J N 
 

 PIOUS 
 PHRASES 
 
 IN 
 POLITICS 
 
 By 
 J. W. JEUDWINE 
 
 LONDON 
 
 P. S. KING & SON, LTD. 
 2 & 4 GREAT SMITH STREET, WESTMINSTER 
 
PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
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 The First Twelve Centuries of British Story 
 
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 for the study of social history, in his dislike of the ' constitutional ' 
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PIOUS PHRASES 
 IN POLITICS 
 
 An Examination of some Popular Catchwords, 
 their Misuse and Meaning 
 
 BY 
 J. W. JEUDWINE 
 
 LL.B. Cambridge, F.R.Hist.S., of Lincoln's Inn, Barrister- at- Law 
 Author of "The First Twelve Centuries of British Story," "The Manufacture 
 of Historical Material," "Tort Crime and Police in Mediaeval Britain," 
 " The Foundations of Society and the Land " 
 
 LONDON 
 
 P. S. KING & SON, LTD. 
 
 2 AND 4 GREAT SMITH_ ST., WESTMINSTER 
 
 1919 
 
T* 
 
 AUTHOR'S NOTE 
 
 OWING to the rationing of paper and many existing 
 difficulties in connection with book production, this volume, 
 although written in July, 1918, has not been published 
 until now. 
 
 'v.. : 
 
 - 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTION ....... 7 
 
 I GOVERNMENT THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE . . 13 
 
 II THE DUTIES OF THE RULER 18 
 
 III ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE EFFECT OF Pious PHRASES 
 
 IN THE UNITED STATES 27 
 
 IV THE WORD " REPUBLIC " 31 
 
 V THE DUTIES OF THE RULER INTERNAL ORDER 
 
 THE ENFORCEMENT OF LAW .... 37 
 
 VI THE DUTIES OF THE RULER ABROAD COLONIES 
 
 AND POSSESSIONS ...... 45 
 
 VII THE DUTIES OF THE RULER ABROAD FREEDOM 
 
 OF TRADE FEDERATION 53 
 
 VIII INDIA 65 
 
 IX THE MORAL SENSE A FREE CHURCH . . 71 
 
 X A CONCLUSION 79 
 
 
Pious Phrases in Politics 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 THERE is a passage in Boswell's Life of Johnson very 
 often quoted and very forcible, which followed a suggestion 
 by Boswell that he might become a Member of Parliament. 
 
 He was doubtful of himself. " Perhaps, Sir," he said, 
 " I should be the less happy for being in Parliament. . . . 
 I would never sell my vote and I should be vexed if things 
 went wrong." " That's cant, Sir," said Johnson; " it would 
 not vex you more in the House than in the Gallery. Public 
 affairs vex no man." He was speaking of things that he 
 knew, for he had spent time in the gallery as a reporter 
 taking pains that the Whig dogs did not get the best of it. 
 
 Then the Doctor took up his parable and brought his 
 powerful common sense to bear upon the subject generally. 
 
 " My dear Sir, clear your mind of cant. You may talk 
 as other people do ; you may say to a man, Sir, I am your 
 most humble servant. You are not his humble servant. 
 You may say, These are bad times ; it is a melancholy thing 
 to be reserved to such times. You don't mind the times. 
 You may tell a man, I am sorry you had such bad weather 
 the last day of your journey and were so wet. You don't 
 care sixpence whether he is wet or dry. You may talk in 
 this manner ; it is a mode of talking in society. But don't 
 think foolishly." 
 
 Yes, Doctor, you may say such things ; but if the saying 
 affects to be political or historical or moral truth, and teb 
 saying of some public person widely scattered is untrue, 
 it will go far to create dangers in time of stress. It is 
 necessary from time to time to examine the pious phrases 
 
 7 
 
. . 
 * l * 
 
 ' * 
 
 8 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 used in politics, coins in use on which the image and super- 
 scription has from the lapse of time become defaced. 
 
 As in these days of universal instruction there will be 
 many who will not have heard of Dr. Johnson, it may be 
 advisable to support his dictum with a recent pronounce- 
 ment of our great master of oratory, Mr. Lloyd George. 
 
 At a recent speech in Edinburgh, delivered on May 24 
 last, " Formulas/' he said, " are very useful but very danger- 
 ous. That is one of the lessons of the war, trust not over- 
 much in formulas. I could give you several political and 
 military formulas discredited by abuse and which have cost 
 the nation dearly." 
 
 Examples of Confused Thinking 
 
 I have before me some interesting examples of confused 
 thinking induced by such formulas, and I want to clear my 
 mind of cant, political cant, historical cant. So I set down, 
 subject to the criticism of those who really know, what 
 appear to me, as an ignorant person, to be the basic prin- 
 ciples on which societies suffer the necessary evil of govern- 
 ment. I propose to introduce what I have to say on the 
 subject by relating and commenting on these examples 
 of confused formula thought. 
 
 In the speech referred to at Edinburgh, " I am put here," 
 said the Premier, " by THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE of the coun- 
 try." " They have called me to this colossal task." " No 
 mere intrigue or cabal would place at the head, in the chief 
 direction, and maintain in the chief direction ... of the 
 greatest Empire in the world," etc., etc. 
 
 Turn your memories back for a moment. When Mr. 
 Lloyd George joined Mr. Asquith's Ministry in 1905-6 the 
 party to which he belonged was not in a majority. They 
 were composed of different sections with conflicting pro- 
 grammes and a common hatred of each other. They had 
 no mandate from the country for any part of their policy, 
 and no part could have been put into effect by the party 
 supporting it alone. But they turned the Unionists out 
 of office and obtained a majority for their measures by 
 what is called " log-rolling." Sections irrevocably opposed 
 gave each other mutual support for mutual policies of 
 destruction on mutual promise of repayment. 
 
 There is no need to dwell on the results of this past 
 
INTRODUCTION 9 
 
 further than may be necessary to illustrate Mr. Lloyd 
 George's statement that he became Premier by the will of the 
 people. He or any substitute for him, any depth beneath 
 the lowest deep who may follow him, is nothing else than 
 the King's Minister liable to be dismissed by the King if 
 they disagree as to policy and only able to maintain his 
 position against the King's will if he have the overwhelming 
 force of public opinion behind him. Both the political 
 parties concerned have long since been dead, though quite 
 a number of their members do not know it and will not 
 find it out even from a general election which just now is 
 little else than a mandate from a very weary people to finish 
 the war. Meanwhile about eighteen months ago, by a par- 
 liamentary shift of parties, without any appeal to the 
 people whatsoever, Mr. Lloyd George ousted Mr. Asquith, 
 and allying himself with his former enemies was appointed 
 by the King to be Prime Minister, kissing hands no doubt 
 but not the hands of the people on his appointment. Since 
 his first appearance he has never appealed to the people 
 for any endorsement of his views until December, 1918. 
 
 Dr. Johnson, I think, would truly say, " My dear Sir, 
 clear your mind of cant ; you may say that you are in 
 office, called to this colossal task and so on by the will of 
 the people ; you have never attempted to ascertain the 
 will of the people. You may speak of yourself as in the 
 chief direction of this mighty Empire and so forth ; you 
 have very little to do with the chief direction ; you could 
 not conscript a single soldier in Australia, New Zealand, 
 Canada, South Africa or India, nor even in Ireland ; you 
 may say all these things because they are the compliments 
 which a party meeting expects as tribute to its vanity, 
 expressions accepted in the sincerity with which they are 
 put forth ; but don't think foolishly." 
 
 I take as other illustrations of confused thinking the 
 Fourth of July speeches on both sides of the Atlantic. 
 
 Mr. Wilson at Washington's tomb sets forth historical 
 assertions which will not bear examination. r< Washington 
 and his associates, like the barons at Runnymede," he says, 
 " spoke and acted not for a class but for a people. . . . 
 They were consciously planning that men of every class 
 should be free," etc., etc. Nothing could be further from 
 the truth. The barons at Runnymede spoke for their 
 
io PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 class only, so far as they were not log-rolling with the 
 Church and the London Aldermen against the King. They 
 excluded from the benefit of their claims the majority of 
 men, white men of their own race and religion, the villeins 
 and the serfs. Washington and his associates were and 
 remained slave owners. But the President's speech, like 
 all such speeches, is only a mode of talking in society, a 
 tribute to the vanity of the vulgar crowd. 
 
 Crossing to this side, Mr. Churchill expresses confused 
 thought and false formulas still more directly. " The 
 Declaration of Independence," he says, "is not only an 
 American document. It follows on Magna Chart a and the 
 Petition of Right, and is the third of the great title deeds 
 on which the liberties of the English-speaking races are 
 founded." He confuses three separate distinct matters ; 
 the declaration of ancient customs regulating feudal service 
 and the claim of the barons to be exempted from trial in 
 the King's Courts, the substance of Magna Charta ; the 
 protest against illegal arrest and trial four centuries later 
 in the Petition of Right ; and the declaration of the inherent 
 rights of man, suggested by French philosophic theory, 
 alleged as an argument for refusal to pay taxes a century 
 and a half after. These have as much to do with one 
 another as the sinking of the Audacious or Lusitania had 
 to do with the scandalous disaster of the Dardanelles or 
 the bonus to munition workers. Thank God, the liberties 
 of the English-speaking races are not founded on any written 
 documents. 
 
 Behind Mr. Churchill comes Lord Bryce. He speaks in 
 the usual cant terms of the " love of FREEDOM and the faith 
 in FREEDOM which, sown long ago in English hearts, came 
 to full flower in the days of Milton and Hampden and estab- 
 lished civil and religious liberty on foundations never there- 
 after to be shaken." By this Lord Bryce means that, in 
 the days of Milton and Hampden, Cromwell holding down 
 the islands by military force, our first experience of the 
 tyrant with the standing army, crushed all liberty and pre- 
 pared the way for the reaction of license and absence of 
 government which lasted until King George III, who gloried 
 in the name of Briton, again asserted the royal authority. 
 
 I beg that these illustrations of my subject may be con- 
 sidered as impersonal. I have no desire to attack, or to 
 
INTRODUCTION n 
 
 criticize any person. As Mr. Lloyd George at Edinburgh 
 justly said, " There is criticism that is helpful, suggestive 
 criticism, criticism designed to improve "as I believe my 
 criticism to be " that we all welcome," and he contrasted 
 it with the criticism used by him to his present allies in 
 former days, criticism which is best expressed by a word 
 from a dead language, aTroa-L^-rrrjcri^. I use these illustra- 
 tions because of the great political dangers connected with 
 them if they do not represent truth. 
 
 The Danger of Confused Thinking 
 
 When the whole world is labouring under physical and 
 mental strain away from moral support, when our best are 
 on the sea or in the field fighting and dying for an ideal, 
 nothing, nothing whatever, could be worse, could more 
 fitly represent the match set by a child to the powder than 
 that confused thought about the origin of political power, 
 about the principle of rule, about the present realities of 
 political existence, and especially about freedom, should be 
 put forward by men in temporary possession of supreme 
 power. If we labour under fictions, let us get rid of them. 
 We are fighting for the freedom of peoples, and we must 
 free ourselves from lying and foolish words. They are 
 elements just now of extreme danger. 
 
 A man must be what his language is. If he is a strong 
 man, he will use restraint in words ; and if he is a free 
 man ruling over free men, he will emancipate himself from 
 the errors of language which have been handed down to 
 him from former generations and become free ; he will 
 use no false cant terms or misleading phrases of the past 
 which have lost their meaning. If not he will think foolishly 
 and may by foolish language create the forces of disaster. 
 
 It is the words and the ideas which lie behind them which 
 force nations on in an aggressive career of political inter- 
 ference, which drag nations down into the abyss of revolution. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 GOVERNMENT THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE 
 
 I PROPOSE to consider the effects of some pious phrases 
 and the political ideas suggested by them on the develop- 
 ment of government in the British Empire. 
 
 What is meant by government ? Consider a few of 
 the conceptions which revolve round the term. 
 
 It presupposes a condition of inequality, a condition in 
 which the men of the people submit to a superior will ; 
 it involves a society, an association of people who have a 
 community of interest, a society which has political power. 
 
 Political power can only exist where the individual, who 
 has been guarding his life and possessions from the stronger 
 by the power of his own individual arm, by the cunning 
 of his own separate brain, joins with others for common 
 defence, for a common aim ; joins in an alliance of which 
 the first necessity is that each member gives up his own 
 individual freedom of action to the whole body and submits 
 to the condition of inequality which is inherent in all socie- 
 ties or in alliances of unequal societies. The most absolute 
 final condemnation of the conscientious objector is that 
 his action is destructive of the society from which he derives 
 not only his safety but his moral sense. 
 
 When once one has got away from this elementary pre- 
 sumption of individual liberty and equality, inconsistent 
 with any political society, the next step is very simple. 
 The individuals, having surrendered their liberty and their 
 equality in whole or in part to the society, a common autho- 
 rity must be set up to regulate their relations with each 
 other, so that life and property may be safeguarded within 
 the society, and its existence protected from assault from 
 without. 
 
 13 
 
14 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 For this purpose the community delegates its political 
 power, the power to employ the brute force and to invoke 
 the moral force of all, and to impose sanctions, a power only 
 very slowly admitted through long centuries. The com- 
 munity appoints and submits to a common authority. 
 
 Submission of all to the Ruler 
 
 One fatal weakness of the international Socialist concep- 
 tion would appear to be that with the best intentions there 
 could under no conceivable conditions be any certainty 
 that any one person, appointed to control international 
 society, could have power either to safeguard life and pro- 
 perty or to repel foreign attack, unless, as would almost 
 certainly happen, the associated mass should so relinquish 
 its powers as to place itself under control of an absolute 
 tyrant, who, forgetting the origin of his authority, would 
 claim sovereignty by delegation from the Deity. 
 
 To avoid this danger the community, delegating its poli- 
 tical power to any one, generally makes conditions which 
 it is hoped will enable it to resume abused authority. The 
 relation which these efforts to control the ruler bears to 
 the actual facts is called constitutional history. 
 
 The community, having appointed its ruler, becomes, so 
 far as it does not qualify its trust, the umpire only and 
 registrar of his actions. How far it can qualify depends 
 upon conditions perpetually changing. In these islands 
 those who wish the trust to be generous and care little 
 about its exercise are called Conservatives ; those who give 
 as little as possible, and watch the use closely, Liberals. 
 
 Only one can be Ruler 
 
 Government then is the delegation by a community of 
 political power to one man. Only one man can govern. 
 To those who are distracted by phrases about democracy 
 and the will of the people and so on, this may seem a strange 
 saying. But the slightest exercise of common sense will 
 demonstrate its truth. The confusion of thought has arisen 
 from want of appreciation of an elementary principle, namely, 
 that all power though delegated remains in the political 
 community to be resumed at will. 
 
 If the community has made a bargain with the delegate, 
 it will enforce the bargain (expressed in the first instance 
 
PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 15 
 
 by its threat to disobey), by voting or by disobedience to 
 his orders. If it has made no bargain, nothing remains 
 but force. FORCE is THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE. 
 
 The Various Forms of Government 
 
 There are three forms of such delegation only ; one, 
 absolute monarchy, where either the community has dele- 
 gated its authority without reserve or has been robbed of 
 it by the delegate. 
 
 Another is the delegation of absolute authority to an 
 individual by election for a short term of years subject to 
 the threat of force for his removal if the delegate is unsatis- 
 factory, or to provision for his helplessness. This form of 
 government is called democratic or republican, being a 
 despotism subject to threat of frequent revolution. 
 
 The third form, very safe and efficient, peculiar to the 
 British Empire only and originating in England, is heredi- 
 tary monarchy accompanied by Parliamentary control ; 
 the ruler succeeds by inheritance, appoints his own ministers 
 and dismisses them at will, but subject to the check that 
 the ministers must represent not only the views of the ruler 
 but the considered will of the general community. It is 
 a very perfect form of government, but as delicate in its 
 balance as the works of a watch and as susceptible to dirt 
 and atmosphere. 
 
 Equality is Impossible 
 
 Only one man can rule. Equality whether of opportunity 
 or of anything else is impossible. No two men are equal. 
 It is among those who aspire to rule that the competition 
 is keenest and the exclusion of the less suitable most speedy 
 and certain. 
 
 Many times in the world's history has a society striven 
 to disregard this elementary fact, and tried to vest political 
 power in more than one person, urged by the hope that 
 each would become a check upon the other. You can 
 illustrate it from the history of any people from Rome to 
 Scotland, from Crassus, Pompey and Caesar to the Nor- 
 wegian Kings of the twelfth century or the Dutch rulers of 
 the seventeenth. In each instance has necessity or luck, 
 or the catastrophe of vaulting ambition or judicious jerry- 
 mandering retired the less suitable and endowed the sanest 
 
16 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 or most far-seeing or most politic or most rascally with the 
 delegated powers of the community until some cleverer 
 man or bigger rascal displaces him. 
 
 But there are long periods in the history of all nations 
 when government is not exercised by the delegated ruler 
 except during short intervals for some special purpose. 
 For two hundred years since King George I, owing to his 
 ignorance of the English language, ceased to sit at the head 
 of his Cabinet to direct affairs, there has been no person 
 governing the British Empire. 
 
 That does not mean that society has dissolved. Far 
 from it. It means that society itself resumes its deputed 
 powers of direction, acting by what is called public opinion, 
 acquiescing in existing conditions, the nominal head appoint- 
 ing such deputies as may for the moment be approved by 
 the community. 
 
 This is a temporary condition which is only possible 
 without supreme disaster in times of abnormal peace at 
 home and abroad, when few questions arise which require 
 the action of government and these not urgent. It breaks 
 down at once in any crisis. In every case where imperial 
 questions have arisen requiring such action in Ireland 
 always, in India and Canada and South Africa frequently, 
 in the course of the long wars with France, on various 
 occasions of wars between foreign countries which affected 
 our Empire unless the King as ruler acted either personally 
 or through his ministers for the community, disaster and 
 danger have come very near. As witness the loss of the 
 American Colonies, the Crimean war, the mutiny in India, 
 the Boer war, all those external matters which we have 
 " muddled through," matters which need not have happened 
 and could not have happened if the ruler had acted for the 
 whole community instead of allowing affairs to drift in 
 the hands of men representing only a section of the com- 
 munity, and not armed with the authority of the whole. 
 
 Party Government 
 
 This form of " muddling through " is called party govern- 
 ment. Until this want of system in government, reckless 
 waste of the best elements of brain and morals, coupled 
 with perpetual squabble relating to extinct party issues, 
 
PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 17 
 
 is got rid of, and replaced by national government, our 
 position can only be one of waste and danger. 
 
 Government, I repeat again, rests on one man personally. 
 As society becomes more complex the delegation of bits of 
 authority by the ruler becomes so various, so extreme, 
 that it appears to the individual, whose vanity is flattered 
 by talk about his share in democracy, the will of the people 
 and popular government, that the authority is scattered, is 
 not vested in one person, and that he ought to have some. 
 But one person and only one person is finally responsible. 
 It is he who suffers if the government is displeasing to the 
 community, who suffers often for permitting the acts of 
 vain or foolish subordinates. It is he who runs the lisks 
 attendant on the enforcement of popular will, and the 
 greater risks of weighing the value of a demand which may 
 be OP may develop into it. 
 
 The wise ru^er, or the minister through whom he acts, is 
 chary of employing force himself. If he has the instinct of 
 the true ruler he will show good judgment as to whether a 
 threat of force represents a command from the body of the 
 people, or only an attempt by some noisy minority hunting 
 trouble to test the timidity or the pliability of the ruler or 
 his acting ministers. 
 
 It is an inevitable risk attending the possession of power. 
 
 B 
 
CHAPTER II 
 THE DUTIES OF THE RULER 
 
 ONE of the first duties of government is to promote unity 
 of thought and of action among the members of the com- 
 munity. It is not merely the keeping of the peace. For 
 that the ruler is responsible ; it is the origin of his power ; 
 a large part of his duty ; as internal quarrels must cause 
 weakness and possibly lead to civil war. The administra- 
 tion of justice to this effect is a duty largely neglected by 
 party politicians in power who, without the support of the 
 united community and uncertain as to the future, seek the 
 path of least resistance. 
 
 But the duty of the ruler does not stop here. He must 
 also encourage unity of national endeavour as a thing in 
 itself desirable. 
 
 He must advocate and organize peace between members 
 of the community, protecting the weaker against the stronger. 
 It is his chief duty at home. He must also take necessary 
 measures to protect the community against foreign aggres- 
 sion. He must strive for peace, but he must be fully pre- 
 pared for war. 
 
 These two chief duties presuppose a power in the com- 
 munity to make regulations for its internal peace and for 
 its external safety, to restrict the liberty of the individual 
 in the interest of the society. 
 
 Legislation 
 
 Let us still further define government by exhaustion. 
 It exists quite apart from legislation per se, though you 
 would not think so if you read the constitutional histories. 
 Legislation is, in the first instance, merely the late reduc- 
 tion to writing of those rules of action already in practice 
 
 18 
 
PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 19 
 
 which govern all organized societies which have passed 
 from the primary test of supreme force to the civilized 
 State, to the arbitration of the supreme judge or ruler, 
 expressing the will of the majority. 
 
 When such rules of arbitration are written they have the 
 same relation to the former unwritten custom of the society 
 as the propositions of Euclid, learnt by the schoolboy, have 
 to the instinctive prehistoric practice of the hedge carpenter 
 and mason. They are written declarations of the will of 
 the community. 
 
 But although no part of the art of government, legislation 
 sooner or later becomes closely connected with its exercise. 
 Every community must subject itself to rules of conduct, 
 which, if they are to live and be of lasting value, will rest 
 either on elementary principles of current morality or on 
 social precautions for safety to be enforced on all the 
 members. 
 
 The community will take care, for instance, to make 
 sure that every member shall help to defend it against foreign 
 aggression, even if he should consider that it is more in 
 accord with the Gospel that he should make money at home 
 under protection of the ships and guns of the bleeding free 
 nations than that he should share in their work and perils. 
 They will not, in the first instance, use force to ensure this 
 result, but will make regulations to be observed. 
 
 But although the enactment of law is a necessity, the 
 civilization of a nation will be judged by the simplicity and 
 paucity of its laws, as the best machine has few working 
 parts and those easily reached and adjusted. Unfortunately 
 this is rather the exception than the rule. 
 
 The tendency with all large, loose masses of humanity, 
 whether Chinese, British or Hindoo, and with most western 
 European communities, is to an ever increasing flow of 
 petty regulations and provisions, checking and controlling 
 every relation of life, prohibiting mental advance, as the 
 tangled mass of loose barbed wire of the enemy checks the 
 advance of an army. Each such addition to the rules to 
 which a society must submit acts as a new bandage to 
 prevent the growth of national energy, a new handicap to 
 hinder the community in its contest with others more free. 
 
 Some few of these rules were necessary for the protection 
 of the community, as when Samuel Plimsoll, in the face of 
 
20 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 the fiercest opposition, protected the seamen by forcing a 
 regulation of the load line. A good many are distinctly 
 harmful. The great majority become at once, or in a 
 short time, a dead letter. 
 
 With the rarest exceptions each such rule affects only 
 a very small portion of the society ; each, when put into 
 force by the arm of the ruler, is often merely for the con- 
 venience of a still smaller minority. 
 
 But whether good, unnecessary or evil, this outpour of 
 regulation and restriction is not government. It is in fact 
 somewhat of a test of the weakness or absence of govern- 
 ment, the multiplication and verbosity of the laws being 
 in inverse ratio to the capacity for rule of the temporary 
 delegate of the ruler. 
 
 At the best it is only one means of enforcing the will 
 of the community against those who persistently put their 
 interests before those of the society, a threat that force 
 will be used if need be to compel obedience, a reminder that 
 social life means restriction of liberty. 
 
 The Enforcement of Law 
 
 While the making of laws by a community may be some- 
 times in the nature of an act of government, their relation 
 to ruling is this, that the oldest duty of the ruler in history, 
 and one of his chief duties, is that he should provide that 
 the laws, under which the community lives, are fairly and 
 honestly enforced among its members. It would be bordering 
 on exact truth to say that this is the only duty of internal 
 action, which at all times imperative necessity imposes on 
 a ruler so long as social life has any meaning. 
 
 It is by far the most difficult honourably to accomplish ; 
 it is the easiest both to slur and to criticize in execution. 
 Yet on the action of the ruler in respect of this execution 
 of the laws depends all advance in the moral sense of the 
 community, all safety for life and property, all freedom in 
 word and thought for political action or social act which, 
 unpopular at the time, ma}' lead to advance or expansion. 
 This truth cannot be better put than in the words of Milton's 
 Areopagitica : " For this is not the liberty which we can 
 hope that no grievances should ever arise in the common- 
 wealth that, let no man in this world expect ; but when 
 complaints are freely heard, deeply considered and speedily 
 
PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 21 
 
 reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil liberty obtained 
 that wise men hope for." 
 
 There at once arises the question under what conditions 
 can this utmost bound of civil liberty be obtained ? which 
 brings up at once for consideration the variations of forms 
 of government, and the meaning of words. We must define 
 freedom or liberty. 
 
 What is Freedom or Liberty? 
 
 The confusion of thought shown by British politicians 
 and Fourth of July orators is, I believe, largely due to a 
 false use of the word liberty, and to a belief that liberty 
 is closely connected with Republican institutions, and is 
 more likely to be obtained in large measure in a Republic 
 or as we say a Democracy. This is the natural result of 
 a misunderstanding as to the nature of government and the 
 nature of liberty. 
 
 Let us carefully consider the meaning of the word liberty 
 by the light of a few illustrations from British and American 
 history bearing on this point. 
 
 There is no word in the English language which has so 
 little or so much meaning, which can be distorted into so 
 many good and evil forms, no word which can so quickly 
 fire the generous impulses or evil passions of men, which 
 possesses such pathos, bitter irony, inflammatory calls for 
 warfare and bloodshed, or earnest appeals to costly resolves, 
 no word capable of so much influence for good or so much 
 vile misuse as the word " Liberty." Every one who objects 
 to the form of government under which he happens to be, 
 who calls monarchy tyranny, or aristocracy oligarchy, or 
 democracy anarchy, fights against it under this sacred name. 
 Liberty of the person, liberty of religion, liberty to refuse 
 to pay taxes, liberty to print and oftentimes to libel, liberty 
 to protest and urge reform, it has been used for them all. 
 Atrocious and obscene libels and wholesale murders have 
 been justified in its name. 
 
 The commonest misuse of the word is confusion with 
 political power, with political liberty, the right to vote, 
 to decide on the form of government, to help to nominate 
 those who have office, and to urge and insist on the changes 
 to be made in the laws and the administration. This is 
 
22 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 commonly spoken of as if it were the only liberty worth 
 having, worth all the blood which has been shed over it. 
 The paper constitutions, which have misled European and 
 South American peoples into the belief that they were 
 making great advances in freedom, are due to this fallacy. 
 The voting powers given to the negro in the United States 
 were due to it. 
 
 Yet this political liberty or political right is of no value 
 except as a means to gain individual liberty, or as it lends 
 power to the few to make gain of politics out of the many. 
 
 The South African war is an interesting example. What- 
 ever may have been the merits, the Boers were fighting for 
 the latter use of this kind of liberty, the power to make 
 gain out of politics. They fought to perpetuate their own 
 political power, to prevent others from having any share 
 in the management of affairs, and to preserve a political 
 system which guaranteed to a small part of the population, 
 who paid little towards the expenses of the community, 
 the power to regulate in their own interests political and 
 social affairs, to the disadvantage of those who paid the 
 greater part of the expenses. 
 
 What is liberty ? The most generally accepted definition 
 of a free people is that of Algernon Sydney, a people who are 
 governed only by the laws which themselves have made. 
 
 The definition is, I think, imperfect. It is no doubt 
 an urgent necessity that a watch should be kept by the 
 community on the laws passed, whether new departure or 
 change of old custom, by the persons entrusted with that 
 duty. But so long as there is any social responsibility 
 laws can do little harm if a watch be kept over their execu- 
 tion. A free people always in effect make their own laws. 
 For if the majority of a community disapproves of a law, 
 the difficulty of enforcing it will be so great that it will 
 fall harmless. 
 
 Liberty is more than the power to make your own laws. 
 It is the guarantee to the individual from the society that 
 property and person shall be safe from seizure on behalf 
 of the community except after open and fair trial of the 
 alleged cause of offence. 
 
 Tyranny is the enactment of unjust and immoral laws, 
 but it is more. It is the illegal and arbitrary working in 
 the courts of laws which may in themselves be harmless. 
 
PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 23 
 
 The Influence of the United States on the Conception 
 of Freedom 
 
 British conceptions of the meaning of the words I have 
 been considering have been very much influenced by the 
 short history of the United States. This has been written 
 from this side by Whigs who were proud of their work of 
 destruction and revolution, and anxious politically to im- 
 press its beneficial lessons on the British Empire. They 
 have exaggerated all those points which told for their 
 party advantage, and they have written flattery of the 
 North-East corner of the States, settled by the Congrega- 
 tional Republicans of the seventeenth century, who were 
 politically near to them. The histories written in America 
 have also been written from this North-East corner for 
 Great Britain, and written from the same standpoint. 
 
 Hence it is that the British know less about the United 
 States and understand it less than any other country with 
 which they have social and commercial intercourse. Other 
 countries can be considered from the historical standpoint 
 of their own development ; but the British have been led 
 by Whig and Yankee writers to look upon the development 
 of the United States as the natural complement of their 
 own growth, to consider in fact the Declaration of Indepen- 
 dence as the full fruition of Magna Charta, the Petition of 
 Right, and the Bill of Rights ; they are inclined to view 
 American institutions and American ideals as an advance 
 upon their own world-famous guarantees for freedom and 
 good government, and as such to be copied and admired. 
 
 This false view has been so bandied backwards and 
 forwards by writers on both sides that it is now accepted 
 almost without investigation. It has given rise to mis- 
 conceptions so fundamental, that there is no hope of either 
 country understanding the other until both reconsider 
 their preconceived ideas from the foundation. Every year 
 they go further from a common basis of knowledge, nearer 
 to dangerous false analogies, which will some day furnish 
 food for quarrel, as at present they give rise to fulsome 
 hypocritical flattery. 
 
 The two peoples are different organizations, diverging 
 on different lines ; they dwell apart like two particular 
 stars. Their ideals, their conceptions of government, of 
 
24 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 society, of progress, the goals towards which they press, 
 are absolutely opposed. They are at present conflicting, 
 very much, I think, to the injury of the British conceptions 
 of society. 
 
 A Conflict of Ideals 
 
 The British Ideal, DUTY, rests on the acknowledgment 
 of natural inequality, and aims at enforcing the obligations 
 due from ordered classes of society by reference to a common 
 law based on equal justice to all. It thus lays restraints 
 on individual greed, and encourages the rich and powerful 
 to respect the liberties of their weaker neighbours. 
 
 This is a realizable Ideal, and one which to a large extent 
 has been realized. The gist of it, equal justice to all, is 
 happily expressed in Milton's Declaration in the Areopa- 
 gitica. 
 
 All the great Charters of English liberty, as they supple- 
 ment the guarantees for freedom handed down to us by 
 our ancestors, have reference to this respect for a common 
 law. The Petition of Right ties itself to the past by con- 
 struing the provisions of Magna Charta to intend fair and 
 public trial by due course of law. ' We have good laws," 
 says Sir John Eliot in discussing it, " we want not good 
 laws." The Habeas Corpus Act looks to guarantees for 
 the speedy and open trial ; the Bill of Rights, after reciting 
 the assumption by James of the power of dispensing with 
 laws and his " committing and prosecuting divers worthy 
 prelates, for humbly petitioning to be excused from con- 
 curring in the said assumed power," goes on to declare that 
 the pretended power of " suspending of laws " or " dispens- 
 ing with laws or the execution thereof " was illegal. 
 
 The execution of the laws of the country, not the indi- 
 vidual rights of the subject, is the Englishman's conception 
 of liberty, and resistance to law, whether by king or subject, 
 is the greatest offence against that conception. 
 
 Sir Henry Maine, one of the most profound thinkers of 
 the last century, insists upon the danger which follows from 
 apathy on this point : "If any government should be 
 tempted to neglect, even for a moment, its function of 
 compelling obedience to law ; if a Democracy, for example, 
 were to allow a portion of the multitude of which it exists, 
 to set some law at defiance which it happens to dislike, it 
 
PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 25 
 
 would be guilty of a crime which hardly any other virtue 
 would redeem, and which century upon century might 
 fail to repair," a saying which I recommend to those respon- 
 sible for the appointment of Messrs Carson and Smith in 
 succession to the office of Attorney-General after their 
 importation of German arms and ammunition in the Fanny 
 in 1914, accompanied by inflammatory speeches. 
 
 The British Ideal then is based on moral obligation. 
 Resting on human inequality, it recognizes no rights in the 
 individual, apart from the society, through which the 
 inequalities of life may be mitigated and redressed by just 
 laws. It'is an ideal of duty. England expects every man 
 to do his duty. And to a great extent it has been realized. 
 
 The American Ideal, as it permeates all American life, 
 public and private, was laid down in a sentence of the 
 Declaration of Independence, which claims that " since all 
 men are born equal," they are entitled as individuals to 
 certain RIGHTS of life, liberty and the " pursuit of happi- 
 ness," even if injurious to the society." 
 
 This Ideal is not realizable, and is founded on a mis- 
 chievous fiction. It has had most disastrous effects in 
 American history, and promises equal misfortune to the 
 British if they allow themselves to be seduced by their 
 Yankee friends into following it. 
 
 The chief effect of this American theory of government, 
 a strange one to the British, who, with the exception of 
 Ireland, have hitherto carried with them their sense of 
 moral obligation for the weak all over the world, has been 
 to substitute a concentrated selfishness as the spring of 
 human action for the Christian virtues of self-sacrifice and 
 benevolence. The rule of the strongest is the inevitable 
 result of the adoption of this fiction of human equality. 
 
 The theory, the foundation of Rousseau's theories, 
 embodied in his Contrat Social, of man in a state of nature 
 was obviously untrue ; nowhere more untrue than in the 
 American Republic, of which a great writer says, " There 
 has hardly ever before been a community in which the 
 weak have been pushed so pitilessly to the wall, in which 
 those who succeeded have so uniformly been the strong, 
 and in which in so short a time there has arisen so great 
 an inequality of private fortune and domestic luxury/ 1 
 
 Leaving untouched the moral duties, which, owed by 
 
26 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 the society to the individual, may hinder him in his race 
 for the pursuit of happiness ; putting to one side the Chris- 
 tian duty to his neighbour, less able physically, mentally, 
 or financially, than himself ; the doctrine impresses on the 
 individual, as the end of life, that he let nothing stand 
 between him and the pursuit of " happiness." It has had 
 a most evil effect on the moral side of American life ; it 
 is in collision with all that large teaching of self-sacrifice 
 demanded by Christianity. I have not infrequently, for 
 instance, heard it given as a good reason for divorce on 
 trivial grounds that marriage should not stand in the way 
 of the man's or woman's pursuit of happiness. It is an 
 immense tribute to American manhood that the United 
 States is outgrowing it. 
 
 So long as the United States was ruled from the South, 
 that is to say, up to the time of the Civil War, the abstract 
 doctrine did no harm but rather good, offset as it was by 
 the state of southern society, resting on slavery, which did 
 not admit of any equality in man, but which from that 
 very condition brought about a certain equality of white 
 men in the presence of the negro. 
 
 But when the Civil War raised up the question of the 
 status of the negro, this doctrine was unfortunately brought 
 into politics as a war-cry under most unfavourable circum- 
 stances to endue it with good effect. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE EFFECT OF Pious 
 PHRASES IN THE UNITED STATES 
 
 THE debates in Congress in 1866, when the South which 
 Mr. Wilson now represents lay under the heel of the Yankee, 
 when the white gentlemen of the South were disenfranchised 
 and for years put into subjection to the negro led by northern 
 carpet-baggers, are most interesting reading. It is instruc- 
 tive to see how, with the Declaration of Independence to 
 guide them, the politicians who shaped affairs were influ- 
 enced ; how they confused political and individual liberty, 
 and rested on the doctrine of assumed equality an undeni- 
 able right to the franchise in all humanity. 
 
 After a reference by the Speaker to the Declaration of 
 Independence, and the protection to all men in their in- 
 alienable rights, Mr. Stevens very early lays down the 
 principle that " equal rights to all the privileges of govern- 
 ment is innate in every immortal being, no matter what 
 the shape or colour of the tabernacle which it inhabits." 
 Mr. Trumball of Illinois, in introducing the amendment 
 making the negro a citizen and giving him the franchise, 
 says, perhaps very truly : " There is very little importance 
 in the general declaration of abstract truths and principles 
 unless they can be carried into effect," and he then instances 
 the " immortal declaration that all men are created equal." 
 Mr. Howard of Maine asks that, as the slave has become 
 by emancipation a free man, " in all common sense is he 
 not entitled to those rights which we conceded to a man 
 who is free ? " Mr. Thayer of Pennsylvania speaks of the 
 franchise as " those rights which constitute the essence of 
 freedom," and so on ; the argument resting on the premiss 
 that, since all men were created free and equal, they had 
 
 27 
 
28 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 as a fundamental right the right and duty of the franchise. 
 Political rights, the right of voting on the enactment of 
 new laws, and the appointment of legislators, are confused 
 with and made equivalent to the individual liberty, the 
 right to see the laws properly executed. 
 
 Supposing that instead of the brains of the legislators 
 having been filled with this fiery fiction of human equality 
 (beneficial in some respects as it is), the dominant part y in 
 Congress had been guided by common sense and experience, 
 is it conceivable that they would have given to the newly 
 enfranchised slave as a man the franchise without any proper 
 qualification ? They had the example before them of 
 emancipation in the West Indies, where, besides an appren- 
 ticeship before freedom, the negro received any political 
 rights in reward for the energy which had acquired him 
 property, on the English principle that those who supply 
 the means of government shall vote the disposal of the means 
 supplied. 
 
 The Venezuelan Imbroglio 
 
 As another example of the false use of the word liberty 
 connected with an equally confused idea of the meaning 
 and value of a Republic, the dispute between the United 
 States and Great Britain over Venezuela, which very nearly 
 involved us in war with " the Great Republic of the West," 
 is a very interesting episode, especially to a person who, 
 like the writer, was then living as an unnaturalized alien 
 in the United States. 
 
 It is ancient history perhaps. But history of great 
 value, if you put Mr. Olney's dispatch to Mr. Bayard by 
 the side of the Fourth of July speeches of this year and 
 the speeches of English politicians. 
 
 Every one knows what sort of a " Republic " Venezuela 
 is. It is one of those " despotisms tempered by revolution " 
 of which South America furnishes so many instances, a 
 " Republic " ruled by a military dictator, often a mulatto, 
 and an army. 
 
 Yet Mr. Olney, in his dispatch to Mr. Bayard, speaking 
 of the "moral interests involved," thus instructs Lord 
 Salisbury, the representative of the freest people on earth : 
 " Europe, as a whole, is monarchical, and with the single 
 
PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 29 
 
 important exception of the Republic of France is com- 
 mitted to the monarchical principle. America, on the 
 other hand, is devoted to the exactly opposite principle 
 to the idea that every people has an inalienable right of 
 self-government. . . . The States of America, south as well 
 as north, by geographical proximity, by natural sympathy 
 (whatever that may mean), by similarity of governmental 
 institutions, are friends and allies, commercially and politi- 
 cally of the United States. . . . The people of the United 
 States have a vital interest in the cause of popular self- 
 government. . . . They believe it to be for the healing 
 of all the nations, and that civilization must either advance 
 or retrograde accordingly as its supremacy is extended or 
 curtailed. Imbued with these sentiments, the people of 
 the United States might not impossibly be wrought up to 
 an active propaganda in favour of a cause so highly valued 
 both for themselves and for mankind." 
 
 Cannot one imagine the British Minister, like Mr. Burchell, 
 saying "Fudge" at intervals, during the reading of this 
 document ? Yet, " imbued with these sentiments," the 
 people of the United States were so " wrought up " "for 
 the healing of all the nations " as to risk a gigantic war 
 with Great Britain on behalf of the Venezuelan " Republic." 
 And it was the statesmanship, the self-control of Lord 
 Salisbury, not their own tact, which saved them. 
 
 The South African War 
 
 Test the words again by the attitude of the American 
 politician on our South African war with Kruger and his 
 German friends. 
 
 Senator Hale said, speaking in Congress on a resolution 
 reproving the attitude of the U.S.A. Government in the 
 Transvaal affair, that the war England was levying was 
 " the most fell blow at human liberty that has been struck 
 in the last century. I deny," he said, " that the American 
 people are in sympathy with the administration of Great 
 Britain in this war to stamp out liberty. I deny that the 
 section of the English-speaking race that lives on this 
 continent is to be dragged at the chariot wheels of war 
 against the republics of South Africa." 
 
 Mr. Sulzer, on the same subject, says, " In a fight between 
 liberty and monarchy I want to see liberty win. ... A 
 
30 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 republic that will secretly connive and aid a monarchy to 
 destroy a sister republic and blot out its free institutions. 
 . . . The defeat of the Boers will be the severest blow to 
 republican institutions that has been struck in a century." 
 
 " We see in South Africa," says Mr. Bryan, " a monarchy 
 fighting a republic. Because of its unpatriotic policy , the 
 republican party does not say a word for the Boers in their 
 fight for liberty." 
 
 Again Mr. Sulzer in Congress speaks of the Transvaal 
 and Orange Free State as "two brave little Republics, 
 sisters of our own, and as free and independent. A republic 
 that refuses sympathy to a sister republic struggling to 
 maintain its independence against monarchical aggression 
 ... a republic that will secretly aid a monarchy to destroy 
 a republic and blot out its free institutions," and so on and 
 so on ad nauseam. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE WORD " REPUBLIC " 
 
 LET us for a moment consider the word " REPUBLIC." 
 
 There is nothing in a " Republic " per se which implies 
 liberty or free institutions. The word was originally used 
 for any form of government without a king. There is 
 nothing in itself meritorious in such a government. Up to 
 the end of the eighteenth century all such governments, 
 from the Roman aristocracy onwards, were oligarchies ; 
 not necessarily free governments, not by any means govern- 
 ments proceeding from the people, but governments by 
 an exclusive senate, by the doge, or tyrant and council, 
 such as the governments of Venice and Genoa and other 
 Italian Republics, by municipal corporations such as the 
 Dutch Republic, by military force like Cromwell's Common- 
 wealth. 
 
 These forms of government were not popular in any sense 
 of the word, and had fallen into very evil odour when the 
 American Revolution gave a new form to the world a 
 new form, because, although republican in form, the Ameri- 
 can Constitution was, as may be seen by the Federalist, 
 especially No. 62, as close an imitation of the then existing 
 monarchical Constitution of Great Britain as could be 
 made without calling the ruler by the name of king. It 
 was, in fact, an adaptation of the only free government 
 which has naturally grown and thriven under monarchy, 
 to the republican form which in the circumstances was 
 thought necessary. For that reason apparently it has 
 remained so far the only stable form of republican govern- 
 ment, under which there is any individual freedom. 
 
 It grew. The American Constitution was the fruit of 
 sound national education, the effect of a healthy graft 
 
 31 
 
32 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 from a healthy tree, the operation done by skilful hands 
 and at an opportune time. 
 
 After the American Revolution in the eighteenth century, 
 another republic came from the French Revolution. And 
 since the beginning of the nineteenth century half Europe, 
 all South America, and parts of other continents, have 
 adopted the republican form based on the franchise of the 
 entire people, or constitutional forms of government which 
 rest upon a widely extended franchise. But what a differ- 
 ence in results ! Perpetual upheavals and military coups 
 d'etat ; half the time spent under despotism and half under 
 corrupt official rule, which is little better than despotism ; 
 the liberty of the person regulated by the will of the army 
 or the money of the politician. Sir Henry Maine estimates 
 that in Spain alone, between the adoption of the Constitu- 
 tion of 1812 and the accession of Alfonso XII, there had 
 been forty military risings, aided by the mob, nine of 
 which were successful revolutions. In the same span, 
 France has lived one-half of her time under despotic mili- 
 tary rule. 
 
 It became common cant to attribute this want of success 
 to a decadence in the national character, to speak of Spain 
 and France as " dying " nations. Yet there is no reason 
 to connect any decay with the want of success of this 
 form ; for with these nations it is nothing but a form. It 
 would be a much more simple explanation to attribute 
 it to the madness of adopting, or of forcing on others, 
 political forms which are not of natural growth. No one 
 of these Constitutions was evolved from within the countries 
 which adopted them. 
 
 From the date of the English Revolution of 1688, the 
 philosophers of Western Europe, especially in France, took 
 the British Constitution as their envy and their model, 
 and with very good reason. A republic is much more 
 liable to revolution, and as we know by the short history 
 of the American Republic to assassination, than a monarchi- 
 cal form of government. It is a negation of society, and 
 so of any form of socialism, good or evil, as the temporary 
 ruler must of necessity be the nominee of a party in the 
 State, and not of the whole people. 
 
 It is a far easier matter to reconcile the powers and 
 privileges of an hereditary monarch, whose personality 
 
PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 33 
 
 in case of a difference with the will of the people, is invested 
 with all the prestige of past glories, of victories and acquisi- 
 tions of territory for the whole nation won under his fore- 
 fathers, than is the case in a country governed by a temporary 
 president. His whole power in the absence of moral force 
 rests on his own personal qualities and on the brute force 
 behind him, force which he will be much more inclined to 
 use against the force or personal qualities of an opponent 
 representing the party opposed to him than will an heredi- 
 tary king who represents the entire nation and not a party. 
 In consequence a republic has a perpetual tendency either 
 to promote a military tyranny or to create an anarchy 
 under a feeble President. 
 
 That the present autocracy in the United States has not 
 developed into government by the army is due to its descent 
 from and imitation of our excellent constitution, a king with 
 powers of administration, and a free parliament. 
 
 Paper Constitutions from Without 
 
 When France destroyed the monarchy, the practical 
 parts of her many political failures in republican constitu- 
 tions were modelled on the British Constitution and on 
 that of the United States. The numerous paper constitu- 
 tions which have graced or disgraced Europe and South 
 America are more or less close imitations of these admirable 
 forms. They all in practice have a tendency to revert 
 to the form of government which existed before they were 
 introduced, to the native form which has been of natural 
 slow growth of many years or ages. The form imposed 
 from without becomes a mere shell, and the practice adapts 
 itself to the wants and the desires which, if a natural growth 
 had been permitted, would have been gradually drawn out 
 from within. The President of the South American Repub- 
 lic becomes a precarious dictator, and the President of 
 the French Republic exists with the consent, or by the 
 will, of the army. If we allow ourselves now to be per- 
 suaded into insisting on Germany assuming democratic 
 government, it can result in nothing but a despotism 
 tempered by revolution, though it may render her more 
 efficiently organized for war. 
 
 Where a natural and constant growth has been allowed, 
 the form of the new government, as in the Transvaal 
 
 c 
 
34 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 Republic, adapts itself as closely as possible to that of 
 the country from which it takes its birth. The close 
 oligarchy of the Transvaal was only the " chain of cor- 
 porations " of the United Netherlands transferred to South 
 Africa, and accentuated by the militarism which is the 
 natural result of practice of close oligarchical methods under 
 popular forms. President Kruger, as far as one can see, 
 had all the powers of an absolute monarch ; he dictated 
 to his exclusive legislature, he removed judges at his will, 
 he controlled legislature, executive and judiciary without 
 reserve. And he accumulated an enormous store of mili- 
 tary material, and under the forms of freedom stimulated 
 in his " Republic " a most martial spirit. So far as the 
 Constitution gave popular government, so far was he drawn 
 to offset the loss of political power by increased military 
 force. 
 
 Ireland as an Illustration 
 
 To give one more illustration of the meaning of these 
 words, Ireland has been steadily driven by the Anglo- 
 Scottish politicians under Carsonism into association with 
 American ideas of government and of political philosophy. 
 When the extremist Sinn Feiner calls for a Republic under 
 which he will have political liberty, as his ideal of a free 
 government, he is asking for something as far removed as 
 possible from the rule under which he suffers. He has 
 been educated for many generations by the British poli- 
 ticians to look with contempt upon the laws and their 
 administration. Personal liberty has been constantly denied 
 him, and as a result his only idea of liberty is political 
 liberty. 
 
 The Two Opposed Ideals 
 
 Just at present the Americans and the British are whoop- 
 ing over the Fourth of July and the " will of the people." 
 Does it mean any closer approach between the two ideals ? 
 Not in the very least. 
 
 The two communities are races diverging, with a language 
 gradually diverging, possessed of different ideals, basing 
 all legislation, all treatment of social problems, upon the 
 opposite poles of duty to the society and right of the indi- 
 
PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 35 
 
 vidual, of unity of moral aims and the dissidence of dissent. 
 
 One or the other of the two opposed principles of life 
 have to give way. It will not be the American. There 
 is great and growing danger that the British politician, 
 ignorant of history, and without any moral leading, should 
 be led to desert *the British goal for that of the American, 
 to attempt to mould our national life on the false assump- 
 tion that the American development is a growth of our own 
 historical advance. Whereas, on the contrary, it is the 
 logical result of the adoption, as a political creed, of maxims 
 of sophistical philosophy which from time to time have 
 been used by orators as pegs on which to hang revolutionary 
 clothing. 
 
 Such a course would mean the reversal of all our history 
 and the destruction of our true liberties. For through all 
 the mists of phraseology private liberty, as expressed in 
 the due and impartial enforcement of law, and not politi- 
 cal liberty based on a fiction of equality, is the only liberty 
 worth having. 
 
 Unfree Peoples 
 
 When a people are not free, either subject to a military 
 despot or owned by another community, laws for their use 
 are made and administered by and in the interest of the 
 alien ruler, who always tries to persuade the world, and 
 often succeeds in persuading himself, that his rule is very 
 beneficial and his legislation good. 
 
 Whether such rule is good, bearable or bad is matter of 
 indifference. The people upon whom it is forced will never 
 agree that it can be good, and it is extremely unlikely that 
 in any respect the rule will be in the interest of the subject 
 people. Such a condition is opposed to the elementary 
 principle of freedom, of that disposal by a people of them- 
 selves of their own free will which we call democracy, and 
 which we in Britain claim to represent. 
 
 With peoples who are not free I do not intend to deal in 
 these pages. There is nothing to be said about such socie- 
 ties, whether in these islands or elsewhere, except that 
 first and last they rest solely on the brute force of the 
 ruler ; they dissolve like warm snow, as in Russia to-day, 
 when the brute force is insufficient, or when the moral 
 
36 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 sense or the political theories of the community nullifies 
 its action. All that can be said of such peoples is summed 
 up in the words of Burke, speaking on Conciliation with 
 the revolted colonies in 1775 : " Force may subdue for a 
 moment ; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing 
 again ; and a nation is not governed whicti, is perpetually to 
 be conquered." 
 
 Free peoples and peoples desirous of putting their 
 freedom to good use will make their own laws, and will 
 make as few as possible. They will know that each fresh 
 law or regulation is a lessening of the freedom of all, an 
 unnecessary restriction on social energy, a certain opportu- 
 nity for internal conflict, a new impediment in the way of 
 equal rights, a serious hindrance to competition with other 
 peoples. 
 
 But good or bad as the laws may be, the community will 
 take the utmost care that they shall be justly and impartially 
 administered. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE DUTIES OF THE RULER INTERNAL ORDER 
 THE ENFORCEMENT OF LAW 
 
 IT is worth while to consider carefully the essentials in 
 a free society of this first and principal element of govern- 
 ment, for several good reasons the action of the ruler 
 here affects much more closely, more frequently, the free 
 action of members of the society, than other uses of his 
 power ; the members have, or if they choose it can have, 
 better knowledge of this action than of other, and better 
 control. The continued abuse of power in this respect only 
 will dissolve the society and destroy the possibility of liberty 
 for all, and the effects of such abuse cannot be foreseen and 
 will not be confined to any one locality or class of persons 
 in the future, but will extend itself to a variety of matters 
 not originally contemplated. 
 
 For example, as Sir Mark Sykes pointed out in the House 
 of Commons on June 25 last, " Sinn Fein is a potential 
 nucleus of a Bolshevist movement in the United Kingdom 
 in case of great moment of stress." It is not likely to stay 
 on one side of the Irish Channel. Does any one suppose 
 that conviction of persons charged with an attempt to 
 poison Mr. Lloyd George on evidence offered of a man who 
 could not be produced, will, under D.O.R.A., stop there ? 
 Has the hunger strike, to which the Suffragists were driven 
 by the cruelty and duplicity of the Asquith Ministry, 
 ceased on the discontinuance of their agitation ? 
 
 There is nothing which brings a society nearer to revolu- 
 tion than the tampering with the workings in the Courts of 
 Law of the guarantee for individual liberty. 
 
 Let us enumerate the essentials for freedom. 
 
 The judge in every case must be just and impartial, as 
 
 37 
 
38 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 free from the influence of the power which appointed him 
 to act as he should be from bias towards either party to the 
 trial. 
 
 Such a condition of independent equilibrium can only 
 be preserved by incessant watchfulness on the part of the 
 community. 
 
 Another important guarantee is that the charge of offence 
 against society shall be speedily heard in public. There 
 must be no delay in trial, no secrecy, no claim that it is 
 for the public good that the facts should not be known. 
 
 When at any time refusal of trial, refusal to produce 
 evidence, refusal to prove the charge brought, has occurred 
 in political matters, it has always been cloaked by the 
 same foolish excuse that to do justice, to respect liberty, 
 to carry out the elementary principles of real democracy, 
 was contrary to the public advantage. 
 
 The men who used the prisons of the Star Chamber for 
 their political opponents, the men who issued lettres de 
 cachet for the Bastille, the judges of the Vehmgericht, the 
 Inquisition of the Venetian oligarchs, the Ministers of 
 Bomba of Naples, the Inquisitors of Spain and Rome and 
 Flanders, all so excused their abuse of power, their deten- 
 tion of men in prison without trial, on the grounds of public 
 advantage. We have the evidence, they all say, plenty 
 of evidence, but no power will force us to produce it. It 
 would be contrary to the public advantage. Meanwhile 
 let them lie in prison. 
 
 This has been time out of mind one of the chief means 
 for the breaking of freedom. 
 
 Many dread the forgetfulness of prison who would not 
 fear to face death. Men and women in prison are out of 
 mind ; their fate deters some who might otherwise support 
 and suffer for free institutions. 
 
 The effect of the evil is still more far-reaching. It not 
 only injures the individual, it endangers the safety of 
 society, for the causes for which the untried prisoners suffer 
 pass into more desperate hands. 
 
 There is still further effect. In every one of the instances 
 I have given from the past this misuse of power has been 
 the prelude heralding speedily the revolution from which 
 we hope to be preserved. 
 
 We pass to another guarantee for fair trial. The witness 
 
PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 39 
 
 who speaks to any facts must be produced to testify openly, 
 so that the jury may form an opinion as to his credit, that 
 his statements may be sifted by cross-examination. Where 
 this guarantee of freedom is not present there is no fair 
 trial. 
 
 These two guarantees are included in the principle on 
 which our system rests that the burden of proof is upon 
 the prosecutor, and that the person is entitled to be treated 
 as innocent and to enjoy his freedom until clear proof has 
 been given of his guilt. 
 
 I assert without hesitation that any provisions of the 
 Defence of the Realm Acts or any like interference with 
 free institutions which may be adjudged necessary for the 
 conduct of the war are, so far as they contravene these 
 principles of a free people, not only an evil in themselves 
 as an abrogation of British liberty, not only wholly unneces- 
 sary, not affecting in the very least the issues of the war, 
 but very really harmful both to ourselves as affecting our 
 national spirit, encouraging distrust of our rulers, giving 
 an advantage to adverse comment which cannot be answered, 
 and detrimental to our reputation with the other peoples 
 of the world. 
 
 The guilt or innocence of the persons accused is beside 
 the question ; it is far better for the strengthening of the 
 moral powers of the nation that they should remain un- 
 punished if guilty than that they should be convicted in 
 defiance of the guarantees for individual liberty. 
 
 The Character of English Legal Procedure 
 
 Moreover we in these islands are in a unique position 
 with regard to those means by which our liberties are 
 retained. As a commercial people we have developed from 
 early times (it is not necessary here to inquire how or why) 
 a form of criminal procedure unlike that of other European 
 peoples, who have taken their forms from Rome. The 
 adoption of this system from us by the United States 
 forms one of the few close links between their people and 
 ourselves. 
 
 In other countries the procedure is an inquisition ; an 
 inquiry by the ruler on the part of the community into 
 all the circumstances attending the offence. 
 
 The whole object of the inquiry by the community being 
 
40 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 to elicit the facts in its interest, the procedure is conducted 
 in its interest without regard to that of the accused. He 
 may be kept in confinement, closely and repeatedly ques- 
 tioned, spied upon, subjected to all treatment short of 
 actual torture 1 which may lead to any discovery, treatment 
 which assumes that as a suspected person he is in all 
 probability guilty, and as such should be induced to confess 
 and to implicate others. The State decides what witnesses 
 shall be called, and the mode of examination. 
 
 Our Police Court procedure, being without appeal, tends 
 to a similar procedure and requires to be carefully watched. 
 But apart from this the ruler in these islands no longer 
 " maketh inquisition for blood." The criminal trial on 
 which a man's liberties depend is a public inquiry, but it 
 is a public inquiry in the interests of the community in 
 the form of a litigation between two private parties, like 
 the hearings at the Iceland Things in the Sagas. The Crown 
 assists the prosecutor to put forward his case, but it is so 
 far from acting as inquisitor that the prosecuting counsel 
 is bound to put forward in his statement not only the facts 
 against the accused but any which he knows to be in his 
 favour. 
 
 As a consequence all those guarantees of freedom that I 
 have enumerated, which are lacking in other countries 
 where the inquisitorial process has remained and developed, 
 have grown up round English criminal procedure. 
 
 The demagogue tries to persuade the people that their 
 freedom is menaced by militarism, by men learning to bear 
 arms in defence of their country. Clear your minds of 
 cant. Militarism plays little part in the loss of liberty ; 
 it only fills the vacant space when liberty is lost. 
 
 The constitutional historian would have you believe 
 that the talking and voting of money in the House of 
 Commons is the cause of your liberties. Clear your minds 
 of cant. The powers of talking and voting are not the 
 cause but the result of the freedom gained by our criminal 
 procedure which guarantees a fair trial. The usage of the 
 
 1 The third degree as used by the police in the United States 
 would seem to go beyond this and be actual torture. The particu- 
 lars above are stated for the most part with a view to French criminal 
 procedure. 
 
PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 41 
 
 House of Commons copies the proceedings in a court of 
 English law. The party system has grown from the same 
 model. 
 
 Whatever happens we must see to it that no ruler or 
 temporary delegate of a ruler shall deprive us of this. If 
 we lose this, if, from panic or for political profit, or from 
 desire of some temporary revenge, or from a hope of advance 
 by imitation of some other political form, we give up these 
 guarantees of liberty we lose all. And we shall find no 
 place of repentance, though we seek it with tears. 
 
 It has been a long struggle through the centuries to 
 obtain it, but the impartial character of the British adminis- 
 tration of justice is now acknowledged universally, though 
 many do not realize how easily it may be lost, or by what 
 efforts the foundations were laid. 
 
 The whole judicial system of the United States has 
 been borrowed from Great Britain. The laws are the same 
 laws, the courts are of the same character. Yet there is 
 perhaps not any stronger contrast between the two peoples 
 than the administration of these same laws, or a study which 
 would more thoroughly repay a capable politician than 
 that of how our liberties were gained. He should study 
 not the passion-heated atmosphere of political debate, 
 but the true patriotism of judges like Gascoigne, Coke or 
 Holt, who risked life, property and reputation to preserve 
 the integrity of the laws. You may have a House of 
 Commons always full of earnest, vehement defenders of 
 popular rights, but they will be of no avail, unless the 
 judges, even to the meanest, are so removed from tempta- 
 tion of reward, so free from political influence, that they 
 can be depended upon to administer impartial justice in 
 the Courts. 
 
 It is this condition which has hitherto obtained in the 
 Courts of the British Empire. There is probably in no 
 modern history a sight to which mankind can point with 
 greater pride, as showing the height to which a disinterested 
 sense of honour can mount, than the unpaid magistracy of 
 England, men of wealth, men of worth and leisure, giving 
 time and pains, in the face of vulgar obloquy and foolish 
 criticism, to the administration of the small and inglorious 
 matters of local law. 
 
 I will conclude this matter, already too long, by giving 
 
42 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 a short illustration which may show how easily these liber- 
 ties may be lost. 
 
 English Magistrates Courts : an Illustration 
 
 In the far away prehistoric days before the war, Parlia- 
 ment in 1906 passed the " Justices of the Peace Act," 
 rendering a property qualification unnecessary for a County 
 Justice. 
 
 This bill, passed to offset the number of men of property 
 on the Bench who were Conservatives, by creating magis- 
 trates with no property qualification who were Liberals, 
 is the most dangerous, the most insane, the most destructive 
 Act, which even Parliament, in its worst moments, has 
 passed in a century, and that to any one who has followed 
 Parliamentary happenings is saying a very great deal. 
 
 There had not been, so far as I know, the slightest sug- 
 gestion made that the unpaid Justices had abused their 
 office, that they had declaimed politics from the Bench, 
 or had allowed politics to influence their decisions, or that 
 they had in any way discriminated against political oppo- 
 nents. If there had been any such case to quote, it would 
 have been carried through the country at the election like 
 a carted bawd, with the cheap loaf and the Chinaman in 
 chains. 
 
 Now the first qualification for an upright magistrate 
 is that he shall be either, by the independence of his wealth 
 out of the reach of bribery, and by the certainty of his 
 tenure out of reach of fear of revenge from political enemies, 
 or that he shall be made so by the qualifications of his 
 office. 
 
 That he shall be out of reach of bribery means that his 
 office shall not be the reward of party politics. 
 
 It is a high tribute to the honour with which the magis- 
 trates had performed their judicial duties that they had 
 deceived Parliament into believing that their imperfect 
 natures, apart from the quickset of condition by which it 
 has been fenced, were sufficient guarantee for the present 
 satisfactory state of justice. 
 
 This Justices Act at one blow destroyed all that guarantee 
 of independence of the Bench, which, for the last hundred 
 years at least, has rendered possible the granting of large 
 local powers, alleviating legislation for the poor, and has 
 
PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 43 
 
 enabled this country to dispense with much military force. 
 
 The Justice of no property, the small tradesman or work- 
 ing man, would be open to many acts of coercive bribery 
 from men of means or from associations of force and wealth. 
 He has every inducement to favour wealth and power, 
 where they conflict with poverty and weakness, the trades 
 union, for instance, as against the non-union worker ; 
 and beyond that he is open to that subtle bribery which 
 has taken the place in political battles of beer and money. 
 
 The Act, as it stands, in words, is no more harmful than 
 the allegation of equality in the Declaration of Indepen- 
 dence. The Lord Lieutenant still appoints, and so long 
 as the Lord Lieutenant is not dragged into politics on 
 account of his powers of appointment, he may be trusted 
 to appoint proper persons. But, as Mr. Turnbull says, 
 " There is very little importance in the declaration of 
 abstract principles, unless they can be carried into effect." 
 
 On January 3, 1907, a Mr. Barnard, M.P. for Kidder- 
 minster, wrote to The Times, p. 5, column 3, expressing a 
 desire that the appointment of Justices should be placed 
 on a non-political basis, at some future time, when the Justices 
 had become Liberal. He points out the very large majority 
 of Conservative magistrates, and says, " Could anything 
 be more unfair to a great political party ? Justice cries 
 aloud for a prompt restitution to these men of their too 
 long withheld political rights. . . . It (the appointment of 
 magistrates) is simply and solely the political right of the 
 dominant party in the State." 
 
 This principle, announced in 1907, that appointments 
 to the magisterial Bench are simply and solely the political 
 right of the dominant party in the State, is the very bed- 
 rock foundation stone of all American judicial appointments, 
 and the first cause of the unquestioned want of justice in 
 their Courts. It is the result of a misuse of the word 
 "liberty." 
 
 In America the way of expressing Mr. Barnard's principle 
 is " the spoils to the victor," whether the appointment is 
 a Federal Postmaster or a State Judge, all such offices 
 being political appointments ; it is an understood thing 
 that the capacity of the man is nothing, his party affiliation 
 everything. No doubt there are many honest men on the 
 Bench in the United States now, as there were in England 
 
44 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 in the days of Scroggs and Jeffreys, when Mr. Barnard's 
 principle was acted on, and when the judicial murders of 
 the Popish plot and the Bloody Assize disgraced the English 
 Bench ; but the principle of preferment for political services 
 fights against single-mindedness and honesty of opinion. 
 
 The process of evolution of the political magistrate from 
 the present County Bench may be a long one. But, long 
 or short, the eventual end must be the appointment as a 
 reward for political services of men fit only by such services, 
 who, having no qualification of wealth to support them, 
 will naturally come to look upon office as a means of acquir- 
 ing wealth. Then whether he makes use of his office for 
 gain by taking bribes, or by jobbery, or for revenge upon 
 his political opponent, the end is the same. The respect- 
 able man goes off the Bench and gives place to the " ward 
 heeler/' 
 
 Very soon the office ceases to be an unpaid one. Does 
 any one suppose that the troublesome, inglorious duties 
 of a country Justice will be undertaken by the small trader 
 or working man for honour only, and that he will leave his 
 daily bread to spend time upon the Bench without some 
 monetary gain ? 
 
 The British are no more honest and certainly no more 
 clever by nature than the Americans. But they are hedged 
 in by morality preached to them for many centuries, and 
 by honesty on the Bench gained by a succession of struggles 
 by upright judges against power in high places. When 
 they are induced to give away the blessings won for them 
 in the past, in exchange for the fiction of equality which 
 advantages the political nonconformist, they will revert 
 to the parody of justice in use in the smaller courts of the 
 United States. If the principle of the spoils to the victors 
 is once admitted as to our judiciary, there will very soon 
 be no appointment, however small, which will not be made 
 the reward of party support in politics. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE DUTIES OF THE RULER ABROAD COLONIES 
 AND POSSESSIONS 
 
 WHEN the principles of judicial procedure have once 
 been adopted they may be expected to continue a fairly 
 even course. They become fixed, subject to such unvary- 
 ing rules that it is fairly safe to leave them in the hands 
 of the judges appointed from the great trade unions trained 
 for legal affairs. It is only when politics interfere, when 
 the party politician wishes to injure some opponent, that 
 there is need for the ruler to take pains to obtain justice 
 for the accused, a fair trial. 
 
 But when we turn to external affairs, the relations of 
 the ruler in his dealings with foreign nations, or his powers 
 over and his duties to distant communities allied by blood, 
 descent or emigration, or dependent by conquest or absorp- 
 tion, we come upon conditions requiring very different 
 treatment. The conditions vary from day to day, calling 
 for ripe judgment, quick decision and complete freedom of 
 action. In such dealing no one generation can lay down 
 a rule for the next to follow with safety or certainty, and 
 the questions should be referred to some expert who has 
 made careful study of world conditions. Here we come 
 upon a new duty of government, and a new aspect of 
 equality. 
 
 The Colonies 
 
 There are people who show no reluctance to receive divi- 
 dends from the labour of other countries, worked under 
 conditions into which they do not inquire, who object to 
 the unemployed men of the nation going forth to till the 
 earth elsewhere if by that means they displace other men 
 who are tilling it ever so feebly. 
 
 45 
 
46 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 It is waste of time to try to convince these people for 
 many reasons ; they are generally sincere, unmoved by 
 gain, and so open to no charge of self-interest ; they very 
 seldom make any effort to put themselves in the place 
 of the colonizing party ; they take no trouble to become 
 acquainted with facts ; and they are generally totally 
 incapable of learning the lessons of history. 
 
 That their ignorance is not entirely their own fault will 
 appear from the following taken from the Pall Mall Gazette, 
 July 8, 1918 : 
 
 " No Imperial History Books. Mr. H. A. L. Fisher, 
 President of the Board of Education, explained to a depu- 
 tation that one of the difficulties in the way of teaching 
 Imperial history in the schools was the complete absence 
 of text books dealing with the subject." 
 
 The only progress which the world makes either in morals, 
 intellect or physical power is by the rough and ready method 
 of the conquest of the weaker by the stronger, the replacing 
 of poor methods by better, the supremacy of those systems 
 of morals, those forms of government, those views of politics 
 and literature which tell for social advance over those of 
 lesser efficiency, in short by a process which admits in- 
 equality. 
 
 It is a persistent, an ever-present war between the socially 
 strong and the socially weak, in which the weak are exter- 
 minated or live in a position of subordination, and a like 
 war between the stronger races, in which the fittest survive. 
 In spite of all the nonsense talked about a war to end 
 war, a league of nations to enforce peace and so forth, 
 the necessary fire of war in which the fitness of nations 
 competing for existence is tried, must continue to be a 
 factor of life. No league of nations would be of value 
 without a league of churches. 
 
 No greater misfortune could befall the world than that 
 any one State, Germany or other, could attain such a world 
 dominance as to do away with the need for further struggle, 
 a pax Germanica or a pax Brittanica or a pax Americana, 
 in which advance by competition would cease, a trades 
 union which could fix the price for progress or the rate of 
 wages for adventure and risk. 
 
 The world can only advance in this fashion. Every 
 agreement for arbitration, by which a race socially stronger 
 
PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 47 
 
 abandons territory to the possession of a weaker, is a step 
 backwards in the world's progress. When this war is over, 
 if we believe in ourselves and our ideals and are faithful 
 to our trust for humanity, we shall disregard the fury of 
 the Free Trade Pacifist Press and fight the German and 
 the Turk all over the world. We shall hold his colonies 
 for our trade and for our ideals of social life and for our 
 freedom. No religion is of any value that is not militant 
 for its ideals. He that hath no sword, let him sell his 
 garment and buy one. 
 
 The races which colonize must be vigorous races, proud 
 of themselves and believing in their superiority over the 
 other races of the world. They will never colonize a new 
 country without coming into contact with other races less 
 virile than they are, or less advanced in material means of 
 power, or without conflict with other races of their own 
 character. Thus there will arise at once a condition of 
 inequality which has to be met in the main by the rough 
 and ready methods of shoving and pushing which is part 
 of the recognized lot of the colonist. Manhood there comes 
 to the front. 
 
 To give him any right to colonize at all, the colonist 
 must be of a superior race, and must insist on his superiority. 
 
 A Republic and Colonies 
 
 Under these conditions it is plainly impossible for a 
 republic, which rests on a fictitious equality of rights, to 
 have any such colonies, or to incorporate in its republican 
 bounds any races of a lower standard than its own except 
 as equals. All men within the republic must have equal 
 rights, especially the right to the franchise. The republic 
 must live and die on its own level without any advance 
 and any development. 
 
 The rulers of the American Republic have from time to 
 time acknowledged and acted on this fact, though not 
 always. They have acted on it sufficiently to inflict in 
 the case of the negro great injury to the republic, and to 
 show in the case of Cuba originally great self-restraint. 
 How far temptation in this case will outlast a principle 
 which rests on the fiction of equality will be seen. 
 
48 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 The British Colonies 
 
 The greatness of the self-governing colonies of Great 
 Britain, and their success in their dealings with the problems 
 of race which distress them, are obscured to the British 
 by the incessant adulation given to the United States. 
 
 They have had very much the same problems to face, 
 European immigration, the position of native races, Indians 
 or Maoris, Chinese, the Negro, and the British subject from 
 Hindustan ; they have faced them, and go far to solve 
 them, without having to resort to any great extent to 
 chicanery and fraud, and without setting out any false 
 principles of political life. 
 
 I believe that great part of the success of Great Britain 
 in her colonizing work is due to the elasticity resulting from 
 the admission of political inequality, subject only to the 
 acknowledgment of a common head and a just and common 
 law. 
 
 No connection between the mother country and a colony 
 could exist without friction, especially when the child gets 
 too big for the stick. But in spite of difficulty and dis- 
 content, the causes of trouble over the relations between 
 races have for the most part been peacefully surmounted, 
 except where, as in South Africa, the colonists have been 
 subjected to fits of vicious interference from these islands 
 for a century, and to attempts by politicians at home to 
 create cleavage between the races by taking sides against 
 their own people without any knowledge of the problems 
 which lie before them for solution. 
 
 Successful French colonization ended with their pronounce- 
 ment of a doctrine of equality of man. The German, on 
 the other hand, fails because the ruling race is not itself 
 free. The rule is by brute force only, with the result that 
 the equality of all under the law to which a free-ruling race 
 advance is discouraged. Having no liberty themselves, 
 the ruling race assert their superiority by degrading the 
 inferior. 
 
 To appreciate the splendid success of British colonization 
 one must turn away from the continents peacefully acquired, 
 such as Australia and New Zealand, and look to the lands 
 absorbed as a result of conquest already inhabited by strong 
 
PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 49 
 
 and progressive races. Fusion, so far as it is necessary or 
 advisable, has followed in such colonies under British rule 
 where the line of development has been left to the men 
 concerned. 
 
 The most striking example of all, to be considered later, 
 where fusion is either not possible or followed by ill effects, 
 is India. It has no parallel in any records of the world. 
 
 The British colonies, the homes of sea-faring men, united 
 by wide stretches of sea, have been able to watch all sorts 
 of experiments, in religious development of every descrip- 
 tion, in the adaptation of trade requirements, and in race 
 treatments from the Dyaks of Borneo and the Maoris of 
 New Zealand to the Transvaal Boer and the French Canadian. 
 When let alone they have solved their problems satisfac- 
 torily. 
 
 It would appear as if the period of stretching colonization 
 over vast areas was past for European powers, and that 
 the time for consolidation of such acquisitions, in order to 
 hold them against inferior races, and to stock them with 
 European blood, has now come. A warning voice should 
 be raised against encouraging any colony to fill up its 
 territory with population, regardless of their value as men. 
 Such a course is destructive of freedom. 
 
 The time will come, not so very far off, when the Euro- 
 pean races will have to stand shoulder to shoulder against 
 the other races in their colonies to preserve their existence 
 as ruling races. 
 
 The struggle only now beginning is not between European 
 nations for the possession of territory, but between the 
 European and the Chinaman, the European and the Negro, 
 the Turk, the Mohammedan Arab, possibly the Indian of 
 Hindustan. Success can only come to the European nations 
 sinking their differences and welcoming each other's colo- 
 nists as a bulwark against the black and yellow invasion. 
 The nation which attracts the best and most white immi- 
 grants will succeed. 
 
 I would say, though I can well believe that such a saying 
 will be unpopular and would be misconstrued, that a 
 German in a British colony subject to British influence 
 is an asset superior to several Japanese or Chinese. Great 
 Britain is in a far better position than other races to-day 
 to compete for the best colonists. Her laws are better 
 
50 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 executed, and her government, except in Ireland, is more 
 just. 
 
 But above all no race can be successful eventually in 
 Colonizing that regards standing on two legs as a qualifi- 
 cation for voting. It leads to the admission in the future 
 of the lower races to a political equality, and the door once 
 opened remains open. 
 
 The young colony is a thin sprinkling of the superior 
 race over a large area of land ; it will need the assistance 
 of the old country against the attacks of neighbours who 
 are supported from their European connection, as we had 
 to support our South African colonies by the Boer war, 
 not only against the Boers but against the German power 
 who assisted them, ready to jump into our position if we 
 had been defeated as the Japanese would jump into our 
 position in India to-day if we left it. 
 
 This brings us back to the political relations of the colony 
 to the European country from which it sprang. 
 
 The Contrast of the British Colonies and American 
 States 
 
 It is natural, as I have noted the different specimens 
 of British and American oratory and contrasted the prin- 
 ciples upon which the two countries proceed, to go on to 
 contrast the relations of the States of the American Union 
 to the Federal authority with those of the British colonies 
 to the government of the islands. It is a very instructive 
 contrast. 
 
 The States of the American Union correspond very par- 
 tially to the British colony. But there is a likeness and 
 a contrast. 
 
 The steady tendency of the British offshoot from the 
 islands is to become an independent community, united 
 only for purposes of mutual safety to the British islands ; 
 it appears to tend to a Federation somewhat like that of 
 the United States but increasingly jealous of Federal 
 authority exercised from these islands ; the States of the 
 United States, which were formerly, until the attempt of 
 the southern States to enforce their right to secede led 
 to its extinction, sovereign States, who had voluntarily 
 entered into a compact for union on equal terms. They 
 are, since the Civil War decided against secession, no longer 
 
PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 51 
 
 independent sovereign States, the Federal authority inclines 
 constantly to grow stronger at the expense of the State ; 
 but there may be a long history yet to come. 
 
 Let us look at the conditions which differentiate the two 
 combinations. 
 
 In the American Union, the several States, corresponding, 
 let us say, ,to New South Wales, Ireland, Cape Colony, and 
 Nova Scotia, have each its own legislature and executive 
 to attend to local questions, and that not devised for it 
 by the older State, but modelled by itself. Over all is 
 the Federal Legislature (in which each State is represented, 
 in the Upper House equally regardless of strength, and in 
 the Lower House according to population), controlling the 
 army and navy, post office, customs and foreign relations. 
 
 Each State contributes to the upkeep of the Federal 
 Government and to the support of forces for national defence, 
 and each State has in return a voice in the management 
 of Federal matters. 
 
 As all the States are in a ring fence on one continent, 
 there can be little disagreement in case of an attack upon 
 any one of them by a powerful neighbour, so that one great 
 cause of friction between Britain and her colonies, which 
 led to the American Revolution, is absent. 
 
 The sense of security from attacks without has led to 
 jealousy of the interference of the Federal power in compos- 
 ing difficulties within. It is not so long ago that an offer 
 made by the President of the United States to send Federal 
 troops to assist the State authority of a North- Western 
 State to put down serious disturbance which threatened 
 to develop into civil war was answered by the Governor 
 in language of which the actual words, if I remember rightly, 
 were " Mind your own business." 
 
 The anomalous position of the British colonies is in 
 strong contrast to that of the States of the United States. 
 It brings into full relief the absurd falsity of the conceptions 
 of government by the will of the people which fill the speeches 
 of the British politicians. Their only connection with 
 the islands apart from sentiment is the tie of allegiance 
 to the King. He is their ruler and their only ruler, save 
 as the community appoints its own local delegate to 
 manage affairs. Subject to his control of some of their 
 relations with foreign nations, they are absolutely self- 
 
52 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 governing ; they claim complete independence of the 
 British Parliament ; they tax themselves ; they decide for 
 themselves whether or not their sons shall fight and die for 
 the Empire. 
 
 Australia, like Ireland, has definitely refused conscription. 
 In Canada the civil authorities propose to leave its enforce- 
 ment to the military. General Botha has told us plainly 
 that no Imperial Parliament could ever decide such a 
 question for South Africa. In no one of these countries 
 can any British Prime Minister, however supported in these 
 islands, obtain a man by compulsion. Colonies have always 
 refused to be ordered by the Parliaments of the country 
 of origin. It was the attempt of the British Parliament 
 to tax the American colonies which brought about that 
 Declaration of Independence. In these matters history 
 has a way of repeating itself. 
 
 The anomalous position of the British colonies extends 
 much further. They have no representation in the British 
 Parliament, so that in matters of Federal import, of which 
 the King leaves the execution to his Ministers, they are at 
 the mercy of the decisions caused by party politics in Eng- 
 land or by academic theories of men who have no knowledge 
 of their local conditions, while the British islands pay the 
 whole cost of the defence of the colonies of the Empire. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE DUTIES OF THE RULER ABROAD 
 FREEDOM OF TRADE FEDERATION 
 
 THE chief anomaly of the position is that all the oversea 
 possessions have in commercial matters a destructive 
 independence which tends to force them apart from the 
 mother country, enabling them to put up tariffs to exclude 
 British goods from their territories. We come to another 
 aspect of the word freedom, FREEDOM OF TRADE. 
 
 It is manifestly impossible for any statesman to lay 
 down an absolute rule which for all time can guide a people 
 in their commercial dealings either with their own brethren 
 or with strangers. 
 
 The seasons on which the supply of food depends vary ; 
 in one year there is plenty, in another dearth ; in one 
 country a good, in another a scanty harvest ; the new dis- 
 covered capacity of some country to produce some much 
 wanted product, gold in the Transvaal or Klondyke, rubber 
 in Para, tea in Ceylon, oil in Pennsylvania or Baku, aniline 
 dyes, potash, the thousand and one things which from time 
 to time revolutionize some branch of trade, cause distur- 
 bance of the course of trade, the decay of some places and 
 the increase of others. 
 
 Trade routes change for political reasons, as when the 
 captures of Constantinople by the unspeakable Turk forced 
 Europeans to find another road to the East. 
 
 The trade routes may change by the discovery of new 
 lands, as when the merchants of Europe were startled from 
 their accustomed markets by the change of trade and the 
 competition resulting from the discovery of the new worlds 
 of America, of Java and Sumatra and of Australasia, or 
 they may be disturbed and entirely rearranged by war, 
 
 53 
 
54 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 It would be strange indeed if after this war the great road 
 of Alexander the Great from Susa to Sardes should not 
 become more prominent as a causeway of trade. 
 
 Under such ever- changing conditions a sensible ruler 
 will use discretion and common sense to meet changes ; 
 he will try to foresee them ; while he recognizes the principles 
 which underlie all commerce, all foreign relations, he will 
 be unlikely to lay down a hard and fast rule which will 
 admit of no alteration. 
 
 The State should try to be Self-supporting 
 
 One of the first principles which underlies the art of 
 government connecting industry at home with commerce 
 and colonization abroad is that the community must, as 
 far as may be, support itself, so as to be independent of 
 the want which may follow the changes and chances of 
 external trade. As complete independence can only come 
 by the universal convenience for exchanging products, 
 freedom of commerce from vexatious restrictions and tolls 
 is a first necessity. 
 
 An Illustration of Freedom of Trade 
 
 The dealings of the party politicians with tariffs and 
 foreign commerce during the last eighty years furnish us 
 with a good illustration of the false use of the word "free " 
 in regard to this subject. 
 
 In the forties of the last century there was good reason 
 for adopting a policy of commercial exchange which would 
 give great facility for the import of grain and other food 
 from foreign countries. The British Islands, with a great 
 surplus of manufactured goods, for the disposal of which 
 she was searching the world's markets, did not produce 
 in the islands sufficient food for her population. As long 
 as her prosperity lasts she can never do so. 
 
 Though the production of grain was at that time far in 
 advance of the production much later, when the academic 
 political theorists had forced the land user back to the 
 conditions of the seventeenth century without the timber, 
 the islands were largely dependent on foreign food. This 
 came for the most part from European countries ; the 
 Western States of the United States had not then been 
 opened up and the slowness of transit reduced the value 
 
PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 55 
 
 of imports from the new world. The balance of trade was 
 very largely in favour of the islands. Everything pointed 
 to the encouragement of a free importation of corn. 
 
 Then conditions wholly changed. Other nations took 
 advantage of the open market offered ; they not only 
 invaded the islands, but, accepting the principle of the 
 open market where it coincided with their own interests, 
 they attacked and took possession of markets formerly 
 in the possession of the islanders in their colonies and in 
 foreign countries all the world over. 
 
 But while accepting the British invitation to use these 
 islands as a free dumping ground for their own surplus 
 goods, the leading industrial nations put heavy protective 
 tariffs on British goods exported to their own markets. 
 They killed the principle of Freedom of Trade, mutual 
 exchange. That it should be mutual is of the essence of 
 all kinds of freedom. 
 
 Another factor arising at the same time was the changed 
 condition of the wheat production of the world. The 
 Western States of the United States and Canada were 
 opened up for the production of immense crops of grain 
 at cheap cost by new machinery. India, the Argentine 
 Republic, even Australia and New Zealand poured their 
 surplus food into the islands. 
 
 Very speedy transport of all this food, whether grain 
 or cattle or fruits, rendered any fear of want or famine a 
 very distant possibility. There was no longer the urgent 
 necessity for the islands to make the highest bid for the 
 surplus food of Europe in conditions under which a scanty 
 harvest might mean famine. 
 
 Another factor of importance was the increasing ratio 
 of prominence in trade by the nations who had grown in 
 competition with the British in their own markets while 
 withholding reciprocity of freedom. 
 
 It was clearly to the advantage of the islands to import 
 their food from their own kinsfolk in the colonies or from 
 other nations, who would in return give them an open 
 market for their manufactured goods. 
 
 To any man of ordinary common sense who had " vision," 
 there had arisen a splendid opening for bargaining which 
 might serve to great advantage a double purpose, the 
 welfare of the trade of the Empire and the extension, of 
 
56 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 the principle, a fundamental principle of civilized trade 
 relations, mutual freedom of trade from tolls and restric- 
 tions. Of course it is essential that the freedom should 
 be mutual. 
 
 The British " Free Trade " Policy 
 
 Unfortunately the sovereign had ceased to take part in 
 government ; there was no ruler of the islands who could 
 consider the very difficult questions arising out of trade 
 relations with foreign countries from the standpoint of 
 the welfare of the whole community. There were only two 
 political parties, who in his absence treated the whole 
 question as the pivot of advantage to their faction. 
 
 Party government has the effect of replacing considera- 
 tions of principle by advantage for party tactics. The 
 academic politician who might have considered principle 
 was so eaten up by his conceit that he failed to realize that, 
 because Great Britain had laid down a well acknowledged 
 principle, it need not happen that all the other nations of 
 the world would follow her example where it operated to 
 their own detriment. 
 
 As a result there has arisen the pitiful position that the 
 nation which originated the crusade for Freedom of Trade 
 covers, after sixty years of effort, the smallest area of free 
 trade among the great nations, that she is debarred from 
 the markets of her own colonial possessions and is buffeted 
 on every side by protective tariffs. 
 
 Yet there were two great examples before her if her 
 politicians had only had the gift of imagination to enable 
 them to learn the lesson, the United States and Germany, 
 States that were fast eating up her external trade because 
 they had themselves effected the first step towards free 
 trade, complete freedom in a certain defined area within 
 their own borders. 
 
 It must be very galling to the apostles of Cobdenism to 
 see a country saddled with the very highest protective 
 tariff not only enjoying prosperity and a superabundance 
 of wealth, but rapidly overtaking the nation of " free 
 imports " in every branch of commerce and manufacture. 
 Yet, if they could but see it, the lesson is not the good effect 
 of protection, but the advantages of Freedom of Trade 
 properly applied in practice, instead of being kept to the 
 
PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 57 
 
 closet of the Cobdenite philosopher. For the United States 
 is the greatest Free Trade country in the world. Over a 
 tract of land larger than Europe some three thousand by 
 two thousand miles there is absolute and unqualified Free 
 Trade. The lumberman of Minnesota or Michigan can 
 exchange his products of the freezing north for the sugar 
 and rice of Louisiana and Mississippi without any customs 
 or duties ; the wine and fruits of California can cross the 
 continent in free exchange for the turpentine and cotton 
 of the Carolinas. A country with so vast a free exchange 
 can afford to put up its bars against the outside world even 
 if it does not do so with discretion. 
 
 A Suggestion for Freedom of Trade 
 
 What is to prevent Great Britain from forming with her 
 Colonies and Dependencies a Free Trade area of the same 
 character, only on a more solid foundation and of far vaster 
 size ? Nothing, if she can once get over the fallacy of 
 cheapness with which the demagogue deceives an ignorant 
 working class. 
 
 Englishmen forget only too often the nature of their 
 Colonies and Dependencies. 
 
 When the eastern seaboard of America became crowded, 
 the emigrant crossed the Alleghanies and the Ohio into 
 worlds unknown, and formed new States for the Union. 
 And when these worlds were in their turn filled up, he 
 crossed the Rockies to the Pacific Coast and overflowed 
 into Texas and California. He carried his Free Trade with 
 him. And now he is crowding into Western Canada, ready, 
 when the moment comes, to seize that magnificent land for 
 his free commerce. 
 
 The overflow of the British islands crosses no mountains ; 
 it crosses the sea, the same sea which laps the shores of 
 the islands and the shores of the new land, and forms the 
 boundary line of the new States. Joined by the highway 
 of the sea, the great States of the Canadian, Australian and 
 African Commonwealths and New Zealand bear to Great 
 Britain the same relation geographically as the States 
 of the Middle and Far West bear to the Carolinas, Virginia 
 and Massachusetts. The same may be said of India. And 
 there might be Free Trade over all this United Empire. 
 
 The States of the United States are bound together by 
 
58 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 bands far less strong than those which should unite Great 
 Britain and her sovereign States beyond the seas ; there 
 is no long history of the great deeds of a homogeneous 
 people to unite Louisiana and Maine ; and the imaginary 
 lines which form the borders of the several United States 
 are no such close bond of union as the sea which unites 
 Great Britain's States to her. Let Britons once grasp the 
 fact that the sea in every instance (except the Transvaal and 
 the Orange Free State) forms the border lines of their 
 States, and they might realize a dream of Free Trade far 
 beyond Cobden's wildest anticipations, and form an empire 
 of peace and liberty, which should exist for all time. 
 
 But to achieve this they must be willing to give up some- 
 thing and to pay something ; there is no something for 
 nothing in this world. It is a matter for bargaining. 
 
 Before any such mutual relation could be brought about 
 between the Mother Country and the Colonial States as 
 would open up a vast area of Free Trade, whatever schemes 
 of " Imperial Preference " may be started at Westminster, 
 a vital change would have to come about in the adminis- 
 tration of the Empire. The British Parliament must finally 
 give up all control over Imperial questions to an Imperial 
 authority. 
 
 There are several powerful arguments against any change 
 of fiscal system, whether from Free Imports and heavily 
 taxed Exports to mutual Free Trade or Protection, or 
 from one tariff to another. Of these arguments probably 
 the strongest is the uncertainty created that, however 
 well it may work eventually, the installation of the change 
 is always accompanied for a time by depressing disturbance 
 of trade. For example, in the United States in the year 
 preceding and following the election of a new President, 
 trade delays while the buyer is waiting to see results. 
 
 It would be absurd to expect that the great Colonial 
 States should upset their entire fiscal system, disturb and 
 to a certainty lose some foreign markets, and risk great cost 
 and loss, only to find six years later that the British elector, 
 not moved by Imperial interests but influenced by a general 
 check in trade the world over, frightened by dearer goods, 
 or misled by purely local issues, had declared for a reversal 
 of the policy, to find themselves in fact at the mercy of 
 sectarian hatred or party animosity. 
 
PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 59 
 
 A Scheme of Federation 
 
 If the British desire that these four huge continents 
 (peopled by men equally alive to their commercial needs 
 and far more self-reliant than the British electorate which 
 decides their destiny) should join them in Free Trade, they 
 must lay the foundations of empire in a National Council 
 of two Chambers, apart from the British Parliament, a 
 Council which would, in the first place, give the Colonies a 
 full voice in the management of all Imperial concerns. 
 
 The first essential of such a Council is that its head should 
 be one who represents the whole Empire, not only the 
 islands and not at all a faction in the islands. That the 
 possible views, not ascertained, of the people of Criccieth 
 or Fife represent the Empire is a most whole-hearted and 
 most dangerous fiction. All empires sooner or later die, 
 unless the community which rules is fully and clearly 
 represented in government, both by its delegated head and 
 in the group of advisers who must assist him. Empire 
 assumes a ruling race. 
 
 As a head there is for us only one such person the 
 Sovereign, the ruler alike of the people of these islands, 
 of the great self-governing Colonies and of the various 
 dominions such as India. 
 
 A king is the only personality in the Empire who can 
 be sufficiently free from bias to undertake such an office. 
 For no other man is such freedom possible, however pure 
 in mind and single-hearted he may be. So completely is 
 the party system ingrained in our politics that it will be 
 at least two generations before the young people can dis- 
 prove the gibe of Gilbert's Bab Ballads that every little boy 
 or girl is born a little Liberal or else a little Conservative. 
 Even at this present the Coalition which is supposed to 
 represent national unity is detaching the independent 
 thinkers by the attempt to remove from Parliament former 
 members however able who will not positively subscribe 
 to their very extensive and futurist programme. 
 
 His Majesty has many personal qualifications for such 
 a position. He is, what few of his Ministers can be, a 
 travelled man. He has visited foreign lands and has from 
 a standpoint which is denied to the man of the people a 
 knowledge of other peoples and manners and languages, 
 
60 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 a knowledge of which his Ministers are often sadly deficient. 
 His Majesty's silence, which could often have been so easily 
 broken to his apparent advantage during this war, is by 
 no means a sign of weakness. One of the difficulties of 
 the position of a constitutional sovereign is that apart from 
 gossip the people have no means of becoming acquainted 
 with the real character of their ruler or of measuring the 
 man responsible for all administration with his temporary 
 and garrulous Ministers. 
 
 But the King's fitness as President of such a Council 
 does not rest on any personal characteristics. He is the 
 only person who can possibly represent the entire Empire 
 away from faction and from the reach of influence and 
 bribery ; he represents all classes ; he has no interest in 
 favour of any ; he is able from his position to deal with all 
 freely ; he stands for the protection of unpopular minori- 
 ties ; he stands for the national religion, for the country's 
 view of the moral sense as embodied in the national Church ; 
 and he represents in his person as an inheritance the tradi- 
 tion of the growth of the whole British people in a long, 
 various and inconstant history. 
 
 Whether his Majesty would make a better or a worse 
 President of such a Council than Queen Anne, the last 
 sovereign who presided over her Cabinet, or any other kings 
 or queens before her, is immaterial. Men as they show 
 themselves are judged by their acts and not by their volume 
 of talk. Any disadvantages are offset by the unity attained, 
 the full representation of the community, the Empire. 
 Contrast his Majesty's position with the President of a 
 Republic, first and last a man of party, who works for his 
 party in the State and exacts to the last the spoils for the 
 victors. 
 
 In the course of centuries of history the powers of the 
 king as head of the great Council of the Empire have been 
 so closely marked out as to remove any fear for the freedom 
 of the people or the non-enforcement of their will, so long 
 as the Council is free. 
 
 In such a Council the King would have what none of 
 his Ministers ever can have under present conditions, the 
 expert advice and knowledge of the ablest men of all parties 
 in the entire Empire, and he will have what now he has 
 not got, a free Parliament of all his people. 
 
PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 61 
 
 Those who approve of the destruction of the powers of 
 the House of Lords, because it has occasionally resisted 
 that phase of transitory passion euphemistically known 
 as the will of the people, might study with advantage the 
 elected American Senate, especially as the Senate is, as 
 often as not, in conflict either with the House of Represen- 
 tatives or with the President, and does not generally give 
 way. 
 
 The Contrast of the United States 
 
 The Senate has the advantage of the House of Lords 
 in its numbers, two Senators for each State, irrespective 
 of size and population. But in its composition the Senate 
 differs entirely from the Lords. Except so far as any 
 Senator may express Iccal issues the Senate consists only 
 of paid politicians, men who are delegates of the great 
 manufacturing and mining corporations, lawyers feed by 
 the trusts and the railroads, agents of municipal corpora- 
 tions, guarding against blackmail. Any form of religious 
 belief or morals, the arts and sciences, the learned profes- 
 sions, the army and navy, agriculture, philanthropy, or 
 the interests of the workers in any shape, are entirely 
 unrepresented. Money only, and only money in the hands 
 of aggregates of men, is represented in the American Senate. 
 Any man who wishes to make himself heard and assert his 
 legal rights must belong to a corporate body of money- 
 getters. 
 
 The House of Lords, in spite of its weak points which call 
 for internal reform, is so truly representative in the widest 
 sense that it would be comparatively easy to form from it 
 an Upper Chamber of the Empire which should represent 
 that Empire in its entirety. The Colonial Proconsul, the 
 Indian Viceroy, the Liberal philanthropist, the scholar, 
 the manufacturer, the soldier, the churchman, here meet on 
 ground where, freed from the necessity of flattering the 
 vote of the moment, they can consider the interests of the 
 whole people as a society. They are at present equally 
 free from the subservience to monarchy which endangered 
 British freedom in the past, and from the need of conciliating 
 the interests of powerful combinations of capital or labour 
 which promises to be the danger of government in the 
 future. 
 
62 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 The Problem of Finance 
 
 Any popular Chamber, whether local or Imperial, must 
 deal as a first duty with that most difficult of all questions 
 of government, the provision of the means of carrying it 
 on. Finance is one of the chief difficulties of the art of 
 Government. 
 
 Whoever aspires to rule need never expect anything but 
 blame for his management of the regulation of expenditure. 
 It is a matter of such great difficulty that if badly managed 
 it may easily lead .to revolt. " Great is bankruptcy," says 
 Thomas Carlyle ; "no falsehood, did it rise heaven high 
 and cover the earth, but bankruptcy would one day sweep 
 it down and make us free of it." It is the prelude of revo- 
 lution. 
 
 Men object very much to pay for government, and how- 
 ever honest and capable it may be they always imagine 
 that their money is being wasted and stolen. They are 
 often willing that others shall have the responsibility of 
 this heavy burden of governing, so long as they are not 
 called on to contribute either blood or money. They 
 generally expect to become richer under a strong govern- 
 ment, and they often do so. But they never wish to pay 
 for their increase of riches. The ruler, in the collection of 
 the means of government, will follow the path of least 
 resistance. 
 
 The Colonial View of Federation 
 
 Participation in Federal control means that the States 
 represented would tax themselves for Imperial expenses 
 and Imperial defence. Would the British Colonies do so ? 
 
 I believe that they would. Only those who have spent 
 many years away from the Mother Country can appreciate 
 the strength of the sentiment of pride in its history and 
 achievements, the only tie which binds the scattered States 
 together. The new lands are proud of the past building 
 of the Empire, proud too that they have helped to build, 
 and proud and willing to undertake the responsibilities of 
 its future destinies from which the timid British elector 
 would shrink. I believe that this sentiment would be 
 sufficient if there were nothing else ; but there would be 
 other causes at work. 
 
PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 63 
 
 Under the present system the colonist, whether the 
 oldest colony of Newfoundland or the latest one of South 
 Africa (liable at any moment to have his whole commercial 
 and foreign relations sacrificed to the conditions of political 
 parties in Great Britain), would give much to put an end 
 to Downing Street control of his affairs. To him, to whom 
 money is a great power, it is worth a deal of money to be 
 the master of his own destinies. And he would, I believe, 
 be willing to pay on this score. 
 
 Besides this a colonist learns to look ahead in development. 
 In new lands things change more quickly and he sees sudden 
 and far-reaching changes in his conditions. And he suffers 
 besides from insufficient markets. He would be keen to 
 realize that such a tightening of the bonds would mean 
 not far off an immense increase of trade between the States 
 of the Empire. And he would probably see, what the 
 British apparently cannot see, that such real Free Trade 
 would very soon indeed lead to a fall of the tariffs of the 
 nations outside who would want to come in to the largest 
 and most lucrative market in the world. 
 
 Federation 
 
 But the first step is Federation. 
 
 Consider the results which such Federation would have 
 on the political balance of Europe, and on the congested 
 powers of the British Parliament. 
 
 The formation of the Imperial Parliament could not fail 
 to lead to the reform in the representation of the House of 
 Lords, the only reproach to an otherwise exceptionally 
 powerful Chamber. And on the House of Commons the 
 effect would be stupendous. Probably a great cause of 
 the contempt which is undoubtedly felt for the House of 
 Commons is the weariness of the electorate with the impo- 
 tence of an assembly which deals effectively with no legis- 
 lation, either Imperial or local, nor exercises any control 
 over expenditure. 
 
 Great issues, colonial and foreign, now liable to be thrown 
 into the melting pot of party tactics would have a chance 
 of being heard and determined on their merits in a Federal 
 Parliament. The overburdened British ratepayer in the 
 British Parliament would have a chance of making his 
 voice heard on local affairs. 
 
64 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 The effect would be specially effective in the naval and 
 military estimates of the Empire. Under the present system 
 these are matters of infinitesimal concern by the side of 
 the purely local issues on which the existence of a majority 
 depends. Surely Ireland would cease to be the victim of 
 English party politics. Home Rule would become an 
 Imperial issue. 
 
 If the United States has succeeded so greatly in her 
 Federation, why should not Great Britain, so much more 
 favoured, succeed ? 
 
 And last and greatest of all advantages, it would be next 
 to impossible to strangle parliamentary freedom as used 
 in such an assembly. We should have a free Council of 
 the Empire presided over by the King. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 INDIA 
 
 The Problems Facing Colonial Rule 
 
 IF the Colonies were themselves all that the British ruler 
 had to consider of the possession beyond the seas, the task 
 of organizing the Empire would not be a matter of supreme 
 difficulty. The ruling race in our self-governing Colonies, 
 a European race, is present in large numbers ; it is perma- 
 nently resident ; it is admittedly always vastly superior 
 in inherited intelligence and in moral training to the abori- 
 ginal races, and the ruling race themselves recognize the 
 gulf which separates them from the inferior and the neces- 
 sity of just dealing, of keeping faith, and of firm government. 
 They can learn from the people of the United States both 
 from their mistakes in the past, and from contact with 
 them in the present, the absurdity of the fiction of equality 
 embodied in the Declaration of Independence, and they 
 can avoid it so far as they are not interfered with by pressure 
 from the home politician. 
 
 The Negro 
 
 In the West Indies and in South Africa they have the 
 insoluble problem of the immense negro population, of the 
 race, if it be human, which from its very earliest appearance 
 on Egyptian or Babylonian monuments has been the slave 
 of every people in turn, the curse of every race with which 
 it comes in contact, never advancing, but keeping step in 
 all ages behind its masters like King Wenceslaus' page. The 
 negro alone has learnt nothing, has invented nothing. He 
 has no religion of his own, no polity of his own. 
 
 The immense black population of the West Indies lies 
 like a black cloud over the country, prohibiting any genuine 
 
 65 E 
 
66 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 prosperity, while the whole troubles of the British in South 
 Africa originated a hundred years ago not in any divergence 
 of race between themselves and the Boers, but in conflict 
 over the status and treatment of the negro. For the moment 
 other questions raised by him there have overshadowed his 
 apparent importance ; but at any moment the zeal of some 
 irresponsible negro lover in Parliament may bring about 
 an acute crisis, in which the negro and the franchise will 
 appeal to sentiment in England as against the white blood. 
 
 For wherever the negro is in numbers, there he is for 
 all time the dominant issue. The men who light-heartedly 
 imported negro slaves into the West Indies and the American 
 plantations, and the men who invited the free Kaffir to 
 emigrate into Natal have left to the men who came after 
 them a riddle which no one since the world began has been 
 able to solve. 
 
 A constant menace to the civilization of the white race, 
 his contact with it has been disastrous to its advance and 
 to its purity in both hemispheres ; he is now exercising a 
 deadly pressure both on the United States and on Great 
 Britain in Imperial and local politics. I would merely 
 remark that in Natal alone there are 97,000 white men to 
 900,000 blacks, and that when trouble arose not so long 
 ago when the colony was fighting for existence against the 
 blacks and their Zulu allies, the leading Labour Socialists 
 in the British Parliament expressed their sympathy with 
 the negroes as against their white brethren. 
 
 In the United States there would appear to be no solu- 
 tion to the problem of race . hatred daily growing more 
 intense, brought about by the reckless gift of the franchise 
 to the negro by the victorious party after the Civil War. 
 Segregation in a separate State, deportation to Africa, and 
 that last refuge of the hopeless, free intermarriage, have 
 all been suggested as remedies. 
 
 The Yellow Races 
 
 Then there is the ever-present question for all our Colonies 
 of the exclusion of the yellow races of Asia from the labour 
 market and from commerce. It is a very simple problem. 
 So long as we are strong enough physically we shall keep 
 them out, as in the past they kept us out of Asia, but only 
 so long. There is only one remedy, to make our organiza- 
 
PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 67 
 
 tion more efficient, our education more a reality, and to 
 surpass them in the competition so that it will cease to be 
 worth while for them to invade our labour market. 
 
 The solution of these problems is the same for the white 
 man all over the world, increased pace in competition, 
 brute force and diplomacy. 
 
 Equality in India 
 
 But we have a problem to solve in Asia which admits of 
 no such easy solution, but on which this same fiction is 
 liable to exercise a very evil influence indeed, a problem 
 unlike in magnitude any that the world has ever seen. 
 
 It is the government in India including Burmah and Cey- 
 lon, by a very small floating minority of Europeans resident 
 on account of climatic conditions for a short part of each 
 personal life, of an immense variety of Asiatic races, con- 
 fusedly mixed as the result of events extending over the 
 history of the world in a huge continent. India is a name 
 only. The only thing that keeps it a unit is the government 
 by the British Raj. 
 
 One can hardly express the situation better than by 
 stating that India has an area of over 1,800,000 miles, a 
 population of over 315 million and some 220 languages 
 besides the literary Hindustanee and Sanscrit and English. 
 
 Some of the Difficulties of Government 
 
 The races have no likelihood of amalgamation ; they 
 vary through stratas of men of the very highest mental 
 acquirements, subject to a most highly elaborated system 
 of most ancient law, and through men of military origin 
 also of a high type who are directly opposed to them racially 
 and otherwise to races very little above the negro in type. 
 
 To go further, the tiny minority of Europeans profess 
 for the most part a form of Christianity which does not 
 extend as a national religion beyond the limits of the Empire. 
 Even within those limits its influence is checked by varia- 
 tions of political religion, of which some are allied to this 
 fictitious doctrine of equality. This minority of Europeans 
 obtain political rule over the vast mass of Asiatics who 
 profess a very great variety of religious beliefs, away from 
 the influence of Christianity as an organized form. 
 
 A very large majority, some seventy per cent, the Hindus, 
 
68 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 hold to a most ancient form of religion, so highly organized 
 as to enter into and regulate all the relations of social 
 life; a minority, small by comparison, some twenty-one 
 per cent., are Mohammedans. But as if to show the magni- 
 tude of the problem this minority of Mohammedans makes 
 the British Raj the greatest Mohammedan power in the 
 world. There are other living religions numbered in millions 
 exercising immense pressure on social and political life, 
 Sikhs, Jains, Parsees, Buddhists, and over ten million so- 
 called Animists who practise magic and worship nature. 
 
 It is not only the antiquity and elaboration of the Hindu 
 faith which form the difficulty for the European. The 
 philosophic basis for the beliefs is so far in conformity 
 with human instincts, as might be expected from its high 
 antiquity, as to render it very difficult indeed and very 
 unlikely, apart from the force of example of a virtuous life, 
 for the Hindu to become a convert to Christianity. It has 
 even attractions for the Christian. The doctrine of rein- 
 carnation, with all its physical terrors, affords a theory of 
 future existence which might stand comparison with the 
 material conceptions of Christian saints and poets, and 
 self-sacrifice for others the kernel of the Christian faith is 
 not absent from the religion of Vishnu. 
 
 Can any one imagine a field in which the doctrine of 
 political equality could be put to more disastrous use ? 
 
 Still further the East is not exempt from the angel who 
 just now troubles all the waters of dogmatic religion. The 
 Eastern has grown impatient of the restraints of his elaborate 
 forms as compared with Christian observances. He is 
 reconsidering his system by the light thrown on it by the 
 West. But the process of sifting the gold from the dross 
 strengthens his animosity to other faiths, and inclines him 
 to regard less kindly political interference which may check 
 and confuse his development from within. 
 
 Caste in India 
 
 Still more the social relations of the East, resting, as 
 ours do not, on religious observances, are regulated by 
 caste, by a division into minute classes absolutely opposed 
 to any fiction of equality, a condition in which there is no 
 room for a " man of the people " at all. Each man has his 
 own place in society. The West may not wish it, may not 
 
PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 69 
 
 approve of it, certainly will not attempt to understand it, 
 but cannot change it. 
 
 The Influence of Negro Equality from the United 
 States 
 
 Evil as the effect of the negro has been upon our South 
 African and West Indian possessions, his influence in the 
 light of the fiction of equality is worse as it affects the 
 European superiority in the East. On the one hand, the 
 untra veiled islander is led to despise the very highest class 
 Indian, often his intellectual equal and not far from his 
 equal in the moral sense, and to confuse him with the negro 
 on account of his dark colour; on the other hand, he is 
 encouraged by his fiction of equality to introduce what he 
 calls constitutional government into the East under the 
 impression that all dark men are homogeneous and that the 
 half-educated agitators who preach discontent will become 
 contented if, in the place of the institutions which have 
 grown with them from the far ages, some ready-made 
 schemes of government are put upon them in the name of 
 freedom. One is reminded of a former ruler of Serbia who 
 is said to have given a constitution to his subjects to allay 
 discontent when they wanted pasturage for their pigs. 
 
 There is no hope of union or of mixing either between 
 the European and the Indian or with slight exceptions 
 between the races and the religions themselves. 
 
 The Government of one Community by Another 
 
 Let us consider again the word Government in relation 
 to Empire, that is to the rule by one community of other 
 communities with whom it will not or cannot amalgamate. 
 
 The ruler (it is the baffling hopelessness of the republican 
 conception) must represent a race or a community which 
 depends for its successful rule upon the admittance of 
 political superiority over the other races. Such political 
 superiority, if it is to be permanent, can only rest on 
 liberty and equality, not in the Franco- American but in 
 the British sense, the equality of all white, brown, yellow 
 and black under just administration of the law which pre- 
 serves individual liberty to all. 
 
 There are a few Indians who have travelled and have a 
 half knowledge of Europe read largely by the instruction 
 
70 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 of Japan. They are ripe for any mischief. But except 
 for these, the great body of Indians, who recognize only 
 the King as Emperor, who have no knowledge of and no 
 use for the British parliamentary minister or member, who 
 have no wish for a vote and no belief in the counting of 
 noses, submit to our government because it recognizes such 
 equality. Once asked to take charge of the political field 
 as the white man's political equal, there is no limit to the 
 inequality in the Law Courts and to the oppression of the 
 weaker by parliamentary means. 
 
 It would be to hand over the cultivator, who is India, 
 to the handful of lawyers and half-educated students of 
 European methods, who are called India. 
 
 When that step is taken there will be no further place 
 for us in the country at all. We can step out, and Japan 
 will step in as a naval power in our place to control the 
 long coast line. 
 
 To the Indian it is death equally with ourselves. Multi- 
 plication of departments, of officials, of bodies of delegates 
 for discussion or action, does not mean liberty in any small 
 country. Still less on a vast continent inhabited by peoples 
 having nothing whatever in common but the climate such 
 surrender, at the bidding of the English and the Indian 
 baboo, of the power to enforce equal justice over the whole 
 country according to local custom would be an unparalleled 
 calamity to the whole world. 
 
 Here Federation with our Colonies may help us, and if 
 quickly consummated may possibly save us. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE MORAL SENSE A FREE CHURCH 
 
 THERE remains one more aspect in which to consider the 
 use of the words liberty and equality and the will of the 
 people with regard to a community, the most important of 
 all, their relation to the moral sense. 
 
 It is usual to jeer against the Church, to make light of 
 any observances of social religion, to assume that success 
 in national and political life is assured apart from morals 
 in both ruler and ruled. But any one who seriously con- 
 templates the foundation of society on a firm basis will 
 recognize that it must rest, if it is to be a free society to 
 bring freedom of any description to its members, on some- 
 thing other than brute force. Otherwise under whatever 
 form it may appear, whether as a naked tyranny, or as a 
 rule by the will of the people of a man of the people, it 
 is nothing else but despotism cloaked by pious phrases, 
 supported only by force, and effectual so long only as force 
 can support it. 
 
 All rulers, hereditary, elective or usurpers, whether king 
 or demagogue, recognize the fact and make appeal to the 
 Deity as evidence that their power to control society rests 
 not only on the physical strength to enforce their will, but 
 on the moral force to which all humanity must bow. 
 
 The ruler from all time claims to be as the delegate of 
 the Deity of a caste apart and superior to those whom he 
 governs, and, judging from past history, it is necessary for 
 the permanent stability of government that this claim 
 should be acquiesced in. History does not tell us what 
 became of the children of King Cophetua and the beggar 
 maid. Formerly he asserted a direct descent or direct 
 
 71 
 
72 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 delegation from the Deity, rule by Divine Right. He was 
 not only Caesar but Pontifex Maximus. Even before this 
 claim becomes discredited by investigation he had joined 
 to it the claim of election by the people, but it is never 
 absent, for it represents an elementary instinct of man. In 
 all those cases which in the circle of time recur, where there 
 is no direct ruler of the community, or where the man 
 acting for it temporarily is one of themselves, the same 
 theory of Divine Right asserts itself. It is claimed that 
 the voice of the people is the voice of God, and that this 
 hoarse oracle chooses by a voice equal to the call of a Divine 
 Right the man chosen for the time to direct the affairs of 
 the nation. 
 
 In the case of the Christian sovereign, whose position 
 rests on inheritance, the king appeals to the moral sense of 
 the community by admitting the intervention of the Church 
 at his coronation. Mere election is not a permanent title 
 to rule. When the ruler feels that his crooked actions will 
 not bear inquiry, he covers it over by putting the blame for 
 his lying on God ; where, as an usurper such as Napoleon, 
 there could be no claim to the throne either by virtue of 
 Divine Right or by election, he strengthens his position by 
 a convention with those charged with the interpretation 
 of the moral sense of the nation, a concordat as it is called. 
 
 The Moral Sense in Great Britain and the United 
 States 
 
 I venture once more to draw a parallel between the 
 United States and the British Empire, in respect of this 
 matter of the moral sense on which the whole destiny of 
 our people depends. 
 
 There can be no doubt, I think, that the men who origi- 
 nally settled the American Colonies, whether they were 
 the Churchmen of Virginia or the " dissidence of dissent " 
 of New England, were in the main men who sincerely expected 
 and approved of some State form of religion. The Virginia 
 Churchmen introduced their parish system throughout the 
 Southern States, the New Englander enforced his theocracy 
 on social life and on State organization, and the Huguenots 
 from France brought their ministers with them and set up 
 their churches in the new desert. There would seem, judg- 
 
PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 73 
 
 ing from the past, to have been no reason why each State 
 should not have held to its State form of religion after the 
 Revolution. 
 
 But the time when the American Colonies broke off from 
 Great Britain was not favourable to any connection of 
 Church and State or to the adoption by the State of any 
 definite religious creed. Philosophic doubt was in the air, 
 then as now. The spirit of resistance to political authority 
 encouraged men in refusing recognition to any claim to 
 control the individual will ; the Church of England was 
 suffering from the neglect and refusal of the authorities 
 in England to send out bishops and clergy to serve the 
 scattered settlements in America, a neglect which led directly 
 to the Methodist schism, by forcing Wesley to ordain 
 helpers in America ; New England had rebelled against 
 the Congregational theocracy, and was already becoming 
 Unitarian and Agnostic ; and the Papacy was at a low ebb, 
 a foreign exotic, as it always must be with an Italian Pope, 
 a form of authority contrary to every principle on which 
 the new Republic was founded, and without the material 
 of immigration from Europe on which to work. But 
 besides this the basis on which the Federal Government 
 was established after the Declaration of Independence was 
 such that adherence to any one form of State belief was 
 impossible without wrecking the whole. 
 
 Founded by Christian men the country could not and 
 cannot be left wholly without religious faith. But religious 
 belief was in no sense connected with the State, in no sense 
 encouraged or assisted ; the men who formed their social 
 fabric on the oddments of French philosophy, and taught 
 "equality" of "rights," failed to see that a system of 
 public morality was necessary for a free people. They did 
 not recognize that the State which divorces itself from 
 association with any system of moral government abdicates 
 not only the right to teach morals, but the right to enforce 
 them, except by brute strength. The rulers may be pro- 
 fessing Christians, but their beliefs become individual beliefs 
 only, and have an evil influence unless their actions are in 
 accord. Where the State has no definite religion, the Ten 
 Commandments have no force except through the Federal 
 bayonets. 
 
 It is of interest to note how and how far at the time 
 
74 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 of the American revolution, the vacuum caused by this 
 attitude of the State was naturally filled. 
 
 The constructive forces, Washington, Hamilton, Jeffer- 
 son, were, as they must always be in the first instance in 
 revolutions, aristocrats, men of property and education, 
 men who had something to lose and were willing to risk 
 losing it. No one will follow in far-reaching change the 
 man who has nothing, or who, asking sacrifice from others, 
 holds on to his salary. So far as they had in those days 
 any religion at all these men were affiliated to the Church 
 of England. They had no connection with the dissidence 
 of dissent. But the educated man is always the first when 
 the religious bodies are slack in their evangelical work 
 silently to drop his religious forms and convictions. 
 
 At the revolution the Church of England, which repre- 
 sented the displaced Government, was practically for the 
 time being swept out of existence. In the north the great 
 majority of Churchmen were forced by the furious persecution 
 to emigrate to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick or the West 
 Indies ; in the south the Church as an organization wa 1 ^ 
 practically prohibited. 
 
 The history of the Church in Virginia is instructive to 
 any one capable of learning a lesson from history, as showing 
 what the politician who uses freedom of conscience for his 
 horse block can do when he gets into the saddle. As one 
 of their own supporters then said, the Dissenters were 
 actuated by two strong principles, " love of freedom " and 
 " hatred of the Church Establishment," and love of freedom 
 meant then what it meant in the seventeenth century, what 
 it always means to men of any extreme who mix up God 
 with politics, the power to subordinate the social fabric 
 to their own opinions. 
 
 The Methodists in the United States 
 
 In this sacrifice of all spiritual agencies on the alta:~ 
 of political and philosophic ideas, it was due to the Metho- 
 dists, then in their spiritual stage, that Christian doctrine 
 and morals were preserved in the country. Methodism 
 was the natural religion of the revolted provinces. Romanism 
 leant towards Socialism, subordinating the individual to 
 priestly control ; the Church of England, holding the mean 
 between two extremes, represented the hated British Govern- 
 
PIOUS PHRASES IX POLITICS 75 
 
 ment, and savoured of aristocracy ; the Baptists and Inde- 
 pendents, though aggressive and powerful, were too purely 
 political to satisfy any spiritual instincts. 
 
 Methodism exactly suited the spirit of the revolution. 
 It rested as extremely on the individual as Romanism rested 
 on the authority of the society ; the open-air preaching, the 
 dispensing with any formal prayer or ritual, the elimination 
 of any medium between the lonely pioneer and his God, 
 appealed to the conditions of the struggle in which he 
 was engaged, and supplied a spiritual background to his 
 earthly warfare. And Methodism was more than merely 
 in accord with the conditions of the revolution. It was 
 itself the spiritual revolution which preceded the political 
 revolution of which it was the counterpart, the claim for 
 freedom of conscience which preceded the claim for freedom 
 of action, just as the Congregational fanatic of the Pro- 
 tectorate was the product of the real Puritan of the Tudor 
 times, and as the " passive resister " of to-day is the knotty 
 growth of the resisting Ritualist of the seventies. 
 
 The Church of England 
 
 While the United States, nursed in the cradle of French 
 atheistic philosophy, was early carried by Jefferson's Bill 
 for religious freedom outside of any system of public morals, 
 the political institutions of Great Britain have grown up 
 from the beginning under the shelter of a system of public 
 morality. The liberties of the people had been formulated 
 and won by Churchmen before the question of their infrac- 
 tion came to be debated in any House of Commons. 
 
 Throughout English history, with few exceptions, long 
 before Archbishop Langton led the battle for Magna Charta, 
 and long after the Declaration of Rights had been obtained 
 as the result of the self-sacrifice of the Seven Bishops in 
 face of the opposition of Roman Catholics and Dissenters, 
 the Church has been the moulding hand of British liberty. 
 The liberties of England are embedded in religious strata. 
 
 On the other side, the history of America, begun in revolt 
 against authority lay and spiritual, has ended in complete 
 separation of the State from any system of morals, so that, 
 apart from voluntary moral agencies, and the tremendous 
 reflection of morals from Great Britain and from Rome, no 
 
76 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 power in aid of morality is brought to bear on any issue, 
 political or social, in the United States. 
 
 Nor is this difference only felt in Great Britain. A man 
 has merely to cross the border from Maine to New Brunswick 
 to feel this difference, the difference of a tradition of Chris- 
 tianity, and a tradition of its absence. 
 
 In the British Colony, even with the theological extremists, 
 owing to this difference, love of freedom does not of neces- 
 sity correlate hatred of the establishment. 
 
 The Established Church 
 
 I have referred so far to history because the conditions 
 which existed then have produced and are being reproduced 
 in the conditions of to-day. Whilst religion in England 
 has been through the Church, and when the Church lagged 
 in its duty through the Methodists, the only body having a 
 religious origin which has separated from it a vivifying 
 spiritual influence in political and social life, responsible 
 for the altruism, the sense of responsibility, of noblesse 
 oblige in the well-born and wealthy, which has saved Great 
 Britain again and again from revolution ; in the United 
 States the religious bodies, disowned by the State, have 
 failed to touch any part of public life, politics, the adminis- 
 tration of justice, or the ethics of society ; they have struck 
 no blow in defence of purity of law or of commercial honesty ; 
 they have passed by on the other side the bleeding bodies 
 of free institutions won for the race by the religious men of 
 these islands ; they have been obliged to content themselves 
 with encouraging vicarious almsgiving, and accumulation 
 of Church property. 
 
 No empire can continue for long to exist without having 
 unity of religious belief in the ruling class. Dissent such 
 as that in Ireland or Wales which rests upon political differ- 
 ence and class hatred is fatal to the influence of the moral 
 sense on which and not on machine-guns success in rule 
 depends. The overpowering strength of the Church of 
 England is shown by its continuing to exist and to exercise 
 widespread influence as an aristocratic body in a democratic 
 age, an example of men preaching religious freedom apart 
 from political equality. 
 
 Why should not the Protestant bodies of the English- 
 speaking race become the Catholic, the Universal Church 
 
PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 77 
 
 of the English-speaking world, and through that eventually 
 of the Christian world ? Have we faith in our own destiny ? 
 
 In the eyes of her critics the defect of the Church of Eng- 
 land, the true free Church, is her tolerance ; she gives shelter 
 to parties so contrary that each cannot understand why the 
 other is allowed to exist ; she is strong in all the British 
 Colonies, and her counterpart in the United States, the 
 Protestant Episcopal Church, though small, is a much 
 respected body, daily gaining solid ground. 
 
 The Methodists have become a numerous, powerful and 
 far too wealthy body in all the English-speaking world, 
 wanting only an evangelical call to make their ministrations 
 effective. Why should not these two unite their forces 
 for the world's good ? They are the complements of each 
 other ; they would beneficially react on each other, and the 
 wall between them is low and thin. 
 
 The Methodists could learn from the ritualistic High 
 Churchman, from whom their founder sprang, the lesson 
 of disregard of the world's wealth, and devotion to the poor, 
 to which their body owes its origin ; the English ritualists 
 might be induced to pay less regard to those mediaeval 
 ordinances, in spite of which their evangelical work is done. 
 
 If the parochial system of England, with its learned 
 and hard-working elergy all over the world, could be joined 
 to a revived Methodist evangelical body in the United 
 States and in the British Empire, there would be formed 
 a body of Christian faith uniting the voice of authority and 
 freedom of thought that might verily convert the world. 
 
 The force of such an alliance is not to be judged merely 
 by the numbers or the intellectual power of the members ; 
 the solvent power of conciliation on other religious bodies 
 must be taken into account. At a time when the statement 
 of many religious beliefs is being recast, it could not fail 
 that the other Protestant bodies, if not the Roman Catholics, 
 would consider with themselves whether there was really 
 sufficient ground for separation from the Universal Church. 
 It is always the effect of schism to exaggerate causes of 
 dissension ; weakening the strength of both parties by the 
 hatred aroused. But if such a junction between these 
 two great bodies could be effected, many differences between 
 other religious bodies would look small indeed. Conciliation 
 minimizes difficulty. 
 
78 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 Beside this the perfection of the Union would be that 
 it joins the two poles of religious thought and action, the 
 direct responsibility of man to his Maker, and the direct 
 responsibility of man to the society ; it would do more to 
 join the British Empire and the United States in a real 
 bond of union than all the fine speeches made by well- 
 meaning men on both sides of the Atlantic. The League 
 of Churches, the softening down of religious differences 
 might bring about the peace between all civilized peoples, 
 which no League of Nations however loudly advertised 
 by the politician can ever effect. 
 
 It should also have a very marked influence on our poli- 
 tical life. The King, and the King almost alone in politics, 
 represents in any form the moral sense of the nation. It 
 is he only who sets any example to his people of self-restraint 
 either in action or in language for example, at a time of 
 national danger, when the bar-room of the House of Com- 
 mons was running full time, the King set the example of 
 temperance to the nation. 
 
 He represents also freedom of religious belief. His 
 ministers who represent the Parliaments in the various 
 parts of his Dominions hold various forms of belief, pagan, 
 Mohammedan, Christian, Roman Catholic and Protestant. 
 He might have such a minister even in Ireland if that 
 political band of separatists which has been described by 
 Sir Henry Maine as the " running sore," and by Edmund 
 Burke as the " spear point- embedded in the flesh," the 
 Ulster Sinn Fein headed by Sir Edward Carson, could be 
 eliminated from that unhappy country. But whatever his 
 limitations, while the politicians are occupied in destroying 
 the ancient Churches in the name of religious freedom the 
 King as the political head of those Churches remains as the 
 real exponent of the national and imperial unity under 
 which only religious freedom can exist. 
 
 Any movement towards unity of Churches which intends 
 freedom would assuredly react in the direction of strengthen- 
 ing national and imperial unity throughout the Empire. 
 
 It is moral sense which the King represents and not 
 political liberty which is needed to avoid disaster in the 
 future, and a free national Church representing the moral 
 sense of the ruling race is a prime necessity. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 A CONCLUSION 
 
 I HAVE made use in these pages of the statement of 
 equality of rights in the Declaration of Independence as a 
 dangerous fiction which may have a most disastrous effect 
 on the future of British conceptions of government both 
 in respect of internal and of foreign affairs. The enthusiasm 
 over the Fourth of July in England comes from the mis- 
 understanding by the English people of the history both 
 of the United States and of the British Empire (as apart 
 from England). 
 
 The misunderstanding is an unmitigated evil to both 
 countries, and the danger to our own social ideals is very 
 close indeed. " Heterogeneous as is the population of the 
 United States to-day," say the comments in that most 
 able and popular paper, the Bystander, July 10, 1918, " it 
 is our proud belief that the handful of Pilgrims who landed 
 at Plymouth Rock three centuries ago served as the little 
 leaven that has leavened the whole Transatlantic race. The 
 enunciation of American Independence was merely the 
 re-establishment of a cardinal principle of Anglo-Saxonism 
 that we had lost awhile, etc., etc." It is a small matter, 
 perhaps, that the " handful of pilgrims," like Raleigh's 
 colony in North Carolina, were all wiped out leaving no 
 descendants ; and that the Mayflower ended her days 
 as a slave ship carrying negroes to Virginia in face of 
 impassioned protests from the Southerner, while subsequent 
 " handfuls of pilgrims " were illustrating their belief in the 
 " cardinal principle of Anglo-Saxonism " by whipping 
 -Quakers or burning witches, as they later on tarred and 
 feathered the American loyalists and still later put the 
 white aristocrats of the South under the heel of the negro. 
 
 79 
 
8o PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 But I wish most strongly to impress on readers that stric- 
 tures on this unfortunate document are not intended to 
 imply any disrespect for the United States itself, or any 
 want of appreciation of the great people of the continent. 
 I have too many good friends in that country to say a dis- 
 paraging word of them. They lead the world in so many 
 things, such as national self-respect ; they have shown 
 courage in dealing with the many dangerous problems, 
 and they have a most wonderful power of assimilation of 
 races. The two peoples could teach each other much ; 
 the British the moral strength of the society, and the 
 American the self-respect of the individual. 
 
 It is quite a mistake for a Britisher to suppose, as he 
 often does, that as an individual he is physically or mentally 
 superior to the American. It is by no means the case. It 
 is his conditions which are superior, his historical institutions 
 won for him long ago by his forefathers. He is protected 
 from the evil impulses of his individual nature by the 
 good influence of a consummately illogical political system ; 
 he is taught the moral duties of a citizen early in his youth 
 by the Church as supported by State authority ; and from 
 babyhood he learns obedience to authority, and to the laws 
 of the State. He is fortunate above all other peoples in 
 the world in having his laws administered apart from 
 politics, and therefore justly ; he lives in an atmosphere 
 of trust and morality, of true liberty and equality. 
 
 This very excellence of his social system leaves him with- 
 out the initiative which is so strongly impressed on the 
 American by the weakness of his social institutions. But 
 even if carried to such an extreme as to have this ill effect, 
 the British social system has made the people the greatest 
 colonizing race on earth, the distributors over the whole 
 world of the blessings of morals and true freedom, resulting 
 from ordered obedience to law. The American is prevented 
 by this foolish fiction over which we are hurrahing from 
 using forms of administration which permit of colonies. 
 
 The British, if once they get rid of the idea that the 
 American institutions are a superior development of their 
 own growth, if once they can understand that it is to their 
 own Colonies, and not to the United States, that they must 
 look for development, may learn many things of that 
 country. 
 
PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 81 
 
 At present while in their struggle with their surroundings, 
 the best Americans are crying, like the man in the iron 
 cage, " I cannot get out," the British author, and ambassa- 
 dor, and tourist and journalist are lost in admiration of 
 the beauty of the cage. 
 
 The British may learn to put a just value on their own 
 institutions and traditions. The moral of such cases as 
 the Thaw trial was not the breakdown of the American 
 Courts of Justice, the pliability of the jurors, or the sensuous 
 nastiness of the press. The true moral was that the Yankee 
 American ideals of New England, with their doctrine of 
 equality, have so moulded American public life as to give 
 no showing to men of the Thaw class, however able. They 
 leave no occupation, no aspiration, for the rich man, except 
 commerce, or commercial gambling, or the public prosti- 
 tution of his means and energies to the pursuit of vice and 
 idleness. 
 
 He is prohibited from seeking to do his duty in the 
 administration of the laws as a magistrate. That is " the 
 political right of the dominant party in the State," and as 
 such has inevitably fallen into the hands of the poor political 
 camp follower, who needs it as a means of support. For 
 the same reason he cannot hope to compete in politics with 
 the delegates who are paid for their services as professional 
 politicians. There is no encouragement to philanthropic 
 effort, where selfishness is the standard of national morality ; 
 no opening for literary excellence, where all scholarship is 
 knocked to the dead level of State uniform instruction ; 
 no inducement to a country life subject to plundering raids 
 by armies of tramps, while deprived of all the duties, 
 responsibilities and pleasures which give it attraction for 
 men of leisure. 
 
 The saddest of the memories of the Britisher who has 
 lived in the United States is the foolish flattery, to which 
 the American makes no response, consistently poured by 
 the English journals and politicians always on the wrong 
 spot, on American people and American institutions. The 
 American only respects those people who respect themselves. 
 He has no respect for people who exact no respect for 
 their own flag. He is not likely to reply to the plastered 
 flattery on the Fourth by transferring his Thanksgiving 
 turkey to Guy Fawkes day. 
 
82 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 The effect of our Colonial is twofold. Naturally looking 
 to the Mother Country for the lead, he is perforce driven 
 to admire and to imitate many very questionable features 
 of the United States held up to him by her for admiration. 
 
 Thus Lincoln, the poor boy, and equality of rights, is 
 much more likely to become the ideal of the Colonial, than 
 Lee, the stainless knight, and duty to the State. 
 
 But all the same the Colonial thinks for himself. 
 
 The Colonies have repaid the slights and contempt of 
 Great Britain with true affection and generosity in her 
 hour of need. But they are not misled by the knowledge 
 that their people are few in number as compared with the 
 United States ; they know that the future is with them ; 
 they know their real place in the Empire. 
 
 If the British wish to draw closer for their own benefit 
 the ties of relationship between the Colonies and the Mother 
 Country, they must realize in time that their real greatness 
 lies, not in the United States which severed from them, 
 but in the lands which remain loyal to them. 
 
 In these islands and in their self-governing Colonies 
 this fiction has had and is having very evil effects. In 
 India and in those parts of our dominions which have a 
 like government, it has not merely an evil effect. It spells 
 absolute ruin, and that very quickly indeed unless its falsity 
 is brought home to the common sense of the British people 
 and by them to their Ministers. That is my excuse for 
 making use of it as an illustration. 
 
 Let us look at our past history and sum up present 
 conditions of government, and clear our minds of political 
 cant. 
 
 We have achieved the true liberty, equal justice in the 
 Courts, for ourselves and by our example and influence 
 very largely for the world at large, owing to the form of 
 our government as a growth of the ages. By this all 
 responsibility for administration is vested by the com- 
 munity in the ruler (whether you call him King or President 
 or Emperor does not matter) as a first necessity of communal 
 life. 
 
 Our ruler under our Constitution, if carried into effect, 
 is checked and controlled in the use of his power by the 
 public opinion of the whole community as expressed in the 
 
PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 83 
 
 action of the assembly in the two Houses of Parliament. 
 This government, by a ruler and a general assembly has 
 occasionally been disturbed and come to a disastrous end 
 for the want of a just balance between the ruler's authority 
 and the control over it by the community. When so dis- 
 turbed tyranny from the one side or .the other has certainly 
 followed. Those who imagine that a King or an Emperor 
 will incline to tyranny, and that a President or an irrespon- 
 sible Prime Minister will encourage freedom are as mistaken 
 as the invalid who refused the medicine offered to him as 
 a radical cure but accepted it when told that it was a sovereign 
 remedy. Clear your minds of cant. A King by name is 
 no more tyrannous than a President, a Bishop no more 
 than a Moderator. The difference in either case lies only 
 in the control reserved by the community. 
 
 The perfection of our government has consisted in the 
 perfect balance of control between the King and the com- 
 munity. 
 
 It is not possible that the King should personally attend 
 to all arts of government. But he should be able to call 
 upon the fittest men of all classes to become his Ministers 
 for the work, which he cannot do under the party system, 
 and it is necessary that he should preside over their councils 
 and be cognizant of all the acts done in his name, consulting, 
 especially in Imperial matters, all who can give him expert 
 advice, and acting on the final opinion of the majority. 
 
 This essential of government disappeared and the balance 
 of our Constitution was so far destroyed when King George I 
 ceased to preside over the deliberations of his Cabinet. 
 Yet our King, in spite of the most extensive delegation of 
 his authority, remains in effect the ruler of the Empire. 
 All matters of any importance are transacted in his name, 
 though the matter may not be a personal act. As an instance 
 I see to-day, July 30, 1918, a notice posted up in front of 
 Buckingham Palace. It runs : 
 
 BY THE KING. A PROCLAMATION. 
 
 Withdrawing certain certificates of exemption from military 
 service. Whereas (quoting the Act of Parliament passed by the 
 King and the two Houses) it is provided that His Majesty may 
 by Proclamation, etc. etc. (Then follows a long Proclamation 
 
84 PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 
 
 with two schedules.) Given at our Court at Buckingham Palac e 
 this 4th day of June, 1918, etc. etc. 
 
 Once more the King represents no party but the entire 
 people ; he is the only tie between us and the Colonies, 
 the only expression of our rule in India, the only protector 
 of the rights of minorities anywhere, the only emblem of 
 our moral sense in politics. 
 
 As His Majesty has not abdicated but has merely allowed 
 his present interference in politics to fall into abeyance, 
 it would be a very simple matter that he should resume 
 active participation in the acts which are done with the 
 consent of the community in his name. It would be im- 
 mensely for the benefit of the Empire that he should do 
 so. 
 
 Our Constitution of King, Lords and Commons is at 
 present wholly in abeyance. 
 
 The Kingship has succumbed to the Whig doctrine that 
 it is " unconstitutional " for the King, who is part of the 
 Constitution, to perform his duties except as the conduit 
 pipe of his Ministers, who must be in one of the Houses 
 of Parliament. 
 
 The Ministers of either party professedly holding office 
 on the sole ground that by log-rolling or otherwise they can 
 command a temporary majority in the House of Commons 
 have ceased to consult Parliament and by means of the 
 closure and other procedure prevent any expression of 
 opinion of the members. A free Parliament, free from 
 closure and ministerial authority, and a free Parliament 
 free from the intolerable burden of party cries and party 
 treasons in which all members are not only national but 
 imperial, is an essential if we are to preserve the freedom 
 for which we have been fighting and suffering. At present 
 as the Ministers concentrate all authority for the moment 
 in their own hands, they can make far-reaching changes 
 in our Constitution and can substitute even in India for 
 British ideals of liberty and equality the eighteenth- century 
 fiction from which the United States of America has suffered 
 so much. It is a fiction which the sensible American, 
 though his politicians pay homage to it on the Fourth of 
 July, has swept out of his practical life. 
 
 The present conditions of the Empire offer no opportu- 
 
PIOUS PHRASES IN POLITICS 85 
 
 nity for trying new experiments in government. A general 
 election, in whiclj all the party intrigues, the caucus man- 
 agers, the conscientious objectors and pacifists and cranks 
 of all sorts could play their tricks in the absence of the 
 fighting men, tells us nothing of the temper of the people, 
 or of their support of any one party, whether coalition or 
 other. It is no expression of confidence in the present 
 Ministry, but the assertion of a still sane people that in this 
 time of great uncertainty until peace has been signed a 
 change from our present Ministry would very likely be a 
 change for the worse. 
 
 But that is no reason why the Constitution should not 
 be restored to its former state, the nation with a full voice 
 in Parliament united under the leadership of the King, 
 as it never can be under any Minister of a party. 
 
 At least let us clear our minds of cant, and see words 
 and phrases in their true meaning. 
 
 P. S. KING 6c SON, Ltd., 2 & 4 Great Smith St., Westminster, S.W. 
 
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 Bolshevism, Another Year of Inflation, and the 
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 WAR FINANCE 
 
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 Professor of Political Economy in the University of Edinburgh. 
 
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 MONEY 
 
 Its Connection with Rising and Falling Prices. 
 
 By EDWIN CANNAN, M.A., LL.D. 
 
 Professor of Political Economy in the University of London. 
 Author of Wealth, etc. 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 I. Introduction. II. Recognition and Measurement of Changes in the Value of Money. Ill: 
 The Value of Money or General Level of Prices where the Unit of Account is a Fixed Quantity of 
 Bullion, Uncoined or Coined. IV. The Value of Money or General Level of Prices where the Unit 
 of Account is a Coin of which the Issue is Limited. V. The Value of Money or General Level of 
 Prices where the Unit of Account is a Bank-note or Currency Note. Appendix. Some Topical 
 Illustrations. 
 
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 THE FREE SEAS IN WAR 
 
 By SIR FRANCIS PIGGOTT, 
 
 Formerly Chief Justice of Hong Kong. 
 
 Together with Extracts from the Writings and Speeches of 
 DAVID URQUHART, 
 
 The Champion of " The Right of Search," and of " The Right of Seizure," 1852-1875. 
 
 Compiled and Commented on by M. SIDNEY PARRY, B.A., Oxon. 
 
 FROM THE AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION. " A strange thing, and a dangerous 
 thing, is happening before our eyes. The ' Freedom of the Sea ' which, 
 since it was first created, it has been our special privilege to guard, is pro- 
 claimed by the enemy to be a mere tyranny which we have imposed upon 
 the world ; and he, the German, has declared his intention of ousting us 
 from the guardianship and assuming it himself. The claim is so desper- 
 ately dangerous that I beg for the thoughtful attention of every man and 
 woman in the country while I try to make it plain." 
 
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 Problems Confronting Russia 
 
 By BARON A. HEYKING, D.C.L., 
 
 Formerly Imperial Consul" General to Russia in London. 
 Author of "A Practical Guide for Russian Consular Officers." 
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 Introduction. 
 
 Chapter I. The Evolution of the State and Social Organisations of Russia. 
 
 Chapter II. The Russian Revolution : Its Causes and Effects. 
 
 Chapter III. Cosmopolitanism versus Nationalism in Russia. 
 
 Chapter IV. Racial and Religious Tolerance. 
 Chapter V. The Degeneracy of the Revolution. 
 
 Chapter VI. Bolshevik Political Economy. 
 
 Chapter VII. Prospects of Regeneration. 
 
 Chapter VIII. The Economic Resources -of Russia, with special reference to British Industrial 
 
 and Commercial Opportunities. 
 
 Chapter IX. The Potentialities of Russo-Indian Trade Relations. 
 
 Chapter X. A Plea for Russo-British Intellectual Coalescence. 
 
 Chapter XI. The Suppression of Vodka. 
 
 Chapter XII. Russian Efficiency and English Deficiency with regard to Posterity. 
 
 Chapter XIII. The Difference between the Russian and English points of view upon Duelling. 
 
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 Russia : Its Trade and Commerce 
 
 Edited by ARTHUR RAFFALOVICH, 
 
 President of the Russian Chamber of Commerce in Paris. 
 
 CONTENTS. Brief Geographical Sketch National Education Agriculture Cotton and Cotton- 
 growing Factories and Workshops Mining and Metallurgy Machine Industry Forestry 
 Fisheries Internal Transport Posts, Telegraphs, and Telephones Internal Trade of Russia 
 Foreign Trade in Russia Public Finances Money and Credit The Drink Question k in Russia 
 Formation of Joint Stock Companies Appendices. 
 
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 Race Regeneration 
 
 By E. J. SMITH, 
 
 Author of " Maternity and Child Welfare." 
 Chairman of the Health Committee of the Bradford Corporation, etc. 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 Chapter I. Our Duty to our Soldiers. II. The Declining Birth-rate. III. Housing. IV: 
 Housing. V. Standards of Family Life. VI. Racial Poison. VII. Endowment of Motherhood. 
 VIII. A Clean Milk Supply. IX. A Ministry of Health. X. The National Balance-sheet. XI. 
 " Lighthouses in the Storm-tossed Seas." XII. The Bradford Scheme. XIII. The Aftermath. 
 Appendix I. The Fall in the Birth-rate, Legitimate Birth-rates and Infantile Mortality. Appendix 
 II. Other Municipal Health Activities in Bradford. 
 
 Yorkshire Observer. " The author has given years of study to this perplexing problem . . . 
 he advocates the establishment of a Ministry of Health, and we congratulate him upon the manner 
 in which he states his case . . . we can say quite honestly that, in our judgment, no serious student 
 of present problems and future perplexities can afford to be without this book. 
 
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 Parliamentary Elections 
 
 UNDER THE REFORM ACT, 1918. 
 
 BY 
 
 J. RENWICK SEAGER, C.B.E. 
 
 AUTHOR OF " NOTES ON REGISTRATION," " REGISTRATION OF VOTERS UNDER THE REFORM ACT 
 1918," " MUNICIPAL ELECTIONS," " CORRUPT AND ILLEGAL PRACTICES," ETC., ETC. 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 Chapter I. Candidates. II. Returning Officers. III. The Election Agent and Sub-Agent. 
 V. The Election. V. Election Expenses. Sections of Acts relating to Elections. Index. 
 
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 Registration of Voters 
 
 UNDER THE REFORM ACT, 1918. 
 
 By J. RENWICK SEAGER, C.B.E. 
 
 Chapter I. Qualifications. II. Disqualifications. III. Registration. 
 Sections of Act Relating to Registration. Registration Rules. Index. 
 
 Scotsman. " A very useful little manual. There are clear and complete statements of qualifi- 
 cations and disqualifications, and an excellent chapter on registration. The sections of the Act 
 relating to registration are given, and an index makes the book valuable as a means of rapid 
 reference." 
 
 Globe. " A lucid and well-arranged volume." 
 
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 The People and the Parliament 
 
 By WILLIAM COATES. 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 Chapter I. The People. II. The House of Commons. III. The Evil: 
 Its Cause and Cure. 
 
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