Chapter VII: Part 7

Certainly at this moment, if ever in our national life, we must be content to "walk by faith and not by sight." This chapter began with imagery, and with imagery it shall end. "I have often stood on some mountain peak, some Cumbrian or Alpine hill, over which the dim mists rolled; and suddenly, through one mighty rent in that cloudy curtain, I have seen the blue heaven in all its beauty, and, far below my feet, the rivers and cities and cornfields of the plain sparkled in the heavenly sunlight."

That is, in a figure, the vision for which we must hope and pray.

III

"_DISSOLVING THROES_"

I borrow my title from a poet.

"He grew old in an age he condemned;
He looked on the rushing decay
Of the times which had sheltered his youth;
Felt the dissolving throes
Of a social order he loved."

It seems odd that Matthew Arnold should have spoken thus about Wordsworth; for one would have expected that the man who wrote so gloriously of the French Revolution, "as it appeared to enthusiasts at its commencement," would have rejoiced in the new order which it established for all Europe. But the younger poet knew the elder with an intimacy which defies contradiction; and one must, I suppose, number Wordsworth among those who, in each succeeding age, have shed tears of useless regret over the unreturning past. Talleyrand said that, to know what an enjoyable thing life was capable of being, one must have been a member of the _ancienne noblesse_ before the Revolution. It was the cynical and characteristic utterance of a nature singularly base; but even the divine Burke (though he had no personal or selfish interests in the matter) was convinced that the Revolution had not only destroyed political freedom, but also social welfare, and had "crushed everything respectable and virtuous in the nation." What, in the view of Burke and Talleyrand, the Revolution did for France, that, by a curious irony of fate, our attempt to defeat the Revolution did for England. Burke forced us into the Revolutionary War, and that war (as Gladstone once said in a letter to the present writer) "almost unmade the liberties, the Constitution, even the material interests and prosperity, of our country." Patriots like William Cobbett and Sydney Smith, though absolutely convinced that the war was just and necessary, doubted if England could ever rally from the immense strain which it had imposed on her resources, or regain the freedom which, in order to beat France, she had so lightly surrendered.

At a time when Manchester was unrepresented and Gatton sent two Members to Parliament, it was steadily maintained by lovers of the established order that the proposed enlargement of the electorate was "incompatible with a just equality of civil rights, or with the necessary restraints of social obligation." If it were carried, religion, morality, and property would perish together, and our venerable Constitution would topple down in ruins. "A thousand years have scarce sufficed to make England what she is: one hour may lay her in the dust." In 1861 J. W. Croker wrote to his patron, the great borough-monger Lord Hertford: "There can be no doubt that the Reform Bill is a stepping-stone in England to a republic, and in Ireland to separation. Both _may_ happen without the Bill, but with it they are inevitable." Next year the Bill became law. Lord Bathurst cut off his pigtail, exclaiming: "Ichabod, for the glory is departed"--an exquisitely significant combination of act and word--and the Duke of Wellington announced that England had accomplished "a revolution by due course of law." In some sense the words were true. Political power had passed from the aristocracy to the middle class. The English equivalents of Talleyrand--the men who directly or in their ancestors had ruled England since 1688, had enjoyed power without responsibility, and privilege which alike Kings and mobs had questioned in vain--were filled with the wildest alarms. Emotional orators saw visions of the guillotine; calmer spirits anticipated the ballot-box; and the one implement of anarchy was scarcely more dreaded than the other.

Sixteen years passed. Property and freedom seemed pretty secure. Even privilege, though shaken, had not been overthrown; and a generation had grown up to which the fears of revolution seemed fantastic. Then suddenly came the uprising of the nations in '48; and once again "dissolving throes" were felt, with pain or joy according to the temperament of those who felt them. "We have seen," said Charles Greville, "such a stirring-up of all the elements of society as nobody ever dreamt of; we have seen a general saturnalia--ignorance, vanity, insolence, poverty, ambition, escaping from every kind of restraint, ranging over the world, and turning it topsy-turvy as it pleased. All Europe exhibits the result--a mass of ruin, terror, and despair." Matthew Arnold, young and ardent, and in some ways democratic, wrote in a different vein: "The hour of the hereditary peerage, and eldest sonship, and immense properties, has, I am convinced, as Lamartine would say, struck." Seventy years ago! And that "hour" has not struck yet!

The "dissolving throes" were lulled again, and I scarcely made themselves felt till 1866, when a mild attempt to admit the pick of the artisans to the electoral privileges of the middle class woke the panic-stricken vehemence of Robert Lowe. "If," he asked, "you want venality, ignorance, drunkenness, and the means of intimidation; if you want impulsive, unreflecting, and violent people, where will you go to look for them--to the top or to the bottom?" Well might Bishop Wilberforce report to a friend, "It was enough to make the flesh creep to hear Bob Lowe's prognostications for the future of England."

Next year the artisans got the vote, though the great Lord Shaftesbury, who knew more than most of his peers about working-men, plainly told the House of Lords that "a large proportion of the working classes have a deep and solemn conviction that property is not distributed as property ought to be; that some checks ought to be kept upon the accumulation of property in single hands; and that to take away by legislation that which is in excess with a view to bestowing it on those who have less, is not a breach of any law, human or Divine."

Yet once more. When in 1885 the agricultural labourers (of whom a Tory M.P. said that they were no fitter for a vote than the beasts they tended), were admitted to the franchise, the same terrors shook the squirearchy. We were warned that the land would soon be broken up into small holdings; that sport would become impossible; and that "the stately homes of England" must all be closed, for lack of money to keep them open. The country, we were told, had seen its best days, and "Merry England" had vanished for ever.

I only recall these "dissolving throes," real or imaginary, because I fancy that just now they are again making themselves felt, and perhaps with better reason than ever before in our history. People who venture to look ahead are asking themselves this question: If this war goes on much longer, what sort of England will emerge? Some are looking forward with rapture to a new heaven and a new earth; others dread the impending destruction "of a social order they loved." Can we not trace something of this dread in Lord Lansdowne's much-canvassed letter? He is one of the most patriotic and most experienced men in public life; he "looks on the rushing decay of the times which sheltered his youth"; and it may well be that he is striving to avert what seems to him a social catastrophe.

IV

_INSTITUTIONS AND CHARACTER_

As a rule, I call a spade a spade. When I mean _The Times_, I say _The Times_, and I condemn the old-fashioned twaddle of talking about "a morning contemporary." But to-day I depart from my rule and content myself with saying that I lately read in an important newspaper a letter dealing with Mr. Asquith's distinction between "Prussian Militarism" and "German Democracy." For my own part, I did not think that distinction very sound. The experience of the last three years has led me to the conclusion that the German democracy is to the full as bellicose as the military caste, and that it has in no way dissociated itself from the abominable crimes against decency and humanity which the military caste has committed. I hold that the German people, as we know it to-day, is brutalized; but when one thus frames an indictment against a whole nation, one is bound to ask oneself what it is that has produced so calamitous a result. How can a whole nation go wrong? Has any race a "double dose of original sin"? I do not believe it. Human nature as it leaves the Creator's hand is pretty much the same everywhere; and when we see it deformed and degraded, we must look for the influence which has been its bane. In dealing with individuals the enquiry is comparatively simple, and the answer not far to seek. But when we deal with nations we cannot, as a rule; point to a single figure, or even a group of figures, and say, "He, or they, did the mischief." We are forced to look wider and deeper, and we shall be well advised if we learn from Burke to realize "the mastery of laws, institutions, and government over the character and happiness of man." Let me apply Burke's teaching to the case before us.

The writer of the letter which I am discussing has a whole-hearted dislike of the Germans, and especially of the Prussians; charges them with "cruelty, brutal arrogance, deceit, cunning, manners and customs below those of savages"; includes in the indictment professors, commercial men, and women; recites the hideous list of crimes committed during the present war; and roundly says that, however you label him, "the Prussian will always remain a beast."

I dispute none of these propositions. I believe them to be sadly and bitterly true; but if I am to follow Burke's counsel, I must enquire into the "laws, institutions, and government" which have prevailed in Germany, and which have exercised so disastrous a "mastery over the character and happiness of man." In this enquiry it would be obvious to touch military ascendency, despotic monarchy, representative institutions deprived of effective power, administration made omnipotent, and bureaucratic interference with every detail of human life. Sydney Smith's words about unreformed England apply perfectly to modern Germany. "Of all ingenious instruments of despotism I most commend a popular assembly where the majority are paid and hired, and a few bold and able men, by their brave speeches, make the people believe they are free."

But for our present purpose I must concentrate attention on another institution which has had an even more direct and practical bearing on the character of the German people--and this is the enforcement of military service. This, like every other institution, must be judged by its effects on the character of those who are subject to it. The writer of the letter holds that "the only good thing about the German nation" is the "national service through which all men pass, and which makes soldiers of all not physically unfit, and which inculcates patriotism, loyalty, obedience, courage, discipline, duty." Now, these words, read in connexion with the description of the German people quoted above, suggest a puzzling problem. The Germans are cruel, brutally arrogant, deceitful, and cunning, and "the Prussian will always remain a beast." Yet these same people have all passed through a discipline "which inculcates patriotism, loyalty, obedience, courage, discipline, duty." Doth a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter? Does the same system make men patriotic and cruel, loyal and arrogant, obedient and deceitful, courageous and cunning, dutiful and beastly?

Perhaps it does. I can conceive some of these pairs of qualities united in a single character. A man might be a zealous patriot, and yet horribly cruel; loyal to his Sovereign, but arrogant to his inferiors; obedient to authority, yet deceitful among coequals; courageous in danger, yet cunning in avoiding it; dutiful according to his own standard of duty, and yet as "beastly" as the torturers of Belgium. But a system which produces such a very chequered type of character is scarcely to be commended.

Now, the writer might reply, "I only said that the military system _inculcated_ certain virtues. I did not say that it ensured them." Then it fails. If it has produced only the "vile German race" which the writer so justly dislikes, unredeemed by any of the virtues which it "inculcates," then it has nothing to say for itself. It stands confessed as an unmixed evil.

It is right to expose a logical fallacy, but I am not fond of the attempt to obscure by logic-chopping what is a writer's real meaning. I will therefore say that, as far as I can make out, what this particular writer really believes is that the German people, through some innate and incurable frowardness of disposition, have turned the inestimable blessings of compulsory soldiership to their own moral undoing, and have made themselves wholly bad and beastly, in spite of a beneficent institution which would have made them good and even pleasant.

Here I take leave to differ, and to range myself on the side of Burke. Great, indeed--nay, incalculable--is "the mastery of laws, institutions, and government over the character and happiness of man." The system is known by its fruits. We may think as badly as we like of the Germans--as badly as they deserve--but we must remember the "laws, institutions, and government" that have dominated their national development. And this is not only a matter of just and rational thinking, but is also a counsel of safety for ourselves. If, as a result of this war, we allow our personal and social liberties (rightly suspended for the moment) to be permanently abolished or restricted; and, above all, if we bend our necks to the yoke of a military despotism; we shall be inviting a profound degradation of our national character. It would indeed be a tragical consummation of our great fight for Freedom if, when it is over, the other nations could point to us and say: "England has sunk to the moral level of Germany."

V

_REVOLUTION--AND RATIONS_

"A revolution by due course of law." This, as we have seen, was the Duke of Wellington's description of the Reform Act of 1832, which transferred the government of England from the aristocracy to the middle class. Though eventually accomplished by law, it did not pass without bloodshed and conflagration; and timid people satisfied themselves that not only the downfall of England, but the end of the world, must be close at hand.

Twenty years passed, and nothing in particular happened. National wealth increased, all established institutions seemed secure, and people began to forget that they had passed through a revolution. Then arose John Bright, reminding the working-men of the Midlands that their fathers "had shaken the citadel of Privilege to its base," and inciting them to give the tottering structure another push. A second revolution seemed to be drawing near. Dickens put on record, in chapter xxvi. of _Little Dorrit_, the alarms which agitated respectable and reactionary circles. The one point, as Dickens remarked, on which everyone agreed, was that the country was in very imminent danger, and wanted all the preserving it could get. Presently, but not till 1867, the second revolution arrived. Some of the finest oratory ever heard in England was lavished on the question whether the power, formerly exercised by the aristocracy and more recently by the middle class, was to be extended to the artisans. The great Lord Shaftesbury predicted "the destruction of the Empire," and Bishop Wilberforce "did not see how we were to escape fundamental changes in Church and State." "History," exclaimed Lowe, "may record other catastrophes as signal and as disastrous, but none so wanton and so disgraceful." However, the artisans made a singularly moderate use of their newly acquired power; voted Conservative as often as they voted Liberal; and so again belied the apprehensions of the alarmists.

When the workman of the town had been enfranchised, it was impossible to keep his brother who worked on the land permanently in the position of a serf or a cipher. So we began to agitate for the "County Franchise"; and once again the cry of "Revolution" was heard--perhaps in its most typical form from the lips of a Tory M.P., who, as I said before, affirmed that the labourer was no fitter for the suffrage than the beasts he tended. Even ten years later, Lord Goschen, who was by nature distrustful of popular movements, prognosticated that, if ever the Union with Ireland were lost, it would be lost through the votes of the agricultural labourers. To those who, like myself, were brought up in agricultural districts, the notion that the labourer was a revolutionary seemed strangely unreal; but it was a haunting obsession in the minds of clubmen and town-dwellers.

So, in each succeeding decade, the next extension of constitutional freedom has been acclaimed by its supporters as an instalment of the millennium, and denounced by its opponents as the destruction of social order. So it had been, time out of mind; and so it would have been to the end had not the European war burst upon us, and shaken us out of all our habitual concernments. Now "the oracles are dumb." The voices, of lugubrious prophecy are silent. The Reform Act which has become law this year is beyond doubt the greatest revolution which has as yet been effected "by due course of law." It has doubled the electorate; it has enfranchised the women; it has practically established universal suffrage; it has placed all property, as well as all policy, under the control of a class, if only that class chooses to vote and act together. All these effects of the Act (except one) are objects which I have desired to see attained ever since I was a boy at Harrow, supporting the present Bishop of Oxford and the late Lord Grey in the School Debating Society; so it is not for me to express even the faintest apprehension of evil results. But I am deliberately of opinion that the change now effected in our electoral arrangements is of farther-reaching significance than the substitution of a republic for a monarchy; and the amazing part of the business is that no one has protested at any stage of it. We were told at the beginning of the war that there was to be no controversial legislation till it was over. That engagement was broken; no one protested. A vitally important transaction was removed from the purview of Parliament to a secret conference; no one protested. If we suggested that the House of Commons was morally and constitutionally dead, and that it ought to renew its life by an appeal to the constituencies before it enforced a revolution, we were told that it was impossible to hold a General Election with the soldiers all out of the country; but now it seems that this is to be the next step, and no one protests against it.

But these may be dismissed as constitutional pedantries. So be it. The Whigs, who made the Constitution, may be pardoned if they have a sneaking regard for their handiwork. Much more astonishing is the fact that no resistance was offered on behalf of wealth and privilege by the classes who have most of both to lose. The men of £100,000 a year--not numerous, according to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but influential--have been as meekly acquiescent as clerks or curates. Men who own half a county have smiled on an Act which will destroy territorial domination. What is the explanation? Was their silence due to patriotism or to fear? Did they laudably decline the responsibility of opposing a Government which is conducting a great war? Or did they, less laudably, shrink from the prospect of appearing as the inveterate enemies of a social and economic revolution which they saw to be inevitable? Let us charitably incline to the former hypothesis.

But there is something about this, our most recent revolution, which is even more astonishing than the absence of opposition and panic. It is that no one, whether friend or foe, has paid the least attention to the subject. In ordinary society it has been impossible to turn the conversation that way. Any topic in the world--but pre-eminently Rations,--seemed more vital and more pressing. "The Reform Bill? What Bill is that? Tell me, do you find it very difficult to get sugar?" "The Speaker's Conference? Haven't heard about it. I'm sure James Lowther won't allow them to do anything very silly--but I really cannot imagine how we are to get on without meat." Or yet again: A triumphant Suffragist said to a Belgravian sister: "So we've got the vote at last!" "What vote?" replied the sister. "Surely we've had a vote for ever so long? I'm sure I have, though I never used it."

When the real history of this wonderful war is written, methinks the historian will reckon among its most amazing features the fact that it so absorbed the mind of the nation as to make possible a 'silent revolution.'

VI

"_THE INCOMPATIBLES_"

My title is borrowed from one of the few Englishmen who have ever written wisely about Ireland. Our ways of trying to pacify our Sister Kingdom have been many and various--Disestablishment Acts, Land Acts, Arrears Acts, Coercion Acts, Crimes Acts, and every other variety of legislative experiment; but through them all Ireland remained unpacified. She showed no gratitude for boons which she had not asked, and seemed to crave for something which, with the best intentions in the world, England was unable to supply. This failure on the part of England may have been due to the fact that Gladstone, who, of all English statesmen, most concerned himself with Irish affairs, knew nothing of Ireland by personal contact. It is startling to read, in Lord Morley's _Life_ this casual record of his former chief: "In October, 1878, Gladstone paid his first and only visit to Ireland. It lasted little more than three weeks, and did not extend beyond a very decidedly English pale.... Of the multitude of strange things distinctly Irish, he had little chance of seeing much."

One of the "strange things" which he did not see was the resolve of Ireland to be recognized as a nation; and that recognition was the "something" which, as I said just now, England was unable or unwilling to supply. Late in life Gladstone discovered that Ireland was a nation, and ought to be treated as such. As regards his own share in the matter, the change came too late, and he went to the grave leaving Ireland (in spite of two Home Rule Bills) still unpacified; but his influence has lived and wrought, not only in the Liberal party. The principle of Irish nationality has been recognized in legislative form, and the most law-abiding citizen in Great Britain might drink that toast of "Ireland a Nation" which aforetime was considered seditious, if not treasonable.

It was certainly a very odd prejudice of English Philistinism which prevented us, for so many centuries, from recognizing a fact so palpable as Irish nationality. If ever a race of men had characteristics of its own, marking it out from its nearest neighbours, that race is the Irish, and among the best of those characteristics are chastity, courtesy, hospitality, humour, and fine manners. The intense Catholicism of Ireland may be difficult for Protestants to applaud; yet most certainly those who fail to take it into account are hopelessly handicapped in the attempt to deal with Irish problems. The Irish are born fighters. One of the most splendid passages which even Irish oratory ever produced was that in which Sheill protested against the insolence of stigmatizing the countrymen of Wellington as "aliens" from England, and no policy could be more suicidal than that which deflects the soldiership of Ireland from the British cause.

Charles James Fox shares with Edmund Burke the praise of having brought the ideas which we call Liberal to bear on Irish government, and his words are at least as true to-day as when they were written: "We ought not to presume to legislate for a nation in whose feelings and affections, wants and interests, opinions and prejudices, we have no sympathy." Are "The Incompatibles" to be always incompatible, or can we now, even at the eleventh hour, make some effort to understand the working of the Irish temperament?

The incompatibility, as Matthew Arnold read it, is not between the two nations which Providence has so closely knit together, but between insolence, dulness, rigidity, on the one hand, and sensibility, quickness, flexibility, on the other. What Arnold lamented was that England has too often been represented in Ireland, and here also when Irish questions were discussed, by "the genuine, unmitigated Murdstone--the common middle-class Englishman, who has come forth from Salem House--and Mr. Creakle. He is seen in full force, of course, in the Protestant North; but throughout Ireland he is a prominent figure of the English garrison. Him the Irish see, see him only too much and too often"--and to see him is to dislike him, and the country which sent him forth.

Is there not a touch of Murdstone and Creakle in the present dealings of Parliament with Ireland? Forces greater than that of Salem House have decreed that Ireland is to have self-government, and have converted--for the astonishment of after-ages--Mr. Balfour and Lord Curzon into Home Rulers. Surely, if there is one question which, more conspicuously than another, a nation is entitled to settle for itself it is the question whether military service shall be compulsory. True, the legislative machinery of Home Rule is not yet in action; but legislative machinery is not the only method by which national sentiment can be ascertained. To introduce conscription into Ireland by an Act of the Imperial Parliament, after you have conceded to the Irish their claim to have a Parliament of their own, may not indeed be a breach of faith, but it surely is a breach of manners and good sense.

VII

_FREEDOM'S NEW FRIENDS_

Many, said the Greek proverb, are they who bear the mystic reed, but few are the true bacchanals. Many, in the present day, are they who make an outward display of devotion to Liberty, but few, methinks, are her real worshippers. "We are fighting for Freedom" is a cry which rises from the most unexpected quarters; and, though 'twere ungracious to question its sincerity, we must admit that this generous enthusiasm is of very recent growth.

Liberty has always had her friends in England; but where she could count one, Authority could count two.[*] Five years ago, how many Englishmen really cared for Liberty, not rendering her mere lip-service, but honestly devoting themselves to her sacred cause? If you polled the nation from top to bottom, how many liberty-lovers would you find? At one election their number, as disclosed by the polls, would rise, at another it would sink. At the best of times, if you divide the nation into strata, you would find large sections in which Liberty had no worshippers and very few friends. It had long been one of the bad signs of the times that the love of Liberty had almost ceased to animate what are called, in the odious language of social convention, "the upper classes." For generations the despised and calumniated Whigs had maintained the cause of Freedom in their peculiarly dogged though unemotional fashion, and had established the political liberties of England on a strong foundation. But their day was done, their work was accomplished, and their descendants had made common cause with their hereditary opponents.

[Footnote *: I am speaking here of England only--not of Scotland, Ireland, or Wales.]

After the great split of 1886 a genuine lover of Freedom in the upper strata of society was so rare a character that people encountering him instinctively asked, "Is he insincere? Or only mad?" Deserted by the aristocracy, Liberty turned for her followers to the great Middle Class; but there also the process of apostasy had begun; and substantial people, whose fathers had fought and suffered for Freedom, waxed reactionary as the claims of Labour became more audible, and betook themselves to the side of Authority as being the natural guardian of property. If you make the division geographically, you may say, in the broadest terms, that the North stood firm for Freedom; but that London and the South were always unfriendly to it, and, after 1886, the Midlands joined the enemy.

If we apply a test which, though often illusory, cannot be regarded as wholly misleading, the Metropolitan Press was, in a remarkable degree, hostile to Freedom, and reflected, as one must suppose, the sentiments of the huge constituency for whom it catered. How many friends could Irish Nationalism count? How many could Greece, in her struggle with Turkey? How many the Balkan States? How many Armenia? How many, even in the ranks of professed Liberalism, opposed the annexation of the South African Republics? At each extension of the suffrage; at each tussle with the Lords; at each attempt to place the burden of taxation on the shoulders best able to bear it, few indeed were the friends of Freedom in the upper classes of society; in the opulent Middle Class; in London and the Midlands and the South; in the Church, alas!; in the Universities, the Professions, and the Press.

And yet, at the present moment, from these unlikely quarters there rises a diapason of liberty-loving eloquence which contrasts very discordantly with the habitual language of five years ago. To-day the friends of Freedom are strangely numerous and admirably vocal. Our Lady of Liberty, one thinks, must marvel at the number and the energy of her new worshippers. Lapses from grace are not unknown in the after-history of revivals, but we must, in charity, assume the conversion to be genuine until experience has proved it insincere. And to what are we to attribute it? Various answers are possible. Perhaps, as long as it was only other people's liberty which was imperilled, we could look on without concern. Perhaps we never realized the value of Freedom, as the chief good of temporal life, till the prospect of losing it, under a world-wide reign of force, first dawned on our imagination. Perhaps--and this is the happiest supposition--we have learnt our lesson by contemplating the effects of a doglike submission to Authority in corrupting the morals and wrecking the civilization of a powerful and once friendly people.

But, theorize as we may about the cause, the effect is unmistakable, and, at least on the surface, satisfactory. To-day we all are the friends and lovers of Liberty--and yet the very multitude of our new comrades gives us, the veterans in the cause, some ground for perplexity and even for concern. "He who really loves Liberty must walk alone." In spite of all that has come and gone, I believe that this stern dogma still holds good; and I seem to see it illustrated afresh in the career, so lately closed amid universal respect and regret, of Leonard, Lord Courtney.[*]

[Footnote *: Leonard, Henry Courtney (Lord Courtney of Penwith), died May 11, 1918, in his eighty-sixth year.]

V

EDUCATION

I

_EDUCATION AND THE JUDGE_

Not long ago a Judge of the High Court (who was also a Liberal) made what struck me as an eminently wise observation. While trying a couple of Elementary School-teachers whose obscenity was too gross for even an Old Bailey audience, and who themselves were products of Elementary Schools, the Judge said: "It almost makes one hesitate to think that elementary education is the blessing which we had hoped it was." Of course, all the prigs of the educational world, and they are not few, were aghast at this robust declaration of common sense; and the Judge thought it well to explain (not, I am thankful to say, to explain away) a remark which had been sedulously misconstrued.

Long years ago Queen Victoria recording the conversation at her dinner-table, said: "Lord Melbourne made us laugh very much with his opinions about Schools and Public Education; the latter he don't like, and when I asked him if he did he said, 'I daren't say in these times that I'm against it--but I _am_ against it.'"

There is a pleasantly human touch in that confession of a Whig Prime Minister, that he was afraid to avow his mistrust of a great social policy to which the Liberal party was committing itself. The arch-charlatan, Lord Brougham, was raging up and down the kingdom extolling the unmixed blessings of education. The University of London, which was to make all things new, had just been set up. "The school-master was abroad." Lord John Russell was making some tentative steps towards a system of national education. Societies, Congresses, and Institutes were springing up like mushrooms; and all enlightened people agreed that extension of knowledge was the one and all-sufficient remedy for the obvious disorders of the body politic. The Victorian Age was, in brief, the age of Education; and the one dogma which no one ventured to question was that the extension of knowledge was necessarily, and in itself, a blessing.

When I say "no one" I should perhaps say "hardly anyone"; for the wisest and wittiest man of the time saw the crack in the foundation on which his friends were laboriously erecting the temple of their new divinity. "Reading and writing," said Sydney Smith, "are mere increase of power. They may be turned, I admit, to a good or a bad purpose; but for several years of his life the child is in your hands, and you may give to that power what bias you please. I believe the arm of the assassin may be often stayed by the lessons of his early life. When I see the village school, and the tattered scholars, and the aged master or mistress teaching the mechanical art of reading or writing, and thinking that they are teaching that alone, I feel that the aged instructor is protecting life, insuring property, fencing the Altar, guarding the Throne, giving space and liberty to all the fine powers of man, and lifting him up to his own place in the order of Creation."

That first sentence contain? the pith of the whole matter. "Reading and writing are mere increase of power," and they may be turned to a good or a bad purpose. Here enters the ethical consideration which the zealots of sheer knowledge so persistently ignored. The language about fencing the Altar and guarding the Throne might, no doubt, strike the Judge who tried the school-teachers as unduly idealistic; but the sentiment is sound, and knowledge is either a blessing or a curse, according as it is used.

Sydney Smith was speaking of the Elementary School, and, indeed, was urging the claims of the working classes to better education. But his doctrine applies with at least equal force to the higher and wider ranges of knowledge. During the Victorian Age physical science came into its own, and a good deal more than its own. Any discovery in mechanics or chemistry was hailed as a fresh boon, and the discoverer was ranged, with Wilberforce and Shaftesbury, among our national heroes. As long ago as 1865 a scientific soldier perceived the possibilities of aerial navigation. His vision has been translated into fact; but Count Zeppelin has shown us quite clearly that the discovery is not an unmixed blessing. Chemistry is, to some minds, the most interesting of studies, just because it is, as Lord Salisbury once said of it, the science of things as they are. Yet aconitine, strychnine, and antimony have played their part in murders, and chloroform has been used for destruction as well as for salvation. Dr. Lardner was one of the most conspicuous figures in that March of Mind which Brougham and his congeners led; and his researches into chemistry resulted in the production of an effluvium which was calculated to destroy all human life within five miles of the spot where it was discharged. This was an enlargement of knowledge; but if there had been Nihilists in the reign of William IV. they would have found in Dr. Lardner's discovery a weapon ready to their hand. Someone must have discovered alcohol; and my teetotal friends would probably say, invented it, for they cannot attribute so diabolical an agency to the action of purely natural causes. But even those who least sympathize with "the lean and sallow abstinence" would scarcely maintain that alcohol has been an unmixed blessing to the race.

To turn from material to mental discoveries, I hold that a great many additions which have been made to our philosophical knowledge have diminished alike the happiness and the usefulness of those who made them. "To live a life of the deepest pessimism tempered only by the highest mathematics" is a sad result of sheer knowledge. An historian, toiling terribly in the muniment-rooms of colleges or country houses, makes definite additions to our knowledge of Henry VIII. or Charles I.; learns cruelty from the one and perfidy from the other, and emerges with a theory of government as odious as Carlyle's or Froude's. A young student of religion diligently adds to his stock of learning, and plunges into the complicated errors of Manicheans, and Sabellians, and Pelagians, with the result that he absorbs the heresies and forgets the Gospel. In each of these cases knowledge has been increased, but mankind has not been benefited. We come back to what Sydney Smith said. Increase of knowledge is merely increase of power. Whether it is to be a boon or a curse to humanity depends absolutely on the spirit in which it is applied. Just now we find ourselves engaged in a desperate conflict between materialism and morality--between consummate knowledge organized for evil ends, and the sublime ideal of public right. Education has done for Germany all that Education, divorced from Morality, can do; and the result has been a defeat of civilization and a destruction of human happiness such as Europe has not seen since the Middle Age closed in blood. What shall it profit a nation if it "gain the whole world" and lose its own soul?

II

_THE GOLDEN LADDER_

Education is an excellent thing, but the word has a deterrent sound. It breathes pedantry and dogmatism, and "all that is at enmity with joy." To people of my age it recalls the dread spirits of Pinnock and Colenso and Hamblin Smith, and that even more terrible Smith who edited Dictionaries of everything. So, though this chapter is to be concerned with the substance, I eschew the word, and choose for my title a figurative phrase. I might, with perfect justice, have chosen another figure, and have headed my paper "The Peg and the Hole"; for, after nearly a century of patient expectation, we have at last got a Square Peg in the Square Hole of Public Instruction. In simpler speech, England has at length got a Minister of Education who has a genuine enthusiasm for knowledge, and will do his appointed work with a single eye to the intellectual advancement of the country, neither giving heed to the pribbles and prabbles of theological disputants, nor modifying his plans to suit the convenience of the manufacturer or the squire. He is, in my judgment, exactly the right man for the office which he fills; and is therefore strikingly differentiated not only from some Ministers of Education whom we have known, but also from the swarm of Controllers and Directors and salaried busybodies who have so long been misdirecting us and contradicting one another.

When I say that Mr. Fisher will not give heed to theological disputants, I by no means ignore the grievance under which some of those disputants have suffered. The ever-memorable majority of 1906 was won, not wholly by Tariff Reform or Chinese Labour, but to a great extent by the righteous indignation of Nonconformity at the injury which had been inflicted on it by the Tory Education Acts. There were Passive Resisters in those days, as there are Conscientious Objectors now; and they made their grievance felt when the time for voting came. The Liberal Government, in spite of its immense victory at the polls, scored a fourfold failure in its attempts to redress that grievance, and it remains unredressed to this hour. Not that I admired the Liberal Education Bills. My own doctrine on the matter was expressed by my friend Arthur Stanton, who said in 1906: "I think National and Compulsory Education must be secular, and with facilities for the denominations to add their particular tenets. My objection to this Bill" (Mr. Birrell's Bill) "is that it subsidizes undenominationalism." And again in 1909, when another of our Liberal practitioners was handling the subject: "I object altogether to the State teaching religion. I would have it teach secular matters only, and leave the religious teaching entirely to the clergy, who should undertake it at their own expense. This is the only fair plan--fair to all. The State gives, and pays for, religious teaching which I do not regard as being worth anything at all. It is worse than useless. Real religious teaching can only be given by the Church, and when Christ told us to go and teach, He did not mean mathematics and geography."

That was, and is, my doctrine on religious education; but in politics we must take things as they are, and must not postpone practicable reforms because we cannot as yet attain an ideal system. So Mr. Fisher, wisely as I think, has left the religious question on one side, and has proposed a series of reforms which will fit equally well the one-sided system which still oppresses Nonconformists and the simply equitable plan to which I, as a lover of religious freedom, aspire.

I see that some of Mr. Fisher's critics say: "This is not a great Bill." Perhaps not, but it is a good Bill; and, as Lord Morley observes, "that fatal French saying about small reforms being the worst enemies of great reforms is, in the sense in which it is commonly used, a formula of social ruin." Enlarging on this theme, Lord Morley points out that the essential virtue of a small reform--the quality which makes it not an evil, but a good--is that it should be made "on the lines and in the direction" of the greater reform which is desiderated.

Now, this condition Mr. Fisher's Bill exactly fulfils. I suppose that the "greater reform" of education which we all wish to see--the ideal of national instruction--is that the State should provide for every boy and girl the opportunity of cultivating his or her natural gifts to the highest perfection which they are capable of attaining. When I speak of "natural gifts" I refer not only to the intellect, but also to the other parts of our nature, the body and the moral sense. This ideal involves a system which, by a natural and orderly development, should conduct the capable child from the Elementary School, through all the intermediate stages, to the highest honours of the Universities.

The word "capable" occurs in Mr. Fisher's Bill, and rightly, because our mental and physical capacities are infinitely varied. A good many children may be unable to profit by any instruction higher than that provided by the Elementary School. A good many more will be able to profit by intermediate education. Comparatively few--the best--will make their way to really high attainment, and will become, at and through the Universities, great philosophers, or scholars, or scientists, or historians, or mathematicians.

At that point--and it ought to be reached at a much earlier age than is now usual--the State's, concern in the matter ends. The child has become, a man, and henceforth must work out his own intellectual salvation; but in the earlier stages the State can and must exercise a potent influence. The earliest stage must be compulsory--that was secured by the Act of 1870. In the succeeding stages, the State, while it does not compel, must stimulate and encourage; and above all must ensure that no supposed exigencies of money-making, no selfish tyranny of the employing classes, shall be allowed to interfere with mental or physical development, or to divert the boy or the girl from any course of instruction by which he or she is capable of profiting. This ideal Mr. Fisher's Bill, with its plain enactment that education shall be free; with its precaution against "half-time"; with its ample provision for Continuation Schools, goes far to realize. Even if it is a "small" reform--and I should dispute the epithet--it is certainly "on the lines and in the direction" of that larger reform which the enthusiasts of education have symbolized by the title of "The Golden Ladder."[*]

[Footnote *: Happily for Education, Mr. Fisher's Bill is now an Act.]

III

_OASES_

My title is figurative, but figures are sometimes useful. Murray's Dictionary defines an oasis as "a fertile spot in the midst of a desert"; and no combination of words could better describe the ideal which I wish to set before my readers.

The suggestion of this article came to me from a correspondent in Northumberland--"an old miner, who went to work down a mine before he was eight years old, and is working yet at seventy-two." My friend tells me that he has "spent about forty years of his spare time in trying to promote popular education among his fellow working-men." His notice was attracted by a paper which I recently wrote on "The Golden Ladder" of Education, and that paper led him to offer some suggestions which I think too valuable to be lost.

My friend does not despise the Golden Ladder. Quite the contrary. He sees its usefulness for such as are able to climb it, but he holds that they are, and must be, the few, while he is concerned for the many. I agree. When (following Matthew Arnold at a respectful distance) I have urged the formation of a national system by which a poor man's son may be enabled to climb from the Elementary School to a Fellowship or a Professorship at Oxford or Cambridge, I have always realized that I was planning a course for the exceptionally gifted boy. That boy has often emerged in real life, and the Universities have profited by his emergence; but he is, and always must be, exceptional. What can be done for the mass of intelligent, but not exceptional, boys, who, to quote my Northumbrian friend, "must be drilled into a calling of some kind, so as to be able to provide for themselves when they grow up to manhood"? When once their schooling, in the narrow sense, is over, must their minds be left to lie fallow or run wild? Can nothing be done to supplement their elementary knowledge, to stimulate and discipline their mental powers?

The University Extension Movement was an attempt to answer these questions in a practical fashion, and my friend does full justice to the spirit which initiated that movement, and to the men--such as the late Lord Grey--who led it. But I suppose he speaks from experience when he says: "University Extension, as it is, will never become established in working-class villages. Forty-five to fifty pounds is too big a sum to be raised in three months, and is also considered too much to be paid for a man coming to lecture once a week for twelve weeks, and then disappear for ever like a comet." My friend uses an astronomical figure, I a geographical one; but we mean the same thing. The idea is to establish Oases--"fertile spots in the midst of deserts"--permanent centres of light and culture in manufacturing districts. "The Universities teach and train ministers of religion, and they go and live in their parishes among their flocks all the year round. Why not send lecturers and teachers of secular subjects in the same way? A system something similar to the Wesleyan or Primitive Methodists' ministerial system would answer the purpose. The country might be divided into circuits of four or five centres each, and a University man stationed in each circuit, to organize Students' Associations, give lectures, hold classes, and superintend scientific experiments, as the case may be."

This is a good illustration. The Church professes to place in each parish an official teacher of religion and morality, and most of the Nonconformist communities do the same. To place an official teacher of culture (in its widest sense) in every parish is perhaps a task beyond our national powers as at present developed; but to place one in every industrial district is not conceivable only, but, I believe, practicable. The lecturer who comes from Oxford or Cambridge, delivers his course, and departs, has no doubt his uses. He is like the "Hot Gospeller" of an earlier age, or the "Missioner" of to-day. He delivers an awakening message, and many are the better for it; but if culture is to get hold of the average lads and young men of an industrial district, its exponent must be more like the resident minister, the endowed and established priest. That he should live among the people whom he is to instruct, know them personally, understand their ways of thinking and speaking, is at least as important as that he should be a competent historian or mathematician or man of letters. If the State, or voluntary effort, or a combination of the two, could secure the permanent presence of such a teacher in every district where men work hard, and yet have leisure enough to cultivate their intellects, a yawning gap in our educational system would be filled.

It would not be polite to mention actual names; but take by way of example such a district as Dickens's "Coketown," or Disraeli's "Wodgate," or George Eliot's "Milby," or any of those towns which Cobbett expressively called "Hell-Holes." Let the State establish in each of those places a qualified and accredited teacher for adult students. The teacher may, if necessary, be paid in part by voluntary subscription; but it is, in my view, all-important that he should have the sanction and authority of the State to give him a definite place among local administrators, and to the State he should be responsible for the due discharge of his functions. In Coketown or Wodgate or Milby his lecture-room would be a real Oasis--"a fertile spot in the midst of a desert." Even if it has not been our lot to dwell in those deserts, we all have had, as travellers, some taste of their quality. We know the hideousness of all that meets the eye; the necessary absorption in the struggle for subsistence; the resulting tendency to regard money as the one subject worth serious consideration; the inadequate means of intellectual recreation; the almost irresistible atmosphere of materialism in which life and thought are involved. The "Oasis" would provide a remedy for all this. It would offer to all who cared to seek them "the fairy-tale of science," the pregnant lessons of history, the infinitely various joys of literature, the moral principles of personal and social action which have been thought out "by larger minds in calmer ages."

That there may be practical difficulties in the way of such a scheme I do not dispute. The object of this chapter is not to elaborate a plan, but to exhibit an idea. That the amount of definite knowledge acquired in this way might be small, and what Archbishop Benson oddly called "unexaminable," is, I think, quite likely. A man cannot learn in the leisure-hours left over by exhausting work as he would learn if he had nothing to think of except his studies and his examination. But Education has a larger function than the mere communication of knowledge. It opens the windows of the mind; it shows vistas which before were unsuspected; and so, as Wordsworth said, "is efficacious in making men wiser, better, and happier."

IV

_LIFE, LIBERTY, AND JUSTICE_

When an article in a newspaper produces a reply, the modest writer is gratified; for he knows that he has had at any rate one reader. If the reply comes to him privately, he is even better pleased, for then he feels that his reader thinks the matter worthy of personal discussion and of freely exchanged opinion. I have lately written an article on "Life and Liberty" as proposed by some earnest clergymen for the English Church, and an article on Mr. Fisher's Education Bill, in which I avowed my dislike to all attempts on the part of the State to teach religion. Both these articles have brought me a good deal of correspondence, both friendly and hostile. The term allotted to human life does not allow one to enter into private controversy with every correspondent, so I take this method of making a general reply. "Life and Liberty" are glorious ideals, but, to make the combination, perfect, we must add Justice. Hence my title.