RELIGION, COMMERCE, LIBERTY

INTRODUCTION

GOVERNMENT, LAW AND REVOLUTION

If mankind could only be so persuaded, the form of government under which they live is a matter wholly indifferent. A few men instinctively recognize the indifference of forms, that there is little variation in individual freedom under variations of authorized force, that the Calvinist may be just as tyrannical as the Bishop, the President of the Republic as absolute or as thin a smoke of burning paper as the King. But for the most part men are too much engaged in the struggle for food and shelter to take interest in political action until it affects them personally, and even then too much afraid of the effect on their private affairs to take action so long as the evil can be borne. Under all forms and in all ages the powerful and rich oppress and make use of the poor and weak; the strong people, quickly multiplying, dragoon the feebler race; the dull nation with the predatory possessory outlook exploits the self-contained intellectual.

As a consequence the history of mankind is a sombre record of the fatalistic patience with which the average man endures the ills he has, exerting in his turn his individual pressure on those weaker than himself, if by so doing he may modify his own disadvantages, and looking always for some relief from any quickening of the moral sense of society, from which alone he can hope for alleviation of his lot.

This moral sense lies outside all political action. But the instinct which teaches that it is through the moral sense only that advance can be made is so strong that the politician must always pretend that his actions are urged by it.

This indifference of mankind is ruffled from time to time by

determined efforts made to redress grievances or even to change by violence the system of social life. In the first instance many of the men who engage in such attempts to remake society are idealists, their minds filled with theories of social improvement, but without knowledge of the limitations of human nature which would enable them safely to carry their theories into practice. They are examples of the saying that you may learn in the study that a stone when thrown describes a parabola, but that you can only learn in the outside world to allow for the deflexions and disturbing influences which prevent the stone from describing a complete parabola.

Every such attempt to reconstruct society attracts a crowd of idle thinkers, school teachers, journalists, agents of all sorts, small lawyers, all the parasites who breed on developed society, eager to try experiments at other men's expense in new conditions; and very soon, if any profit is to be gained, every knave who can mouth for his advantage the popular phrases which have been handed down through the centuries with various interpretations by the prophets of change, becomes a patriot and the friend of humanity.

To have any chance of success, such movement must be, or appear to be, in accord with the moral sense, must be agreeable to economic conditions, and must rest on some favourable theory of life. When this happens, those who are not directly concerned with alteration or destruction of existing conditions had better for their own safety "stand from under." For when the moment comes for the mob to put into actual practice the wandering theories of generations of philosophers and politicians, those whose fate it is to uphold the existing conditions are like men moving forward in the teeth of a hurricane, depending for progress on the small surface offered to the gale and for safety on the chance of shelter when the storm overwhelms them. Hooker, writing in England in the seventeenth century (Eccles. Polity, Book I) of such a case, has well expressed the difficulties to be met. Because," says he, " such as openly reprove supposed disorders of state are taken for principal friends to the common benefit of all and for men that carry singular freedom of mind; under this fair and plausible colour whatsoever they utter passeth for good and current. That which wanteth in the weight of their speech is supplied by the

aptness of men's minds to accept and believe it. Whereas, on the other side, if we maintain things that are established, we have not only to strive with such a number of heavy prejudices, deeply rooted in the hearts of men, who think that herein we serve the time, and speak in favour of the present state, because thereby we either seek or hold preferment; but also to bear such exceptions as minds so averted beforehand usually take against that which they are loath should be poured into them."

The eighteenth century was fertile in disturbance resulting from such attempts to rebuild the social frame, which had ceased to meet the requirements of European progress. They were to a great extent unsuccessful because they ignored the elements on which social life must permanently rest.

The very essence of the most elementary society, the first essential feature of every healthy community life, is the cultivation of a sense of social duty, of a course of action which considers the interests of others as well as of oneself, a sense of duty which ranks before the individual rights which in every wellregulated Christian society are correlated with and follow on the performance of "my duty towards my neighbour." This essence of social duty is expressed for the community by its laws. "Generally all laws human, which are made for the ordering of public societies, be either such as establish some duty whereunto all men by the law of reason did before stand bound; or else such as make that a duty which before was none." When the lawyers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries discourse of the philosophy of law, they pay especial respect to social duty.

To take one example only of the philosophizing of a practical lawyer, Blackstone admits the possible equality of man in a state of nature, without any superior but Him who is the author of our being. But he laughs at the idea of a social contract. "That there ever was a state in which there was no society," he says, "is unbelievable. Man is formed for society "; so we come to what he calls the municipal or civil law which "regards him also as a citizen and bound to other duties towards his neighbour than those of mere nature and religion; duties which he is engaged in by enjoying the benefits of the common union and which amount to no more than that he contribute on his part to the subsistence and peace of the society." As

social duties are of a relative nature, due from one and due to another, the English lawyers, Hale, Blackstone, and others, consider it as more clear and easy to regard them as duties required from rather than as rights belonging to particular persons. You can contrast later this essential for humane society, the conception of social duty, which has always been a strong feature of British philosophy, with the programmes of natural rights without any corresponding duties, put forth in the eighteenth century by the free-thinkers of America, France and other nations, and excused or praised by some of our English historians to the young people of to-day as being expositions of freedom.

To understand the growth and power of these theories we must go back a little. The peoples of Western Europe had been living ever since the days of the Scandinavian raiders under an ordered society, which had superseded the personal adherence of the freeman to the chief. This, which is sometimes called the feudal system, was a social edifice, based on the holding of land and on military service, connected by mutual guarantee, each lord in turn contracting with his tenant for protection and peaceful possession, and receiving in return fealty and service in war and in peace. In a society exposed to constant war this relation of mutual duty and right between lord and vassal had for a long time worked in a very rough way to the material advantage of both. But the system, avoiding the concentration of power in the remote kingship, had resulted in creating a number of small warring baronies in which the local ruler exercised an independent authority resting on his military power, accompanied by great increase of privileges to himself at the expense of the people ruled.

Then economic changes, among them increase of trade and the rediscovery of the East, aided by the unifying influence of the Roman Papacy, told persistently in favour of unity of rule in larger areas under stronger rulers. As the areas of authority became greater, the rulers found the collection of feudal levies uncertain and undisciplined, liable to leave the field for home at the most inopportune moment, unsuitable in every respect to their more prolonged military operations. Hence the standing army of mercenaries, to be paid by taxation of or plunder of the people, took the place of feudal forces.