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 $B 22 415 
 

 LIBERTY, EQUALITY 
 AND FRATERNITY 
 
 BY 
 
 FRANCIS ANDERSON, M.A 
 
 Emeritus Professor of Philosophy 
 The University of Sydney 
 
 MIONOGRAPH SERIES - NO. 1 
 of the Australasian Association 
 of Psychology and Philosophy. 
 
 Published by The Australasian 
 
 Association of Psychology and 
 
 Philosophy. Challis House, 
 
 Martin Place, Sydney 
 
 N. S. W. 
 
 PRICE: ONE SHILLING 
 
THE. AUSTRALASIAN ASSOCIATION OF 
 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY 
 
 LIBERTY 
 EQUALITY 
 
 AND 
 
 FRATERNITY 
 
 BY 
 PROFESSOR 
 
 FRANCIS ANDERSON, M.A. 
 
 
 
 
 JBT "wr^t 
 
 1 
 
 
 Sydney : 
 
 -Jtt-B. 
 
 
 O'LOUGHLIN BROS.. 
 
 PRINTERS. 342 ELIZABETH STREET 
 
 
 
 
 1922 
 
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 INTRODUCTORY NOTE. 
 
 This lecture originally formed part of a 
 course on French Art, Thought, and Literature, 
 arranged by the Sydney University Extension 
 Board. It was afterwards repeated before the 
 Art Society of the same University on the 
 occasion of the writer's retirement after thirty- 
 three years of service. 
 
"The dreams which nations dream come true, 
 And shape the world anew." 
 
 Lowell's Ode to France. 
 
 "And so I am strong to love this noble France, /*" 
 This poet of the nations, who dreams on . . . 
 For ever, after some ideal good . . . 
 May God save France!" 
 
 E. B. Browning. 
 
 I. 
 
 THERE is a theory, known as Historical Materialism (or 
 the Economic Interpretation of History) according to 
 which ideas an ideals are only the shadows of the real 
 moving forces of history. Our English poet has said, 
 "We live by admiration, hope, and love;" and an older 
 teacher has warned us that man liveth not by bread alone, 
 but this is poetry not science. Man is held fast in the grip of 
 economic forces, and the mode of production in a given com- 
 munity determines the political moral, religious super-structure. 
 Ideas are not forces, but products. To think otherwise is to 
 confuse the active with the passive, substance with shadow. 
 So runs the theory. 
 
 Yet by a curious inconsistency, Karl Marx, the founder 
 of the school, appears as the herald of a new gospel, in which 
 ideas and ideals are preached with the fervour of a Hebrew 
 prophet. He has the vision of a promised land, a humani- 
 tarian Millennium. "Workers the whole world o'er, unite!" 
 is his battle cry. His ideals, too, are Liberty, Equality, Brother- 
 hood of a kind. And like every great teacher, he comes to 
 bring, not peace, but a sword. 
 
 It is our English habit to distrust rhetoric, and to be sus- 
 picious of phrases, unless they embody what we call common- 
 sense and hard fact. Business is business. An ounce of fact 
 is worth a pound of theory. These pass as current coin, 
 stamped with the approval of that common-sense which 
 fondly supposes that it has no dealings with the imagination. 
 Yet if we take any movement which has influenced the course 
 of our national life, from the dream of the Lollards, to 
 Chartism and the Labour Movement, the dream of John 
 Wesley or John Henry Newman, we shall find that while the 
 impulse to action may have come from some immediate 
 felt need in the circumstances of the situation, the deeper 
 source lay in an aspiration of the imagination, and without 
 aspiration, no inspiration. It was not an English poet, but a 
 
 r2r>s : 
 
sober English economist, who said, ''If you would vanquish 
 earth, you must invent heaven." And men have always been 
 inventing heaven. 
 
 The dream of liberty, equality, fraternity, has taken 
 many forms. Long before this rhetorical formula was adopted 
 as the motto of political revolution in France, the unchanging 
 East was convulsed by a spiritual revolution, known as Budd- 
 hism, the first of the four greatest movements of human 
 history. Since all great movements are revolutionary in 
 character, we may, for convenience, speak of those move- 
 ments as the four great revolutions, the moral revolution 
 known as Buddhism, the religious revolution, known as 
 Christianity, the political revolution of which France was the 
 standard bearer, and the economic revolution, in the midst 
 of which we are struggling, and the end of which is not yet. 
 All these great revolutionary movements have begun and con- 
 tinued in a dream of the possible, a vision of the imagination; 
 and in all of them, behind the differences of time, place, and 
 circumstances, the ideal has been one of liberty, equality, and 
 fraternity, but not the same ideal. 
 
 II. 
 
 Buddhism was a moral revolution. It inverted the ac- 
 cepted values, and transferred the centre of interest from the 
 world without to the world within. It knew no personal God. 
 It ignored caste. The Eastern world of humanity, split into 
 castes, like so many different species, felt itself born again. 
 
 P Buddhism was a great liberating movement. Creed and 
 A ritual and caste were among the things that did not matter. 
 ik The individual human soul thrown inward upon itself, found 
 ' itself alone, with the moral law. Before this moral law, all 
 souls were equal. My law, said Buddha, is a law of grace 
 for all. To liberty and equality, there was added fraternity. 
 Liberty and equality by themselves alone may be merely 
 negative and disintegrating forces. Liberty may be the re- 
 nunciation of obligations, and nothing more. Equality may 
 be the denial of differences, and nothing more. But a gospel 
 cannot be constructed of negatives. Buddha, thought, not 
 of revolution, but of redemption, and like a greater than 
 Buddha, he spoke of the love which was the fulfilling of the 
 law. "By love alone, can we conquer wrath." "By good 
 alone can we conquer evil." "Do to others what you would 
 have them do to you." 
 
 According to some, Buddhism was the first universal 
 religion. According to others, it is not a religion at all. It 
 had no creed, or only such a credo as might be summed up 
 
in the three humanitarian aspirations, liberty, equality, frater- 
 nity. An aspiration without a driving force behind it, re- 
 mains only a sentiment. We need not discuss the defects of 
 Buddhism from the point of view of philosophy and religion. 
 Our concern is with its threefold ideal of liberty, equality, 
 fraternity, and the failure of that ideal to renew the world. 
 Buddhism had its heroes, saints, and martyrs, but these are 
 not the monopoly of any faith. It has given, or helped to give 
 to the East, its dominant spiritual characteristic.. The East, 
 it is said, is the land of love; and the secret of love is devotion, 
 self-sacrifice. Buddhism did not fail, if it remained, and still 
 remains the source of fair and lovely lives, the moral and 
 spiritual solace of many thousands of our fellow men. But 
 from the standpoint of sociology, Buddhism has failed. A 
 gospel of liberty, equality, fraternity, which does not estab- 
 lish an actual liberty, equality, fraternity, which does not 
 translate the inward into terms of the outward, the spiritual 
 into the material, is socially ati ineffective gospel. To be ef- 
 fective, it must not merely preach a new spirit within, but pro- 
 vide a set of principles to act on in the world. The East, in 
 its absence of actual liberty, legal and political equality, social 
 fraternity, remains the unchanging East. Buddhism, although 
 it was strong enough to redeem the individual, was not strong 
 enough to renew the world. 
 
 Buddha's great discovery was the discovery of man, the 
 man himself behind the difference of creed and circumstance, 
 of social and political status. Every man had the same moral 
 task, which he had to fulfil without help from others. "By 
 oneself the evil is done; by oneself one suffers. By oneself 
 evil is undone; by oneself one is. purified. Purity and im- 
 purity belong to oneself; no one can purify another." This 
 is moral individualism, at its highest and finest. Each man 
 shall bear his own burden. But moral individualism is not 
 the last word of morality. Bear ye one another's burdens. 
 We are co-operators in wrongdoing as in righteousness. Cor- 
 porate sin and corporate responsibility! The Buddhist could 
 not in the noble word of the Christian apostle, co-operate 
 with God, for he had no God. He was a spiritual unit, alone 
 with the moral law. The moral law itself was but a chain of 
 causes and effects, -which held him as with the fatalism of a 
 physical causality. Such a morality, such a religion could not 
 overcome the world. The sentiment of love remains an ab- 
 stract sentiment, a barren sentimentalism, unless it develops 
 into a system of positive social duties. A gospel which is only 
 a moral gospel is not a gospel which is too good for this 
 world, it is not good enough for any world. 
 
The East is the land of love. If the secret of the East 
 is love, is will the secret of the West? Love and Will! Per- 
 fection and progress! "East is east, and west is west, and 
 never the twain shall meet." The spirit of the East turns from 
 a will it does not understand. It abhors the fret and tumult 
 of the Western soul. The ways of the West are not its ways. 
 The ideals of the East are not its ideals. It regards them with 
 indifference, or with "silent, deep disdain." What shall it 
 profit a man if he gain a whole world of material prosperity, 
 and lose his own soul? The spirit of the West turns from a 
 one-sided spirituality, which seeks not freedom in action, but 
 freedom from action, whose supreme ideal is not the trans- 
 " formation of the natural and human, but their abandonment 
 or negation. "What shadows we are, and what shadows we 
 pursue!" So spoke the English statesman, in a passing mo- 
 ment of depression, amid the clash of armies, and the fall of 
 empires. Buddhism makes this passing moment into a per- 
 manent mood. It seeks to overcome the world by renouncing 
 it. Shadows we are and shadows we pursue. The last word 
 of Buddha is, "I have attained to peace. I have won Nirvana." 
 
 III. 
 
 Love, the secret of the East. Will, the secret of the 
 West. Shall the supreme secret be found in the union of love 
 and will, in a love that wills and a will that loves? And is this 
 supreme secret, the peculiar revelation of Christianity? 
 
 The centre of Buddhist teaching was an impersonal 
 moral law. The centre of Christian teaching was, and is, a 
 personal life. "Christ exercised not a juridical but a spiritual 
 authority the authority that truth exercises over the mind, 
 and goodness over the conscience, and love over the heart 
 and the affections, the authority that true manhood exercises 
 
 over men, true personality over persons The Gospels 
 
 are the light of the world, not the light of a new theology, but 
 that of a new revelation, a new life, a new ideal of human 
 personality." ( Tyrrell : Medievalism). To Buddha, indi- 
 viduality was a snare and an illusion, and the death of self, 
 the greatest gain. To Jesus, the death of self, meant not self- 
 lessness, but unselfishness, and the Kingdom of God was a 
 community of persons, each of whom was a radiating centre, 
 not a vanquishing point in a world of unreality. "My King- 
 dom is not of this world." "Be of good cheer. I have over- 
 come the world." Behind the verbal similarity of text and 
 precept, there is a mighty difference in spirit and principle. 
 Hear how the victorious words of the fighting apostle to the 
 Gentiles ring out, "All things are yours, and ye are Christ's, 
 and Christ is God's," all things are yours. 
 
Has Christianity, the religious revolution failed, as 
 Buddhism, the moral revolution, failed? Buddhism failed, 
 because it was a moral revolution, and nothing more, a moral 
 renovation of the individual, and not a social reconstruction. 
 Has Christianity failed, because it was a religious revolution, 
 and nothing more? Has its gospel of liberty, equality, f rater- /% , 
 nity, been as ineffective to renew the Western world, as ^- 
 Buddhism was to renew the Eastern world? The great human 
 interests of literature, art, science, were left untouched in any 
 recorded teaching of Jesus. The saying, "Know the truth, 
 and the truth shall make you free," did not explicitly refer 
 to anything else than a spiritual freedom, which counted all 
 things as dross, save having the mind of Christ. The doctrine 
 of the equality of all men, entered into no conflict with the 
 powers that be, and accepted even slavery as one of the in- 
 stitutions apparently ordained by God. The doctrine of the 
 brotherhood of men was a corollary of the doctrine of the 
 Divine Fatherhood, yet even in the Christian community, it 
 failed to bring forth the fruits of the Christian spirit, and in 
 the centuries that followed, men were accustomed to say, 
 Behold, how these Christians hate one another! The early 
 Christians and their successors for many centuries, looked for 
 the new Kingdom to be brought into being by a cataclysmic 
 change, a supernatural irruption. They could not foresee the 
 long and laborious development to be achieved by the efforts 
 of men, before a fitting habitation could be formed for the 
 new principle of personality. They took up an attitude of 
 uncompromising hostility to the world, or else they made a 
 pact with Caesar, and compromised with the powers that be, 
 until men came to look on the church itself as a worldly in- 
 stitution, an instrument, too often a subservient instrument, for 
 the maintenance of the existing law and order, and the protec- 
 tion of privileged minorities. 
 
 Yet the pale Galilean conquered. The new principle of 
 personality in its development helped to put a new soul into 
 the dying Roman Empire. It gradually absorbed many of 
 the finest elements of Greek culture and Latin civilisation. It 
 broke the rude spirits of the barbarians who had themselves 
 broken the power of Rome. It ameliorated the position of 
 the slave, if it did not abolish slavery. Thunder for thunder, 
 force for force, the Pope was often no better than any other 
 earthly monarch, yet in an age of violence, the church was 
 the only power which intervened between the oppressor and 
 the oppressed, and stood for the moral law against the force 
 which knows no law. 
 
 Yet when the full tale is made up of all that the world 
 owes to the spiritual revolution accomplished by Christianity, 
 
8 
 
 the fact remains, that the possibilities contained in the prin- 
 ciple of personality, its promises of a new liberty, equality, 
 fraternity, are still promises and possibilities, rather than per- 
 formances. Three main reasons may be offered in explana- 
 tion of this failure of historical Christianity to fulfil the promise 
 of its social gospel. 
 
 In the first place, the passive elements of the Christian 
 ideal, the passive or altruistic virtues of obedience and resig- 
 nation, charity and self-sacrifice, have been emphasised at the 
 expense of the active virtues, those virile qualities without 
 which human society and civilisation would become impos- 
 sible. A society of saints is not the highest human ideal. 
 
 In the second place, the individualistic aspect of Christian 
 teaching, the appeal to the individual conscience, the doctrine 
 of personal salvation, has been emphasised at the expense of 
 the socialistic aspect, so as to obscure the fact that the Chris- 
 tian principle of personality is not merely a saving principle 
 but a civilising principle, the only principle on which not 
 merely a Christian society, but a democratic commonwealth 
 can be established. 
 
 Jn the third place, churches as institutions, and especially 
 the official representatives of the churches, have been subject 
 to the common law of all established institutions, the law of 
 custom and habit, which favours inertia and acquiescence to 
 the detriment of initiative and progress. And worse than 
 that, the natural conservatism which dislikes innovation, has 
 too often been allied with the political conservatism which 
 regards interference with the established order of things as 
 an attack on the sacred rights of property, privilege, and 
 monopoly. 
 
 For these and allied reasons, a single and no doubt es- 
 sential aspect of Christianity has often been presented both 
 by friends and enemies, as if it were its sole and exhaustive 
 expression. Writers like Nietzsche have described Christian 
 morality as a morality for slaves, not for free men, and have 
 set up as a counter-ideal, the conception of a will devoid of 
 all weakness, and divorced from all charity. Writers like Karl 
 Marx have represented religion, and especially Christianity, 
 as the willing servant of the organisation in possession of 
 power, the spiritual support of every autocracy, aristocracy, 
 or oligarchy, the parasite of capitalism. It was thus, also, 
 that the leaders of the French revolution, finding the old order 
 embattled behind the twin authorities of church and state, 
 resolved to sweep them both away in one common ruin. 
 
 Are we to conclude then that the saving principle of 
 Christianity has ceased to be also a civilising principle? You 
 
cannot have a civilisation without a principle of civilisation. 
 The question is, what is to be the nature of that principle. It 
 is a fact not without significance, that between the two words 
 "culture," and "civilisation," the Germans chose culture and 
 not civilisation, to express the nature of their social and poli- 
 tical ideal. We cannot speak of civilisation without connect- 
 ing it with the idea of society, citizenship, and therefore of 
 reciprocal relations among men, that is, with a moral idea. 
 The only word which we have to express that idea, is per- 
 sonality, the root idea of the Christian principle. If we try 
 to trace the origin of the term civilisation, we are led back 
 to the old conception of the Civitas Romana; and it is again 
 a significant fact that both Roman law and Christian teaching 
 are grounded on the same profound idea, the idea of person- 
 ality, which is not individual merely, or social merely, but 
 the union and harmony of both. Without society, there are 
 no persons, ye are members one of another. Without per- 
 sons, there is no society, no rights and no duties, for all rights 
 and all duties have their source and centre in the human per- 
 son as a moral and spiritual being. Even the rights of nations 
 are a deduction from the rights of man. What is Humanity, 
 if it is not the human person, transfigured and symbolically 
 conceived? If the saving principle is not also a civilising 
 principle, that is due not to any defect in the principle itself, 
 but to the ignorance and folly, the weakness and intolerance 
 of men in interpreting the principle. The saving principle of 
 Christianity is not merely one among many civilising prin- 
 ciples. It is the only civilising principle, the only principle 
 which gives any moral right to revolution, which supplies a 
 goal to progress and unites justice and mercy. It is the right 
 and duty which is the ground of all rights and duties. The 
 true opposites, the irreconcileable contradictories, are not in- 
 dividualism, and socialism, not liberty and authority by what- 
 ever names they may be called, but Christ and Anti-Christ, 
 the Christian principle and its negation, by whatever name it 
 may be known, the spirit of egoism, the spirit of mammon, 
 the necessity that knows no law, the force that knows no right 
 but the right of the mailed fist, or the "dictatorship of the 
 Proletariat." 
 
 IV. 
 
 The progress of civilisation is not a uniform and orderly 
 advance, like that of an army with banners. The rhythm of 
 human history is broken and fragmentary. The drama of 
 human history is not the development of a single idea, moving 
 onwards to the inevitable finale. It is a tragedy to make the 
 high gods weep, a comedy to make them laugh. Its harmony 
 
10 
 
 is made up of deepest discords. The French Revolution, as 
 we read of it, is a tragi-comedy, a mingling of the grotesque 
 arid the sublime, a hideous nightmare, and a flaming vision of 
 a new heaven and a new earth. LowelJ, in his fine Ode to 
 France, wrote 
 
 "The brute despair of trampled centuries 
 
 leaped with one hoarse yell, and snapped its bonds; 
 Groped for its right with horny, callous, hands, 
 And stared around for God with bloodshot eyes. 
 
 What wonder if those palms were all too hard 
 
 For nice distinctions if that maenad throng . . . 
 
 Set wrong to balance wrong, 
 And physicked woe with woe." 
 
 The French revolution was a political revolution. The 
 violent transference of the centre of political gravity brought 
 about an almost immediate inversion of the existing political 
 values. The whole machinery of social and political organisa- 
 tion was thrown into the melting pot, and not machinery only, 
 but man himself was tried, as if by fire. It seemed as if no- 
 thing could withstand the fierceness of that fire, except then 
 as now, the faith of France in itself and its cause, undying 
 unconquerable France. But every faith has a creed, a formula, 
 a symbol, in which, sooner or later, it finds expression. To 
 seek the symbol of the French Revolution in the redcap, or the 
 guillotine would be as foolish as to sum up the trade union 
 movement as a policy of death to blacklegs. Men then as 
 now, set wrong to balance wrong, and physicked woe with 
 woe. Of such things, we can say, they are unjust, and can- 
 not last. But we cannot say so, unless we have faith in the 
 things which endure, in righteousness, justice, humanity. 
 France linked herself to humanity, when she took as the for- 
 mula of her faith, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. 
 
 "The France which lies 
 Between the Pyrenees and Rhine 
 Is the least part of France." 
 
 France has been the inheritor and the transmitter of 
 Latin civilisation to the modern world. In the revolution, she 
 became the herald of a new spirit, the standard-bearer of the 
 rights of man. 
 
 More than a hundred years have passed since France 
 engraved the formula of her faith on her walls and temples 
 to be a memorial and a warning to future generations, and 
 once again, in 1914, France became the standard-bearer in 
 a conflict which covered a still vaster field. Although many 
 things had changed, the central issue had not changed. The 
 nations were fighting, in a life and death struggle, not merely 
 for the rights of nations, but for the rights of man. It is true 
 that the main issue was obscured in the minds of many, by 
 
11 
 
 minor issues and by false issues. It is true that each nation 
 was fighting for itself as well as for humanity. It is true that 
 each of the allied nations suffered, and is still suffering, for its 
 own crimes in the past, its own neglect of the laws of x^ 
 righteousness, its own grievous sins against humanity, its cal- ^ 
 lous disregard of the claims of liberty, equality, fraternity. 
 But it is none the less true that in the ordeal of battle, the 
 supreme issue was a moral issue, and that the appeal to the 
 sword was the appeal to the right of armed justice. God 
 defend the right! 
 
 Not for the first time was France the great protagonist 
 in a struggle on which the fate of civilisation depended. It 
 was combined Gallic valour and Roman genius which in the 
 great battle of Chalons, flung back the horde of Huns under 
 Attila, on the bloodstained plains of Champagne, a conflict, 
 says a contemporary writer, "fierce, vicious, obstinate and 
 bloody, such as could not be paralleled in the present or past 
 ages." The Huns, according to Gibbon, "practised their cus- 
 tomary maxims of war. They massacred their hostages as 
 well as their captives, the priests at the altar, and the babes 
 in their homes, and two hundred young maidens were tpr- 
 tured with exquisite and unrelenting rage." Less than two 
 centuries later, another alien horde, the Saracen invaders from 
 Africa, were hurled back at Tours, by Charles Martel, and 
 Western Europe was saved a second time from the destruction 
 of the conditions of an orderly and civilised life for man. 
 The triumph of the Hun and the Saracen would have meant 
 the death of Latin civilisation, the loss of the glorious heritage 
 of Roman law with its ideal of civic equality and impartial 
 impersonal justice, and possibly also the decadence of those 
 spiritual values which Christianity has kept alive in the human 
 heart and conscience. From such dread disasters, France 
 saved herself, and in saving herself, saved Europe and the 
 world. 
 
 We are not concerned here with the history of the efforts 
 made, so often tragic and sanguinary, to reconstitute Europe 
 after the fall of the Roman Empire; or with the dream, the 
 noble but impotent dream, of the Middle Ages, the theocratic 
 ideal of a united Europe under one law, one God, one em- 
 peror; or with Feudalism, as the framework of the new 
 society, out of whose ruins modern nations have arisen, with 
 their separate langauges and literatures, their rivalries, hatreds 
 and lusts; or with the disastrous and fratricidal wars, which 
 sprang from dynastic ambition, economic jealousy and greed, 
 or religious bigotry and intolerance. Nor are we concerned 
 with the record of the efforts made by Christianity, when it 
 
12 
 
 was occasionally in earnest, to transform actual human rela- 
 tions, and social institutions, to make the Christian principle 
 a principle of civilisation, the wellspring of human justice and 
 love. It is enough here to say that the result of all the efforts 
 of church and state, so far as France was concerned, was the 
 production of a condition of society which had become in- 
 tolerable. The moral and spiritual forces which alone can 
 save a nation from degeneration and death were for the time, 
 at any rate, spent forces. "If the salt hath lost its savour; 
 wherewith shall it be salted?" Here is the description given 
 by a sympathetic critic of to-day, "The end of the eighteenth 
 century provides us with the spectacle of a world in dissolu- 
 tion, a generation where the best impulses are sterile, ending 
 only in an impotent sentimentality, where even the emancipa- 
 tors, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, are poisoned with the pre- 
 vailing corruption. It provides us with the spectacle of an 
 aristocracy having no longer the discipline either of war, re- 
 ligion or honour, having moreover ceased to believe in itself." 
 (Sarolea: The French Renaissance). If the salt hath lost its 
 savour, wherewith shall it be salted? 
 
 The revolutionists of 1 789 were not fully aware of all 
 the clenched antagonisms which were concealed in their 
 simple programme of liberty, equality, fraternity. The revo- 
 lutionists of 1 792 were so impressed by the thought that all 
 old things had passed away, that they named that year, the 
 year I., the beginning of a new .era in the history of mankind. 
 The sober German philosopher, Kant, when he heard the 
 news, shed tears of joy, and exclaimed| "I can now say 
 with Simeon, 'Lord, let thy servant depart in peace, for mine 
 eyes have seen thy salvation.' ' It was not till the following 
 year, the year of the Terror, that Fraternity was made part of 
 the device of the Revolution. Previous to that, it had been 
 Liberty and Equality, to which was sometimes added, "or 
 death." 
 
 The modern historian, in his task of social analysis, has 
 taught us to distinguish between the avowed aims of the 
 leaders of any great political movement, and the direct or 
 proximate causes which act on masses of men. The French 
 Revolution was in truth a political revolution. Liberty and 
 hquality were preached as political ideals. But to the great 
 majority of Frenchmen, the immediate aim was relief from 
 the overwhelming burden of the fiscal system, which made 
 actual liberty and equality impossible. In 1 789, according to 
 Henri Taine, the great analyst of the Revolution, the French 
 peasant, of every 1 00 francs of net income, paid 1 4 francs to 
 his seigneur, 1 4 to the church, 5 3 to the King, and kept only 
 
13 
 
 19 francs to himself. After 1800, he paid nothing to the 
 Seigneur or to the church, paid 2 1 in all to the state, depart- 
 ment, and commune, and kept 79 for himself. When we ask 
 what the revolution did for France, let us not forget what it 
 did for the Frenchman, the peasant and producer. To France 
 it brought among other things, the anarchy of mob rule, the 
 "despotism of disorder," the tyranny of military autocracy. 
 To the peasant it turned 1 9 francs into 79 francs. It set him 
 on his feet, and macje him a man. It secured to him the results 
 of his labour, a measure of that economic freedom, without 
 which, political equality and liberty are empty names. 
 
 Yet this visible and measurable economic result of the 
 revolution does not suffice to explain the devotion of the 
 Frenchman to the principles of '89, or why we should rank 
 the French Revolution among the great movements which 
 have profoundly influenced the course of human history. The 
 principles of '89 are not the heritage of Frenchmen alone. 
 England and Australia, America North and South, Italy and 
 Russia have in turn felt the inspiration of a fafth which has 
 removed mountains of oppression, and brought down prin- 
 cipalities and powers. To each nation its own task, and its 
 own peculiar genius. We need not undervalue the solid con- 
 tribution which England has made to the sum of political 
 wisdom achieved through the long labours of the nineteenth 
 century. Nor need we too nicely balance the pedestrian poli- 
 tical virtues against the heroic virtues, the virtues of those who 
 occupy themselves with the next step, the practical expedient, 
 the working compromise, against the virtues of the political 
 enthusiast, the moral idealist, of those who would take the 
 Kingdom by violence. But we cannot understand the French 
 Revolution and what it accomplished, unless we conceive it 
 as a great outburst of religious fervour. The ideas of liberty 
 and equality, in themselves abstract and formal ideas, 
 acquired a living spiritual significance through the contagion 
 of a great emotion, which made France a new nation, exulting 
 in its strength, and ready to take up the gage of battle against 
 a coalition of tyrants. Liberty and Equality, the logic of 
 sentiment led to the addition of the third and complementary 
 idea, Fraternity, the solidarity of a band of brothers, held 
 together by a common spirit, a common faith, a common ob- 
 ligation, a community of duties and rights, a fellowship in suf- 
 fering and sacrifice. It is true that this idea of fraternity has 
 often been confused, through rhetorical caricature, with a 
 vague cosmopolitanism, a sickly sentimentalism. But this 
 was merely the shadow of the substantial living reality, faith 
 in man and in new possibilities open to man, in a world set 
 free. To us with another century of bitter experience behind 
 
14 
 
 us, in which illusion and disillusion have followed each other 
 with bewildering rapidity, the boundless optimism of the men 
 of the revolution seems like the credulous faith of inexperi- 
 enced youth. Yet our own Burns caught the echo of the 
 French appeal to humanity above and beyond the limitations 
 of creed and country, when he wrote: 
 
 . "Then let us pray that come it may, 
 
 As come it will, for a* that . . . 
 
 That man to man, the world ojer, 
 
 Shall brothers be for a' that/' 
 
 Many writers have noted the "double strain" in French 
 character, the combination of what often seems hard realism 
 with a "relentless idealism," a deep underlying idealism which 
 may break forth in a passion of religious enthusiasm. Presi- 
 dent Poincare tells us that "the French people have faith in 
 principles. They have an innate taste and traditional need 
 for general ideas, but they do not confuse general ideas with 
 vague ideas, ideals with empty phrases. They want solid 
 living realities." Is the formula in which the ideas of '89 are 
 summarised, only a vague formula, an empty phrase, or does 
 it stand for solid living realities? Men need some kind of 
 creed to hold them together, in a church, a party, a nation, 
 but the measure of their fighting capacity is the intensity of 
 their belief in their creed. The slackness and flabbiness of 
 modern liberalism, or let us say of modern liberals, seems to 
 show that liberalism is a spent force, that its work is done, 
 its warfare is accomplished, and that all that it requires is 
 decent burial. Let the dead bury their dead! "Things won 
 are done; life's joy lies in the doing." In our orations over 
 the tomb of nineteenth century liberalism, let us not forget the 
 things won, or the deeds of the mighty men of old who fought 
 and died to secure for us those solid living realities, which 
 because they seem assured possessions, are accepted without 
 enthusiasm, and enjoyed without gratitude. We forget the 
 price that has been paid, that we might be freeborn. Other 
 men have laboured, and we have entered into their labours. 
 
 V. 
 
 Liberty is, of course in itself, a negative conception. It 
 
 | demands that there shall be no unnecessary restrictions on the 
 
 ' right which each man has, of asserting his own personality, 
 
 developing his own activities, and enjoying the fruit of his 
 
 labour. But it gives no guidance in determining the line to 
 
 be drawn between necessary and unnecessary restrictions. It 
 
 contains no positive principle of instruction or construction, 
 
 either for the building up of that inward liberty of the soul to 
 
 which personality aspires, or for the building up of that out- 
 
15 
 
 ward liberty expressed in civic and political institutions, on 
 which the life of a free community depends. Real liberty, 
 freedom as a fact and not a mere pious aspiration, is some- 
 thing to be earned and won. It is not a battle cry, nor even 
 the result of the battle. The French Revolution, and Liberalism 
 too failed, so far as they did fail, because, the first battles for 
 freedom having been won, the campaign for the rights of man 
 was understood in too narrow a sense, as a merely political 
 campaign for the removal of hindrances to the liberty of the 
 individual. When the old hindrances had been removed, the 
 old creed gave no help or guidance in the new campaign on 
 which society was to enter. When the individual is freed from 
 the bondage of authority and tradition, he is still face to face 
 with the problem of life, of how to use his freedom. When 
 society is liberated from the incubus of antiquated institutions, 
 from the old law and order founded on force and privilege, 
 it has still to face the problem of the new law and order, the 
 task of constructing new institutions, fit for a free man's 
 habitation. 
 
 Equality is by itself a purely abstract and formal concep- 
 tion. It is a mathematical relation never found verified out- ffi 
 side the sphere of abstract quantity. The cynic and the satirist 
 have an easy task, when they set themselves to parody the 
 claims and aspirations of the new democracy, or collectivist 
 schemes for the reconstruction of society on the basis of 
 equality of labour or equality of reward. Equality, like IS 
 liberty, is not a fact but an ideal. There is not a single human -* 
 function or faculty which is not the source of human inequali- 
 ties. There is no equality in physical or moral force, in wis 
 dom or folly. A complete equality in attainments or ideals 
 would mean the death of progress. A German anthropologist 
 (Otto Ammon) tells us that "it is upon inequality that social 
 order is based, and that inequality cannot be destroyed. It is 
 as inseparable from the human race as birth and death, in- 
 variable as the truths of mathematics, eternal like the laws 
 of the revolutions of the planets." A French writer (Ch. 
 Maurras) draws what he considers to be the inference, "The 
 cry of the Terrorists was Equality or Death! Political science 
 places before us a new dilemma, but one more certain, it 
 says to us, Inequality or decadence! Inequality or anarchy! 
 Inequality or death!" The obvious fallacy in all such futile 
 declamation lies of course in the confusion between those 
 natural inequalities which no efforts of ours can remove, al- 
 though we may mitigate some of their results, and the artificial 
 and arbitrary inequalities which are of human and social pro- 
 duction. We may put aside as irrelevant, all idle talk of the 
 natural inequality of men. The false equality of the socialist 
 
dreamer, or the conservative denouncer, is too absurd to be 
 dangef6us. Natural inequality is a fact, but a fact is neither 
 a right nor a duty. Political and legal equality is not a fact, 
 but an ideal, the assertion of both a right and a duty. Equality, 
 as part of the creed of the French Revolution meant no more 
 and no less than that no artificial inequalities should be added 
 to the inequalities which existed as a necessity of man's nature 
 and heritage. The demand for equality, like the demand for 
 liberty, was a negative protest against all privileges based on 
 caste, position or property, which endangered the free exer- 
 cise of the legal and political rights of the individual. As 
 thus conceived, liberty and equality are correlative terms, 
 simply defining the formal condition of citizenship in the 
 democratic state. Where this condition is not fulfilled, the 
 state may be autocratic or bureaucratic or aristocratic or pluto- 
 cratic, but is not democratic; and in no state is this democratic 
 ideal fully realised, not in England or France or America or 
 Australia. Equality, like liberty, is still to be won. 
 
 . The political theorists of the Revolution had no very 
 definite conception of the state, except that it is or ought to 
 be an organisation for guaranteeing certain rights and securing 
 the performance of certain duties. This fundamental function 
 of the state was afterwards, in the creed of liberalism, re- 
 garded as practically the sole function of the state, so far at 
 least as the interrelations of the citizens were concerned. The 
 defect of Liberalism as a political philosophy was already in- 
 herent in the principles of the French Revolution, for neither 
 equality nor liberty contains in itself any positive principle of 
 social construction. They are essentially negative concep- 
 tions, principles of demarcation and delimitation. They 
 postulate a fair field and no favour. They emphasise com- 
 petition rather than co-operation, the rights which divide men, 
 rather than the duties which unite them. What is lacking is 
 the idea of community, social solidarity, joint responsibility 
 for social slavery, social inequality, social suffering and sin. 
 
 Does the idea of Fraternity supply what is lacking to 
 complete the social and political gospel? All men are breth- 
 ren! Yes, the cynic replies, Cains and Abels. We know 
 how in practice the revolutionary gospel of fraternity turned 
 into a deliberate policy of fratricide. We know how often 
 the democratic profession of comradeship is made to cover 
 malice and envy and all uncharitableness. We know how the 
 other side of "class consciousness" is the bitter passion of 
 class hatred and revenge. Of fraternity as of Jiberty we may 
 say, how many crimes have been committed in thy name! 
 
 Some would urge that for fraternity, there should be sub- 
 stituted the idea of justice. But the idea of justice by itself 
 
17 
 
 seems just as little capable of supplying a positive principle 
 of construction as the ideas of liberty and equality, separately 
 or combined. Justice is a regulative or distributive principle. 
 It metes out to individuals something or other, according to 
 what the existing law declares or assumes to be equitable. 
 Once justice is done in a given case, the issues are supposed 
 to be closed. But the issues of social life are never closed, 
 and what is wanted is a principle of life, a positive principle 
 of construction such as the abstract idea of justice cannot 
 supply. We must enlarge the idea of justice if it is to become 
 the inspiration of social duty and moral and political progress. 
 The juridical conception of justice, negative and distributive, 
 does not suffice; it requires to be supplemented by the idea 
 of justice as a positive and organising principle. Men demand 
 justice. They hunger and thirst for righteousness and love. 
 Now what is fraternity if it is not the union of justice and 
 love? The German philosopher, Kant, great part of whose 
 work was inspired by the revolutionary idea, when asked 
 what the moral law prescribed, replied, always treat human- 
 ity, whether in thine own person or that of another, as an end, 
 never as a means. Respect and reverence for personality and 
 its possibilities, is a fine, an ennobling idea, but respect and 
 reverence may be cold and inactive. To be roused to action, 
 they must be kindled into a great emotion by the fire and pas- 
 sion of love. It has been said that if we could give the in- 
 tensity of the family affections to our social relationships, the 
 social problem might be solved; yet love by itself may be in- 
 discriminating in its action, and harmful in its effects. The 
 symbolical figure of Justice is represented as blind. The scales 
 of Justice are equal. As justice and nothing but justice, it 
 knows only the doer and the deed, and the sword is held 
 ready to smite the doer of the deed. Love too, as love, and 
 nothing else than love, is blind. Its heart goes out to weak- 
 ness and sorrow, to the sufferer and the sinner. But just be- 
 cause it is so individual and personal in its impulse, it cannot 
 become a principle of social regeneration, unless its action 
 is guided by the insight and foresight of reason. Justice and 
 love, not separately or in spasmodic succession, but com- 
 bined and harmonised in thought and action, this and no- 
 thing else than this, can satisfy the desire of our hearts and 
 the demand of our intelligence in the search for the ideal. 
 Our supreme idea of God is a moral as well as a religious idea, 
 the perfect union of justice and love. 
 
 It would seem then, as if the development of the revolu- 
 tionary gospel leads us back to the Christian idefa of person- 
 ality as a civilising principle. If Christianity has failed as a 
 religious revolution, if the French Revolution failed as a poli- 
 
rai 
 VXFr 
 
 18 
 
 tical revolution, the failure in both cases, has not been due to 
 any defect inherent in the principle itself, but to defects in its 
 interpretation and application by men to men. In the case 
 of Christianity, a spiritual principle which was interpreted 
 only as a spiritual principle, failing to understand the world, 
 failed to penetrate and overcome it. In return, since the 
 church could not live out of the world, the spirit of the world 
 invaded the church, and the empire of man was divided by 
 a subtle policy of accommodation and compromise, between 
 God and Caesar, God and Mammon. The French Revolu- 
 tion failed, so far as it did fail, because its principle as inter- 
 preted and applied, was only a political principle. The ideals 
 of equality and liberty, as conceived and formulated, were 
 /^ /negative definitions, delimitations of individual activity, not 
 positive principles of social construction. The justice which 
 fraternity implied, was an abstract and formal justice, juridical 
 ither than social and political. The faith which inspired, the 
 French nation contained by implication, both a morality and 
 a religion fit for humanity, but its leaders were infected by all 
 the anti-social vices of the time, egoism, intolerance and lust 
 for power, and so the revolution devoured its own children 
 and produced the forces of disorder and reaction, to which 
 it became itself the victim. The humanitarian enthusiasm 
 which made France for a moment the hope of the nations was 
 lost in a welter of blood; yet all the later errors and disasters 
 of France cannot rob her of the glory of her great initiative, 
 through which the Utopian ideas of the past have become 
 part of the common consciousness of to-day. 
 
 VI. 
 
 Modern democracy, it would appear, prefers equality 
 and a severely restricted equality, to liberty. It prefers to 
 talk of the rights of labour, rather than of the rights of man. 
 When new enemies have arisen within the gates, the old 
 battle-cries seem, thin echoes of a far distant strife. The ap- 
 peal to a humanity which would include the capitalist and the 
 blackleg, rouses no enthusiasm. An abstract ideal cannot 
 compete with a fighting programme. It is in the name and in 
 the strength of "class-consciousness," that the new revolution 
 is to be accomplished, and the kingdom of man established 
 on the basis of equality of opportunity and enjoyment in a 
 co-operative industrial commonwealth. This is the faith of 
 great masses of men, bound together by fear and hope into 
 an ever increasing army. 
 
19 
 
 "Hark, the rolling and the thunder! 
 Lo the sun! and lo thereunder 
 Riseth wrath and hope and wonder, 
 
 And the host comes marching on." 
 
 The best way to prevent revolutions is to forestall them. 
 Why should we wait for our liberties to come to us on the 
 wings of the whirlwind? In every great convulsion of the 
 social life of humanity, men's thoughts dwell in anxiety and 
 hope on the possibility of some reconstruction to be carried 
 out afterwards, "after the war," after things have settled 
 down, after the violent expedients of the present have served 
 their purpose, and ceased to be necessary. But what if things 
 do not settle down? "I will shake the nations, and the things 
 desired of all nations shall come." What are the things de- 
 sired of all nations? Not peace merely, a static condition of 
 equilibrium, which might mean stagnation and death; still less 
 a return to the old conditions, when the spirit of anti-Christ, 
 envy, jealousy, grasping egoism, governed the relation be- 
 tween states, and when the same spirit poisoned the national 
 life at its sources, and perverted social relations in a thou- 
 sand subtle and diverse ways. We may be premature with 
 our plans, even supposing we were agreed on our plans, of 
 the structure of the new society, which is to arise fair and flaw- 
 less in some visionary future; but it is never premature to dis- 
 cuss principles of social or political construction. Are we so 
 satisfied with the old, or so certain of the new, that we can 
 treat the problem as one 'merely of mechanical rearrange- 
 ment or adjustment of things or institutions, a matter of poli- 
 tical engineering? The constitution manfacturers and mon- 
 gers of the French Revolution thought so, and left to their 
 successors a heritage of bitter disillusionment. The Russian 
 people and the Russian politicians of to-day, have apparently 
 still to be taught by the stern lessons of experience that the 
 social and political problem is first and before all, a moral 
 problem. 
 
 The principle of reconstruction is not to be found any- 
 where outside man himself. Out of the heart, not out of ma- 
 chinery, are the issues of life. The civilising principle of the 
 twentieth century is not different from that of the nineteenth, 
 or the eighteenth, or any other century. The difference lies 
 in the comprehension of the principle and of the conditions 
 of its realisation. The centuries to come may bring with them 
 new problems yet undreamt of in this age of imperfect de- 
 velopment, the comprehension of the full meaning of the 
 principle may broaden and deepen, but the principle itself 
 will remain throughout the ages, however problems and con- 
 ditions may change in the growing life of humanity. They 
 
20 
 
 may perish, but it shall endure, the same civilising principle, 
 the principle of personality, the centre and source of all true 
 liberty, equality and fraternity. 
 
 We may try to reach our principles of reconstruction 
 from a consideration of the nature of personality itself, but 
 apart from their application, principles are, in Milton's phrase, 
 "ideas that effect nothing." In a given historical epoch, con- 
 sideration of the principles cannot be severed from a thought- 
 ful and unprejudiced analysis of the conditions of time, place, 
 and circumstance. Otherwise we may fail as our predecessors 
 failed, when in the pursuit of a spiritual ideal, they mistook 
 other worldliness for unworldiness, or when in the new born 
 love of freedom, they thought that liberty itself would cure 
 all the evils which liberty produced. The true and full nature 
 of a spiritual principle can be shown only in its development. 
 It reveals new possibilities in the process of its application. 
 It awakes new powers, and creates new duties. A man be- 
 comes aware of all that lies hidden in his own personality, 
 only as he is roused to face the new fact, to master the new 
 situation. Nations are judged by the same law of spiritual 
 development. Although we use the same words, our ideals 
 of social liberty, equality and justice, are not the same as 
 those of the revolutionists of '89, or even of '48, and the dif- 
 ference is to be measured not merely by the greater complex- 
 ity of our social problems, but by the wider range of our sym- 
 pathies, our deepened sense of solidarity, our greater em- 
 phasis on social duty, our stronger faith in social justice, the 
 readiness of our response to the voices that come to us from 
 
 "The deep, dark underworld of woe, 
 That underlies life's shining surfaces, 
 Dim populous pain, and multitudinous toil." 
 
 We cannot therefore look on economic or political reform as 
 outside the moral' task of social regeneration. To say that the 
 social problem is first and before all a moral problem does 
 not imply that it is only a moral problem. The goal of 
 humanity is no mystic city of the soul, but the coming of the 
 kingdom of righteousness. 
 
 The men of the political revolution, and of the genera- 
 tions which followed, had little or no conception of the tre- 
 mendous tasks which were to test the faith and energies of 
 their successors. The liberalism of the nineteenth century had 
 for its motto, "the price of liberty is eternal vigilance," yet 
 fy silently and unseen by the political watchers, new""Forces were 
 arising and gathering in their strength, the impersonal elusive 
 forces which were the outcome of the great industrial revolu- 
 tion. The accumulated and concentrated power of human 
 
21 
 
 production, aided by nature and guided by science, is sym- 
 bolised for many minds, in the portentous figure of 
 Capitalism, a Colossus which doth bestride the world, a mon- 
 strous combination of Mammon and Moloch. If the essential 
 evil of things consists in the degradation of personality, in the 
 destroyal of the conditions of liberty, equality and fraternity, 
 then Capitalism, it is agreed, is the great evil, and the pre- 
 liminary to social revolution is the destruction of capitalism. 
 We are not concerned here with the confusions of popular 
 thought on the subject of capital, or with the theories of 
 economists, busy over post mortem analysis of the accom- 
 plished fact, still less with collectivist visions of the future 
 state. But even granting the truth of all or most of what is 
 said as to the evils of capitalism, we may still ask what is the 
 real end or "objective" of Socialism as a politics of recon- 
 struction. The means are social control, but social control 
 may be attained in different ways, and it is probable that the 
 socialised control of capital will be brought about in the 
 future society by a combination of many methods rather than 
 by the exclusive adoption of one. The exclusive adoption of 
 one method would mean the setting up of the absolute state 
 with supreme centralised control of the total energies of na- 
 tional production, perhaps a greater despotism than history 
 has ever known. Yet this elaborate machinery, contrived 
 for the attainment of a material wellbeing, would after all be 
 only a means. The real end would remain personality and 
 the promotion of personality, the full and free development 
 of the activities of man as a moral and spiritual being. Let 
 us turn to French sanity and clearness of thought for a de- 
 scription of the true aim of Socialism. J. Jaures, the lamented 
 leader of the French Socialist party, declared that "Socialism 
 is the supreme assertion of individual right. Socialists desire 
 to universalise human culture. For us the value of every in- 
 stitution is relative to the individual. It is the individual, as- 
 serting his will to liberate himself, to live, to expand, who 
 henceforth is to give virtue and life to institutions and ideas. 
 
 That is the logic of the revolutionary idea. That is 
 
 Socialism." If this be the true end or "objective" of social- 
 ism, it is very doubtful whether the means advocated, the 
 establishment of the absolute collectivist state, is the one best 
 adapted to secure it. The events of recent history have not 
 increased our love for absolutism, political, industrial, or any 
 other form of absolutism. The extravagance of the col- 
 lectivist creed has even roused, within the ranks of socialists 
 themselves, a protest, and more than a protest, a rebellion, 
 under the form of .SiOldicalisin, a new army, with a new 
 
22 
 
 vice, and a new political philosophy. The syndicalist philo- 
 sophy is in its origin a product of French thought. France, 
 the "poet of the nations," has never been enamoured of the 
 mechanical, German built scheme of collectivism. In addi- 
 tion, two factors in French life, combine to offer a permanent 
 rggjstflpre frn the ruthless ambition of a universalising J:ate 
 socialism, family life and private property. The tenacious 
 vigour of these twin institutions, is in part, the result of the 
 work of the revolution, perhaps its most valuable heritage, 
 and it is in virtue of these that France has been enabled to re- 
 cover and renew her strength again and again after the direst 
 disasters. After having rebelled against the oppression of 
 the political state, France is not likely to replace it by the 
 tyranny of the economic state. Syndicalism is, in part, a re- 
 . turn to the ideas of liberty and equality, in opposition to the 
 ff ironbound doctrine of the centralised collectivist state. It 
 foresees the dangers of a new autocracy, government by a 
 monstrous managing bureaucracy, without liberty, without 
 equality, without justice. It advocates self government by 
 communal group, by local district, distribution of power ac- 
 cording to function, among the different economic organs or 
 sections of society. Whatever be the merits or demerits of 
 syndicalism, whether it constitutes a healthy protest or a new 
 peril, it is a rebellion arising in the ranks of the workers them- 
 selves, against the tyrannical claims of the centralised col- 
 lectivist state. 
 
 VII. 
 
 I have not attempted, nor shall I attempt to define per- 
 sonality. We can define liberty or equality or fraternity, but 
 we cannot define personality. To define is to limit, but the 
 personality of man in its realisation tends to overcome the 
 limitations of the finite. God reveals himself within the finite, 
 that man may rise above his limitations, and enter into the 
 life which is infinite and eternal. Human history is a great 
 adventure in which man sets out to discover himself and the 
 secret of his personality. He has to fight with beasts, in order 
 to find out that he himself is not a beast. He has to fight 
 with nature, in order to find out that his spirit is greater than 
 nature. He has to fight with himself, and with his fellow 
 men, in order to find out that obedience to law is the condi- 
 tion of freedom, and that love is the fulfilling of the law. His- 
 tory is the record of man's efforts to discover himself, but 
 human nature is continually making new discoveries, and 
 breaking through its self -set limits. As "Arrlurath to Amurath 
 succeeds," so civilisations, and philosophies, and religions 
 
23 
 
 follow each other, in the never ending attempt to define 
 human personality and its possibilities; yet all of them pro- 
 vide but broken lights wherewith to guide man in his stumb- 
 ling steps upwards and onwards to his far distant goal. "Un- 
 less a man above himself exalt himself, how poor a thing is 
 man!" Personality is what it does and dares, and its task 
 is infinite. Let us cease then the vain attempt to apply our 
 yardsticks to the immeasurable, to define the indefinable. 
 The highest is the measure of the man, but what the highest 
 is, we have yet to learn. What personality is in its full com- 
 pleteness, we cannot say, until there are no more worlds left 
 for it to conquer. 
 
 The civilising principle of personality has still many 
 worlds to conquer. "The dark places of the earth are full of 
 the habitations of cruelty," and the darkest places are some- 
 times to be found within the centres of civilisation itself. The 
 spirit of Mammon defiles the springs of life, and debases the 
 moral currency. It ruins art, prostitutes sport, perverts re- 
 ligion, stains family honour, and makes patriotism a market- 
 able commodity. Materialism can breed nothing but materi- 
 alism. The task of social and political reform is to provide 
 conditions under which not merely a human life, but the good 
 life shall be at least a possibility for all. 
 
 "Reform, 
 
 Make trade a Christian possibility, 
 And individual right no general wrong." 
 
 This task of reform is a common task, in which all can share, 
 and we need not be too careful in distinguishing the friends 
 of society from its supposed enemies. We need many minds 
 and many hands. We need the passive resister as well as the 
 fiery fanatic. We need the unsparing analyst of our social 
 vices. We need the men who are perhaps over-fond of 
 hoisting danger signals on every possible path, as well as the 
 pioneers who blaze the way and open up new paths for social 
 progress. What we do not need is the complacent satisfac- 
 tion of those who think that they are living in the best of all 
 social worlds, the silly superstition of those who think that 
 things will right themselves, the base flattery of those who 
 hold up a distorted mirror to society, in which its vices appear 
 as virtues, the credulous faith of those who think that vic- 
 tories can be gained without fighting, and that the strongholds 
 of cruelty and oppression and sin, will crumble at the sound 
 of the blowing of their trumpets. Our failures are not due to 
 any excess of idealism. 
 
 "It takes the ideal to blow a hair's breadth off 
 the dust of the actual." 
 
24 
 
 Our failures are due to inertia, selfish interest and selfish in- 
 terests, lack of knowledge, lack of power, and lack of faith: 
 lack of knowledge, the latest and most complex of the 
 positive sciences, Sociology, is still in its infancy: lack of 
 power, not brute power, but intelligent control, grounded 
 on co-operative effort, and guided by sympathetic insight: 
 lack of faith, faith in ourselves and in our fellow men, faith 
 in the possibilities of personality: and finally, lack of the 
 divine spirit of charity, which is ready to forgive and forget, 
 because it understands. 
 
 Liberty may be won, if we are willing to surrender some 
 of our own anti-social liberties. Equality may be won, if we 
 think less of our own individual rights, and more of our com- 
 mon duties. Fraternity may be won, if we aim more at that 
 justice which is inspired by love. 
 
THL AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF 
 PSYCHC ~>GY A ,0 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 Editor: FRANCIS ANDERSON,, M.A. 
 
 Emeritus Professor of Philosophy The University of Sydney. 
 
 To deal with such subjects as the following: -, 
 
 Political Philosophy and Theory of the State. 
 
 Normal and Abnormal Psychology, and Psycho-analysis. 
 
 Applications of Psychology to Industry, Education and Law. 
 
 Modern Philosophical Movements. 
 
 Ethics and Philosophy of Religion. 
 
 There has been for some time, a strong feeling among those 
 engaged in the teaching of Philosophy and Psychology in Austral- 
 asian Universities, that the general interest shown in these subjects, 
 should be promoted by the institution of an Australasian Journal de- 
 voted to them. 
 
 The existence of such a Journal should be a stimulus to original 
 work to Australasian students, who now find publication difficult, 
 owing to our distance from Europe; and it would provide a local 
 medium for recording and discussing current developments of 
 thought, which, even in Psychology alone, are at present of the 
 greatest interest. 
 
 Steps have therefore been taken to inaugurate an 
 
 AUSTRALASIAN ASSOCIATION OF PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 AND PHILOSOPHY, 
 and to publish as its organ: 
 
 THE AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY 
 AND PHILOSOPHY, 
 
 Meetings of the Association will be held from time to time and 
 wherever practicable; and at present four (4) numbers of the 
 Journal will be published annually. Publication of the Journal will 
 commence early in 1923. 
 
 The subscription for membership of the Association during 
 1923, is 10/- payable in advance. This will carry with it four 
 (4) numbers of the Journal free, and the right to attend free of 
 charge all meetings and lectures arranged by the Association. 
 
 Professor Francis Anderson, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy 
 in the University of Sydney, will act as Editor of the Journal, and 
 will be assisted editorially by those engaged in the teaching of Phil- 
 osophy and Psychology in all the Australasian Universities. 
 
 Interesting contributions to the Journal have already been 
 promised from Australasia, and it is expected that well-known 
 English and American Philosophers and Psychologists will contribute 
 from time to time. 
 
 Members are now being registered. Those desirous of assisting 
 in this attempt to further the expression of thought among Aus- 
 tralasians should communicate with the Honorary Business Secretary 
 of the Association 
 
 S. C. RATCOFF, B.A., 
 Challls House, Martin Place, 
 Sydney. 
 
/63 
 
 
 LD 21-100m-6,'56 
 (B9311slO)476 
 
 % 
 
 General Library m 
 University of California 
 Berkeley