and political prejudices will probably act in England as they have acted in other civilised countries, to the exclusion of pure econo- mics, and we shall see before many years are over a defiance of all the arguments that enabled capitalists and employers to establish Free Trade in their own interests, so far, at all events, as regards the imports of manufactured goods from foreign countries. Poor men will have much to say for this policy. In cold weather it is good to warm the hands within two or three feet of a bright fire, but it does not follow that greater comfort would be gained by approaching to within two or three inches of the glowing embers. It is to be feared that we shall before long approach too close to the fierce blaze of protection, and years afterwards will retire a singed and experienced people. When Free Trade was established in these islands, the food producers were hopelessly out- numbered by the non-producers of food. The consequence was a cosmopolitan impulse to thought and feeling, which dimmed the light of the national pride that shone clearly at the begin- ning of the century. Cobden always held that peace and Free Trade were inter-dependent. The rivalries and hatred of nations were fatal to 54 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. it. The rise and development of the mercantile class, with their cosmopolitan tendencies, was accompanied by great prominence being given to the doctrine of buying cheap and selling dear. Men with souls and loves and ambitions, just like their masters, were termed " hands." The per- sonal equation was ignored in the classification of humanity with commodities. If the middle class resented the supercilious assumption of the men of family, who governed them until 1832, how much more justly may Demos resent being classed with iron ore and cotton goods. The mercantile classes, like their predecessors, have been steeped in selfishness. When they could not make profits under Free Trade pure and simple, they have sought to extinguish competition by establishing monopolies. Monopoly is detestable, not because it is protection, but because human nature objects to all protection in which it does not share. The tendency to equalise profits is arrested by the creation of monopolies, whether of land, privilege, or situation. The farm in Marylebone, bought by the founder of the Portman family for two thousand pounds, conferred upon his descendants a monopoly differing in degree only from that of the railway kings of our southern lines. The people who suffer, or who think they suffer, from monopolies in land, transport, communications, EXPERIMENTS. 55 public lighting, or water supply, since they now possess the power to attempt a remedy and find a balance, will certainly endeavour to do so. When labour was regarded as a ware on equal footing with other commodities the workers were re- garded as fortunate and free, because they were equally free to dispose of their one ware. But Demos now clearly perceives that this is a super- ficial equality. A man who can separate his wares from himself is in a vastly better position than a man who cannot disentangle himself from the only commodity he can offer for sale. Body and soul are inseparable from labour, and the only method of avoiding the sale of body and soul, along with the labour contracted for, is the renunciation of individual liberty, and the use of force to induce other labourers also to lay down their individual autonomy. It was thus that our Trade Unions were formed. They have not yet. as Emerson says, " hitched their waggon to a star." But in pursuing the policy of protecting the greatest number, they are as resolute in destroying the monopolies in which they have no share, as to establish monopoly of their own which shall hold the rest of the community in the firm stricture of irresistible control. Mr. Sydney Webb, an eminent apostle of the new gospel, tells us in his interesting book on the 56 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY, " London Programme," what the metropolis is to become hereafter. County Council aqueducts are to supply London with water from a Welsh lake. A constant supply is to be taken to the top of every house " without special charge." Every parish is to have its public baths and wash-houses open without fee ; every Board School, its swim- ming bath and teacher of swimming ; every park, its bathing and skating ponds ; every station and public building, its drinking fountain and basin for washing the hands nothing is said about collectivist soap and municipal towels. "Then," says Mr. Webb, *' we shall begin to show the world that we do not, after all, fall behind Imperial Rome in this one item of its splendid magnificence." Mr. Webb omits to mention that the water system of Rome was inseparable from a system of con- quest and bloodshed, to which the County Council are supposed to be averse, even in the construction of their Utopia. Moreover, the Roman County Council would have economised in materials and labour, had their engineers been acquainted with the principle of the siphon. According to Mr. Webb, we may even see the County Council laying on a special service of hot water, to be drawn at will from a tap in each tenement. Our nights are to be like those of Norwegian summers, with electric light suns. EXPERIMENTS. 57 Every common yard will be fully illuminated at all hours. Tunnels under every street will con- duct innumerable pipes and wires for every conceivable purpose. County Council tramways will doubtless be made as free as its roads and bridges. Free trams may well imply free trains in the metropolitan and suburban area. Public lavatories and waiting rooms, with convenience for writing, telegraphing, and telephoning, will be adjuncts of every public building. Music, the news of the day, municipal fetes and fireworks on labour day, are to be provided free. A vast army of London's citizens will be enrolled in London's service. The Imperial bureaucracy will be supplemented by a "vast army" of muni- cipal servants, all electors. Decent housing, short hours, regular work, and adequate wages, are all to be provided for the "worker." How long it will be before the " vast army " of municipal tchinovniks strike for better houses, shorter hours, less work, and higher wages ; or what means of resisting their demands will remain with the authorities, Mr. Webb does not tell us. And the cost of it all? ''Probably much less than is wastefully spent by London's million families." But the million families, at all events, have the satisfaction of wasting their money on themselves. The municipal death duties, the unearned incre- 58 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. ment, and the taxation of ground rents, are to supply the funds for the modernised London. The rush of population to such a city, and the impossibility of stopping when free hot water and free travel are supplied, do not seem to be con- templated. Men's needs lie in the direction of food, lodging, and clothes ; not in hot water. This does not seem to enter the minds of the doctrinaires of the County Council. If large masses of the population are to be assisted without their contributing to taxation, it is unlikely that they will quietly accept free telephonic facili- ties, or the right to ride in a collectivist tramcar, without insisting on a supply of the food, clothing, and lodging, without which such boons as Mr. Webb adumbrates, are but empty shows. Society may be safe against any irruption of outer barbarians. But the growth of its own barbarians is inevitable when men renounce thrift and self-help ; look with credulous assurance to the great benefits to be derived from governments, laws, or regulations ; or preach, as Mr. Webb and his Fabians preach, the foundation of Utopia not only without individual exertion, but without provision for the morality or the religion that binds men over to be better than themselves. The experiments that Demos may shortly be expected to make, where they do not lead to EXPERIMENTS, 59 exasperation from failure, and the loss of life and waste of money that characterised the breakdown of the National Workshops in 1848, must inevit- ably lead to disappointment from the results fall- ing short of what was expected. The taxation of ground rents, for example, after the expiration of existing leases, will naturally be added to the rent, provided tenants are found willing to pay the increase. Free hot water and free tramcars for one class, paid for by the struggling tradesmen and occupiers of leasehold property, are likely to stir a strong resentment against any municipal authority that indulges in such pranks. The in- evitable swing of the pendulum after these ex- periments have been tried and have signally failed, will be an insurrection against the popular representation that will have caused such costly waste. The oscillation of democracy between socialist ideas and the strong man will then begin. Until the collectivist idea is purified and spiritual- ised by such teaching as that of the New Testa- ment the stern and individualistic teaching that treats of content, of duty, and of service, as well as softer counsels as to love and sympathy the collectivist idea must alternately gather force from the predatory instincts of mankind, and sink into oblivion by the just indignation of all those who, having gained a store by their industry, 60 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. have the purpose and courage to retain what they have got. The experiments that democracy will try are but a transitory phase. If society be an organism, which few now doubt, the era of demo- cratic experiment may be expected to reveal new truth undreamed of to-day. Doubtless, old errors will be attempted anew ; fallacies reincarnated ; and impossibilities undertaken. Science said that the Atlantic could never be crossed by steam ; that the Suez Canal could never be cut ; that the reproduction of the human voice by means of the vibration of a flat diaphragm, was against the cardinal laws of acoustics. All these things have been done by daring experimenters strong in faith. They were in some respects the ignorant revolutionaries of science. Mr. Edison is said to have re-discovered for himself old phenomena known to the bookworms for generations. Pascal as a boy re-discovered for himself the thirty- second proposition in the first book of Euclid. So amid some blunders and much failure, surpris- ing discoveries will probably be hit on by the new school of democratic research. For we must not omit to note the racial common sense of the people by whom these experiments will be for the most part undertaken. Their ancestors made few mistakes. And if the present democracy be EXPERIMENTS. 61 degenerate, it is from listening to wild counsel from men of the Celtic, Latin, and Semitic races. It is a platitude to say that knowledge alone can throw light upon our path. The reactionaries, who would prevent all experiment, and chain the present to tfye past, are as dangerous to the com- munity as the revolutionaries who court catas- trophe by taking passion and sentiment for guides. Evolution is always slow, and the reactionaries who are too bigoted to permit the changes and experiments which evolution demands, are hostile to national life and character. Change is a con- dition of life. Change of too sudden a character is a wound. No change at all is mortification and death. Change to be healthy must be incessant, minute, and necessary. Mr. Cotter Morison points out that one of the numerous misfortunes that afflict mankind is the difficulty of inculcating the truth that " Incessant and minute change is one of the conditions of life." 1 The majority of people are too vehement or too idle to accept this dogma. To the vulgar of all classes modera- tion is offensive. There are but three courses to be taken by thinking persons with reference to the impending changes. They may be blindly resisted. They 1 " The Service of Man/' p. 171. 62 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. may, with equal stupidity, be blindly stimulated ; and they may be wisely guided. Whichever party in the State ignores the coming change, or employs its political force to stem or destroy the movement, will drive it underground. Its parti- sans will increase. And at last a time will come when, like the Himalayan torrent dammed up by a glacier across its path, it accumulates an energy that carries all before it, and, in the debacle, sweeps away all obstacles of ice and cornfield in its rush. CHAPTER V. THE LEADERS OF DEMOS. FIVE centuries back, the Lollards, with their half-social and half-religious aims, were one of the chief causes of the Peasant Revolt under Wat Tyler and his namesakes. The exaspera- tion of the country artisans and unskilled labourers, at the Statute of Labourers, and at the immigration of aliens from Flanders who rapidly enriched themselves at the expense of the more stolid English, was skillfully fanned by the levelling doctrines of the Lollard agitation. Then, as now, there was a bitter sense of wrong among the population that lived by the work of their hands ; but though the instinct of destruc- tion was strong among them, their conduct was comparatively free from violence. Then, as now, the objects of popular attack were the landlords and the owners of property, protection that pro- tected other classes, and privilege from which the people were excluded. These were the objects of their animosity and the goal of their attack. 63 64 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. The Christian Socialists of to-day, including in their ranks a respectable number of the clergy of the Church of England and ministers of the Free Churches, with their levelling doctrines and half- religious, half-social aims, are playing the part fulfilled by the Lollards in 1318. Like them, the sacerdotal leaders of the new democracy search the Scriptures for ammunition in their campaign against the wealthy and the landholding classes ; and like the Lollards they are working in support of demagogues, few whom they personally know, and of a programme they do not fully understand. Unlike the Lollards, the Christian Socialists include in their ranks some of the principal leaders of Demos, who have the people's ear ; and instead of their operations being conducted among a decimated population in the low state of morality that invariably follows the outbreak of pestilence, the numbers of the people now are increasing by leaps and bounds, and the general advance in their moral ideas, and in the conduct of the main body of the community (deplorable as the crimes of individuals may be), is beyond reasonable dispute even by hostile critics. 1 The influence of ecclesiastical Christianity on 1 The appalling increase in recidivism does not apply to the main body of the community. THE LEADERS OF DEMOS. 65 politics has not been salutary. Priestly partisans, whether of Demos or of Dives, have a habit of ignoring inconvenient passages of Scripture that tell against them and the cause they espouse. The New Testament is quoted freely in support of the New Unionism, of the Living Wage, of the Eight Hour Day, and of the wickedness of employers, landlords, and masters. Especially apt at these quotations are those leaders of Demos, whose religion, as Mr. George Russell has well put it, is part of their politics. But the teaching of the New Testament on the subject of labour and service is strangely ambiguous if the references drawn from the Parables and the Epistles are honestly capable of bearing the in- terpretation put on them by such men as the Rev. Price Hughes, Mr. Mann, and Mr. Tillett. If there be one fact which is indisputable about the teaching of the New Testament, it is that the idea of Christianity as expressed by Christ and His Apostles is associated with suffering, sorrow, and subordination. " Blessed are they that mourn." " Blessed are they which are per- secuted." " Whosoever will come after Me let him deny himself." And about wage-earners : ''Servants be subject to your \ masters with all fear, not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward." " Submit yourselves to every 66 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. ordinance of man for the Lord's sake." u Be obedi- ent to your masters according to the flesh," " not with eye service, but as the servants of Christ." " The servant of the Lord must not strive but be gentle." " Nor is the servant above his Lord." The light thrown upon the Labour problems of to-day by the above quotations, and by the parable of the man who went out early in the morning to hire labourers into his vineyard, is instructive. From this parable we are entitled to gather (i) that sevenpence halfpenny, the pre- sent equivalent of the then value of the Roman penny, is sufficient for the Living Wage ; (2) that the twelve hour day is affirmed to be the just period of labour ; (3) that neither piecework nor payment by the hour, but arbitrary remuneration (irrespective of the amount of work done, or the number of hours employed) at the fancy of the employer, is the Scriptural rate of wages; (4) that so far from property being robbery, as M. Proudhon has it, it is lawful for an employer to do what he will with his own ; and (5) that so far from combination to exact higher wages being permis- sible, the New Unionism is expressly forbidden to picket blacklegs by the command to "take that thine is and go thy way," and by Christ's specific reply to the soldiers, " Do violence to no man ; neither accuse any falsely, and be content with your THE LEADERS OF DEMOS. 67 wages." Still further, Paul says, " Having food and raiment, let us be content ; and he enjoins the Hebrews to " be content with such things as ye have." These quotations are made from their economic, not from their moral, bearing on the subject under discussion. We also learn from the passages first cited that Scripture expressly provides for the case of bad masters, or masters who are considered bad by their servants. Patient, unhesitating obedience is due to them. With one uniform and explicit voice, the historic Christian Church has proclaimed the duty of passive obedience. To explain away these positive commands without perverting the plain teachingof Christ, is possible to none, not even to the Lollardy of the nineteenth century, except by representing Christ as the Wat Tyler of Judea. The necessity of obtaining Scriptural sanc- tion to the programme of the Socialists and Labour Leaders is pressing and irresistible, but not more so than the establishment of an intellectual basis for economical revolution. Their efforts are, accordingly, directed towards the revision and displacement of current ideas on (i) Value; (2) Wages ; (3) Normal Day of Labour ; (4) Machin- ery ; (5) Piecework; and (6) Over-population. 1 1 The best and most impartial survey of the Marxist position is contained in John Rae's "Contemporary Socialism," to whose excellent work I am indebted in respect to this matter. 68 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. 1. The followers of Marx hold that all capital is unproductive of value except in the form of wages, and is, therefore, not entitled to interest. They contend that although labour and capital are equally indispensable to produce new com- modities, it is labour alone that produces new value, for value is only so much labour preserved. It is merely a register of so many hours of work. Value, according to Marx, is something inherent in commodities before they are brought to market, and is independent of the circumstances of the market. All considerations of utility and the state of the market are excluded. The fallacy of this position will be apparent to anyone who con- siders that two characteristics must enter into the composition of value. First, that the commodity must be wanted by someone ; second, that it has cost some trouble to produce it. Nothing lacks value that possesses both these characteristics ; and nothing has value that lacks them. 2. Wages. Having laid down the untenable position that all value is the creation of the per- sonal labour of the workman, the followers of Marx next proceed to declare that the value of these labouring powers is determined not by what they create, but by what is necessary to sus- tain or renovate them. The wages system they contend to be iniquitous, because it falsely pre- THE LEADERS OF DEMOS. 69 tends to pay for surplus labour that is really unpaid. That is the mystery of iniquity of the whole system. A labourer works twelve hours a day because he cannot work longer and work well and permanently; and he gets three shillings a day of wages, because three shillings will buy him the necessaries he requires. In six hours labour he will create three shillings worth of value, and he works the other six hours for nothing, creating three shillings worth of surplus value for the master who advances him his wages. It is from these causes that we arrive at the present system of things under which a labourer, who creates six shillings a day is worth only three shillings a day. This absurd conclusion, says Marx, could never have held ground for an hour had it not been hidden and disguised by the practice of paying wages in money. This makes it seem as if the labourer were paid for the whole day when he is only paid for the part. The wages system is, therefore, the lever of the labourer's exploitation, because it enables the capitalist to appropriate the entire surplus value created by the labourer. 3. Normal Day of Labo^lr. The maximum limit to a day's labour is fixed partly by the physi- cal endurance of the labourer, and partly by moral limits. The labourer needs time for social 70 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. and intellectual pursuits. We find the length of the labouring day vary from eight to eighteen hours. There is no principle in the existing in- dustrial economy which fixed it. It must be determined after reviewing all the requirements of the case. Marx fixed upon eight hours as the best limit, because it affords a security for the permanent physical efficiency of the labourer, and gives him leisure for satisfying those intellectual, social, and political wants which are becoming every day more largely imperative. Some of the private employers, who have conceded the eight hour day, make a great point of the argument that the improved welfare of the workman con- duces to such an increase of production as would alone justify the shorter term of work. Marx himself makes no use of this reason, and his followers in the present day do not employ this argument when persuading or trying to persuade the indifferent wage-earner to combine to secure the compulsory eight hour day. 4. Effects of Machinery. Social wealth is not only increased at the expense of the labourer, but in many cases he is positively injured by division and subdivision of labour, combination, associa- tion, and science, which have cost capital nothing, and which are the sources of the increase in wealth. Capital sits still and seizes the whole. THE LEADERS OF DEMOS. 71 Small wages and long hours go together, because the same causes that enable the employer to reduce wages enable him also to lengthen the labouring day. 5. Piecework is discouraged by the leaders of Demos who follow the teaching of Marx, as encouraging over-exertion and overtime. On the piecework system, the worth of labour is determined by the amount and quality of the work it does. Unless the work done is up to the stipulated standard, a point which the employer alone decides, a specious pretext stands ready for withholding the stipulated price. Labourers unable to produce the average amount of work under the stimulus of piecework are dismissed for insufficiency. The superior workman, it is admitted, can earn better pay working by the piece, but the main body do not. A standard of payment is fixed in the case of the superior work- man, which is injurious to all the rest. In the end it is found that the substitution of piecework for day work merely results in the average labourer working harder for the same money. There are other objections to piecework. It renders super- intendence superfluous, and thus promotes the sweating system. It encourages the labourer to strain his physical powers by working overtime ; and it enables employers to engage more men 72 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. than they actually want, since paying only for work done they run no risk. The competition of the half-employed workmen leads to reduction in wages, and piecework thus leads to workmen being imperfectly employed and insufficiently paid. 6. Relative Over-population. The vast number of labourers constantly left out of employment is called by Marx relative over-population. He is not a Malthusian, and of absolute over-population neither he nor his followers have any fear. They hold that there is plenty of work for all. If work were limited to its due amount for everyone according to age and sex, the existing working population would be quite insufficient to carry on national production to its present extent. The relative over-population is an inevitable conse- quence of the capitalistic management of industry, which first compels one portion of the labouring community to do the work of all, and then makes use of the redundancy of labour so created to compel the working half to take less pay. Low wages spring from the excessive competition among labourers, caused by this relative over- population. The leaders of the democracy ridicule the idea that early or improvident marriages in any way contribute to the evils of relative over-population, and they repudiate THE LEADERS OF DEMOS. 73 with indignation the proposal that recourse to emigration, under suitable conditions, should be had by those able and willing to start afresh for themselves under new heavens and on a new earth. The Rev. Hugh Price Hughes, one of the clerical courtiers of Demos, is recently re- ported by the Daily Chronicle to have spoken as follows : " Pauperism in England was not the result of over-popula- tion, but of the most vicious land system in the civilized world. (Cheers.) It was throwing dust in our eyes to suppose that we should get rid of the difficulty by sending our fellow- men over the seas. When men became more important than sheep, tame birds, and deer, we should see that there was ample room for the natural increase of the race. (Cheers.) They protested against any social programme the goal of which was Manitoba or Timbuctoo. Every method of deal- ing with the social question, except the restoration of the people to the land, was mere tinkering with the subject. The ultimate aim of social reform was to secure to every man a heritage of his own. Then the old prophecy would be ful- filled ; the voice of complaining would cease in our streets ; instead of pauperism, disease, and vice, we should see happy childhood, dignified manhood, and peaceable old age." Prayers and hymns preceded and followed the delivery of Mr. Hughes' discourse. If the foregoing be an accurate summary of the views of the leaders of the democracy who rally to New Unionism, it is not to be wondered at 74 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. that the poorer classes who follow them, but who do not study Marx or Lassalle, believe that in some way their votes will enable them to become richer without labour, and to spoil the rich without bloodshed. Politicians of all parties can enter Parliament by one avenue alone the votes of the people many of whom are, through no fault of their own, necessarily ig- norant of the complex problems now await- ing solution by the democracy and their advisers. To foster popular delusions is, accordingly, a recognised method of entry into political life. Once in Parliament, some show has to be made of zeal in the direc- tion of confiscatory measures, and hence the existence of the startling combination in aspirants to political careers, of public attack on private property, coupled with a passion for retention and increase of such private property as they themselves may own, and the attainment of a peerage or a baronetcy as a reward for ostensible loyalty to the piratical principles of a Revolution- ary party. 1 It would be less than fair to the Labour leaders of the new school not to remark on the uniform 1 The imagination fails to grasp what Mr. Pitt's views might have been on some of Mr. Gladstone's recent creations. THE LEADERS OF DEMOS. 75 purity and even elevation of their lives. Their laborious and ascetic careers contrast favourably with long lines of statesmen, from Walpole to Lord Melbourne and Lord Palmerston. There are some, however, who would say of the New Unionists what Sydney Smith said of Mr. Percival : " You spend a great deal of ink about the character of the present Prime Minister. Grant all that you write I say, I fear he will pursue a line of policy destructive to the true interests of his country ; and then you tell me he is faithful to Mrs. Percival, and kind to the Master Percivals. These are, undoubtedly, the first qualifications to be looked to in a time of the most serious public danger, but somehow or other .... I should prefer that he destroyed the domestic happi ness of Wood or Cockell, owed for the veal of the preceding year, whipped his boys, and saved his country." Brought up to date, Peter Plymley would probably declare, that so long as a politician ab- stained from Gladstone, claret, and lager beer, did not smoke pipe or cigarette, he might proclaim with impunity recourse to the "chemical parcel post," or other similar resources of civilisation, the confiscation of land, mines, and railways, and the general duty of prudential A, who has suc- ceeded, to maintain the prolific B, who has failed. Notwithstanding the general upheaval in the 76 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. notions of what constituted morality a genera- tion ago, it is a happy omen for the future that the democracy, as a rule, insist on high personal character among its delegates. Until the work- ing classes obtained the vote, few men were driven from public life for the breach of the seventh commandment. To-day, no man, unless he be of Cabinet rank, can hope to remain in Parliament who is publicly convicted of destroy- ing the popular ideal of domestic felicity. It is, of course, well known that the discovery, and not the commission of sin, is the offence heinous in the public mind, but there is no reason to doubt that the tone and personal character now insisted on is mainly, if not entirely, due to the lives and examples of the principal leaders of Demos, and that there is a better prospect of high personal character being demanded than hitherto. There is, however, a feature in connection with the new demand for spotless records in public men, which is less encouraging. The temptations to hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness are becoming almost as great as in the days of Puritan ascend- ency. If hypocrisy be the tribute that vice pays to virtue, the increase of pretence and false pro- fession may be the mark of evolution to a higher state of morality throughout society. However this may be, it is certainly a symptom not to be THE LEADERS OF DEMOS. 77 ignored. The dissimulation of which I speak is not necessarily religious. There is a political, as well as a moral, scientific, economical, and re- ligious cant. The simulation of opinions not really held, and the disclaimer of sentiments secretly cherished, were probably never so rife among public men as at the present epoch. The causes of the epidemic of insincerity, from which the Labour leaders themselves are not entirely free, arise mainly from the impossibility for courtiers to tell the blunt, plain truth to their sovereign and retain his favour. The " blazing indiscretions " attributed to one eminent states- man are nothing more than distasteful statements of unpalatable truths. Lord Salisbury displeases Demos not because he is a Peer, but because he will not flatter. No man ambitious of ris- ing in Parliament can afford to kick away the only ladder by which he can expect to rise to the top storey. The people addressed by politicians are very much like the rest of mankind. Skil- fully laid on, there is no limit to the amount of flattery most of us are able to absorb. Tak- ing into account the probability of a further increase in the electorate, it is reasonable to ex- pect that the political hypocrisy of men of means and station will continue to increase. Never coming in contact with the real conditions of life, 73 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. many of them can obtain Parliamentary hon- ours only by playing on the weaknesses, and tick- ling the foibles of King Demos, since they are unable from want of personal knowledge to touch his heart, or to appeal to the higher instincts of his nature. The new leaders of the democracy display a great taste for demonstrations, bands, banners, and emblems. The necessity of being in evidence before their supporters, present and prospective, is a condition of their political existence. More- over, the fever for notoriety, whether in the form of renown or of obliquy, is a disease from which none but the greatest are exempt. It grows by what it feeds on. Mr. Pitt, it is true, was not wont to acquaint the people of London with the time-table of his movements. It is reserved for these days for the progress of a statesman demagogue to be chronicled beforehand, so that the crowds may gather and throw dust in the air in honour of one who has thrown dust in their eyes. The leaders of Demos are obliged "to play it low down " in order to succeed ; and the one art of all arts that ensures success is to be talked about. Dress, habits, language, are made to accommodate them- selves to the passion for publicity. Much of the fustian that is talked by the leaders of the people is simply a necessity of their position. They do THE LEADERS OF DEMOS^ 79 not really mean it. But the people expect it, like it, and ask for more. The growth of platform oratory and the faculty of public speech are likely to be still further developed. Every one aspiring to lead the democracy has to pass through a fiery ordeal of public and outdoor speech. . A man may be as poor as Lazarus, false as Iscariot, ugly as Caliban, and ignorant as Gurth, but if he can speak plausibly, is endowed with a good voice, and has the mysterious gift of magnetising audiences with melodramatic commonplace, he may rise to high office in the State. He may make his reputation by sheer destructiveness. And, if he only de- nounce, abuse, menace, and arraign every interest under heaven, and blacken them enough, he now stands a good chance of having serious con- structive work entrusted to him by the nation. In the growing power of oratory lies a patent danger to the democracy. So long as orators can fascinate their audiences, they have no concern with the dangers that threaten the common weal, or the steps that should be taken to neutralise them. But this evil, such as it is, must tend to remedy itself after a certain time. The more cultivated the people become, the more they will distrust the mere tonguester. Already the Babel of tongues is so confusing that the electors are So ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. beginning to judge more of what is done, less by what is said. Injustice is inflicted even on their leaders by the people ; but injustice grows apace where the government of, by, and for the people is necessarily confided not to the whole or to the best of them, but to the most eloquent, pushing, and determined competitors for the privilege of expressing the wishes of Demos. Now is the day for men of coarse fibre. The abolition of the university seats is therefore naturally within the range of practical politics. The following are fair samples of the utterances of those who have gained the ear of Demos : The joint manifesto of the English Socialists, issued on May ist, 1893, by the chief socialistic societies, proclaims in clear language the common ground of action. It says : " On this point all Socialists agree. Our aim, one and all, is to obtain for the whole community complete ownership and control of the means of transport, the means of manufacture, the mines, and the land. Thus we look to put an end for ever to the wage system, to sweep away all disiinctions of class, and eventually to establish national and international communism on a sound basis." "The following has been issued and circulated by our comrades in the mining districts : " Fellow-Workers, In the midst of the terrible struggle in which you are engaged, we, the Anarchists, ask you to consider for a moment why you are fighting, and for what purpose. " Is it simply to retain the bare and meagre livelihood on which you have hitherto existed? Then even your success THE LEADERS OF DEMOS. 8 1 would be a failure, for the struggle would only cease to again break out with renewed bitterness before many months had elapsed. " To-day you are the slaves of those who neither toil nor spin ; you work for others who do nothing for you but to rob you of the greater part of your earnings. Do the wages you have been receiving represent the wealth you have produced ? On the contrary they simply suffice for your bare necessities. All that you have produced above and beyond has gone to make riches and luxuries for the landlord and capitalist. "The reason is simple. The soil, the minerals, which nature provides and to which all have equal right, the capital, i.e., the machinery, buildings, plant, railways, manufactured goods, etc., which are the product of the labour of generations and thousands of workmen, are monopolised by the few who have appropriated them by force and fraud, cunning, and the tricks of trade, extortion, and unpaid labour. " You, the workers, helpless, propertyless, and starving, must sell your labour to get bread for yourselves and children, you must work on the terms laid down by the boss, or starve. And those terms are that all you produce above a bare sub- sistence wage goes to the masters in the shape of rents, royalties, dividends, profits, wages of managements, official salaries, etc. You are thus the mere beasts of burden whom the master uses and exploits. As long as he can make profit out of your labour he allows you to sweat and slave in his mine (or factory, or workshops) ; when you are incapable he turns you adrift to starve, to suicide, to beg, or to live on the charity of friends and relations. You make all wealth. You toil under danger- ous and cruel conditions, and in return you barely get the means to live. " You die before your time ; your wives are worn out by care and anxiety ; your children are killed by preventable dis- eases ; your daughters are forced to work in sweaters' dens, and sometimes to eke out a scanty living on the streets, while the master grows fat on your misery ; and if you dare rebel he turns you out till your starving bellies and your children crying for bread compel you once more to cringe at his feet. F 82 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. " These monsters do not care for your welfare. Then why care for them ? Strike, not for matter of wages, but to put an end to this system of legalised robbery and murder once and for ever, and if they attempt to crush you by force, show that you are men and have the courage of men. "Do not listen to those humbugs who tell you to be moderate and law-abiding. You have been moderate and law-abiding in the past, and you are starving. The Law, the Government, is your enemy. It is simply the weapon of the capitalist robber to crush you. It exists to protect his property, i.e., the booty he has plundered from you ; to prevent the out- raged and disinherited of the earth from taking back the wealth they have produced to satisfy their natural cravings. " It matters not which party is in power ; all are alike, thieves in the pay of thieves. Politicians of all shades, Conservative, Liberal, or so-called Labour, are simply humbugs who would draw you from the more effective method your own action. They talk on trivialities and side issues while you are starving. Their only remedy is lead and steel to murder you. " No ! If you would be free you must take the matter in your own hands. You must put an end to the system that enslaves you. You must sweep away masters altogether, and take back all the wealth you have made, and which is necessary to production all land and capital, in short to be the common possession of all, and used through your own free organisations for the common good of all. Thereby you will put an end to poverty and overwork, prostitution, and involuntary idleness, and make this earth a paradise, instead of the hell it is to-day. " To do this you must show no respect for law or property. You, the miners, must take the mines and lock out the masters, instead of allowing them to lock you out. This is the only method of effectually ending all strikes and all wars whatever. The extinction of mastership means the free co- operation of labour. "By refusing to pay rent you will do more to injure the propertied classes, and therefore benefit yourselves, than by any amount of purely constitutional resistance. By taking of the THE LEADERS OF DEMOS. 83 wealth around, of which you and your family have need, you will show your bosses that you are in earnest, and at least compel them to refrain from carrying their tyranny too far. " Miners, be determined ! Insist on your rights. If you only dare to set the example, the workers of the world will follow. Everywhere they will take back the wealth of which they have been plundered, and on the ruins of wage-slavery and the workers' misery they will rear a new society where none will command and none obey, where none will be rich and none poor, but all will live in equal fellowship and all will be assured of plenty and comfort, culture and freedom ; in short, Anarchist Communism." " The ranks of the unemployed are being augmented daily, and the coming winter will be one of extreme suffering, likely to cause the classes and the authorities no little trouble. If the unemployed do their duty, the London police who were sent to Yorkshire with cutlasses to terrify the colliers, will have to be sent for to help to put down disturbances here and in other parts where the unemployed have become restive. " Not alone in London with regard to these unemployed troubles : Spain, Germany, Vienna, as well as New York, Chicago, and Melbourne, all have their hands full with hunger riots and unemployed processions. In Chicago the police and the people have already come into collision, with the result that a few policemen were bruised and a few out-o'-works clubbed and arrested. From New York the same news comes, but if these manifestations cause friction now, who can say what will not happen this coming winter ? Something, perhaps, that will shake 'Society' to its rotten foundation." " You cannot remedy the evils you suffer by changing your representation in Parliament. It is necessary to change alto- gether the institutions of to-day, to suppress capitalism, to give the land to the labourer, the machine to the artisan, and liberty to all." " We do not expect to make our lot better by constitutional 84 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. means. Men must gain freedom by their own action, by opposing force to force. Down with capitalism and govern- ment ! Spread this one definite idea among the workers the overthrow of private property and of governments." Such thoughts as these are the direct result of the vast influence exercised by Marx over the minds of the urban proletariat of England, rein- forced by the sentimental and emotional school of politicians and preachers, to whom a reconcilia- tion between the teaching of Marx and that of the Syrian Artisan is a political necessity, and pre- sents no difficulties. The materialism of the Marx school is no obstacle to the theological supporters of incongruous and incompatible principles. The evils of existing society are not due merely to our bad social economy ; they are rooted in the core of human nature itself. Revolutions have changed many things ; they have curbed privilege, de- stroyed abuses and expanded opportunity. But no revolution ever changed human nature. The action of the present leaders of Demos in pro- mising Utopia as the result of their programme may be perfectly sincere. But it is strange if Paradise itself should last ten minutes after the first detachment of humanity has entered it. While lust and vanity exist, the extermination of no class can materially and for long benefit the survivors. The socialism current with the leaders THE LEADERS OF DEMOS. 85 of democracy is too absolute and remote from the experience of history and of human nature to be more than a passing phase of thought. At the same time it is clear that the British people are not to-day, and will not for some time to come, be satisfied that the socialism of the New Unionism is too abstract for our nation. We are not yet satur- ated with Socialism up to the point of our absorp- tive capacity. Municipalities have still a great and practical work left undone, all of it in the direction of Collectivism. Too few experiments have been tried, and too few mistakes have been made, to dis- credit either the men in the van of the movement or the movement itself. Those experiments will be tried. The failures will be glossed over. Suc- cesses will whet the appetite for more State action. The widest attention and interest will be excited. Then some great effort will probably be made, such as the nationalisation of the railways, or the acquisi- tion of the soil by the State, and the assumption by that body of the position of landlord to the com- munity. Taking the position of the railways, as being the smaller operation, and one directly con- templated by the new school of economists, the results would probably disappoint those who inculcate an altruism unattainable by any secular development of human nature. The purchase of the railways in this country 86 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. would involve a sum of about a thousand millions sterling without allowing for reasonable compen- sation for prospective value. 1 Supposing the rates, charges, and gross receipts would be the same as they are at the present time, the annual loss would be nearly a million sterling. If the Government reduced rates and fares for the benefit of the public to the moderate extent of ten per cent., they would, after making every allowance for any economy of working that might be affected by the concentration of management, at once find themselves with a deficit of several million sterling per annum, on the working of the railways, to be made up from some other source of revenue. Apart from mere financial considerations, there are other circumstances that would create a reaction against the phase in human develop- ment that assumes the form of Marxist Socialism on our railway system. The amount of Government patronage and interference involved would affect the industries of the nation and the character of the people. Govern- ment would come in contact with the Trade Unions, and either these bodies would control the railways, or a continual struggle for mastery would 1 "The Working and Management of an English Railway," pp. 232-5, by the late Sir G. Findlay. THE LEADERS OF DEMOS. 87 be carried on between the Government and the Trades organisations. The Government might possibly be expected to work the railways for the benefit of the nation, but the Trade Unions would necessarily regard the rates of pay, hours, and duties of their own members, as the main object of their trust. Labour could no longer be dealt with as a commodity, subject to the ordinary demands of supply and demand, and we should alternate between universal strikes of the employe's of the national railway system, and gigantic losses which must destroy the national credit Teetotal Labour leaders of high character, skilled in strife, with contumelious tongues, would have a field for their genius which would present irresistible temptations. The im- provement and development of the traffic would no longer form the one abiding principle by which the railway administration would be guided. Political considerations, rewards to political sup- porters, and the punishment of opponents, would become objects of more immediate interest than the humdrum methods prevalent under what one high-strung democrat calls the " capitalistic cloud." 1 While certain local and imperial affairs are fitly performed by society, all experience of the scale of expenditure in Government departments is 1 Mr. Tom Mann at Bedford, January 3oth, 1894. 88 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. opposed to the belief that the administration of the railways could ever be carried on economically and upon sound commercial principles by a de- partment of the State. In France, the experience of State-managed railways is unsatisfactory. In Belgium, officials belonging to the clerical party remain unnoticed when the Liberal Minister is in office. In Germany, the Landtag votes supplies to be ex- pended on railways every year, a sum in excess of the paper "profit " alleged to be earned. The experience in Australia entirely confirms the ex- perience gained from the older countries in Europe. The Victorian State railways are now committed to the charge of three commissioners, who are supposed to free from all political in- fluence, and to have absolute powers of control, as if the railways were the fruits of private enter- prise as in Great Britain. Even the nationalisation of the railways by no means exhausts the enterprise of the Labour leaders. Mr. Tom Mann, for example, would apply exactly the same principle to the mines and the land 1 as to the railways. Curious problems 1 Speech at Bedford, Jan. 30th, 1894. Mr. George Russell, M.P., under-Secretary for India, who was present, "entirely agreed with everything Mr. Mann had said." Bedfordshire Times and Independent, Feb. 3rd, 1894. THE LEADERS OF DEMOS. 89 would arise under a Government where half the population were civil servants of the State, and the other half were responsible for the welfare of the Indian Empire. There can be no doubt that the proletariat is resolved to have its fair share of the banquet of life, when changes of so stupendous a character are taken as commonplaces, and assented to with a light heart by a rising statesman of family and reputation. It is impossible to resist the conclusion that, while we may fully expect many experiments, the first blunder of any magnitude, affecting many interests and exciting widespread attention, will abate if it do not destroy the influence of .the present generation of socialistic Labour leaders. If, as I believe, State Socialism is a passing and errant phase in human development, doomed ta disappear after it has become manifest that an individualistic God made individualistic man to work out his own salvation in all essentials, and to sink or swim in the process, the future leaders of the democracy will be of another type from the col- lectivist agitators of the present day. The social- istic idea has undoubtedly done great service to- mankind. It has drawn attention to the econo- mic fallacies and selfishness of the Manchester school. It has wisely insisted on the moralisatioa 90 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. of economics, and that ethical considerations should dominate the whole range of industry and commerce. Above all, it has brought powerfully the question of the poor and unemployed before the nation. The poor are likely to be with us long after the doctrines now, in vogue have been renounced as heresies. On the other hand, Socialism has ignored the moral responsibility of a portion of the poorest population for their own condition ; it has needlessly exaggerated the extent and horror of existing evils, and it has done much with Mr. Gladstone's aid to sow use- less strife between man and man. It has raised hopes that can never be fulfilled while human nature is what it is. It has cultivated a vast army of weak and emotional natures, and lays up for them and their successors the pangs of dis- appointment and the bitterness of disillusion. Thought and practice will probably be still further influenced by the propaganda of the present Labour leaders, but the probability is that they will completely fail to make the revolution in society which they propose to accomplish. Co-operation, the form of Collectivism most widely known among the industrial classes, appeals directly to the innate love of property, and acts with magical rapidity in making the co-operator a friend and not an enemy of the existing order of society, THE LEADERS OF DEMOS. 91 and is, therefore, opposed by the black-coated leaders of the Socialists. The systematic revolt and discontent with the existing order of things has given rise to a set of ideas which, though falling under a new nomen- clature, are as old as history. "In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes." Anarchists existed in 1406 B.C., and have existed ever since. Sobrero's discovery of nitro-glycerine, in 1847, and Nobel's adaptation of it as an explosive agent, have given to evil individuals immensely greater power over society than society possesses over them. An Anarchist who is reckless of his own life, is impregnable to all the measures that may be taken against him before the commission of his crime. His motives being incalculable, cannot be provided against. The courage and determination evinced by the majority of Anarchists after their capture is too remarkable a feature to be dis- missed with levity. Incomprehensible as their motives are, Anarchism, which has existed for at least three thousand years, is not likely to be exterminated by international legislation of to-day. On the other hand, the nihilistic war is likely to continue, since the expression of hate by dynamite is eloquent and effective. As explosions and disasters follow each other with 92 ENGLISH DEMOCRA C Y. growing frequency, society will infallibly awake to the existence of the simple fact that the proletariat of Europe is resolved to have its fair share of the banquet of life quite regardless of the bad things in store for it in this or the next world. When this awakening occurs, and the misery and want that attracted no attention so long as agitation was constitutional, is dealt with humanely and practi- cally, it is possible that the pioneers of the nitro- glycerine department of social reform may be regarded as we now look on Tom Paine and Mazzini. But in any event the Party System must be modified before the nation can set to work to accomplish for the good of the poor those things that they will sooner or later refuse to us. The proletariat, like blind Samson, may first pull down upon our heads and their own the whole structure of civilisation, and in the ruin find both their freedom and their death. CHAPTER VI. THE CROWN. FOR the interests of Monarchy in this country it is unfortunate that for more than a generation the Sovereign has practically withdrawn herself from the public eye. The pageant and the pomp that stimulate the imagination of masses who lead a dull and monotonous existence, have been almost entirely wanting. English wage-earners are beginning to ask themselves what advantages accrue to them from the national expenditure on Monarchy in this country, and whether other arrangements would not be more in accordance with their interests and feelings. During the lifetime of the Queen, there is a tacit agreement on all sides that the question of the succession shall not be raised. On the demise of the Crown, however, there is no doubt that the republican question will be raised in an acute form. The settlement of the Civil List of ,385,000 per 93 94 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. annum, lapses with the death of the Queen. It is a question with some reformers whether the yearly sum charged against the Consolidated Fund has been devoted solely to the support of the " honour and dignity of the Crown," within the meaning of the Act i and 2 Viet., chap. 2. The English people have paid to Her Majesty over twenty-two million sterling since her acces- sion, for the support of Her Majesty's household, and the honour and dignity of the Crown. Most of this money has been spent in the salaries and expenses of the Royal household, retiring allow- ances and pensions to officers of the household, and in the distant private residences of the Queen at Balmoral and Osborne. Previous to the accession of Queen Victoria, the Civil List was beyond the control of Parliament during the life of the Sovereign. By a compact between the Queen and Parliament, she surrendered the hereditary revenues of the Crown for life. Should the Prince of Wales succeed Her Majesty on the Throne, he will at once resume the rights over the hereditary Crown revenues from the date of his accession to the time when Parliament elects to settle the new Civil List, or otherwise deals with the question of Crown revenues or the finan- cial standing of the King of England. Under the provision of various Acts of Parlia- THE CROWN. 95. ment, of which the chief are i Anne, St. i., c. 4, sec - 5 5 39 and 40 Geo. III., c. 88 ; 4 Geo. IV., c. 1 8 ; i and 2 Viet., c. 95, sec. 4 ; 25 and 26 Viet., c. 34 ; no grants of Crown land can be, made for a longer period than thirty-one years. It will therefore be competent to the successor to Her Majesty to hypothecate such Crown lands as form part of the hereditary revenues for the period named. Should the new King or Queen on his .or her accession be burdened with debts which Parliament could not be asked to pay, the only visible means for their discharge would be by charging the hereditary revenues resumed by the occupant of the Throne on the demise of his or her predecessor. This contingency of indebtedness by the new Sovereign, discharged by encumbrances on the hereditary revenues of the Crown before Parlia- ment has determined the arrangements for the future Civil List, is a palpable danger to the pros- pects of Monarchy in this country. Repeated applications to Parliament for provision for the numerous sons and daughters of the Queen have familiarised the public with the costliness of monarchical institutions, while the advantages derived from the existence of a stately and hereditary office, under which all subjects may unite but to which none may aspire, are not so< 96 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY, apparent. The working classes of Great Britain are profoundly jealous of public expenditure in salaries. It has been said, not without some show of reason, that they prefer to contemplate the waste of millions in bad administration rather than suffer five hundred a year to be paid as a salary. Persons who are themselves constantly struggling with life on narrow means, cannot bear that public officials to whose support they contribute should subsist in superfluous luxury. Mr. John Burns has said that there is no public position in England the duties of which are not adequately remunerated by a payment of five hundred a year. The payment of ten thousand a year to the Duke of Saxe-Coburg is an act sanctioned by a Radical Ministry and arranged by Mr. Gladstone himself. The irritation excited by the payment of the Duke's ten thousand is out of all propor- tion to the amount of the grant. No greater blunder could have been perpetrated by those who are sincerely desirous of assuring a peace- able succession. Indeed, had Mr. Gladstone, with Machiavelian subtlety, intended to maim monarchical institutions in Great Britain, he could have devised no more effectual means for bringing the Crown into disrepute with the people. The Duke of Saxe-Coburg had no THE CROWN. 97 special or overwhelming popularity. He was credited with the virtue of thrift, which is not shared as it should be by the majority of the people of this country. He is a foreign potentate. And in the last place, Parliament was hustled into sanctioning Mr. Gladstone's arrangement in a way which jarred with the feeling of many that calm deliberation should properly obtain when Royal grants are considered by the representatives or delegates of the people. By the i and 2 Viet, cap. ii., 1837, it is ex- pressly provided that after the demise of the Crown, the hereditary revenues surrendered by the Queen are payable to her successors (clause ii.). By clause xvii. it is enacted : " That this Act shall continue in force for six months after the death of Her most Excellent Mie (whom may God preserve), unless the heir or successor of Her said Majesty shall sooner signify to both Houses of Parliament His or Her Royal will and pleasure to resume the possession of the several Hereditary Rates, Duties, Payments, and Revenues hereby surrendered by Her Majesty." The next successor to the Throne will therefore be free on accession to elect between accepting a sum of ,192,500 during the first six months of his or her reign, or resuming possession of the several hereditary rates, duties, payments, and revenues, G 98 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. surrendered in 1837 by Her present Majesty. In estimating the relative value of the two revenues, it should be remembered that the Sovereign will only receive ,30,000 on account of his Privy Purse, the remainder of the ^192,500 being ex- pended strictly according to specific provisions of the Act. On the other hand, the Queen's Civil List, which was an excellent bargain for the nation in 1837, is now some ^"4000 per annum more than the amount realised by the nation from the revenues relinquished by Her Majesty. The Queen's successor, therefore, unless stopped from so acting by Parliament, may forego the advan- tages derived from clause xvii. of the i and 2 Viet., cap. ii., and, resuming the hereditary rev- enues of the Crown, make such disposition of the property, whether to pay debt (should such exist) or otherwise, as he or she may be pleased to determine. The Ministry in power when the demise of the Crown takes place, have to face a difficult situa- tion. The future Sovereign may do as he or she will with the hereditary revenues of the Crown, under certain specified conditions. To prevent the then Monarch from thus dealing with the revenues reverting at that time to the Crown, an Act of Parliament will be necessary. Parliament may not be sitting. The passage of this Act cannot fail to THE CROWN. 99 be accompanied by much plain speaking, the ex- hibition of a republican spirit, and the vigorous assertion of strictly economical principles. The House of Commons will then be reminded that the Civil List was found inadequate to the maintenance of the royal family, and it will be pointed out that in the reign of Queen Victoria, the Consolidated Fund had been charged with the payment of ; 188,000 per annum, in addition to the Civil List of ^385,000. The payment of ,573,000 per annum for the support of a single family will inevitably be held by needy representatives of an impover- ished but omnipotent electorate to be equal to, if not in excess of, the requirements of the case. The Act settling the Civil List in 1837 expressly recites that the expenditure on the Crown should be kept within due limits. The new republicans will declare that during the previous reign it had not been kept within due limits, but that gross extravagance had been perpetrated, for which the nation had very little to show. The existence of debt, which the annual payment of ,573,000 had been insufficient to defray, will further exasperate some portion of the electors, and they will regard themselves as defrauded of their just rights if an attempt be made to discharge such debt from the Crown revenues. loo ENGLISH DEMOCRA C Y. So strong are the Conservative instincts and traditions of the people of this realm, that it is unlikely that at the next demise of the Crown monarchical institutions will be successfully at- tacked. That the Crown will be assailed with intense hostility is beyond question, and it is unlikely that it will emerge untouched from the struggle. There is no reasonable chance that the English people will ever again submit to the rule of a George the Third, or, still less, of his successor. The Crown, like other institutions, is always on its trial. If the Throne be occupied by a monarch of patriotic sense, sound judgment, industry, and inflexible resolve to maintain the character and purity of the Court of Queen Victoria, there is no reason why the long line of the kings of England should end in the lifetime of the present generation. Austerity and as- ceticism are not yet qualities that evoke the enthusiasm of multitudes, and there is happily no reason to fear that the security of the English Throne is likely to be menaced by its occupant displaying those qualities in excess. The irk- someness of the Sovereign's position cannot but increase. Loss of power is accompanied with increase of publicity. Hampered in every move- ment, with curtailed revenues, and restricted privi- leges, scanty leisure and jealous watching by THE CROWN. 101 millions of eyes under the fierce light that beats upon a Throne, it will not be surprising if, in the course of time, the difficulty of filling the Throne proceed from its rightful occupant rather than from those who hanker after the monotony and corruption of a republic. The Indian Empire and the Colonies are potent elements in the forces that make for the security of the British Throne. The tie between India and England is being loosed by the levity of the House of Commons, and the unbridled emotion- alism of those who see unrighteousness in every act of England towards her Indian Empire. So long as the British Throne lasts, the inarticulate millions of Hindostan can personify in its occu- pant, the British raj, and can contemplate with languid complacency the eccentricities of the Parliament men who cross the sea to inject with Western Radicalism the Indian Congress, and to acclimatise the doctrine of One Man One Vote in the valley of the Ganges. Were the British Throne to disappear from a spasm of parochialism and ignorance of all that the mon- archy really means, the loss of India would pro- bably become a mere question of time, since personal rule is inseparable from oriental concep- tions of Government. Of equal value and importance is the British 102 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. Throne to the maintenance and improvement of our relations with the Colonial Empire. Were England to adopt Republican institutions, the signal would be given to the Colonies to cut the painter and set up for themselves. The tie of sentiment would be snapped, and no student of history of the English-speaking peoples will be disposed to undervalue the element of sentiment in preserving national affinities. The unity of the English-speaking people was destroyed in the last century mainly by the stubborn folly of the Monarch. It may be that the restoration of that unity may come once more within the range of possibility by the wise efforts of an English king. But the British Throne must, in the first place, make its peace with the Irish race. The task is not impossible. CHAPTER VII. THE HOUSE OF LORDS. PARLIAMENT, with the assent of the country, has for so long treated trifles with solemnity and matters of importance with levity, that it is un- likely that we shall see any sudden alteration in the habits of our rulers. We have for so long been accustomed to see hereditary government thrown into the hands of men unworthy of it from want of principle, or unfitted for it from want of capacity, that we should all feel a void if the New Year or Birthday Gazettes did not contain the usual announcement of new Peerages. The hereditary system exists, and is so deeply em- bedded in the Constitution, that the ending of the Peers until they make the serious blunder of j opposing the real will of the people, is impossible without a revolution. The hereditary system in a democracy is like one of those rudimentary organs which serve no end at all, but are quite 10.3 104 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. useless and meaningless. Some of these cases of rudimentary organs are extremely curious. The presence of teeth in fcetal whales, which when grown up, as Mr. Darwin tells us, have not a tooth in their heads, is one of these cases. " Noth- ing can be plainer than that wings are formed for flight ; yet in how many instances do we see wings so reduced in size as to be utterly incap- able of flight." 1 Nothing can be plainer than that eyes are made to see. But sightless eyes are found in many animals which live in the dark, as in caves or underground. These eyes, says Haeckel, often exist in a well-developed condition, but they are covered with membrane, so that no ray of light can enter, and they can never see. Nothing can be plainer than that a democratic legislative body is formed to make good laws by wise men, but there is no more relation between the hereditary principle and the production of wisdom or good laws, than exists between the presence of teeth in fcetal whales, and the food they consume requiring no mastication ; or between the rudimentary eyes of several species of moles and mice, and the subterranean darkness in which they pass their days. Tom Paine thundered against "hereditary nonsense " a century ago, and the anomaly has 1 " Origin of Species," p. 450. THE HOUSE OF LORDS. 105 not diminished since Paine wrote his discourteous epistle to Dundas. Largely under Pitt's advice, George III. had made 388 Peers. Mr. Gladstone, for once, mimetic of Mr. Pitt, has created more Peers than any one Minister since the Revolu- tion. Most men in public life or at the bar, at some time or other during their lives, secretly con- template the possibility of becoming a Peer. They do not talk about it, or even consciously hope for it. But their attitude of mind towards the Peerage is affected by the fact that the bulk of the House of Lords consists of plain citizens of the last three or four generations. The ending of the House of Lords, so long as England remains a rich country, is by no means so probable as many ardent spirits be- lieve or desire. Were a Lancashire cotton famine to recur, and similar disaster simultaneously to afflict the other staples of the country, revolution might well end the Upper House and much else besides. But if we are to maintain a Second Chamber, it must remain respectable ; it must have more and not less power than the House of Lords. The Upper House is powerless unless it has the people at its back. The new Second Chamber, if the Lords should receive their marching orders, must possess real powers of revision and delay. But there is only a certain definite quantity of political power available under any political system. 106 ENGLISH DEMO CRA C Y. Power given to any Second Chamber that in the future may replace the Lords, must therefore be taken from the power now wielded by the House of Commons. Nothing is more unlikely than that the House of Commons will consent to its own undoing, or will take any part in impairing its present omnipotence. M. Challemel-Lacour, in his speech from the chair of the French State, delivered after his re-election in 1894, pointed out as a gratifying proof of the progress the political education of the country was making, that at the last French General Election little was heard about the necessity of abolishing the Senate, which for- merly was the cheval de bataille of a certain school of politicians. He attributed this to the fact that public opinion understood and discerned more clearly the disadvantages and perils which might accrue from the dictatorship of a single Assembly, even if it were an Assembly of sages. If this sense of the danger of the single Chamber be thus tacitly accepted by a people both more logical and more revolutionary than ourselves, there is no likelihood of a Second Chamber being abolished in the United Kingdom. Shrewd observers may remark that it is possible for a Ministry to gain a victory in the House of Commons and to lose support in the country. The THE HOUSE OF LORDS. 107 proposal contained in the tenth clause of Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill, whereby the Irish Members were to exercise power over British taxation, education, and trade, while similar powers over Irish affairs were denied to English and Scottish representatives, was carried in the House of Commons by a good majority. No impartial person, not blinded by partizan feeling, could hesitate in condemning such a proposal, .and probably nine-tenths of the supporters of the Government among the electors were sincerely grateful to the House of Lords for rescuing Great Britain from so humiliating a badge of inferiority being fastened upon her. Nor can there be reasonable doubt that the Government in conse- quence lost weight in the constituencies from the very circumstance that they gained a majority in the House of Commons on a matter detestable to patriotic Englishmen and Scots. The victory in the House of Commons in the contracting-out clause in the Employers Liability Bill was equally attended with corresponding defections in the electorate, and approval of the action of the House of Lords. A hundred years ago, Thomas Paine asked, in reference to the laws regulating workmen's wages : " Why not leave them free to make their own bargains, as the law-makers are to let their farms and houses ? io8 ENGLISH DEMO CRA C Y. Personal labour is all the property they have. Why is that little and the little freedom they enjoy to be infringed ? " l Had he lived to-day, Tom Paine would have denounced Mr. John Burns as a reactionary Tory, and, if free from the serfdom of party, he must have recognised in the action of the House of Lords on the Employers Liability, the championship of that same prin- ciple of freedom for which he had struggled and his publisher had suffered imprisonment for four- teen years. Ten times as numerous as they were under the Tudors, the Lords' power of initiative has steadily waned, until the continued existence of the House is dependent on the tact and good sense of its leaders keeping it in sympathy with the main body of deliberate national opinion. Re- vision and delay are the only functions it now claims, and no effective reasons have been pro- duced to show that those functions would be more satisfactorily performed by an elective Chamber. The motion of Lord Rosebery in 1888 for a Committee to consider reform of the House of Lords was rejected by a majority con- sisting of less than a sixth of the existing Peers ; and Lord Salisbury's Bill for the creation of life Peers and exclusion of " black sheep " was not 1 " Rights of Man," ii., p. 150. THE HOUSE OF LORDS. . 109 carried to its third reading. The languid interest of which these proceedings are the evidence are but a mirror of the indifference of the country. A Society for the Abolition of the House of Lords exists, but they have aroused little interest among the electors, who have accepted with amused indifference the rejection of the most ambitious measure of the most powerful minister England has seen since the death of the younger Pitt. The abolition of the House of Lords by the Rump in 1649, after the execution of the King and the establishment of a republic, was in no sense an act of the democracy. Those who voted the House of Lords to be useless and dangerous were set up and maintained by the military power, and their existence from first to last depended on the will of the soldiery. When the Rump forgot the source of their power, they themselves were promptly packed about their business. The Commonwealth was by no means popular with the nation. It was established by military viol- ence : the power of the sword alone main- tained its supremacy. Bitterly as the Puritans cried out against the privilege and intolerance of King and Peers, the Commonwealth men were not a whit more tolerant. The English masses then preferred, as they now prefer, to be governed by 1 1 o ENGLISH DEMO CRA C Y. gentlemen. No hatred so bitter exists as that of rival proletarians for the proletary who has gained place or position. Democracy has always de- voured her children. The life of a Trade Union Secretary is a life of incessant struggle for exist- ence. The strongest opponents of Mr. John Burns are now the men who first helped him to emerge from obscurity. The repose of manner, straightforwardness, coolness, and courage of English gentlemen for Peers may frequently claim to be gentlemen added to stately sur- roundings, easy fortune, and the halo of tradition, are irresistible to the majority of British trades- men and interesting to everyone. On these grounds it is unlikely that the House of Lords is in immediate danger, unless, as in 1649, the naval and military powers support a revolution, and maintain as their creature a mutilated House of Commons to carry out their behests. A resolution of the House of Commons not supported by the Horse Guards and the Admiralty would have no effect on the Upper Chamber. It is probable that in the course of the next few years the abolition of the hereditary principle may be repeatedly carried in the Commons. It was defeated by 202 to 166 in 1886; by 223 to 162 in 1888; by 201 to 160 in 1889; and by 201 to 139 in 1890. If carried, THE HOUSE OF LORDS. ill and the Upper House be mended in accordance with that principle, the first and obvious effect will be reinforcement in the House of Commons of elements representing law, family tradition and property. In fact, the immediate effect of the abolition of the hereditary principle, so far from being progressive and democratic in character, would be to give greater weight, because more direct representation to the Conservative elements of society. It is indeed difficult to understand why the Conservative leaders resist the extinction of hereditary right to legislate. They must be aware that it can only last while times are quiet, and the country prosperous and contented. If the hereditary principle be left out in the storm that sooner or later will arrive on these shores, it is unlikely that it will survive. And in its fall, much of the structure of our Constitution will fall with it which wise counsels would maintain. The hereditary principle is the one anomaly upon which the philosopher and the demagogue can unite in common antipathy. It is not essential to the strength and utility of a Second Chamber. Indeed, it is probable that the hereditary prin- ciple will prove the doom rather than the sal- vation of the one force in the Constitution that still has the power to ensure that the real will of the people is ascertained. It seems, therefore, 112 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. probable that unless the privilege of hereditary law-making be wisely surrendered when times are quiet, it will be violently withdrawn in the next serious crisis of our national life. CHAPTER VIII. THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. "A CAPACITY for prostituting a Man's Self in his Behaviour, and descending to the present humour of the vulgar, is, perhaps, as good an ingredient as any other for making a considerable Figure in the World." Richard Steele wrote thus regard- ing candidates for Parliament in I/I2. 1 We may certainly repeat at the close of the nineteenth century what Steele declared to be true at the beginning of the eighteenth. The older tradition under which each Member of the House of Commons was a representative of the whole Commonwealth, and stood for England, has nearly died out. As members responsible for the United Kingdom, it would not beseem Irish Nationalists to itinerate the planet in their research after endowments for themselves and their fol- lowers. The annual sacrifice of one glass of 1 Spectator, No. 394, Monday, June 2nd, 1712. 113 H 1 14 ENGLISH DEMOCRA C Y. whisky by each of the adult Home Rulers in Ireland, would suffice to obviate the degrading mendicancy of an integral and governing portion of the present British Parliament. Although appeals to the bounty of citizens of other lands would be as repugnant to Representatives of the people as to those they represent, there is no incongruity in such importunity on the part of Delegates from localities : owning mercenary allegiance to the foreigners and strangers who pay them, to the party chiefs who nominate them, to the priests who secure their return by the terrors of hell ; or, indeed, to any persons or society other than the general community inhabiting these islands. From the time of the Revolution until the death of John Stuart Mill, the principle that there is a limit to the permissible action of government has been tacitly admitted. Since the House of Commons betook itself to improv- ing the moral characters of men, the idea of limit- ing the sphere of legislation to the protection of life, liberty, and goods, seems to have vanished. And it is noticeable that while this sort of legisla- tion ignores the morality of those in easy circum- stances, and presses almost entirely upon .the poor, moral legislation is becoming more and more identified with the popular party in politics. THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 115 Whichever party succeeds in convincing the electorate that it wishes to make bad men good, to substitute love and sympathy for inexorable natural law, seems destined to hold the reins of power for a long period of time. Experiments in social reform that would be impossible for Representatives of the Empire to sanction, are eagerly demanded by the Delegates of our populous constituencies : not because they them- selves believe in those experiments ; but because a Parliamentary career hangs upon their simu- lation of faith. The scope of Government has been immensely enlarged by the silent entry of ecstasy into administration. The main function of the House of Commons is no longer to control finance, to check administration, or to govern. It is to feel the pulse of a feverish democracy ; to soothe it with new experiments ; to realise in- congruous advantages ; to raise the unfit who fail because they are unfit to the level of those who succeed because they are fit. The keen-witted young citizens who dream dreams are many of them sedentary, bald, spectacled, and toothless. Members of the reformed House of Commons, for the first time in the history of that assembly, are the . delegates of masses suffering from physical debility, destitution, embarrassment, and anxiety. The survival of the fittest may be well 1 16 ENGLISH DEMOCRA C Y. for orchids or gazelles ; but the\ multiplication of the unfit in growing numbers ; the elimination of means by which the unfit are sterilised ; and the increasing reverence with which the lives of broken specimens of mankind are regarded, com- bine to form no small portion of the material from which the British urban electorate is now chosen. It is clear that, in the same measure as the House of Commons is a mirror of the electors, it will reflect their moods, execute their orders, and realise their desires. If the ideal be food without work, immunity from taxa- tion, the political supremacy of one class, free education, libraries, travel, Board School meals for children, and the exploitation of the strong and successful by the garrulous failures in life, that idea will be faithfully followed by the dele- gates of a partially invalid, hungry, and unhappy democracy. Members of the House of Commons must see as clearly as the rest of us that strikes begun in ignorance of facts ruling industry abroad destroy or exile British trade. They may ap- preciate the influence of self-indulgence, reckless marriage, wilful idleness or dogged and obstinate oblivion to plain truths. But they dare not say so, except in private. The late Lord Sherbrooke, in 1 886, destroyed for ever his chance of re-elec- tion for a popular constituency by declaring in THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 117 the House of Commons : " If you want venality, ignorance, drunkenness, and the means of in- timidation ; if you want impulsive, unreflecting, violent people, where will you go to look for them to the top or to the bottom ? " Demos is sacrosanct. He may impute to others with im- punity all the seven deadly sins. To hint that he himself is not an ascetic, a sage, and a saint, is to court political extinction. He gulps down flattery like an Oriental, and accepts adulation with the voracity of a beautiful woman not in her first youth. Devotees who refuse to burn the incense are thrust without the fane. On a recent occasion, a Mansion House Com- mittee was appointed to investigate the existence of distress in London, caused by lack of employ- ment, and to consider the best means of dealing with it. The Committee consisted of competent and representative men, among whom was Mr. George Shipton, Secretary of the Trades Council. It was suggested in the report of the Committee, inter aha, that the stamina, physical and moral, of the London working classes was susceptible of improvement ; that the competition of foreign skilled workmen would only be met by moral and educational improvement in the British workman; and that reckless improvidence and intemperance were often found in the ranks of the unemployed. n8 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. Mr. George Shipton finding in these remarks some reflection by Dives on Demos withdrew his name from the report, on the ground that in his opinion the paragraphs in question are alto- gether erroneous and contrary to fact. Here we have an interesting illustration of Mr. Herbert Spencer's doctrine that social organisms during the militant stage of their evolution have to maintain their lives by offensive and defensive activities. Demos, speaking by the mouth of his prophet, Mr. George Shipton, cannot brook the imputation of insobriety even when brought against the unemployed, of whom from thirty to forty per cent, are notoriously victims of Venus and Bacchus. Where Mr. George Shipton fears to tread, Members of Parliament cannot be expected to rush in. The obvious result is, that since Government is merely the expression of the domi- nant power in the State, the House of Commons neither receives nor expresses the truth about the people. Ce nest que la verite qui blesse. While willing to listen to the truth about the Navy, Home Rule, or the South Kensington gang, the last thing to which Demos will give ear, is the truth about himself. Plato and Aristotle distinguished Government as true and pure when power is used for the good of the people, and as false and perverted when it THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 119 is maintained for the private interest of the ruler. Judged by this standard, the House of Commons cannot escape condemnation. Democracy is essentially and justly identified with government in the interests of the needy. The tax-paying community is to be found mainly among those who have lost political power, and the whole tendency of modern legislation is necessarily to thrust the burden on the shoulders of those who are impotent to resist. The popular allegation that the poor pay the larger proportion of taxa- tion cannot be sustained. According to the Economist (January 20, 1894) the opposite is true. The Imperial taxes collected in England in 1892-3 were ^65,736,000, and the local rates amounted to ,28,000,000. Rates and taxes amounted therefore to ^93,736,000. First as to rates. According to Mr. Fowler's report on local taxation, it is calculated that out of ^27,800,000 of rates raised in 1890-1, ^17,500,000 consisted of rates borne by houses. It is only, of course, of this latter portion that the working-classes bear any share, and from the revenue returns it appears that about 22 per cent, of the aggregate house property is made up of houses rated at ^15 a year and under. Assuming that the 15 limit embraces the houses occupied by the working- classes, and assuming all the rates fall on the ENGLISH DEMO CRA C Y. occupiers, the total contribution of these classes may be set down at about ,4,000,000. Turning then to the Imperial taxes the Economist con- tinues : " These may be divided into two classes those to which the working-classes contribute in part, and those to which they do not contribute at all, that division being, broadly, as follows : YEAR 1892-3. YIELD OF TAXES. To Which the Working- classes Contribute. Cocoa, coffee, fruits, &c 592,000 Tea. 2,587,000 Tobacco 7,593,000 Spirits 13,972,000 Beer .. 8,856,000 Receipt and patent medicine stamps 1,000,000 34,600,000 To Which the Working- classes do not Contribute. Wine 1,083,000 Death duties 9,113,000 Land tax and house duty 2,310,000- Income-tax 11,414,000 Stamps on deeds, securities, &c 3,780,000 Railway duty 331,000 Licences 3,105,000 31,136,000 Total ^65,736,000. Exception may possibly be taken to our including licences among the taxes to which the working-classes do not contri- bute. Our answer is, that we have done so because the revenue from this source is derived either from the gratifications of the better-to-do classes, or from special taxes upon certain traders. And now arises the question, ' What portion of the ^34,600,000 of taxation to which the whole community con- tributes is paid by the poorer classes, on whose behalf Sir William Harcourt has been memorialised ? ' That is a ques- tion to which it is impossible to give a definite answer ; but there are means of arriving at an approximate estimate. In 1891-2, out of 5,839,000 houses assessed to income-tax, 3,772,000 consisted of houses under 1$ rent. The working- class houses, that is, amounted to about 65 per cent, of the total, and it may be assumed that the numbers of the working- class population bear pretty much the same proportion to the THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 121 entire population. Obviously, however, it will not do to assume that their consumption of dutiable articles is as great per head as that of people with larger means. Of spirits, for instance, which of all taxed commodities yield the largest revenue, the consumption of the poorer classes is proportion- ately very much less than that of those with more ample means. Without, however, entering into details, it seems to us that if we credit these 65 per cent, of the poorest of the population with 50 per cent, of our entire consumption of duti- able articles, that is much more likely to be over than under the mark, and on that basis the incidence of Imperial and local taxation may be estimated somewhat thus : Poorer Classes. Other Class. Imperial taxation 17,300,000 .. 48,500,000 Local rates 4,000,000 . . 24,000,000 21,300,000 .. 72,500,000 "According to this, the class that constitutes two-thirds of the population contributes considerably less than one-fourth of the total Imperial and local revenues, while the remaining third contribute over three-fourths." The sense of responsibility is largely blunted in Members of the House of Com- mons by the necessity for advertisement and display. Comparatively few speeches are now delivered for the good of the country. Eight million people read at breakfast the name if not the oration of him who addressed the House the previous night. Vast though invisible, the magic personality of such an audience over- shadows the interests of the House, and even of the Bill under discussion. Democracy has on the one hand created the demand for cheap literature and cheap newspapers, but it also, on 122 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. the other hand, depends for existence upon them. The House of Commons no longer exercises individual sway. Its rule over public opinion is second to that of the Press. Its Members are usually more influenced by the newspapers than by the House itself. The Press exists primarily to pay its proprietors, not to spread truth, and accord- ingly appeals to the largest possible numbers of subscribers. Many of these newspaper-reading electors are among the unfit, albeit they are politically powerful through their numbers. As they cannot win success in life under a system of competition, they are compelled to look elsewhere for an amelioration of their lot. The only source from which their comforts can be increased or their hardships relieved is the pockets of those who have succeeded by exertion or inheritance in getting the wealth so much desired. News- paper proprietors, with dividends in view, articu- late this desire for relief works, the living wage, the eight hour day, and the payment of Members : and find their account in so doing. Members of the House of Commons, tumbling over one another in their fidelity to Demos and his parasites, the newspaper proprietors, become more democratic than Demos in the pillage not only of Dives, but of poor taxpayers whose success in life is wholly due to their own efforts. THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 123 This state of things is but the inevitable out- come of the prevalent drift of existing convention and sentiment. For good or evil the influence of an irresponsible Press is here. The question is : What is the outlook for Parliament ? Such vast masses of the electors as now possess the franchise are necessarily controlled by caucuses, moved by emotion, manipulated by faddists or schemers, and used as the machinery for intrigue. Real interests are concealed under party watchwords, and hard facts are sacrificed to party phrases. Passion flouts experience, and the demagogue thrusts the statesman out of his true position in the esteem of the people. We are approaching the parting of the ways. If the English democracy is to set the example of dignity and moderation, of impartial consideration for all interests, of continuous purpose in foreign and domestic policy, and of resistance to class legislation, it is high time that some evidence were forthcoming of its intentions. The example of the predecessor of democracy does not furnish hopeful anticipations for the future. The governing class is selfish. One source of England's greatness and of the position she occupies among the nations, is that her citizens generally have always been ready gratuitously to devote themselves to the public service ; and one chief reason why the people 124 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. have so much confidence in the House of Com- mons is that the large majority of the Members have not hitherto entered Parliament for the sake of gain, but on the contrary, they make some personal sacrifice in order to serve their country. So long as public life is filled by honourable men who serve their country without gain, the spirit of democracy, whatever its faults, will not lose the note of distinction. Austin said that the nature of the constitution under which men live is of less importance than the spirit in which that constitu- tion is administered. Payment of members may not kill patriotism, but the love of country is more likely to flourish where no money passes in her service. It is notorious that the payment of members abroad has produced evil results ; and that in no country are the personal characters of politicians on so high a level as in England. The payment of a salary by the State to representatives of the people would endanger their independence, curtail their freedom of action, and transfer the real representative functions from Members of Par- liament to the Chairman or Committee of the local caucus, and to the Head Boss of the day. The tone of the House of Commons is already deteriorated, but the entrance of a swarm of needy adventurers, many of them lawyers, would further debase the standard to which the House of Com- THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 125 mons has already sunk. The corruption visible and notorious in all lands where members of the Legislature are paid (except in the Cape Colony, where the aristocratic instincts and traditions of the Dutch have raised the standard of political honour) would not fail to infect our public men. Men with narrow views and limited aims would increase. Constant changes in the personnel of the House would further restrict the number of those with sufficient experience of Parliamentary methods to govern wisely. Bribery by promise, already a fine art, would increase. The tempta- tion for paid members to keep themselves before the public would become irresistible, and the evils of congested legislation could only be remedied by ever-increasing applications of gag and closure. The ancient system of payment of members forms no precedent. It was carried on under totally different conditions, worked badly, and fell into disuse. It has not generally been found elsewhere that the payment of members resulted in the return of "Labour members" ; where it has, the result has been peculiar and unsatisfactory. Sir G. Dibbs has stated that in New South Wales the experiment of the system of payment of members had proved a failure. The early days of Mr. Gladstone's fourth tenure of power produced a vigorous agitation on I z6 ENGLISH DEMOCRA C Y. the part of his followers for the payment of Members of Parliament. On March 24th, 1893, Mr. W. Allen carried in the House of Commons a resolution that "a reasonable allowance should forthwith be granted to all Members of Parlia- ment." Sir William Harcourt accepted the de- finition of "forthwith" as meaning something less than the equivalent of "immediately, with- out delay, at once," set against the word in standard dictionaries. In the new democratic vocabulary, " forthwith " is precisely equivalent to the Russian word seitchass, " as soon as prac- ticable," or the Spanish manana. The House of Commons accepted this view, and carried the resolution by a majority of 276 to 229. One great Party is now fairly committed to the payment of Members of Parliament ; finally pledged to the substitution of the hired delegate for the free representative ; for ever done with Burke's declaration to the electors of Bristol : " Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communion with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him ; their opinion, high respect ; their business, unremitting attention. It is his duty to sacri- fice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions to- THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 127 theirs ; and above all, ever and in all cases, to prefer their interests to his own. But his un- biassed opinion, his mature judgment, his en- lightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure ; no, nor from the law and the Constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your repre- sentative owes you not his industry only, but his judgment ; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion." 1 Let us now attempt to survey the road we shall have to travel in India when the payment of Members of Parliament produces its inevitable results. 1 "Burke's Works," vol. iii., p. 18. CHAPTER IX. THE PAROCHIALISATION OF INDIA. THE treatment of their inheritance of the Empire of India and its frontier questions by the Labour leaders and the British democracy, is notable among the perplexing problems awaiting solution in the near future. Hitherto, the lack of interest in Indian subjects by the House of Commons has been salutary for the governed, however much the governing body may have lost from narrow in- difference to their responsibilities for one-fifth of the human race. So long as the Indian Govern- ment were left untrammelled to govern India, all went fairly well. India was won by the sword : is held by the sword ; and, if English democracy is to continue the mastery that our race has exer- cised there since the battle of Plassey, democracy must steadily face the sudden necessity of again drawing the sword. So-called humani- tarian interests in the mother country, perhaps un- duly represented in the House of Commons, have recently modified the relations between the Indian 128 THE PAROCHIALISATION OF INDIA. 129 Government and the Legislature. Signs are not wanting of the approach of a struggle between the House of Commons and the administration responsible for law and order in India. Con- tinuity of policy in India is produced, as in Russia, by the bureaucracy never going out of office. Individuals change. Government con- tinues. Uninterrupted sequence of view is secured. Alternation of parties is unknown. The body is subject to a process of incessant and minute alteration. The soul of Government dwells permanently in Simla and Calcutta ; is never changed or obscured; and permeates the life of every race throughout the Continent of India. The vast populations have been accustomed to . look upon the Government as the final authority, exercising power for and on behalf of the Empress of India. Since 1885, the action of the House of Commons has seriously affected the position of the Government of India in the eyes of the natives, by giving evidence of the existence of divided authority. The House of Commons is ignorant, but supreme. The Government of India is in possession of all the facts, has a hundred and forty years' experience, and is primarily responsible for holding the wolf by the ears. If the House of Commons were directly to exercise sole control, the Government of our great dependency might 130 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. be strong, but it would certainly lack the know- ledge essential to due appreciation of the compli- cated questions that await ^treatment from day to day. But the direct Government of India by the House of Commons is preferable to the spasmodic interference of ignorant and practically irrespon- sible sentimentalists, with the resident and respon- sible authority. Respect of the many weak for the few strong is impaired by divided counsels. Syndi- cated leadership indicates weakness in the strongest camp. Recent interferences of the House of Com- mons with the Government of India are ominous for the future. The Opium Commission, appointed rather with a view to political exigencies at home, than from any warrantable necessity, has been the most conspicuous example of ignorant or reckless philanthropists jerking the reins from the driver's hands. The question of the holding of examina- tions at Calcutta is another case in point. In the case of the moral condition of military cantonments, the House of Commons ignored plain facts which, however repulsive or deplorable, no statesman dealing with celibate troops can omit from his calculations. 1 Parliamentary interference with the Indian authorities on matters of detail is unconsti- tutional, and tends to sap faith in British firmness 1 I am informed by officers of great experience, that our military power in India is already weakened by the great in- crease of hospital cases among the rank and file. THE PAROCHIALISATWN OF INDIA. 131 and strength, without which no Government can retain the contented respect of Oriental or Celt. When Members of Parliament visit India, and exalt the garrulous Babu to a sense of rights he never possessed, which he has not earned, to wrongs he has not suffered, the amiable Parlia- mentarians concerned are setting in motion a very complex machinery. India is not squeezed by England as Russia would squeeze her. The taxation per head does not exceed sixpence per annum. The condition of the people is distinctly improved since the beginning of the century. There is not, or ever has been, a Poor Law ; nor is there any apparent need for one. Wages and prices have risen during the British rule. The labourer of the better class will earn four annas a day ; the hum- bler, not less than two annas. Fuel is but little needed. Bombay thrives at the expense of Lanca- shire. The Jute Industry of Calcutta has thriven at the expense of Dundee ; and British farmers are ruined, and their agricultural labourers fight at the Metropolitan Dock gates for coolie work, while the Indian Wheat Trade flourishes in great prosperity. Rent for cottages in India is almost unknown, and the masses of the population live as owners or occupants on their lands. The great increase in the population during the last hundred 132 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. years has been provided for by large extensions of the cultivated area. Jungle has been replaced by grain. The swamps of former years bear now rich crops^of paddy. Irrigation has attained vast dimensions. Drought and famine have never been absent for long together, but since England became responsible for India, her western skill and capital have made large contributions to the per- manent fertility of her dependency. The irrigation area is reckoned at twenty-eight millions of acres. The British Government have laid out over Rx 31,000,000 on irrigation alone. Famine has been met by the devotion of the entire resources and power of the Government to the mitigation of distress and the saving of life. The Indian bureaucracy has no equal in history, no rival in the present. Russian tchinovniks im- part to their subjects of Central Asia the vices of Moscow, while themselves adopting the licentious- ness of Samarcand. From the members of the Viceroy's Cabinet to the newest and rawest Com- petition Wallah, there is a tone among the Eng- lish civilians which neither the empire of the Caesars nor the empire of the Tsar has ever known. The lofty aims, the pure lives, the un- wearied toil, the even justice, the strong unsel- fishness, and the ever present courage of the English race, as represented by the Indian Civil THE PAROCHIALISA T1ON OF INDIA. 1 33 Service and their military colleagues in the administration of the country, are scarcely appreciated in England. Russians do not believe in, because they do not understand, the moral strength of England's position in India. We owe this strength in great measure to the conduct and the dutifulness of our Indian services. The men who form these services are silent about their responsibilities. But the sense that they stand as representatives of their country is seldom or never absent from the mind of each one of them. In other directions in her drink traffic, in her sweating system, in her unemployed, in her social evil England stands before Europe convicted of national hypocrisy. But her govern- ment of India, more especially since the Mutiny, has redeemed much that she has left undone else- where. Were it not for India and her Civil Ser- vice, Egypt to-day might have remained in bond age. In a few years, Egypt was carried from bank- ruptcy to solvency by officials lent to Egypt by India. The English hold on Egypt is due to the same spirit that makes India at once the pride and the burden of our country. What will be the methods of the new demo- cracy in dealing with India ? New problems are springing up. The finances are disorganised. There is a religious rivalry among the Hindoos 134 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY, which has had no parallel since the days before the Mutiny. The renaissance of religious feeling among the Hindoo population, which finds ex- pression in the anti-cow-killing riots, is caused by the reactionary forces among them protesting against the inroad of Western ideas. Mission- aries, education, roads, golf, telegraphs, all contribute to the decay of Hindooism. The Brahmins are no longer treated with the respect to which they were formerly accustomed. The decay of priestly and prelatical authority in western Europe finds its eastern parallel in the fading influence of the Brahmin, the Guru and the Moulvie. The waning influence of the ecclesiastical caste, whether in India or England, leads to instinctive efforts to recover its position elsewhere. The democracy must deal with these things. The Indian National Congress is responsible for much of the ferment that is now prevalent among the educated natives. It is responsible for creating the false idea that India is homo- geneous. To convey that idea to the British democracy is necessary to the existence of the National Congress. If it be a misuse of terms to speak of Ireland as one entity when reference is made to the desires of one section of the populace, how much more repugnant is it to THE PAROCHIAL1SA TION OF INDIA. 135 reason and to sense, when dealing with the complex wishes of so many different and rival races, to speak of India as "she"? And how futile is the claim of any man or body of Orientals, superficially acquainted with Western thought, to express the dim longings of the inar- ticulate millions, which are no less unintelligible to then than to us ! The differences of language, race and religion, are more sharply marked in Hindostan than in Europe. There is no such gulf between the Greek, Latin and Anglican branches of the Christian Church as between the Moslem, the Brahmin, the Parsee, the Buddhist and the Jain. Among the Mahommedans alone, the Sunais and the Shiahs, the fanatical Wahabis, the orthodox and the degenerate sectarians, differ from each other on religious matters fully as much as Italian contadini differ from Russian Moujiks. Between Lamaism and the adorers of Vishnu, of Siva, of Rama, Krishna, Kali and Hanuman ; between the Sikhs or disciples, and the Parsees, is a great gulf fixed. Swine are abominable to the Moslem ; cows sacred to the Hindoo. The Caste system is a potent factor in the national life, and is alone an impenetrable barrier to the claim of any Babu, Parsee, or English sentimentalist to speak in the name of the teeming myriads of India. But Demos seems 136 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. inclined to think any Home Rule M.P. a better authority on Indian affairs than Lord Lawrence or Sir Lepel Griffin. In December, 1885, the same year in which the British democracy obtained household suf- frage in the counties, the first National Indian Congress met at Bombay. The coloured Presi- dent of the Second Congress is now, to the honour of his constituents, Member of Parliament for Central Finsbury. At the last Congress held at Allahabad, it was affirmed that the great bane of the Indian Administration was the want of real responsibility. Resolutions were carried arging the advisibility of the election of native repre- sentatives on the legislative Council, cf simul- taneous examinations for the public service in India and England ; of the separation of execu- tive and judicial functions, and of full considera- tion by the Government before undertaking any change in the currency standard. Most Members of the House of Commons, steeped in a democratic environment, find it diffi- cult to project themselves into the conditions of Indian life. With them a congress is too often a fetish. A congress is a congress, vhenever it meets, and whether its members be black, tawny, or white. If the congress be formed of Trade Unionists and meet in England, the resolutions THE PAROCI1IALISATJON OF INDIA. 137 of the Trades Congress have all the force of an authoritative voice speaking for the Trade Unions throughout the kingdom. In like manner, a con- gress of educated natives of India, meeting at Amrika or Allahabad, is assumed to speak for India with as much fidelity as when Mr. Burns expresses the views of the Socialists of South London. Misunderstandings, confusion, false hopes, and the seed of troubles to come, are the natural result of so gigantic and unfounded an assumption. The views of the Indian Govern- ment are jeered at, denied, flouted. Official statements are considered to be sufficiently answered when they are branded as official. The conception that Indian officials tell the truth on any subject, when Mr. Bonerjee, Mr. Lalmohun Ghose, Mr. Caine, and Mr. Naoroji take the opposite view, scarcely exists. They are officials, therefore they are liars. When traduced, custom imposes on them silence. But they resent, and rightly resent, the defamation to which the Indian Civil Service is now constantly subjected. Lord Ripon first opened the door to the loss of India that must inevitably occur unless the democracy wake up to an Imperial sense of their magnificent inheritance : to the worth and moral excellence of their gallant servants in their Eastern Empire, and to the petty fanaticism of the meddlesome 138 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. prigs who alone seem to have gained the ear of Demos in matters relating to India. If thefe is much to make the democracy hesitate to accept whole-hearted the heavy task of rule in India, there are not wanting favourable signs of physical, intellectual, and moral advantages that may well make them pause before yielding, as they are asked to yield in Ireland, to the beguiling emotions of comfort and cowardice. The indirect influence of Christian missions is now remarkable. How far the new ideas that are changing Indian thought and opinions are due to missionary enterprise, how far to the influence of Western philosophy, and what proportion is attri- butable to the lives and examples of the English servants of the Crown in India, cannot here be determined. It is, however, certain, on the testi- mony of all close observers resident in India, that there is a process of evolution at work, destined to produce results of the highest importance. These results are not those looked for by the Indian National Congress. The administration of India by Babus, maintained by the British army, seems to be their secret ideal. The tendencies at work appear to indicate a purification of the best Hindoos, obliteration of caste distinc- tions, a recognition of the unselfishness with which England, since 1857, has refrained from exploiting THE PAROCHIALISATION OF INDIA. 139 India for her own benefit, and the exhibition of a legitimate desire for more knowledge and a larger outlook under English raj. Russia's methods are beginning to be known. There is nothing in them to create a wish to ex- change British red-coats for Cossack grey, or the purity of British administration for Muscovite corruption and intrigue. Even in these depressed times the value of Indian trade to the British democracy is consider- able, and any playing fast and loose with interests so vast is financially unwise. The returns for the last year available amounted to Rx9O,ooo,ooo, or not far short of 2 per head of our population. Were our relations with India to cease, the whole of this great and growing market would vanish. Free imports may possibly be too costly for India to sustain with the disorganised currency the depreciated rupee. 1 But the sort of protection England may perchance elect to impose in India will be a different affair altogether from the zariba of custom houses with which Russia would sur- round the Indian dependency if ever the Cross of St. Andrew floats over the city of Calcutta. We should lose the trade in cotton manufactures, yarn, 1 This was, of course, written before Mr. Westland's 1 894-5 Budget, and the deplorable omission of cotton goods from the tariff, in order to catch the Lancashire vote. 140 ENGLISH DEMOCRA C Y. iron, copper, machinery, and woollens, and thus increase materially the number of the British un- employed. Upon the wage-earning classes would the heavier burden fall. The loss of India would injure English working men and women to such an extent it is impossible but that the self-interest of the democracy will shortly be roused to the danger of allowing anti-opiumists, wild Western theorists, and relentless philanthropists, to plant their projects upon India, in the teeth of England's duty and England's interests. But it will be asked, why are the endeavours of good men pernicious when they are bent upon purifying our Indian Administration and introducing the benefits of Western ideas and the representative system to the people of Hindostan? The answer is simple. They pre- tend to deal with facts that they do not under- stand, by machinery they cannot control. Half a dozen hurried visits to India in the cold weather in search of evidence to support a posi- tion taken up a priori, are worthless as a guide to the enlightened treatment of diverse races who would fly at each other's throats the day after we relinquished our hold upon India. It is true that India is held by the sword : but behind the power of the sword is the repute England has gained of being willing to strike freely and THE PAROCHIALISATION OF INDIA. 141 strike hard. It is not alone that she has the strong hand, but that she is ready to use it, that sustains \hepax britannica, while only 70,000 white soldiers control a population of 270,000,000 many of them the flower of the warlike races of the world. The spell of England's name is equal to many armies. Injure her fame whether the slander proceed from Babu traitors or Glad- stonian baronets is immaterial and you must elect between the costly increase of your white troops and prompt evacuation. English politicians are so absorbed in such matters as nominated or elected trustees of parochial charities, that they have not en- lightened the democracy as to the paramount importance of maintaining the reputation that England now has for being willing to shed the blood of a million of men before her Empire is lost or divided. 1 Every crotcheteer can discover in India food for his fancy or fuel for his fire. Men with the ideals of Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, the sympathies of Sir Joseph Pease, or the versatil- ity of Mr. Caine, find ready to their hands in India all that they seek at a reasonable price. Throughout the East evidence is a commodity. 1 The recent appointment of the Indian Secretaryship on Mr. Fowler, as a reward for minute knowledge of parochial de- tails, is a signal example of how to squander British reputation in India. 1 42 ENGLISH DEMO CRA C Y. It can be bought or obtained by all who are willing to pay the price, or effect the barter re- quired by the dealers in evidence. It is thus that excellent but emotional men are manipulated by wily Hindoos, as other equally comfortable democrats have been practised upon by rhetorical Celts. The anti-opiumists had probably no intention of planting in Indian soil the germs of the Irish question when they embarked on their crusade against the moderate use of the drug by our vegetarian and fever-haunted fellow- subjects. But the injury done by those peace- mongering firebrands in undermining the reputation of England is incalculable, and should never be forgotten by the intelligent democracy. 1 By weakening England in India, it is the English democracy that is wounded in pocket and in prestige. Unless Demos promptly gives to the National Congress fair warning that there is no chance of a small elective Government of intellectual Bengalis being established in India, and then maintained in power by a mercenary British army, the sever- ance of the tie between England and India is but a question of time. The Indian question and the Irish question have much in common. 1 The irritation among the Sikhs at the Anti-Opium Com mission is both serious and bitter. We have not heard the last of it. THE PAROCHIALISATION OF INDIA. 143 In each case a demand is made by the inferior but more numerous race to govern the superior but less numerous one. The Celtic and the Bengali stocks have much in common ; in nothing do they more resemble each other than in their prompt and accurate recognition of all the signs of a strong Government. Surrender to Celt or Hindoo from motives of fear or expediency, and you destroy the possibility of government. The invasion of the House of Commons by sentimentality and emotion is the gravest evil to be apprehended. For the dangers ahead in India are such as are incapable of solution by nerveless or excited politicians. The first time that a weak English Government enables her to do so, Russia will seize the opportunity to push forward her frontier. If the English people refrain from giving the Tsar to understand that retirement or a declaration of war is the alterna- tive, Russia will protest, explain, and stay. In due time, a further advance will be made until she is within distance to corrupt the tribes now counting on our help. The old fighting races like the Sikhs and the Ghoorkas are deteriorat- ing. The conversion of the sword into the ploughshare has had its usual result. Disuse in war has produced decay of faculty, and the Russians would have less trouble in defeating our native allies ten years hence than during the time 1 44 ENGLISH DEMOCRA C Y. of the Penjdeh incident. The Indian Congress, it is true, sneers at Russia in order to justify its plea for the reduction of military expenditure, and thus to obtain more money for the higher educa- tion of the mimetic Bengali. If Russia be a palpable danger in the North, there is an evil of no less gravity in India than in England. The too rapid introduction of Western ideas and the ever growing influence of education, while sharpening the wits of those natives who come under European influence, has done nothing to impart a new moral sanction in place of the old canons of conduct which have become as obsolete as the mythologies they accompanied. The worship of material comfort promises a crop of anarchy and discontent in India as in England. Education and an empty stomach are the raw materials of discontent, and the more capable the new school of educated natives become to ap- preciate defects in the laws and lawgivers who come to them in a foreign garb, the more unwill- ing are they to admit the enormous benefits that India has received at our hands. The debt of India is less than the public debt of Australia- Each inhabitant of India is burdened with but ten shillings of public debt. In New Zealand the public debt is ^"59 us. 6d. per head, or more than one hundred and nineteen times as much. THE PAROCHIALISATION OF INDIA. 145 Moreover, in India there is far more to show for the expenditure. Rxi 15, 862,983 in India, and ,107,404,143 in England comprise the whole of the debt. The railways, canals, irrigation, and other works of public value, represent the major portion of the debt, for the simple reason that politi- cal corruption, the bane of democracies, has not tainted the Indian bureaucracy. The expenditure has not only been intelligent, it has been honest. Other problems awaiting solution are the Cur- rency question, and the policy of extending the Permanent Settlement. In the first case, we have seen an import duty placed on imported goods. The cost of the purity of British inten- tions will be brought home to the democracy with a rush, and not only the question of Free Trade will be brought to the front, but how far the 'thumb mark of the artisan' shall leave its imprint on Indian affairs is an issue that cannot long be postponed. In the growing spirit of protection it is possible that we may see experi- ments made in differential duties, and that both India and Egypt, later on, in their relations with England, shall be made to serve the interests of their mistress before attending to strangers. On the whole, and in spite of many qualifying circumstances, the prospects of our holding India are gloomy. We cannot teach Christianity in the 146 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. schools. It is out of the question to teach any other religion. Missionaries do not directly touch more than one per cent., and those mainly of the lower castes. The extreme labour and pain neces- sary to obtain a seat in the House of Commons are driving out of public life some of the men of leisure who are able to give impartial study to Indian affairs, while the peripatetic emotion- alist Member of Parliament, being only in contact with the voluble, timid, educated, rent -paying minority of natives, darkens counsel. The views impressed by those travellers upon the House of Commons no more represent the inarticulate millions of India than the views of Mr. Davitt or Mr. O'Brien represent the views of Belfast. But the British democracy, with a thousand other interests, fancies that India can be governed on progressive principles, and that the present methods of administration are cumbrous, de- spotic, expensive, and unjust. Whether Demos will learn in time that the Rajpoots and the Ghoorkas cannot be governed by County Council ; that India is an Empire needing Imperial and not parochial administration; that the inheritance of the Moguls is coveted by a stealthy and powerful rival, the continuity of whose policy is one secret of his strength ; that if this Empire is to be held, it is necessary to- THE PAROCHIALISATION OF INDIA. 147 support and not belittle the English in India : to vaunt rather than to impair their influence ; and to hold up the British flag as the symbol of justice and strength that both underlie our rights and ennoble our power are questions that must en- tirely depend on the character and the knowledge of the men whom Demos trusts. Looking at the fact that no democracy has ever yet in history sustained the burden of vast and distant Empire across the sea ; looking at the temptation to politi- cians to shout what is pleasant to the many, rather than whisper what is true, the outlook for India is not hopeful. At all events, it is not too late for the people of England to form the right estimate of the value of their possession, to recognise their duty both to the people of India and to themselves; and to dismiss from their confidence the shrill men who deny that British administration of India is, on the whole and in the main, the most splendid monument of human effort ever created by our own or any other race. The racial good sense of the English and Scotch is so inbred, I believe, that Demos may possibly awake, listen, and act upon good advice before it is too late. But the future of the British people depends upon their firmness in maintaining their grip, and even extending their hold on their Eastern Empire. The task is one that no other nation can fulfil. Russia would loot 148 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. and ravish where England has planted the seeds of prosperity, and has given the example of virtue. Natives of India who are growing up without moral training lose faith in Hindooism, and its place is not supplied. Even the best Hindoos make no effort to cover the vacated ground. The transition period through which the Hindoos are now passing is one in which the strong hand of Britain is essential to the evolution, if not to the existence, of the supple Italians of the East. To drop the work from fear were the most craven course by which a great nation ever declined to insignificance and sunk to dishonour. The stronger races need us no less than the Bengali. Peace would no more result from releasing the tigers and wolves among the sheep and antelopes in the Zoological Gardens than by withdrawing the barriers erected between rival races by British rule in India. If Great Britain pursues the road along which she is travelling now, blood will be shed, and the system of just Empire built up by a century of struggle and sacrifice will first be weakened, and then upset. The House of Commons may restore the old system of decennial inquiry, and restrict its separate action to a standing commission entrusted with the duty of overhauling all Indian affairs. In that case, the Indian Government will be strength- THE PAROCHIALISATION OF INDIA. 149 ened by serious and intelligent criticism, and the House of Commons kept in touch with the phases of contemporary Indian administration. But for ir- responsible Members of the House of Commons to hamper the Indian authorities, by coquetting with sedition, and investing low intrigues with the dignity of constitutional agitation, is an evil that must end, or rule thus undermined will become impossible. The French ' deputies never dream of impairing French authority in Saigon or Sene- gal, by conspiring with incendiary natives against French administration. If two or three travelling philanthropists were tied over an ant heap, blown from a gun, or hanged on a peepul tree, the cause of temperance or the textile trades might suffer, but it would be a bold man who would assert that the welfare of one-fifth of the human race would not be directly enhanced by the perpetration of this crime especially if the victims were M.P.'s. CHAPTER X. JEWISH INFLUENCE ON DEMOCRACY. IT is an article of faith in the higher spheres of Government administration in Russia that if the anti-semitic laws of the Empire were repealed, and the Jewish population were allowed free access to every post in the Empire, eight years would not pass before every appointment worth having would be filled by a tchinovnik of Hebrew birth. Russians hold that the bright Jewish intellect, if allowed free play, would con- taminate the Imperial service within the period of a decade. In England, not only is there free play for Jewish energies, but there seems to be a tacit convention that atonement should be made in England for contemporary disabilities in- flicted elsewhere upon the Jewish race, by ex- tending to them special social and educational privileges, and by the use of language giving an extravagant idea of the esteem in which they are 150 JE WISH INFL UENCE ON DEMO CRA CY. 151 held. So anxious are the public men of England to avoid the imputation of anti-semitism, that they rarely refer to Jewish immigration, educa- tion, charities, or other social or political matters, without taking care to express their sense of the extraordinary value to the common weal of the Jewish element in the population. These pro- testations are not in all cases sincere, for nothing is more common, when no Jew is present, than to hear anti-semitic sentiments expressed with quite as much fervour in England as in Russia. Considering the small number of Jews in Eng- land, probably not more than 120,000, the influ- ence they have obtained is a tribute to their extraordinary abilities. The Press throughout Europe is largely in Jewish hands, and even in England is the product of Jewish brains and capital to an extent quite out of proportion to their numerical importance. In medicine, law, surgery, politics, music, and finance, they are no less remarkable than in journalism. The com- mercial side of art is, to a great extent, absorbed by Jews, as hereditary training has excluded them from the exercise of artistic faculties that in former times were temptations to that idolatry from which they were commanded to hold aloof. The intellectual pre-eminence of the Jews is a phenomenon so remarkable as in itself to render 1 52 ENGLISH DEMOCRA C Y. the jealous anti-semitism of stupid Muscovites, Teutons, and Saxons, a tribute of involuntary compliment. The best of the Russians have dis- covered the fatuity of persecution, because the Jews are more temperate and more industrious than themselves, but the governing body in Russia does not consist of the best among the Russian people. They regard the Jewish faith as an insult to the Greek Church ; the presence of five million Jews as a menace to Russian unity ; and the Jewish intellect as an outrage to national pride. For the poor Jews of Russia a patience that is sublime is the only resource. In England, the necessity for Jewish modesty and patience has passed away. The influence of the community on our national life is out of all proportion to its numbers or even to its wealth. Our rigid insularity is corrected by Jewish de- tachment of mind, by their cosmopolitan traditions, habits of accurate analysis, and their singular power of appreciating facts. There can be no better certificate to the social position of the Jews in England than the differences that exist among themselves on every subject. They agree in little else than the practice of charity, the sacredness of home and its interests, and loyalty to the land of their adoption. On politics, religion, economics, social reform, Free Trade, immigration, and every JEWISH INFLUENCE ON DEMOCRACY. 153. other subject of public interest upon which English- men are divided, the Jewish community is equally free from mechanical unanimity. In England there is no question or class of questions upon which Jew- ish opinion is unanimous, or upon which their ideas are not as various as the ideas of other English- men. Nevertheless, a general impression exists among Englishmen, that when the Chief Rabbi, for example, expresses an opinion on the question, say, of alien immigration, he is expressing the solidarity of view that exists in his community. Nothing can be farther from the fact. On the issues inseparable from the question of immigration, viz., the Free Trade principle, reprisal doctrine, humanitarian and traditional policy, there is no more unanimity among the Hebrew than among the Gentile community. But their numbers are so small, they are credited with a solidarity to which, happily for themselves and for us, they can lay no claim. Unanimity of view is like some forms of crystallisation. It is sometimes the result of pres- sure. Where there is no persecution or pressure, there is no unity on the details of any subject, polit- ical, social, or religious, specially among the bright- est intellectual race in the world. The influence of the Jews in England, in spite of their differences- of opinion, is remarkable. What their influence would be if they were unanimous is useless to in- *54 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. quire, since nothing but the reversal of the tradi- tional policy of England is likely to induce universal agreement among a quick-witted and somewhat quarrelsome people. As it is, by the verdict of the historians and philosophers of our times they are to be reckoned among the chief pro- moters of humanity and civilisation, and we may safely look to them for a valuable element in check- ing the mistakes and preventing the excesses in which our new democracy may be tempted to fall. The means by which Jewish influence is most effectively exercised are by no means the obvious methods of direct advocacy. The Jewish Press, for instance, carries with it comparatively little weight, appeals to a narrow circle, and is incom- petent to speak for the community upon any sub- ject of general importance. The jealous religious exclusiveness of the Jews observable in Russia and Germany is vanishing in England. The cloak of tribal pride is cast aside under the sun of toleration. The influence of the earlier Jewish writers was to depreciate the character and the position of women. Woman was regarded as the origin of human ills. A period of purification was appointed after the birth of every child, and it was twice as long in the case of a female as of a male infant. 1 Every Sabbath, the Jews to this day 1 Leviticus xii., 1-5. JE WISH INFL UENCE ON DEMOCRA CY. 155 thank God that they were not born women, and, with Tertullian, woman is looked on with Oriental depreciation as " the gate of hell." To this day in Russia the most saintly of the Rabbis decline to touch the hand of a woman. The Rabbi of Kovno, a man of the noblest character, who is the doyen to the Jewish priesthood of the Empire, refused in my sight, on religious grounds, to shake hands with a gentle English lady on being introduced to her. The types of female excel- lence exhibited in Jewish history are few and of no high rank, and, as Mr. Lecky points out, 1 that " the warmest eulogy of a woman in the Old Testament is probably that which was bestowed on her who, with circumstances of the most aggra- vated treachery, had murdered the sleeping fugi- tive who had taken refuge under her roof." Whatever Oriental tinge may have coloured the earlier Jewish writers in regard to the estimation in which women were held, there can be no ques- tion as to the dignity and care with which women are now maintained by the Jews of Europe. With few exceptions, no married woman or young girl is allowed to take part in hard or grinding toil involving physical deterioration and moral danger. The practice of restricting female labour to domestic offices is valuable as an example to a 1 " Hist. European Morals," ii., p. 357. i $6 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. nation like our own where the industrial competi- tion of women with men is a source of disturbance to family life, physical injury, and a menace to the well-being of the next generation. Beauty and intelligence are so common among the children of the Jews that it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the loving care with which their women are surrounded at critical periods of their lives is the principal cause for the superiority of their children to those of Gentiles living in the same environment. Valuable as the example in the treatment of women by the Jews is to the stolid Christian population of our great cities, there is yet another matter in which the Jewish leaven is needed for the whole lump. Thrift may become a vice, and caution in money matters a defect, but the racial thriftlessness of the English is a moral drawback of the greatest importance when times are hard, employment scanty, and the profits of enterprise diminishing in regular progression. The exist- ence of bodies of Jews in our midst, with their proverbial mastery of economic truth, full of the instincts of commercialism, and for the most part enthusiastic champions of the indefeasible rights of private ownership, is an unmixed advantage in a socialistic proletariat. It would be impossible to ignore the fact that both the delirium of the Anarchists and the dreams of the Socialists, have JE WISH INFL UENCE ON DEMOCRA CY. 157 been sustained by Jewish leaders. Mr. Samuels and Mr. Lewis Lyons have a considerable follow- ing among the hungry and half-educated multi- tudes in which they live. But the anarchist teachings of Mr. Samuels and the socialistic dreams of Mr. Lyons have no more resolute opponents in England than the main body of the Jewish community. Loathing and detestation are terms none too strong to express the feelings of the Jewish shopkeepers and manufacturers of London, Liverpool, Leeds and Glasgow, at the propaganda preached by the late Mr. Lipski's brother-in-law, and the late M. Bourdin's friend. And it must not be forgotten that if there are a disproportionate number of Jews among the anarchical elements in the metropolis, Russia and the Continent generally have sent us for many years past the worst elements from their Jewish population. It is true that England has received a few victims of religious and civil tyranny, 1 but in following our traditions we have also sheltered some of the champion scoundrels in Europe. The general agreement among public men to refrain from drawing attention to this fact, is an instance of the supersensitive timidity that the Jews have inspired among those who are entitled to object to the right of asylum 1 Possibly 10 per cent, of recent immigrants. 1 58 ENGLISH DEM OCR A C Y. for refugees from tyranny being perverted to the protection of refugees from law. The charge of anti-semitism is dreaded, while the charge of being anti-English is accepted as a compliment, being merely equivalent to having cosmopolitan sympathies. The chief sufferers from the en- trance of Jewish recidivistes are the English Jews. The poverty of the new comers falls on them, and if crime is perpetrated the reputation of the most taw-abiding race in Europe is injured. The character of many of these immigrants is becom- ing a serious question for the State, though it is the height of injustice to associate their immor- ality with their Hebrew origin. Judge Bacon in the Whitechapel County Court, in giving judg- ment in a recent case in which alien Jews were conflicting, is reported to have said : " The evi- dence I have heard is really very shocking. I can understand these aliens entering into a conspiracy to rob the Philistines and spoil the Egyptians. But I cannot understand their com- mitting deliberate perjury in this Court ; day after day I encounter conspiracies to defeat justice by perjury. It is always difficult to prove this to let a jury know the exact words the men say here ; but very soon I shall make an example of someone, and then these German Jews will at length learn that the law is strong enough to JEWISH INFLUENCE ON DEMOCRACY. \& convict, and severe enough to punish those who use our English Courts for the purposes of con- spiracy and fraud." l 1 The Standard of the i6th January, 1894, gives an in- teresting report of a case which sets forth the manner in which the value of the Jewish community is impaired in the eyes of the public. A recent report from the Worship Street Police Court called attention to the changed character of that portion of Shoreditch, Spitalfields, and Whitechapel over which the Court has jurisdiction, necessitating the appointment of an in- terpreter acquainted with the Russian, Polish, and German languages, as well as that spoken by foreign Jews, and known as " Yiddish Hebrew." It was mentioned also that the Court passage is placarded with notices and cautions in all those tongues, and that much of the time of the Court is taken up with the squabbles arising among the peoples of those nations alien immigrants who have settled in the East of London, and within the past few years, moving westward, have appro- priated whole streets in Spitalfields. The keen fight to main- tain a business footing, which the old traders of those streets have to make, is illustrated by the following cases which, among many others, were heard before Mr. Corser : William Fowles, of 79 Sclater Street, Spitalfields, was summoned by Abram Levy, of Mount Street, for assaulting him. The Com- plainant gave his evidence in Yiddish, which was interpreted. It was to the effect that he went to buy two live fowls from the Defendant, who keeps a bird shop, and having offered a price which was refused, the Defendant, because Complainant said the hens were " swelled," struck him several blows. Mr. Margetts, solicitor for the defence, said there was not an atom of truth in the Complainant's story. The Defendant had carried on business for 20 years as a poultry dealer, and had lately found himself much opposed by the foreign Jews. The Complainant was one of those who leagued with others to ob- struct his business, and drive him away. By pretending to be a buyer, the Complainant got a couple of fowls into his hands, and then let them go among the crowd, mostly Jews. When- 160 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. The Jewish Unemployed Committee formed on socialistic lines issued a notice last winter which, while attracting little attention, shows how the the owner tried to catch them he was tripped up, one man threatened him with an open knife, his clothes were torn, his goods overturned, and eight fowls stolen. A Witness was called who bore out the defence, and Mr. Corser said he be- lieved it the more probable story and dismissed the summons. Solomon Solomons appeared to a summons, at the instance of Nathan Chapnisky, charging him with wilful damage. Chapnisky's evidence was interpreted, he being a Russo-Pole. The Defendant was an English-speaking Jew, who said he had carried on business in Spitalfields for about forty years, and his family before him. It was his practice to have a stall in front of a certain shop in VVhitechapel, by permission of the shopkeeper. The Complainant had lately appeared in the market, and on the 23rd December set up a stall on Defen- dant's stand. When told he would have to remove it, he refused. He was eventually compelled to do so by the police on the complaint of the shopkeeper. His evidence was that Solomons, in revenge for being kept out of his position so long, followed him to a place where he had set up his stall in opposition, and, unscrewing the base of the lamp which hung over the stall, let the burning naphtha fall on the goods (cloth caps), which were burned. Then the Defendant flung them on the ground. And the crowd stole them. Replying to the Magistrate, Chapnisky said he lost five gross of caps and the damage was 6. He declared he had got plenty of Wit- nesses to say the same thing. They proved to be foreign Jews like the Complainant, but the constable on duty at the market was called, and said he saw no disturbance, and no complaint of any caps being burned or stolen was made either to him or at the police station. Mr. Corser thought the Complainant's story was a tissue of lies. He dismissed the case, and ordered Chapnisky to pay 75. 6d. costs. Solomons exclaimed, " For once there's justice done on these foreigners." A man, named Johns, a cabinetmaker, of Columbia Row, was summoned by Peter Mache for money due for piece work. The point in dis- pute was as to whether the work in question was properly done. JE WISH INFL UENCE ON DEMOCRA CY. 161 extension of religious toleration in England has reached the confines of callous materialism, and demonstrates the impunity now extended to the insurrectionary minority of a once persecuted, but now dominant, community. The Jewish Com- mittee in question issued a notice calling on their co-religionists to meet on Tower Hill and take part in a march to Trafalgar Square. On their return they were asked to take possession of St. Paul's Cathedral. The assistance of the Canon in resi- dence was to be invoked, and it was notified that should he refuse it, the Jewish Unemployed assembled in the Cathedral would refuse to leave. Had the Jews in Petersburg made free with the Kazan or St. Isaac Cathedral in this manner, they The Complainant alleged that he had done, at the price of 33. per piece, work for which 55. per piece should have been charged, but the Defendant wanted, he said, to put a five guinea article on the market for ^3, and did it by low wages and German labour, he being a German. The Complainant brought two cabinetmakers, who said they had worked from 20 to 30 years at the trade, to state that the work for which the Defendant refused payment was fairly done at the price, one adding that it was " too good for the money." The De- fendant called two Germans, who said that, as cabinetmakers, they considered the work spoiled, and it appeared to be ad- mitted that it might have been better. The Germans said they would have made it better at the price ; the Englishmen said the price agreed was one-half of what was usual. Mr. Corser said when the Complainant agreed to do the work it was reasonable to suppose he undertook to do it properly. He had not done it as well as it could have been done, and so he must lose his case, and the summons was dismissed. L 1 62 ENGLISH DEMO CRA C Y. would have been shot down without scruple, and it is to the credit of the London populace that Mr. Lewis Lyons' methods of drawing attention to the condition of the destitute Jewish workmen are generally appreciated at their true value, and are recognised as being not only unsanctioned, but opposed by the good sense of all responsible members of the Hebrew community. The extortion and violence inflicted on the Jews of England in former days are now suc- ceeded by the good-natured indifference of the British proletariat, and by the deference accorded to the wishes of the Community by our rulers, even when Jewish requirements trespass upon the principle of absolute equality before the law. In the controversy that has recently taken place on the question of the religious compromise of 1870 in the Education Act, it is interesting to mark the fact that the only denominational schools under the School Board for London are the Jewish schools, in which the ordinary syllabus of religious teaching is modified out of deference to the pro- fessed belief of the children's parents. Most people are under the impression that only Jewish children attend these schools. That is by no means the case. Christian children attend them, and Christian teachers are denied the opportunity of giving instruction in the Christian religion fE WISH INFL UENCE ON DEMO CRA CY. 163 under a Board which professes to teach it. Both Christian and Jewish children are taught Old Testament history without any connection between the Old and the New Testaments. Not only, therefore, is there inadequate teaching in the New Testament, since one teacher cannot efficiently deal at one time with fifty children of all ages and all standards, but the Old Testament is taught from the non-Christian, that is, the Jewish point of view. It would seem well that if the School Board of London extends the privilege of denom- inational schools to the Jews, which are paid for out of public money, denied to Roman Catholics, and vehemently opposed by a large section of the religious public, the right thing to do would be to provide Jewish teachers for them, and to send Christian children elsewhere. But no. Such is the paramount influence established in England by the Hebrew community, that where Christian and Jewish interests conflict, the former gives way to the latter, not reluctantly, grudgingly, or with a sense of injustice, but gladly and cheerfully as right-minded inferiors naturally yield precedence to financial and intellectual superiors. If the levies and tortures of John, the exactions of Henry III., and the wicked statute De la, Jeuerie were revenged in the nineteenth century by misuse of the vast political and social powers 1 64 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. the Jews have now obtained, historic justice would not condemn them. But there is little sign of any misuse of power. On the contrary, Jewish influence on English public life, whether political, philanthropic, social, artistic, or literary, is more than irreproachable. It is beneficial, dis- criminating, and munificent. In politics they are represented in Parliament by members considerably above the average of ability, all of whom have given substantial evidence of their sense of duty as English citizens of their attachment to our in- stitutions, and of their mastery of the various problems of public life. In philanthropy the Jews are admittedly the most generous of people, and conduct their charities in the way that makes them the models for the civilised world. As patrons of art, science, and literature, they have advanced the refinement and civilisation of our country. And in no small measure the literary and artistic merit of their contributions to national taste in beauty of form and colour, the drama or the belles lettres generally, have created the posi- tion England occupies in such matters before the civilised world. If Addison could write so far back as 1712 that the Jews of England in his day were "like the pegs and nails in a great building, which though they are but little valued in themselves, are JEWISH INFLUENCE ON DEMOCRACY. 165 absolutely necessary to keep the whole frame together," 1 the truth is that Englishmen of the Jewish race to-day form one of the most valuable constituent elements in our nation, and in the course of the approaching century are destined, I firmly believe, to perform still more valuable services to the Anglo-Saxon people. The manner in which further benefit will be derived from the Jewish Community is through the process of absorption by intermarriage, which has now begun, and will probably continue at an enhanced rate as Jewish exclusiveness vanishes before the equal conditions in which they are now placed ; and as British prejudice evaporates before the light and air of greater knowledge. Jewish character supplies the points in which British character is most defective. The coarse, blunt insularity of the English will become softened and enlarged when blended with the persistent but gentle subtlety and the cosmopolitan traditions of the people of the Dispersion. The rate of absorption is at present unknown, but there is reason to think that since the members of the Jewish Community, as shown by the last census, indicate no material growth, the process of as- similation with the English keeps pace with the natural increase of birth and immigration. Nor is 1 Spectator, 495, Sept. 27, 1712. 1 66 ENGLISH DEM OCR A C Y. the process of absorption restricted to inter- marriage. It is not unusual for Jewish traders and merchants to make changes in their names, which obscure, if they do not hide, their Semitic origin. Hirsch becomes Harris ; Moses is con- tracted to Moss ; Manasseh to Massy ; Abraham to Braham ; Levi to Levison or Lawson. Oc- casionally the surname and the forename are reversed, e.g., Montagu Samuel becomes Samuel Montagu. The practice appears to spring from the same causes as originally induced the Popes to change their names on their exaltation to the pontificate, a custom said to have been introduced by Pope Sergius, whose name till then was Swine- Snout. However this may be, the Anglicisation of Hebrew names removes one barrier between the races : and if it do not pave the way for immediate absorption, it assists the process operating among the reformed Jews for the adaptation of their religious and social life to modern needs. In the more advanced syna- gogues instrumental music and mixed choirs have been introduced, while in some the approach to church practices is signalised by the heads of male worshippers being uncovered, the conduct of the service in the vernacular, and the common use of pews by both sexes of the same family. Many of the reformed Jews renounce all belief in JEWISH INFLUENCE ON DEMOCRACY. 167 hell torments, Paradisian rewards, superstitions whether Biblical or Rabbinical, rites, ceremonies, and institutions, which do not elevate or sanctify their lives; while, at the same time, their devotion to good works is exceeded by nothing that the annals of Christianity can show. It is almost forgotten that nearly ninety years ago Napoleon foresaw with the prophetic glance of supreme genius that the settlement of the Jewish question was second only in importance to the establishment in Europe of French ascend- ency. Then, as now, the Jewish element in the population of any country both in number and character varied directly with the nature of the treatment accorded them. Persecuted Jews wax mighty and multiply. When welcomed, en- couraged, and regarded as equals by a nation, their numbers are few because they tend to dis card their exclusive habits and become absorbed in the intellectual and social life of the country enriched by their presence. Napoleon, recognis- ing this fact, convoked the Sanhedrin to the capital of France. He was in the zenith of his fame. He had been victorious at Austerlitz. He was on the eve of victory at Eylau. For two years the Imperial crown had been upon his brow, and he was master of Central Europe. With all the preoccupations of Empire, he recognised the 168 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. vital importance of determining the attitude of France towards her Hebrew people, and in his statesmanlike^ prescience Napoleon presented an example to the world which England was some- what slow to follow. The miracle of Jewish regeneration has not yet been accomplished, but the events of the nineteenth century seem to indicate that we are on the eve of a movement akin to that of which Isaiah prophesied, and the first Napoleon dreamed. That England will play her part in the strange evolution of the Jewish race which is now in progress cannot be doubted. The liberty and equality which in England have been more than a jingling phrase have given to the Jews their opportunity. The manner in which the recent outbreak of ignorant and stupid persecu- tion in Russia was arrested by the concentration of public opinion against M. Pobedonostzeff at the instance of the Hebrew citizens in all parts of the world, but more especially in England, is too well known to require comment. This display of power, however, is but a small example of what can be accomplished by this marvellous race when unanimously set upon the accomplishment of some given aim. The next time we see the exercise of Jewish influence directed to the achievement of a common object, it will probably be one of a widely different character. JE WISH INFL UENCE ON DEMO CRA CY. 169. England is the chief gold-using country in the world. The heads of English finance are no longer of the English race. The necessities of cosmopolitan dealers in money compel them to regard the interests of creditors as preceding the interests of debtors. Hence arises the interest of creditors in retaining and supporting the gold standard, since the appreciation of gold is ob- viously advantageous to the dealers in gold. The continued and increasing pressure of the fixed charges in all commercial undertakings, the grow- ing weight of interest on mortgages, are presages of a catastrophe that must overtake the industrial and trading population, unless some compromise can be effected by debtors with their gold credi- tors. In the unchallenged control and mastery of British finance there lurks a serious danger to the Jewish community. They may wake up to find the interests of the British nation completely at variance with the interests of cosmopolitan money-lenders. Persecution of the Jews fills every page of history from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Moscow evictions in the winter of 1891. These persecutions have been marked by one invariable feature. They were the result of vulgar ignorance, sprung from the common people ; and in later times the governing bodies have not 170 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. failed to interfere in time to prevent massacre and popular brutality. The anti-semitic movement of the future, how- ever, will not arise from the jealousy of a stupid proletariat of one that is quick-witted. It will not be turned against the miserable masses, but against the rich and powerful Hebrews who really are the rulers of the civilised world, by having it in pawn. All the love of luxury bred of education, hunger, and the decay of faith, will breed inevitable hate towards those who are lapped in luxury, who live in palaces, and who enjoy openly the rewards of greater prescience and foresight. These mag- nates, secure in the possession of immense wealth, endowed with great intellectual powers, will be able to procure as allies all that brains, influence, legislation, and noble alliances can give. Morality will be on their side. Moses and the ten com- mandments will give them all the sanction re- quired for the retention of their possessions. But frantic debtors, starving thousands, and a des- perate democracy are preparing a crucible of pain for the prosperous Jewish people. CHAPTER XL THE OUTLOOK FOR WOMEN. SINCE women have begun to insist on being re- garded as a class or interest, like the Unemployed or the Dockers, their numerical preponderance becomes a matter of concern to the male minority. Although destitute of the physical force, that is the final sanction of all laws, their claim for politi- cal equality cannot be resisted on merely abstract grounds, although there are practical considera- tions which may make equality impossible. In these islands there is a surplus of eight hundred and fifty thousand women enough to give them a permanent tenure of power if the community should ever become politically and paradoxically divided by a sexual cleavage. That women are able to use political power if they obtain it, their leaders, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Mrs. Fawcett, suffici- ently attest. While, from the abstract point of view, it is difficult to refuse their demand for complete 171 1 72 ENGLISH DEMOCRA C Y. electoral equality ; party considerations make it improbable that the male democracy will concede it within the next twenty years. The opening of industrial employments to women, and the consequent decay of chivalry, has brought to the front an array of subjects in which their interests conflict with the interests of men. To endow women with electoral equality would confer upon the female workers in combination a power which their male rivals would find inconvenient to deal with and impossible to suppress. The interests of English women are identified with the main- tenance of the home, the promotion of legislation that strengthens home interests, and the defeat of measures likely to impair its happiness. One of the two political parties in the State would profit so clearly by these results that the most astute leaders and the clearest thinkers on the opposite side are naturally opposed to extending the Parliamentary franchise to women. Already women exercjse the Municipal, School Board, Board of Guardians, County and Parish Councils Suffrage. There is practically no opposition to the endowment of women with subordinate powers of this kind. The natural law of self-preserva- tion, however, prevents the Trade Unions of men surrendering any of the political predominance they have acquired. Disabilities of women have, THE OUTLOOK FOR WOMEN. 1 73 it is true, been one after another removed. In- deed, the legal position of women, as regards private rights in the present day, differs little from that of men. The pressure for political power does not mainly proceed from a sense of present wrong ; yet politically, professionally, and industrially the sexes are still not on an equality. Women of thought and education naturally feel the disabilities to which they are subjected. But the industrial classes of women workers are sub- jected to injustice and inferiority far more serious than those of their sisters in the middle classes, who may be desirous of engaging in the pro- fessions of law or medicine. Allowing for o difference in social habits, the action of the in- dustrial Trade Unions in respect to women may be fairly deduced from the action of the legal and medical Trade Unions. Sir Dyce Duckworth, whose authority to speak for his profession is beyond dispute, says : "I do not go with those who claim that women should enter any of the recognised professions. I do not regard any one of them as affording fitting occupation for women, however strong and able they may be." Sir Dyce goes on to make an exception in the case of women who become medically qualified for Zenana mission work in India. He then con- tinues : " My knowledge of American life has i 74 ENGLISH DEMOCRA C Y. taught me how very undesirable and, I will add, unpleasant it is to meet with professional women. I do not doubt the possibility of some women's engaging in professional life, but I hold that they are out of their proper womanly sphere in com- peting with men, and I deny that there is the slightest demand or necessity for their services in any one of the professions." 1 Substitute for Sir Dyce Duckworth, plain Demos, and for the word " professional " the word " industrial," and we have the Trade Union case against women in a nutshell. To meet them as rivals is unpleasant ; that they should be rivals at all is detestable. Nor can the selfishness of working men be denounced with justice by men in easy circumstances, whether eminent physiologists or not. The competition of pro- fessional women with men, in law and medicine,, has not reduced the latter to want by destroying their livelihood. The sweating system has not been introduced into the ranks of medical men by the superior industry and under-cutting of fees of the other sex. The shirtmakers and tailors of London could tell a story of competition with their own womenkind which naturally rouses the instinct of self-preservation. Were the Parlia- mentary vote to be given to the working woman, 1 An address delivered at Glasgow, Dec. i5th, 1893. THE OUTLOOK FOR WOMEN. 175 there can be little doubt that we should witness the birth of new antagonisms between the women and men of certain occupations, which would be intense in proportion to the relative measure of political power possessed by the respective parties. Where the Parliamentary vote is most required, therefore, it is unlikely it will be given by the present democracy. The dependent position of women under early laws seems likely to be stereotyped by the permanent enigma of the food question. The Anglo-Saxon Colonies, allowing for certain obvious differences, present to us the spectacle of what England will probably become after a few years of democratic institutions. New Zealand has adopted Woman Suffrage, and the working of the female franchise in that colony gives us an interesting, but, as yet, an insufficient peep into the future of our own country. Females, owners of rateable property, were already qualified to vote in Municipal elections. One female Mayor was elected, Mrs. Yates of Onelumga. Her Worship is understood to have fulfilled the duties of her office with dignity and decision. As in all the Colonies, the drink question is. one of grave social concern in New Zealand. Women were there, as elsewhere, the principal sufferers from the drink traffic, and also from the social evil. i?6 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. The fierce industrial competition that rages in England has no equivalent in New Zealand. Accordingly, politicians of all shades of opinion became the champions of the movement. The chief motive power in the campaign, that was afterwards conducted to a favourable issue, pro- ceeded from a desire for social reforms rather than political change. The Women's Temperance League, the Prohibitionists, Social Reformers, etc., found themselves shoulder to shoulder with advanced Liberals and some of the foremost politicians of the Conservative party. The pub- lican and liquor interests were taken by surprise. They had never seriously believed in the success of the movement, and had prepared no organisa- tion of their own. It is interesting to note that the enrolment of women on the Parliamentary Register was regarded as hostile to the liquor interests a curb to the hitherto unchecked power of the Trade Unions, and an antidote to the socialistic proclivities of the day. A writer in the Westminster Gazette thus admirably describes the elections : " Then came the elections, and the manner in which they were conducted was such as utterly to falsify the predictions of the opponents of the female franchise, as well as those who had hoped that it would involve it in ridicule. Thanks to the vigorous canvass, the women polled heavily. Two-fifths of the THE OUTLOOK FOR WOMEN. 177 votes recorded were those of females. There had never been an election that had been carried out with less of excitement or unseemly scenes. The women were in right-down earnest. They marched up to the polls as a solemn duty, and they voted with few exceptions as methodically as though they had been accustomed to it all their lives. Comparatively few shrank from elbowing their way through a throng of noisy partisans, and recorded their votes at quieter booths in the suburbs. But there were absolutely no instances of the slightest disrespect to female voters. Nay, even the roughest of the men vied with each other in little acts of courtesy and defer- ence. Many women were escorted to the door by male friends, but those who were unattended were not subjected to ridicule or unseemly remarks. Once within the booth, they were quietly directed to the proper places. Specimen forms of vot- ing, with explicit instructions, had been extensively circulated before the polling day, and unless a woman were wofully stupid it was impossible to make a mistake. But in case of doubt, a returning officer stood ready to give her the necessary direc- tions on one of these specimen forms, and then to bow her to the recess, and leave her to exercise her choice without dicta- tion or interference. " The result of the polling was to show that the female vote had exercised a very important influence on the constitution of the New House. It ought to have been stated before that, prior to the election, the Women's Franchise League and the temperance and social purity parties had subjected the private morals and antecedents of the candidates to a rigorous investi- gation, and thus a good many men who had black marks set down against their names figured very low down on the poll. "The Labour candidates and those of a utilitarian bent, more especially some who had been prominent in the amelio- ration of the workwomen, came to the front in the polling. The newly-enfranchised voters exhibited a keen sense of grati- tude. The Conservatives had hoped that the women of the M i?3 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. humbler classes would be indifferent and abstain from voting, but the result was quite the other way. It was the women of the industrial classes, the wives and daughters of working men, of the small shopkeepers, who swarmed at the polls, and the ladies of the upper classes who remained aloof. "An argument often used against female suffrage by Liberals who postpone principle to party advantage is that the Woman's Vote will be a Tory Vote, and a vote in favour of reactionary ideas in education. The prediction has proved entirely un- true, so far as New Zealand goes. The addition of women to the Parliamentary Register has confirmed an extremely Radical Ministry in power, and one of the special planks in the Radi- cal programme, thus supported by the women's vote, is Secular Education. " With regard to the future, the friends of female suffrage in the colony confidently look forward to much legislation which touches the home life of the people, the opening of fresh avenues of employment to females, the gradual purification of public life, restraint of the liquor traffic, protection of working men and working women from the evils of the sweating system, and generally the equalisation of opportunities for mental and physical improvement and social advancement." The writer of this account confirms from observa- tion the opinion previously expressed, that if the franchise be ever bestowed in England, it is the women of the industrial classes, not the ladies of the upper classes, who will exercise their political rights. Selfishness arising from want is necessarily greater in England than in New Zealand. New openings for industry are comparatively rare in the old country. The facility "with which the THE OUTLOOK FOR WOMEN. 179 female suffrage has been introduced into New Zealand can find no parallel in the old country. On the other hand, the moral and social success of the New Saxon communities will tend to in- crease the possibilities of the mother country following in the footsteps of her daughters in the antipodes. South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales, have come very near passing the Women's Suffrage Bills. In colonial communities, when a new institution is to be introduced there is, as a rule, no obstacle to its introduction other than the persuasion necessary to convince a con- stitutional majority of the people that it should be tried. It is otherwise in England. The jungle of tradition, interest, and prejudice to be cleared before innovations can be made, is often the most important and arduous portion of the task. For a thing to be new, is in its favour in the United States and in the Anglo-Saxon Colonies; or, at all events, there is no prejudice against it merely be- cause it is new.. Here in England, a large section of the population regard change as evil in itself. However irritating and reactionary this racial conservatism may have proved in} the case of many salutary innovations that have been strangled by the arguments of a Noodles' oration, there can be no question that our complex social machinery has been repeatedly rescued from de- i8o ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. struction or injury by the same sentiment that has resisted improvement and prevented reform. This condition, inherent in an ancient civilisation, points to the process of change being gradual in its operation, if it is to be lasting and effectual to accomplish its ostensible purpose. The woman's movement is by no means restricted to the question of the suffrage, and it is in other fields than those of political activity that we are likely to watch the evolution and development of the independence of women. A peaceful revolution in the status of women is now proceeding, which cannot fail to bring forth fruit both good and evil. Hedges of customs and rules have grown up around them as the results of man's affection and man's selfishness. Heredi- tary custom joined to natural timidity, dread of criticism, and physical impotence, have hitherto secured tacit acquiescence in restrictions against which the brightest spirits among women are now beginning to rebel. The old armoury of argument hitherto used against the cry for more freedom is already abandoned. We hear nothing to-day about intellectual inferiority. We are never told nowa- days that men should do the work of the world because the male brain weighs more than the female. It is mere commonplace that quality as well as size is an important factor in brain power, THE OUTLOOK FO% WOMEN. 181 and Julius Caesar with a small brain accomplished more than all the congenital idiots with hydro- cephalus conformations, who have existed since Adam and Eve. Most women do not like to put forward publicly the real reasons for claiming and asserting rights not hitherto accorded to them. But there is no doubt that men enjoy and women suffer more than their equitable shares of those physiological phenomena incident to the renewal of the species. Women minister to men's comfort and caprice to a greater extent than men have con- tributed to the pleasures and caprices of woman- hood. Thoughtful and intelligent women natur- ally resent this position of animal subservience and inferiority to men, and are resolved to estab- lish the moral equality of the sexes. In the Georgian and early Victorian eras the favourite popular conception of woman was differ- ent to the ideal of to-day. To be weak and tender, to faint with ease, lack appetite, shun exercise, and to simper through maidenhood with witless self-consciousness, were the characteristics asso- ciated with the early Victorian virgin. To be wrapped up with her babies, live in an atmo- sphere of dill water and violet powder, and to devote all the time she could spare from the cradle, to pampering and flattering the selfish prig who was her monogamous pasha, was the 182 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. current ideal of the middle class matron. Under the specious plea of home being the place, and the only right place, for women, tyranny has been as rife in British homes as in Turkish harems. A generation of thought and evolution has modified the evil. Since women of the middle and upper classes have lived more independent lives, their physical improvement has been remarkable. If their bodily development continues to progress at its present rate, the heroine of the future bids fair to be taller and stronger than the hero, and the question of dis- parity of physical force between the sexes will be- come by no means unchallengeable. With the conspicuous improvement in women's looks, their intellectual achievements have kept pace. Girton and Newnham have produced an effect upon our national life, the results of which are not yet fully revealed. Secondary education for girls has undergone a revolution. Miss Buss, Miss Beale, and Mrs. William Grey, have done great things for the twentieth century, unknown, or almost unknown, to fame. In the north of England a Council of Education was formed, which has had no small share in the revolutionary movement that has overthrown the structure of prejudices prevalent as to the limitations of the female in- tellect. Habits of exact thought, the cultivation THE OUTLOOK FOR WOMEN. 183 of judgment and memory, and the practical de- monstration of substantial equality in intellect between the sexes, have rescued women from the indignity of being classified mainly as the baby machines of civilisation. If bearded democracy does not get its own sel- fish way, the next century will be the age of women. Women have already shown that they can retain their gentleness while they acquire a larger and a nobler purpose. Individuals have shown that they can perform their duties in life as daughters, wives, and mothers, and yet take their part in the work of the world. They have lost, meanwhile, nothing of their sweetness, nothing of their strength. Looking back for forty years and contrasting the women of 1850 with the women of this decade, we perceive a stream of tendencies which, if not arrested, will carry them fast and far. In 1930, the differences between the women of that day and our contemporaries will probably be much greater than the differences between the latter and their grandmothers. First, with regard to the women of the working- classes. To sew, cook, and wash for a family of five or six is no light task; and, as Mrs. Fawcett justly points out, " keeps " the family quite as essentially as the man who turns a lathe or ploughs a field, and thereby brings in a weekly sum of 184 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. money to the family purse. Increases to the family are not determined by any volition of hers. In many cases the lot of the house-mother in the industrial classes is one of hopeless toil. Often she is obliged, from no fault of her own or her husband's, to seek employment outside the home, so as to eke out the family budget. The lives of whole classes that are hopelessly entangled in pain and work, cannot be noble lives. Individuals among them may lead noble lives, but there can be no wonder that the leisure of the average women who are submerged in want and care is spent, and naturally spent, outside her slum attic in gossip : in the brighter scene of the public-house : or idling abroad in our narrow and mischievous streets. In acting thus, she is probably better, and cer- tainly no worse, than the idle woman of the smart set whose mischief and narrowness are more prejudicial to the community than the working sisters whom they consider so far beneath them. The outlook for women of the labouring classes (that is, for the great majority of the women of the United Kingdom) is that the present move- ment for the expansion and elevation of women's lives shall first and foremost raise those women who bear the chief burdens of society, by brightening their lives and giving them equal opportunities with men. To take part in a Trade Union THE OUTLOOK FOR WOMEN. 185 movement to protect and foster the work of women ; to join in a co-operative scheme for the distribution of pure food and household necessities, or of production itself, as the healthy northern system of co-operation permeates society, will teach her thrift and honesty. When she has made the first saving she will be touched by the magician's wand that comes to them who own property through self-denial. She will become interested in temperance and education. In all movements that affect her sex she will recognise the opportunity of improving the happiness of her home. When divine discontent has stirred the working women of England, and moral and intel- lectual improvement has permeated the whole class, the time cannot be far distant when the question of family responsibility will 'be raised by women on their own behalf. That time is pro- bably near at hand. No movement for the check or limitation of families will ever be successful from which the good and thoughtful women of England remain aloof. The population question is less a man's than a woman's question. The chief burden rests with women. I cannot doubt that the only direction in which there is solid ground for hoping that undue increase of the population may be checked, and that destitution and misery arising from that cause may cease, is 1 86 ENGLISH DEMOCRA C Y. in raising the general level of education and the position of women of the working-classes. The change in opinion upon the subject of large families is already noticeable. At the beginning of this century an English working man with twelve children was held by general consensus to have deserved well of his country. In France, the State to-day endows the parent of a tenth child with a handsome present in cash. The doctrine of the blessed quiver and the redundant cradle was intelligible when we were recovering from the effects of the great wars of the eighteenth century, and about to engage in a new struggle for our national life. It is a reasonable and intelligible doctrine to-day in France, when she is recovering from a death struggle with Germany, and prepared to engage in a fresh bout with one or other of her rivals. This doctrine may have been true in the days of David, when the tribesmen of Judea were continually losing in border squabbles their most eligible males. For the United Kingdom, however, at the end of this century, when the redundance of population is apparent, to maintain the moral stimulus to fecundity when sterility of the unfit is essential, if the race is not to deteriorate, seems to be a fallacy that needs only to be stated to secure its exposure. It is unfortunate for the population question THE OUTLOOK FOR WOMEN. 187 that for a generation to come it will be indelibly associated in the minds of many thoughtful people with the aggressive atheism of the late Mr. Bradlaugh and his versatile colleague. Their aims are admitted by all to be the good of their fellow creatures. The action they pursued, how- ever, inflicted a grievous blow upon the prospects of reasonable teaching on the population question. It is not likely it will emerge from the cloud in which Mr. Bradlaugh and Mrs. Besant (I am firmly con- vinced involuntarily) left it, until some high intelli- gence, some one pure and holy spirit among women T instinct with enthusiasm for her sex, rises up to teach the nation that selfishness and brutality still lingers under the protection of the marriage state. No mere man can hope to effect much good in this direction. To the good sense and righte- ous self-interest of working women, to the unborn enthusiasm of some high priestess of humanity, and to the surviving chivalry of men, we must look for a change. We shall not look in vain. Touching the middle class women, the un- married daughters of the suburbs of large towns and of villadom in general, are worse off in some of the essentials of happiness than match-girls or tailoresses. Devoid of aims, without vocation, there are no sadder sisterhoods than the daughters of merchants and professional men who are too i88 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. well off to work ; too idle and too silly to excel in art or music ; too selfish to minister to the wel- fare of others. Marriage is their only profession. Until polygamy is established in England, the sur- plus of women cuts many of them off from practis- ing 1 their only profession. The husbands and the brothers of the middle class are busily employed. But their women are idle from habit rather than from incapacity. Most of the young women of this type are often miserably unhappy ; starved in soul ; chained to a rock of conventional re- spectability which they loath as a prison. They wither in peevish celibacy. And, poor things, the fault is not theirs. There is hope for them in the early years of the twentieth century. The profession of teaching will necessarily absorb an increasing number of competent women, and the women of the class spoken of can become com- petent with adequate training. Girls require educating by women, just as boys after infancy benefit from their training coming from the hands of men. The spread of democracy will lead to the employment of larger numbers of factory and school inspectors. Women should be inspected by women, and the lady inspectorate of the coun- try will be largely expanded in response to the growing demand for feminine control of feminine interests. The exactness in detail and character- THE OUTLOOK FOR WOMEN. 18? istic patience of monotony and pain are in them- selves qualifications for the new duties that will devolve on their sex in the course of the evolution of industrial interests now going on in England. Girls of the middle classes will naturally be trained for the inspectorate when the number of candi- dates required are sufficient to make the career one of general interest. The same class of women are likely to become more numerous on Hospital Committees and the managing bodies of Nursing Schools and Infirmaries. School Boards, County and Parish Councils, will come' to be regarded as imperfect if they do not in- clude women among their numbers. Unrepre- sented interests are forgotten. Women's interests are likely to receive more intelligent concern from local bodies where matters relating mainly to women and children are settled in consultation with those chiefly interested in their own and the children's behalf. As the dull and narrow interests of middle-class life are enlarged and brightened by the growing demand for women of sacrifice and intelligent service of humanity, there is little fear that the supply will run short. And as women enter more and more into the larger sphere that awaits them, the dangers menacing from the unchecked predomi- nance of a masculine and selfish democracy will be 190 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. abated even if they do not disappear. Had women acquired in 1820 the same influence as they have now obtained, it is unlikely that food would have been kept artificially dear ; that skilled operatives in the textile trades would have had to bear the same privations, low wages and long hours that constitute the sweating system of to-day. The labour of married women is still a blot upon our humanity, but young children toiling in mines, climbing-boys apprenticed to chimneysweeps, the existence of slavery, coarseness of manners and language, pointed in 1820 as clearly to the absence of women's influence from current politics as to the want of household suffrage. We had one Revolution when power left the Crown ; a second when Land was compelled to hand over to Trade the first place among British interests ; a third when, in 1867 and 1884-5, Trade was dis- placed by Wages as the governing authority. The occasion for revolt against the tyranny of class to-day will be removed if women have free entry into the Councils where home interests are under discussion. The best antidote to Demos is not to be found in the House of Lords or in plural voting. We must look for it in Mrs. Demos. She is the one authority to whom he defers ; of whom he is occasionally afraid ; to whom he is sincerely attached. To hear him talk by the mouths of his THE OUTLOOK FOR WOMEN. 191 bondsmen in the Press, one would not gather that he had a wife. In the refinement and elevation of Mrs. and Miss Demos is our brightest hope. The middle-class women, who are spending their lives in conveying help to those born in a lot less happy than their own, are in truth engaged in work as patriotic as Florence Nightingale's. Beneficence to be effective must generally be silent and always continuous. The good women of England who are busying themselves with the happiness and welfare of the poorer sisters are revealing a treasure too long neglected, though it lies ready to our hand. It is through them that democracy may be knit into a stronger whole ; through them that the malignant whispers of class strife will be hushed ; through them that the organism of society will become sweet and wholesome. The women who are burning for a vote are not in all cases clear in their minds what they will do with it when they get it. They are afflicted with a passion for the vote which reminds the onlooker of the dementia that twenty years ago afflicted the Japanese people. To own a rabbit was there the one aim of existence. Extravagant sums were paid for a bunny. The rage soon died out. Be- hind the rabbit craze there was nothing- but the o ashes of disappointment. The longing for a vote is no more reasonable than the passion for a rab- 192 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. bit, unless the utilisation of the vote is made the first object. Most voteless women have more or less control over a voter of their own. Let them exercise over their voter all the influence they would themselves bring direct to bear upon Par- liament, had the suffrage been already granted them, and the increased political influence of women, which is highly desirable in the presence of the new Tyranny, will promptly make its appearance. In the higher grades in the social scale we encounter the best and the worst of womankind. Those women who form the irridescent scum on the surface of society are poisoning the air for democracy. They live in a whirl of trifles, or of things that not being trifles are not good for any one. Incessant movement is necessary to them. They hover over the stream of life like the brilliant ephemera they resemble. They belong, or aim at belonging, to the vulgar notorious. In the smart set they find occupation without happiness, movement without content, and in- cessant competition for prizes that do not exist, or are never to be attained. Like their coloured sisters in Darkest Africa, their attire, if scanty, is peculiar. On dress, food, and jewels, they spend their souls. Wit and learning bore them. Seri- ous affairs of life bedraggle them. They are, in THE OUTLOOK FOR WOMEN. 193 the true sense of the term, " abandoned women." They have received much ; nothing do they render but chiffons and the tinkle of talk. They are abandoned because they have abandoned all that was worth retaining, and have clung to what they should have abandoned. The only hope for such women is the revival of interest in the serious work of the world, and in their neglect of this work they are stunting and starving the lives of thousands beneath them, who insensibly follow their example. The women of the upper classes, who take part in the work of the world, are sweeter, softer, and more refined than those who lap their souls in the luxury of idleness. Noblesse oblige applies as much or more to women than to men. Men who do nothing are loafers. Women of the upper classes have a kingdom waiting for them. They rail at democracy ; it awaits subjugation at their hands. Remaining aloof, their wealth and privi- leges excite the jealousy and hatred of. the many. If every woman of the upper classes lives her life with the resolve to sever some of the bonds that hold the labouring women of our country in thrall, the new democracy, like the lion, will pro- tect his Una. The result of the woman's movement may pro- duce a nobler not a noisier woman. Her mind may be cleared of prejudice; she needs to become i 94 ENGLISH DEMO CRA C Y. more just, not more attractive or more beautiful. Her qualifications become greater as her outlook becomes wider. The traces written on her coun- tenance of noble thoughts, good works, self- sacrifice, will leave a beauty there not only of the fleeting days of youth upon which she now too much relies. It would be futile to ignore the impediments in her path. Men may be rough, coarse, and hard. But justice and magnanimity come easier to men than women. Man makes a more faithful friend : woman the more constant lover. Men are vainer than women, but they are less spiteful. Women's love of admiration is supreme. Her passion for dress and show approaches instinct in its inten- sity. Her curiosity is dominant. She enjoys secrets too well not to share them with those she loves. She is a hot partisan. Her anti- pathies bias her opinions, her affections, her belief. Few women escape the influence of one man in forming their views on religion and poli- tics. Feminine faults of vanity, curiosity, and injustice, matter little in private life. In public life, these failings generally attributed to women are serious drawbacks to her success. Since the tendencies and temptations of women make her narrower than men, she necessarily finds it hard to see the matter in dispute from her opponent's THE OUTLOOK FOR WOMEN. i?5 point of view. The quality women will gain in contact with the larger life now opening before them is regard for justice. Her difficulties will be to discard her affections and antipathies in dealing with public affairs. That this is not im- possible is patent from the conduct of the picked specimens of their sex who have already won their way in public life. But it would be insin- cerity to imply that such women as Mrs. Fawcett, Miss Flora Shaw, Miss Olive Schreiner, or Miss Buss, are ordinary examples of women of thought and education. Women are either better or worse than men. They sink to lower depths or rise to far loftier heights. Saint or petroleuse, the fire of woman's nature glows more brightly than that of her comrade man. To know good and evil, woman has before now been ready to risk her position. " The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat." Her excuse was not accepted. In once more seeking freedom and knowledge, is she hearkening to the subtlety of the serpent ? And will not her sorrow be greatly multiplied by es- caping from the Eden man's selfishness has created for her ? The answer to these questions mainly rests with the unmarried women. Family cares must continue to absorb the efforts and the energy of most matrons. Upon the pucelage will fall the 196 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. chief burden of advance. Spinsters of forty and fifty may look to brighter times ahead. The early years of the twentieth century bid fair to be the golden a^e of maidens in middle life. If, o o perchance, they bring tears into public affairs, it is but heredity. Had women been treated by men with respect instead of gallantry: educated with vigorous and masculine purpose, they would now be better fitted for their future development. Drink and the social evil from which they suffer the most, will never be grappled with by man-made law. By the time that women are ready to enter public life, man's sensualities, now pandered to in every street, will become unfashionable. There is no brighter outlook for democracy than the com- ing woman. She will tidy up the new century. CHAPTER XII. THE MANUFACTURE OF THE UNEMPLOYABLE. IN the course of his career, Lord Randolph Churchill made no graver addition to the annals of his country than by obtaining for Mr. Henry Matthews the Secretaryship of the Home Depart- ment. And during the tenure of power by Lord Salisbury's Cabinet of 1886-92, no greater error, or one more fruitful in results, was committed, than by the Home Secretary on the 2 7th August, 1889. Epoch-making events in the life of a nation are seldom marked by special or obvious significance. Mr. Matthews' use of the resources o of British civilisation for the suppression of in- timidation and the preservation of personal liberty during the early days of the Civil War, known as the Great Dock Strike, affected for some time to come the attitude of our rulers towards the rights of minorities in the presence of a hostile majority. Wisdom and firmness were never more impera- J 97 1 98 ENGLISH DEM OCR A C Y. lively needed in the Minister responsible for order and liberty than on the occasion referred to. Mr. Matthews combined doggedness with timidity ; and, abdicating his proper functions at the summons of ephemeral popular sentiment, the fears and opportunism of the placeman permitted him to surrender principles of liberty and justice, which had hitherto been regarded as fundamental to the administration of British law by both political parties. On August 27th, 1892, the late Sir Robert Fowler, from his place in the House of Commons, asked the Home Secretary " whether his atten- tion had been called to the organised system of intimidation which prevailed in connection with the wharves on the Thames, and whether he would direct the police to give protection to those who were engaged in their legitimate business." The reply of the Secretary of State was to the effect that he was "not prepared to admit that there is anything which can be properly described as an organised system of intimidation ; " but he was obliged to allow that " a considerable amount of pressure was exercised," which in some cases passed into acts of intimidation, but of a nature very difficult for the police to interfere with. Nothing was done. Had Mr. Matthews resisted in August, 1889, THE MANUFACTURE OF THE UNEMPLOYABLE. 199 the lawless endeavour of the majority of the Dock Strikers to impose on the minority the law of the Trade Union they successfully substi- tuted for the law of the land, millions sterling would before long have been saved in wages to the working classes of this country, much misery averted, and the doubts that now un- settle both employers and employed as to the probable action of the Executive Government towards exhibitions of violence in the course of Trade disputes, would never have arisen. 1 The precedent made by Mr. Matthews has already borne fruit. Unwilling or unable to assert the supremacy of the law in defence of the liberties and rights of Englishmen during the Dock Strike of 1889, they have since then again been trampled under foot by Socialist leaders and their followers, with the passionate approval of a Press too much in a hurry to stop to think, and with the support of clergymen who seek, by political aphrodisiacs, to influence in their own favour the affections of a democracy from whom faith in them and in the unseen has alike departed. The results of the Dock Strike have been to 1 A curious example of the desire of latter-day Governments to associate firmness with love, is presented by the action of those who condoned killing the Featherstone rioters by shoot- ing them down, but subsequently compensated their families with taxpayers' money. 200 ENGLISH DEMOCRA C Y. plunge the unskilled labourers of the East and South of London, into a lower and more miser- able position than they occupied before. The universal testimony of impartial observers is, that however a few of the regular men may be im- proved or sustained in their positions by means of Australian remittances and the deficit of the Dock shareholders, the bulk of the men concerned are worse off than before. A large portion of the strikers were Celtic Irish. Mr. T. P. O'Connor, M.P., speaking in Man- chester on September 27, 1889, in his capacity of President of the Irish National League of Great Britain, said : "Allusion has also been made to the struggle which had so triumphantly closed in London on behalf of the Dock labourers. In that struggle he was permitted to take a small, humble, and modest part, and he was glad to say that the part he took aided in some degree the final success of the strikers. A good many of these Dockers were men of Irish race, a good many of the labourers throughout the country were men of Irish race too, and Irishmen in England, and Scotland, and Wales, if for no other reason, would for their own personal interest and advancement always be found in the vanguard of those who were fighting for better houses, better wages, and greater comfort and enlarged liberties for the working classes in this country. . . . Attacked by Coercion, Ireland had its revenge by the emancipation and uprising of labour in England ahd in Scotland." Land Leagueism in Ireland, and Socialistic Labour movements are part of the same move- THE MANUFACTURE OF THE UNEMPLOYABLE. 201 ment, if Mr. T. P. O'Connor is a witness to be accepted. It is to this movement Mr. Matthews succumbed. Had Mr. Matthews acted in London as Mr. Balfour acted in Ireland, he would have deserved the thanks of the^dupes of the Labour Leaders, as Mr. Balfour is already beginning to receive the thanks of the peasantry in the West of Ireland as the result of his fearless assertion of the principles of liberty, and the maintenance of the rights of the humblest individual citizen. The conduct of the Home Secretary in the Dock Strike may be held to cover the pusil- lanimity of the police. Mr. Monro, who is now a missionary in India, was then Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Constabulary. He was a man of quiet manner, and of known personal courage, with a long record of Indian Civil administration. But whether from religious motives, or acting under the orders of his official chief, he introduced on the critical occasion of the strike, those principles of love and yearning which, however appropriate to the domestic hearthstone of family life, are rarely successful in dealing with crowds of excited strikers of which the Celtic Irish form a considerable portion. Mr. Monro further deemed it his duty to govern his conduct by the indications of popular will. 202 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. In a letter to the Chairman of the Dock Com- pany, he said : " The public very rightly are not ready to extend such allowance to police action under difficult circumstances. The public held the police responsible for acting with promptness tempered by judgment and discretion." This was a new and dangerous departure for a Chief Com- missioner of Police, but it was one in full accord with recent conceptions of the first duty of government to keep in with the biggest crowd, whatever may happen to the protection of persons and property. The fallacy of attributing to a mere section of the people the functions and rights of the public, and then basing his executive action on the wishes or sentiment of that section, shquld be sufficient to hand down to future generations, the memory of Mr. James Monro's period of control of the police of London. Popular approval has not hitherto been the standard of efficiency in the discharge of public duties. It was reserved for the Unionist Home Secretary of a Government whose existence was based on the principle of maintaining law until it was changed by constitutional methods, and of enforcing order irrespective of electoral con- sequences, to permit law to lapse, and order to cease at the call of an irresponsible and unin- structed section of public opinion. THE MANUFACTURE OF THE UNEMPLOYABLE. 203 Since the Dock Strike, much trade has left London. The Shipping Federation has been formed, and the relations between employers and employed on numerous occasions have been strained to the breaking point. The weaker and less competent men have been thrown to the wall, and instead of solving the Labour question, Mr. Matthews' weakness in action has largely con- tributed to the subsequent multiplication of the unemployed. The Dock labourer was cruelly deceived. Australian subsidies and the interven- tion of Cardinal Manning and other large-hearted but incompetent advisers, have produced no permanent effect whatever. The numbers of the unemployed are as numerous, or more numerous than before. A wild sense of injustice has been planted in the minds of ignorant men, and the evils of administrating a great office on political lines to avert unpopularity, are now ripening to a harvest that even this generation may reap. The use of political power for the ends of a class, is an instrument for the destruction of civilisation itself. Untrained emotion, even in a Prince of the Church or an ex-Lord Mayor, is a danger to democracy, only less than the tyranny of godless anarchists. Ignorance of inflexible economic laws, however cloaked and covered in sympathy and " love," or indifference to the consequences 204 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. of breaking them, are the raw materials for the manufacture of the unemployed. There does not exist, to my knowledge, any competent diagnosis of the chronic worklessness that is becoming the greatest question of this era, The following analysis has been carefully thought out, and is, I submit, a substantially exact state- ment of the main features of the problem as it exists to-day. It is the result of many years' work on the subject of the unemployed, and may be useful to some of those who still believe in the possibility of a panacea being found to deal with the unemployed as a whole. The causes of the chronic condition of work- lessness may be broadly divided into two parts : 1. Causes not fairly attributable to the action or defects of the unemployed themselves. 2. Causes that are inherent to the persons affected, and therefore attributable to themselves and none other. With regard to the first heading, the following are the five principal reasons to which want of employment are justly attributable, where society, not the unemployed themselves, is to blame. Bad, obsolete, or stupid laws inapplicable to existing conditions. THE MANUFACTURE OF THE UNEMPLOYABLE. 205 Neglected facts. Callousness of public opinion. Ignorance and preoccupation of Parliament. Confusion of humanity with commodities by capitalists. Further analysis of these causes reveals the following specific forms of error into which the English people have fallen : 1. Destruction of home life and decay of parental responsibility induced by (a) The existing Poor Law, a survival of the middle class predominance, securing the worthless unemployed against the natural consequence of deliberate neglect or vice, and insulting the worthy by herding them with nomads and wastrels. (<) Gratuitous education and Board School meals, leaving parents to regard the pro- pagation of children as the final discharge of all duties towards them. (c] The growing substitution of the im- personal State for the love and sacrifice of the responsible parent. 2. The stream of untrained chanty that de- bauches instead of aiding the recipient, by sapping his self-help ; fertilising instead of sterilising the 206 ENGLISH DEMOCRA C Y. unfit ; vitalising that which should be extermin- ated; and perpetuating incapacity and mendi- cancy. The public has no authoritative guide or Clearing House to tell them the difference be- tween Reuben May and the Charity Organisation Society. They subsidise both, and thus enable fraudulent agencies to flourish and create a mass of pauperised recipients. 3. The competition of immigrant aliens. 4. The unchecked spread of predatory doctrine, ranging from Fabianism to Anarchy, tempting all who wish to forsake honest work for political agitation. 5. The operation of the Sweating System in trades requiring but little skill, arising from the unchecked competition of Bargain hunters. Women with men. Employers with their rivals. Boys with men. The lowest class of Russian Jews with English people. 6. The adulteration of exports, and consequent loss of market, reacting on the unemployed. Turning to the second of the two principal divisions of the causes leading to the want of THE MANUFACTURE OF THE UNEMPLOYABLE. 207 employment, viz., those due to the action or defects of the unemployed themselves, we must sub-divide this class of the unemployed into those guilty of deliberate and avoidable fault of com- mission or omission, and those whose failure is excusable because due to convention, bad advice, or theological sanction. (a) The immoderate use of intoxicants, (b) Gambling, (c) Inveterate idleness, are the three principal features of the first sub- division ; while of the second, (a) Reckless procreation of children. (b) Ignorance, e.g., of the actual facts re- lating to foreign industries, which is one of the chief causes of strikes. (c) Racial thriftlessness. (cC) Want of flexibility of adaptation. (e that the former have, and the latter have not, studied the essential conditions of the problems with which they have to deal. That the New Unionists should be the more successful and the more popular is only natural. Mankind likes to be deceived, and democracy has always objected to be told that the earth is neither flat nor sta- tionary, when the majority of the people, by the evidence of their senses, decide by one man one vote that it is both stationary and flat. The ignorance of Labour leaders is a practical question. If facts can be conveyed to them, masses of poor labourers who now prefer Mr. Alderman Tillett as an economist to the late Dr. Adam Smith, might be enriched with good sense. How is this to be done ? Millionaire statesmen enhance their reputation for brilliancy, by girding .at Blue Books, and associating them in the public mind with the remainder biscuit. Nevertheless, in Blue Books repose the matured and impartial statement of facts that would have prevented many and many a strike, had the knowledge, hidden away in the recesses of Foreign Office publications, been palatable and accessible to the men who decide the question of strikes. The commercial classes, a few years back, became aware of their ignorance of certain economic facts existing on the Continent. Accordingly an agita- 220 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. tion was set on foot, and at the present moment commercial attaches devoted to the interests of the mercantile classes are allocated to the principal Embassies and Legations, and with a refreshing stream of facts and figures irrigate the counting houses of Great Britain. That which men of family and the commercial interests in this land have done for themselves, might be done by the Trade Unions for their constituents. If the engineering, printing, build- ing, boot and shoe trades, were to move Parlia- ment to add to the diplomatic staff serving abroad members of their respective Trade Unions, with the object of keeping in touch with the industrial phenomena of the civilised world, for the informa- tion of the British wage-earners, tons of miscon- ception would be rolled away in a year. In former days, theologians and casuists travelled ta dispute and to learn. Even to-day, artists, architects, and geographers, recognise the neces- sity for professional and continual contact with the evolution of ideas in other parts of the world. The greatest interest of all, "wage labour, speaking no language but its own, is largely dependent for knowledge of international trade interests on cosmopolitan and tainted sources of information. If the artisans of Great Britain were to nominate their own representatives abroad, the Trade THE MANUFACTURE OF THE UNEMPLOYABLE. 221 Unions would be illuminated with a dry light of which they stand in need, and the State would profit by some diminution in the causes of in- dustrial dispute. Industrial attaches to the European Embassies would promote peace, popularise the Foreign Office, familiarise the democracy with the Imperial idea, and make them sensible of responsibility. The only objection I can discern, is that the period of Free Trade in England would be abridged, and the Manchester School would therefore oppose the education of the Trade Unions with all their power. If the Trade Unions are ignorant of many facts it were well that they should know, the British people are in the dark about other things it is essential that they should know and understand in order to deal with the unemployed question. We are ignorant of the real facts of the relation be- tween reckless and immature marriages and the prevalence of distress. We are ignorant of the real character of the population produced by these unions, and we require to learn the views of com- petent women investigators, as to the physical and moral condition of the persons affected, and hear, in their opinion, if the evils complained of can be modified. An examination into the real character of im- ports and exports, both of people and goods, 222 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. would dispel a vast amount of misconception in the public mind. It is alleged on good authority that the emigrants from this country are its bone and sinew ; that the immigrants from Eastern Europe are generally paupers ; that the foreign Jewish poor are growing at an alarming rate; that the prison-made goods of Germany come in under free trade ; that adulterated goods are exported, and that the good name of this country is injured thereby. On these things we want more light. Let there be light. It is only thus that the manufacture of the unemployable can be stopped. CHAPTER XIII. THE RELIGION OF THE IRRELIGIOUS. BEFORE men worship they must eat. The wail- ing of hungry children, whose want is caused by circumstances beyond the control of their parents, paralyses the faculty for worship in ordinary fathers and mothers. There are saintly souls to whom their own want is but a stimulus to faith ; who are attuned to brighter worlds by the sting of privation ; who find in trouble a link with the unseen. With average humanity, however, hunger and lust are the most violent of all the appetites. The first is a perpetual call upon them to preserve themselves ; the latter, to propagate their kind. Men, women, and children hunger - bitten, and lacking all that the body needs, have neither wish nor power to engage in the exercise of prayer, praise, or meditation. Reverence and love towards the Supreme Being cannot exist where a pound of beef-steak at the 223 224 ENGL 1SH DEMO CRA C Y. moment is more to a man than the Kingdom of Heaven hereafter. Let those who doubt this fast for forty hours, and see how far their thoughts linger round the things of this world. For the giving of thanks, one must receive ; for the exercise of prayer, one must expect ; for belief in Providence, there must be provision. Prudential motives, religious principle, serious conduct, and unselfish uprightness, are incom- patible with the prevalence of want among masses of men. It has been observed that famine and pestilence are invariably followed by a state of gross immorality. When famine is on the door- step, morality usually accompanies love out of the window. To moralise the multitudes, begin by feeding them. It is only then that they can reasonably be expected to live soberly with re- spect to themselves, honestly with respect to their neighbours, or piously with God. The hungry may possibly retain their superstitions, rarely their religion. As a remover of discontent, and an incentive to good works, religion may operate upon people sufficiently fed, clothed, and housed, to detach themselves from the wants of the flesh, but rarely with the hungry parents of famished bairns. The scoffing and contumely thrown by the Socialist-Anarchist School upon all faith and faith- THE RELIGION OF THE IRRELIGIOUS. 225 teaching as guides to life, are but a natural con- sequence of the conditions of human life with which they are so well acquainted. Hungry men who wish before all things to satisfy their own and their children's want, prefer to take from others, even by force, the food they lack, rather than -v starve seeking the Kingdom of God. This is but common sense. The writers who articulate the views of the Socialist extremists are neces- sarily faithful to their creed, " Ni dieu ni maitre" To believe in God would involve right thinking. To own a master would imply exertion. " Ni dieu ni maitre " is but another form of " wealth with- out work." The obvious lesson from all this is to feed the hungry before you preach to them. Besides, there is historic precedent for doing so. The majority of men and women who are not hungry, and who are not continually under the cloud of impending want, will worship ! Re- ligion is the perception of the Infinite. Without this idea, religion is inconceivable. The Infinite surrounds the working population. As they walk home from their work in the winter they see the stars. They feel impulses to evil, the desire to resist, and admiration for the right. They are puzzled by the din of voices shouting contra- dictory directions towards the other world. They perceive that the terms " religion " and 226 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. "superstition," "credulity" and "faith," are merely of local application. Faith here is credulity in Constantinople. Religion in Moscow is supersti- tion here. They are charmed and repelled, drawn onward and upward, thrust back into unbelief, or excited into emotional ecstasy. They are as sheep having a plethora of shepherds. The holiest lives and the worst are found in every creed. The dogmas of belief seem to have little bearing upon character. Holy living appears to spring from something deeper even than the creeds. From Little Bethel to the Church of Rome each school of teachers claims a valid patent for revelation. Demos is bewildered. He faces eternity in an impenetrable cloud, without a compass. He is floating on a sunless sea. "The spring sunshine pours out of an empty heaven on to a soulless world, and the Great Companion is dead." 1 What is to be the religion of the irreligious ? Cardinal Newman was not a man who trusted in reason rather than in authority. But what does he say to the seeker after reasonable truth ? " I have no intention at all of denying that truth is the real object of our reason, and that if it does not attain to truth, either the premise or the process is in fault : but I am not 1 E. Clifford. THE RELIGION OF THE IRRELIGIOUS. 227 speaking here of right reason, but as reason as it acts in fact and concretely in fallen man. I know that even the unaided reason, when correctly exercised, leads to a belief in God, in the immortality of the soul, and in a future retribution" 1 With the proviso that to exercise the reason rightly, fallen man must be free from immediate physical want, Newman's admission is of great value for the democracy of the country. The difficulty is to know what they shall be- lieve. Men of high character and of great learn- ing state the case for and against belief with equal ability and nearly equal strength. It is not of them I would now speak. Demos is seeking for a true God and for a real faith, and cares not how he gets these. Faith is no more than suc- cessful credulity ; credulity is equivalent to un- successful faith. Superstition is the other man's religion. If Ramasami immolates himself beneath the wheels of the disestablished Juggernaut, it is credulity. If Stephen be stoned or Latimer burned for what they hold true it is faith. Why? The myriads of Ramasamis who have volunteered for ghastly deaths in India for ages past, in witness of polytheology, suffered as keenly and sacrificed as much as the persecuted Christian victims of Malagasy superstition, or of Alva's savage creed. 1 "Apologia," p. 243. ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. There is nothing specially pathetic in the martyrdom of heroes and of heroines who launch straightway into eternal glory, and who only exchange a sad world for unending bliss. But the bootless sacrifice of life and wife, of sunshine and ease, of all that is good in this strange jungle wherein we are wandering, for creeds that are false, for gods that are wood and stone, is sadder than all the deaths of all the martyrs whose blood is the* seed of the orthodox church. Boys are told inter alia that it were better to do right, because if they do wrong they will go to hell. Men who are men easily make up their minds that they would prefer hell to any convictions gained by giving way to fear. The Gaiety Bogie Man is as effective in renewing a right spirit within the heart of democracy as the prediction of eternal fires. The threat of pun- ishment will never create a desire for the Narrow Way in the heart of Demos ; not even when ac- companied with incomprehensible hymns that sing of joys that are not joys, and commit the singer to statements he does not for a moment regard as desirable if they could be realised as true. The nature we have acquired at our birth, in- herited from at least four million ancestors, revolts at savage, spiritual coercion, or at cajolery of a no less barbarous quality. If the defence of THE RELIGION OF THE IRRELIGIOUS. 229 Lucknow against the sanguinary Pandies was an assertion of British courage in the face of heavy odds, how much more courageous is it for the lonely soul to defy the mysterious powers that first thrust thousands of millions of men unasked into the world, endow them with a spirit of courage and independence, and then impel them to right conduct by means that outrage the best instincts of the nature with which they are endowed ? And if the doctrine of eternal fires and of the worm that dieth not be discarded by Demos, even as the priests are beginning to put it aside : the fear of death itself is no adequate motive, for Demos to lead an upright and manly life. Fear is an animal emotion. Being both animal and emotional, it is transitory ; and being transitory, fear even of death affords no guide of conduct and no ground of sacrifice, and certainly no motive for rising above the level of those who are epicurean in the philosophy of their lives. If there be a God, He must be better than the best, and nobler than the noblest. No ignoble motive, therefore, such as fear of death or the dread of the hereafter, can operate successfully in appealing to men who are themselves already equipped with loftier conceptions, and endowed with hearts impregnable to threats from God 230 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. Himself. If the emotional school of conven- tional theology be right, Demos must submit to his fate, and face the hereafter with a speech- less, impotent sense of burning injustice. If unable to accept conventional theology, Demos is equally unable wholly to reject the supernatural. Flippant unbelief grates on most men to-day as keenly as in the old days of faith. A wit, a Roman Catholic, recently at a supper party listened for some time with disgust to the attacks on religion made by a gentleman named Crowe. After remaining silent for some time, he pre- sented the company with the following im- promptu : " We've heard in accents highly spiced That Crowe does not believe in Christ. But what we really want to know Is whether Christ believes in Crowe ? " But although most people agree in condemning blatant atheism, no hopes or promises can be of value unless they be genuine, based on substantial reality, and appeal to the higher region of man's nature. The hope of heaven is an engine so powerful in the regulation of conduct, that we need not here linger to consider whether or not there be a heaven. The world is full of pain. Every earnest life is mutilated by disappointment at the wide chasm that yawns between effort and THE RELIGION OF THE IRRELIGIOUS. 231 achievement. Almost every family has its skele- ton ; every nation but Norway its social question. The jungle and the prairie groan with the cries of defeated candidates in the struggle for life. Gazelles, it is said, have to fly for their lives twice a day during their whole existence. Natural phenomena of rains, drought, storms, and frosts, convey to millions of animals, birds, and insects, either death, or life maimed by incurable debility or disease. The battle of pain and pleasure, of good and evil, ends twice out of three times in the victory of pain and evil. Pleasant things are so generally wrong things that Calvinists and Puritans naturally reject this world as a vehicle for enjoy- ment, and look to the world to come to redress the evils of this life, as Canning looked to South America to redress the balance of the old world. Women who have lost their characters, men who are about to do so, being out of luck or out of work, children who are in torture with the extravagant in- justice of life, look to the repose of an unknown heaven to appease the achings of their weary hearts, and to give the peace that this world does not give them. No day passes that such as those do not say in their hearts with Solomon, "An untimely birth is better than life, for what hath the man of all his labour and of the desire of his heart for which he hath laboured under the sun ? For all his days 232 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. are sorrows, and his travail grief; even in the night his heart resteth not." There is an attraction in the idea of rest and happiness after the chances and changes of this life that is well-nigh irresistible. It quenches the thirst for release from pain or age, and satisfies every vague desire for capacity to enjoy that here exists only in rudimentary form. What trifles are the pangs of disappointment, the sense of talent warped, chances maimed and illusory happiness, when a little way off lies a country where all these things are changed ! If pain really will give place after death to buoyancy and joy, fatigue to elasti- city and strength, and the weariness of separation from those we love to union with them or oblivion ; the pains, fatigue, and miseries of earth bear the same relation to heaven as the hour and twenty min- utes of a rough channel passage in the Dover boat bears to the sojourn at Monte Carlo or Algiers. The fascination of the belief of heaven is shown by its popularity among religionists, and by those who, having made a mess of this world, have re- course to another to redress the consequences of their own folly or crime. The Guiteaus of civil- isation are more repugnant to healthy minds than the Ravachols and Vaillants. But there is a host of mute, inglorious Guiteaus -to whom the hope of heaven is at once solace, compensation, and THE RELIGION OF THE IRRELIGIOUS. 233. anodyne. Women who have failed to inspire men with interest, find in the heavenly horizons a pleasant solace for bruised affections. They may have preferred man some particular man^ but not having succeeded in obtaining him, they seek from heaven that which earth will not yield. Whenever we refer to human nature, we strangely allude to some weak or vicious propensity in human nature. But in the texture of human nature are some golden threads of which God Himself may be proud. One of these golden fibres is con- spicuous in the lofty conception that the best men have formed of God. It is better that Demos should have no opinion of Him than one that is unworthy of Him ; for the one is unbelief, the other contumely. To heaven as God's home^ men and women in trouble turn as birds in the autumn turn towards the South. As the Medes and Persians and the Egyptians represented their gods like themselves, the Ethi- opians represented their deities as black with flat noses, while the Thracians made them blue- eyed with ruddy complexions. The Jewish idea of God was equally anthropomorphic. English ecclesiastics who still profess to retain the orthodox faith, and believe that which they teach, do not escape anthropomorphism in their conception of the God of this century and of the heaven He in- 234 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. habits. Martin's Plains of Heaven was the popular pictorial conception of celestial bliss two genera- tions ago. It united the ease and grandeur of palace life with the stimulus and fresh air of rural existence. There is nothing sordid or re- pulsive in these conceptions. On the contrary, as material comfort is the political goal of Demos here below, so the comfort of his disembodied soul is too obviously secured by all the provisions that spiritual upholstery can suggest for his ease, com- fort, and relaxation. The hope of heaven as a motive of life, and as a guide of conduct, appeals only to that side of character that responds to the stimulus of gain. A paid Member of Parliament is not necessarily corrupt, but he occupies another level to the man who gives gratuitous service to his country, ''all for love and nothing for reward." It is not ignoble, but it is not the highest side of character, and for the purpose of stiffening character with backbone, the hope of heaven is not more effec- tive than the fear of death. The appeal is ad- dressed to self-interest, and as such is to be judged by precisely the same standard as any other earthly incentive. No individuals except religious geniuses act as if they really believed in heaven. No nation has ever abandoned fraudulent com- merce, secret polygamy or polyandry, drink traffic THE RELIGION OF THE IRRELIGIOUS. 235 with the poor or with black races, its worship of new peers, flattery of the bad side of Demos, or its organised hypocrisy, because that nation hopes for heaven. Not only is the motive futile, for present advantage outbids future results in a democracy, but the appeal is addressed merely to the animal, the emotional side of Demos. The hope of heaven, like the fear of death, is not, therefore, a growing force, but a decaying element in the democratic character. It survives mainly among invalids. Sneers at the contrast between profession and practice, however justly applied to those who call themselves Christians, need not be restricted to those who are of the Nazarene faith. Hypocrisy, doubt, selfishness, and cruelty, abound in the inner circles of Buddhism and Islam, at least, in equal measure to that in which they are discovered in the Western Churches. Buddhism is a philo- sophy that is instantly abandoned by its followers during the serious crises of life. The implacable powers of evil, who send disease, disaster, and death, to the nominal Buddhist home, are appeased by devil dancers brought in for the purpose ; just as the peasant of the Campagna appeals to the Virgin in an agony of devotion to cure his sick swine, or dispel the blight from the corn fields. Mahommedan pashas, who drink champagne 2j6 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. under the name of sherbet, are neither better nor worse than the Irish priests who evaded the pledge of abstinence they and their flocks had taken, by recourse to the cheaper and equally intoxicating effects of ether. Weak pursuit of pleasure, the evasion of duty, and selfishness, are found wherever two or three are gathered together. Neither good nor evil is restricted to any nation, creed, climate, or race. It is true, however, that the evils of the drink traffic are indissolubly associated with the spread of the Gospel. China, India, and Africa, what- ever evils may have been wrought within their own areas, are, at least, free from the re- sponsibility of applying to Western civilisation and faith for the spread of contagious diseases and poison stimulants in distant lands. Nominal Christianity has cheerfully girdled with a zone of drink this fair earth. Had the liquor been Chateau Lafitte, or even well-matured whisky, there would have been comparatively little harm done. But the fusel-oil and pure alcohol with which England and Germany the bulwarks of Protestantism have saturated the heathen, are deterrent influ- ences against acceptance by the new democracy of nominal Christianity. Members of Parliament who have made a fortune by selling drink to black races may support Sir. W. Lawson with their THE RELIGION OF THE IRRELIGIOUS. 237 votes in the House of Commons, but they have done more than most men to promote the decay of faith. Nearer home, the lives of those who have publicly renounced this world, and have under- taken to carry their cross, are enigmatical to those who wish to believe. If it were intended to tilt at nominal Christianity, this would be the place. Nothing is farther from my intention. It is, how- ever, obvious to all that nothing deters belief so effectually as the characters and deeds of those who publicly profess their belief in the Incarna- tion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, and of His Atonement with God for men's sins. The only inference to be drawn from the habits and char- acters of those who constitute the main body of the Christian Churches, is that Christ is no more a living reality to them in 1894 than Leonidas or Aristotle. His life is contradicted by theirs, and His teaching confuted by the maxims that govern their conduct. Laughter, riches, full measure of the good things of this life, and notoriety, if not popularity, are the definite aims of society and democracy alike. To attain these things nerves are strained, mind pushed to its greatest capacity, health risked and impaired, and the teaching of the Nazarene habitually contradicted. For all these things ?38 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. are denounced by Him with the emphatic promise of woe to the rich, full, merry, and popular man. Pure Ebionism, that is to say, the doctrine that the poor almost alone shall be saved, was the doctrine of the democratic Christ, provided the poor would pay the price of implicit faith and passive obedience. After the worst blot on history the Crucifixion had occurred, and Paul was converted in middle life, Christianity changed her mind, and received rich men into her bosom ; just as Buddhism, exclusively monastic in its origin, received the laity when converts to Gaudama began to increase. Lord Palmerston said, "It is unwise to con- demn a class condemnation should be reserved for individuals." So the Church members and the clergy and ministers of all denominations are excellent and delightful people, but somehow there is so broad a gap between the Christianity of Christ and the so-called Christianity taught in the Churches, and practised by the population in the pews, that one of the two must be wrong. Either Christ was an unpractical fanatic, who gained deathless fame by imposing an impossible burden on weak human nature, or He was divine, and His statements were laws that are binding on all His followers, and which cannot, therefore, be broken with impunity. His teaching seems to THE RELIGION OF THE IRRELIGIOUS. 239- contemplate poverty, hunger, contumely, pain, tears, as being the natural lot of men and women who accept His teaching ; and He seems to expect that to lead the perfect life, sacrifice must accompany every act of life. Nor is it in mere externals that the neo-Chris- tianity, into which the evolution of time, and the fidelity of human nature to itself, have converted the Christianity of Christ, differs from the hard sayings of the Mount. The Great Renunciation is too heavy a sacrifice for the average man to undertake with the slightest prospect of success. From the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop on the wall, the vegetable kingdom struggles for exist- ence. The struggle is no less apparent in the sacerdotal fraternity. It is no small matter for a human being to be set aside, or to set himself aside, to construe to the laity the dark sayings of Revelation and the Incarnate Word of God ; to present in his conduct and life the living example of one who has taken up his cross to follow his Master. The adoption of such a career has pro- duced both the loftiest and the most contemptible of mankind. He who deals in the great mystery of life, by justifying the ways of God to man, stands on a pedestal. His light or his darkness are in full view. It is a sorrowful fact known to- those who have mixed most freely with the 240 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. priestly caste, that where their ghostly functions have not softened the heart and refined the intel- lect, the deterioration and even the degradation is more marked in the clerical profession than among the laity. The French priesthood, perse- cuted by a succession of godless Administrations, now garners the harvest of long centuries of sacerdotal arrogance and tyranny. They are but reaping what they have sown. As contact with pain, disease, and suffering in hospital life, where it does not refine the doctors and nurses, coarsens their spiritual fibre and lowers their tone, so the handling of celestial mysteries either casts a beam upon the outward shape " Till all be made immortal," \ or it deteriorates the priest or pastor, and leaves his body and his mind in a state where animal passions and self-esteem exercise complete control. Looking at the grandeur and the inaccessible purity of the ideal given to Western Europe by the teaching on the Mount, and bearing in mind the petrifaction of heart and character that in- variably result from outward contact with holy things where such contact does not reach the soul, there is no reason for wonder at the sharp- ness of contrast between the Message and the messengers. When shepherds thus fall short, the THE RELIGION OF THE IRRELIGIOUS. 241 failure of the sheep to guide their steps by the austere tenets of the Nazarene is no matter of surprise. Mere doctrine is elevated to a position of dignity and importance, and theological emi- nence is not rare among those to whom port wine and acerbity of manner are habitual indulgences. The sects hate each other more than they hate sin, woe, and want. In ecclesiastical edifices of great beauty and much cost, the errors of rival forms of belief are dissected and exposed with a force and continuity of purpose rarely directed against the strongholds of want and misery that make our social question. To this general state of affairs there are ex- ceptions. The Salvation Army, with its vul- garity, its emotion and its advertisements, is abstinent as Islam, and unselfish as Christianity. It is well for England that most High Church men and some nonconformists, principally among the Wesleyans, are truly concerned in the trans- lation of Christ's practice of feeding the multitude before He preached to them. But the main body of nominal Christians are, at least, as self- centred and as far from an admirable ideal of life as a similar number of Asiatics, be they what they may. If the stimulus of the system of rewards and punishment in a future state is inadequate among 242 ENGLISH DEMO CKA C Y. the masses to ensure a noble life and high aims, the fact remains that the question of a future life has engaged from time immemorial, and con- tinues to engage, the most earnest attention of the best and most thoughtful men. We know nothing of the future life, because we can no more look for direct supernatural information than for supernatural nourishment or supernatural clothing. That mysterious and unknown country is no cruel darkness. It is simply an impene- trable horizon beyond which no emigrant of ours has returned to us. If our senses or our reason are powerless to explain this unknown country, we are not debarred from legitimate speculation or from reasonable hope. If doctrinal controversy, elaborate structure, and multitudinous divisions of ecclesiastical Christianity, have replaced the simple morality of the Master ; if the Narrow Way is Haussmannised by priests into a road to the House of Lords, the speechless cry of the people for illumination and guidance in approach- ing the trackless unknown is not lulled as the old gives place to the new. The generations of churchmen who have filled the world with the din of theological encounters have done less to dissipate the impenetrable gloom hanging over the future than the savage races which preserve to this day an all but universal tradition and belief THE RELIGION OF THE IRRELIGIOUS. 243 of the human race in the existence of a future state. It is, in fact, little short of miraculous that a divine scheme for saving men from eternal damnation, taught personally by God Himself incarnate in human form, and completed by His own death at the hands of a colonial governor of a dead empire, should not have conveyed to man- kind, in an intelligible and sufficient form, irre- sistible evidence of the reality of a future life. The prevalence and continuity of traditional belief is no evidence of its truth ; nor does the universal desire for a future life necessarily de- monstrate its reality. Of the inhabitants of this planet, some twelve hundred millions believe in a life to come. Pure materialism, even among the African tribes, is rare. The existence of such races as the Zulus, and their kinsmen the Mata- bele, whose indifference to death is probably owing (at all events in part) to disbelief in sur- vival after death, simply shows that nomadic races may lose in their wanderings doctrines held by the people from which they sprung. The Jews and the Arabs, to whom the Zulus and Matabele probably owe their ancestry, have held the doctrine of a future state, at all events, during some period of their history. S. Mathew says : " Many bodies of the saints who slept arose and came out of the tombs after 244 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. His resurrection." But Dean Milman and Canon Farrar explain this by the supposition that the earthquake " seemed to have filled the air with ghostly visitants, who, after Christ had risen, seemed to linger in the Holy City." It is logi- cally certain, therefore, as the author of " Super- natural Religion " has pointed out, that if one impression described by Matthew as objective, is really subjective, the possibility of a mistake in regard to the appearance of Christ Himself is equally possible. For it must be remembered that the Apostle Paul wrote about the appearance of Jesus to the five hundred about a quarter of a century after the time when the alleged appear- ance took place. Not only so, but some years must have elapsed between the time when Jesus is supposed to have been seen and the time when Paul first heard of the circumstance. In plain English, is the evidence for the resurrection of Christ, or of Lazarus, sufficient to satisfy an in- different and cultivated mind, or to sustain the alleged miracles? As Dr. Lightfoot says : " The abnegation of reason is not the evidence of faith, but the confession of despair." The testimony needed to-day to demonstrate a fact so stupendous as the resurrection of the dead must, at least, include three separate and successful investigations before a committee, including a surgeon, a nurse, THE RELIGION OF THE IRRELIGIOUS. 245 a chemist, a professed conjuror, an historian, an electrician, a barrister of fourteen years' standing, and a Scotch merchant. If the evidence of a future life depends on the documentary evidence for the rise of Christ from the dead, as the whole structure of dogmatic Christianity hangs on that miracle, Demos is not satisfied. Having sifted the evidence honestly and with labour, I reluct- antly arrived at the conclusion that the objective and historic testimony on which the Resurrection and Ascension are established, is not sufficient to determine in our Civil Courts a trivial question of property or title. It may be that Christ rose from the dead, but if He did, the assertion of the fact from disputable sources leaves democracy indeed with faith stranded and with reason un- satisfied. The resurrection of Christ is more fitly proved by the lives of the best of His followers, the knowledge of their deeds, and the vitality of His example. The predominance of an instinct of survival in the best and purest of mankind, without distinction of race, creed, or colour, is evidence 1 of a totally different nature. It is not necessary to assume that God exhibits personal benevolence towards man- kind to justify the inference that as the capacity for thirst implies the existence of water, so the rooted i and intense aversion to annihilation, the desire to 246 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. live on, to shed the outer husk, to escape into the upper air, to obtain larger and freer powers, and to live emancipated from passion and ignor- ance ; to become strong, and to enter into more direct and personal relations with the First Cause, implies the existence of a future state. For, if it were not so, the equipment of man with a long- ing to survive, that is only a baseless dream, might be the work of a humorist, but it would also be an act of a fiend. We did not make ourselves. We were not consulted whether we would enter this world : into what family we should be born : or with what heredity we should be endowed. Intuitive and general sense of sur- vival either implies survival, or the existence of an immoral First Cause, taking the same sort of pleasure in torturing men, as a pretty child in torturing flies upon the pane. Since the natural laws of the universe, as far as we know them, with a few trifling and questionable excep- tions, indicate method, foresight, adaptation, har- mony, and feeling, there is no reason to suppose that the faculty with which we are endowed for contemplating as desirable our survival after death, is without a place in the scheme of things. Indeed, the general existence of the desire, and the intuitive sense of right and wrong given by conscience, enable us to assume the position of THE RELIGION OF THE IRRELIGIOUS. 247 responsible beings who do not finish their careers in this life. If this be right reasoning, the presumption in favour of the fact of a future life rests on a more solid foundation than miraculous occurrences un- supported by any such evidence as we require in dealing with questions of property or title. It does not amount to certainty, and, moreover, the instinct for survival differs widely in different individuals. But the aching for survival implies survival as much as hunger implies food. There is no necessary supply of food to the hungry ; but food exists, and may generally be obtained by those who want it. Even so there may be no necessary supply of immortality to those who prefer survival to extinction, but immortality may be obtained by those who wish for it, and wish for it enough, or the world is the work of a fiend. The acceptance by the democracy of the idea of a future life is of the first importance in urging them to restrain passion, to achieve good, to remedy wrong, and to create a career the retro- spect of which can be surveyed without shame, if not with satisfaction. Besides this, there is the off-chance of pleasing the First Cause, and of carrying out, however feebly, as agent, servant, or commissioner, some 248 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. part of the plan, the bulk of which is hidden from our gaze. If the desire to take a successful and confi- dential part in the campaign of a great general or in the service of a king has, in times past, in- spired the best and noblest of men who ever lived to deeds of reckless courage, to complete suppression of self, and to endurance so sub- lime as to compel the reverence of posterity, how much more justly may men bestir them- selves to take part in the campaign in that other land where we all shall arrive as destitute emigrants. A moderate study of astronomy makes it appear unlikely that this parasite planet, in a distinctly inferior solar system, carries the whole intelligence, and contains the only sentient beings in the length and breadth of the universe. If, as is possible, the evolution we observe dominating all beings and societies of beings subject to natural law continues to act pro- gressively in the future state, there is nothing repugnant to reason or to instinct in the idea of such an expansion of our capacities and of our intelligence as to enable us to take part in the administration of kingdoms not of this world. We know of three dimensions, and we cannot conceive of a fourth. But if our environment were of two dimensions, we should no more con- THE RELIGION OF THE IRRELIGIOUS. 249 ceive of three than under our present conditions we can conceive of four ; and if four, why not forty or four hundred, or of an infinite number of dimensions, each of which beyond the third is inconceivable to the whole human race ? If theologians and ecclesiastics have en- deavoured to hold the people in pawn for sixty generations by successful suppression of reason, the world is no less likely to suffer from the in- tolerance of the new priesthood of science, who erect an altar to the goddess of reason and offer there a sacrifice of that part of our nature which is higher than reason. There is a cant in science O which is no less repulsive than the cant of theology. Scientific men have so often been hopelessly wrong in their predictions and in their dogmas, that we may be excused from believing even the most eminent among them, when they tell us there is no life beyond the grave. We do not know that there is an after life, but we do know that if there is not, God has amused Him- self with the torture of helpless creatures who have trusted Him. Careful of the type that is always progressing and improving, it is out of harmony with all we know of the provisions made for man, beast and plant, for God idly to torture the whole race of man. If it were so, we should be justified in virulent and confident hatred towards 250 ENGLISH DEMOCRACY. God, and those who led fair and honourable lives would stand in an immeasurably higher moral level than God Himself. As the disciple is not above his Master, if there be a God, man is neither better nor stronger than He. Wrong is not right because God does it. If wrong be done by God, then God is no longer God but Devil. But if God can do no wrong, then there is a future life, and democracy will be well employed in contem- plating the retention of conscious individuality and of memory after death. If I am right in the conclusion that the Christianity of history and of the priests is not remotely related to the Christianity of Christ, we still discover in Him the greatest example man has ever had. The principles of justice, of law, of brotherhood, of sacrifice, are the religion of Christ ; they are the indispensable elements of our social progress, and they are miracles more marvellous than any of those recorded in the Gospels. Amid all the distractions of modern democracy, so complex in all its departments as to overwhelm the souls of men who see no out- look for England beyond the graves of her people, there is no such light of the world as His life : no such power as His teaching. The priests have maimed His memory, and " those who heard Him gladly " before the priests had THE RELIGION OF THE IRRELIGIOUS. 251 thrust themselves between the common people and the Master, will not hear Him now. When they listen to Him, democracy will have lost its dangers, for His socialism is the love to share that which the new tyranny would reap by force. And the union of Christ and democracy, though it be the only hope for England, is to-day no mere dream of enthusiasts. t v THE END. Printed by Cowan & Co. , Limited, Perth. W5 THE LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW. Series 9482 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FAOUTY A 001 028 287 9 - ^ V^- "'-' J*- ^^^S" " 1 \^"