The Liberal Tradition
Introduction
THE LIBERAL TRADITION INTRODUCTION
I
AT first sight, the most striking thing about the Liberal tradition is its intellectual incoherence. No one would reasonably deny the name of ‘Liberal’ to any of the men represented in this book, yet each of them—Fox and Bentham, Richard Cobden and Lord John Russell, Macaulay and Acton, Herbert Spencer and T. H. Green, Gladstone and Lloyd George, Mill and Keynes—held views widely different in some respect from those of the others. And these differences are differences not only of policy and programme—those are more easily explained—but also of principle, for example on the role of the State, the vexed question of laissez-faire.
This is the strongest argument in favour of treating Liberalism historically. For it is only when they are seen as part of a developing, and therefore changing, historical tradition that the differences fall into place and the contradictions are reduced to manageable proportions. They can never be eliminated, and it would be a distortion of the Liberal tradition to try to gloss over its inconsistencies. For that tradition has drawn on many different streams of experience and thought. It owes much to the Dissenters with their strong belief in individualism, the place of conscience in politics and their democratic tradition of self-government, but something also to the Whigs with their aristocratic tradition of civil and religious liberty and their dislike of arbitrary government. It inherits a belief in natural law and natural rights only to see these scornfully repudiated by Bentham and the Philosophical Radicals in favour of the principle of utility. From the Classical Economists and the Manchester School it derives the orthodoxy of free trade and laissez-faire, yet at the end of the 19th century embraces the heretical view of working-class radicalism that something ought to be done for the poor.
This catholicity of origins is reflected in the divisions of opinion which have always characterised English Liberalism, but it has its compensation in the richness of the English tradition by comparison with the more doctrinaire views of continental liberalism.
II
English Liberalism was born out of the 17th-century struggle for freedom of conscience and the resistance of Parliament to the arbitrary authority of the King. By the end of the 18th century, the period at which this book begins, half the things for which Continental Liberalism had still to fight in the 19th century, were well established in England. The principles of civil and religious liberty, the rule of law and the freedom of the press, the institutions of parliamentary government, limited monarchy and an independent judiciary had made the English Constitution the cynosure of 18th-century Liberals like Montesquieu and Voltaire.
The hereditary guardians of this Liberal tradition were the Whigs, and the Whig defence of Wilkes and their opposition during the American War of Independence showed that ‘the principles of 1688’ had not lost their vitality.1 But it had become in the hands of the Whigs, a tradition of aristocratic Liberalism, a tradition to be maintained rather than extended, and its limitations were shown by the equivocal attitude of the Whig leaders towards proposals for parliamentary reform. The issue of the French Revolution made even clearer the extent to which the Whigs had become conservative.2 Edmund Burke, the greatest of 18th-century Whig writers, damned the Revolution and all its works, and a majority of the Whigs followed Portland in joining Pitt and supporting the war with France. Indeed Burke and the Portland Whigs appear to have suffered particularly severely from the panic fears which affected the English ruling class at the news from France. It was left to the handful of Whigs who remained faithful to Fox—Grey, Erskine, Sheridan—and above all to Charles James Fox himself to defend the liberties of the subject, freedom of the press and of public meeting against the encroachments of a panicky Government. Fox was almost certainly wrong in his estimate of the danger from France, especially after Napoleon’s coup d’état, and Whig opposition to the war had a tendency to degenerate into factiousness, but his defence of liberty was a vindication both of his own courage and of the Liberal tradition.1
The growth of that tradition up to the end of the 18th century lies outside the scope of this book. But to include its restatement by Fox in a book concerned with the development of Liberalism after 1800 serves two purposes: it establishes the continuity between 19th-century Liberalism and that older tradition which reaches back to Milton and Locke, and it underlines the point after which the Whigs, confronted with the issue of revolution in France, had either openly to turn conservative like Burke or be prepared to extend ‘the principles of 1688’. The split between Fox and Burke in 1791 thus forms one of the starting-points for the development which culminated in the second half of the 19th century in the creation of a Liberal Party out of the old Whig Party.
While the war with France and the fight for office absorbed the attentions of the political world between 1793 and 1815, great changes had been taking place in the economic and social structure of the country, especially in those parts north of Birmingham which were least known and least visited by 18th-century politicians. The axis of English history, which had hitherto lain along a line running from London along the Thames Valley to Oxford and projected westwards to the Bristol Channel, was shifting to the line London-Birmingham-Manchester.
These changes provide the second starting-point for the modern history of English Liberalism. They may be briefly described as growth in trade, growth in industry and growth in population.
The greater part of English history since has been a commentary on these changes. Two immediate consequences were the bewilderment of the Government, confronted with problems for which there were no precedents, and the growth of a middle-class opinion impatient and critical of the Government’s aristocratic incompetence.
Disraeli has well described the state of mind of Lord Liverpool’s Ministry at the end of the war with Napoleon: ‘The peace came . . . the people found themselves without guides. They went to the ministry; they asked to be guided, they asked to be governed. Commerce requested a code; trade required a currency; the unfranchised subject solicited his equal privilege; suffering labour clamoured for its rights; a new race demanded education. What did the ministry do? They fell into a panic. Having fulfilled during their lives the duties of administration, they were frightened because they were called upon, for the first time, to perform the functions of government. Like all weak men, they had recourse to what they called strong measures. They determined to put down the multitude. They thought they were imitating Mr. Pitt, because they mistook disorganisation for sedition.’1
While Government fumbled with the problems of the new society growing up in England, there began to emerge among the new middle class of manufacturers and merchants, bankers and business men, a number of ideas which, many of them became convinced, would lead to the solution of all social and economic problems. The intellectual parentage of these ideas can be traced to two remarkable groups of writers, closely linked and in part identical. The first was the Political Economists: the most famous name, that of Adam Smith (who belongs to an earlier generation than the others), followed by Malthus, Ricardo, James Mill, McCulloch, Nassau William Senior and J. S. Mill. The second was the Benthamites, known sometimes as the Philosophical Radicals: Bentham himself, who died in 1832, James Mill, Grote, Romilly, Place, Bowring, Molesworth and Joseph Hume.
III
There was nothing very original in these ideas. Most of them are to be found in the 18th century, if not earlier.1 What was new was the extraordinary authority which they now acquired and the way in which they fitted like a glove the needs, the interests and the prejudices of that new middle class which was elbowing itself into power.
What were the characteristics of this phase of Liberal thought?
It was intensely individualist. ‘The community’, Bentham wrote, ‘is a fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who are considered as constituting, as it were, its members.’2 It was taken for granted that all social progress depended upon the unhampered initiative of individuals and a prudent self-interest was regarded as the predominant motive in human nature. But, in economics at least, there was no need to anticipate any contradiction between the individual’s selfish pursuit of his own ends and the interest of the community. Bentham added to the passage just quoted the further sentence: ‘The interest of the community then is, what?—the sum of interests of the several members who compose it.’ It was as simple as that: there was no problem to be solved.
For those who still had doubts there was Adam Smith’s comfortable assurance that while each individual ‘intends only his own gain, he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intentions.’
The conclusion was obvious. It was the height of folly on the part of Governments to attempt to interfere with the processes of this ‘natural’ order which, of its own accord, worked to produce a spontaneous increase in wealth and social improvement. ‘The general rule is’, Bentham wrote, ‘that nothing ought to be done or attempted by government. The motto, or watchword of government, on these occasions, ought to be—Be quiet. . . . The art (of government) therefore, is reduced within a small compass. . . . The request which agriculture, manufactures and commerce present to governments, is as modest and reasonable as that which Diogenes made to Alexander: Stand out of my sunshine.’1
This conclusion the Economists reinforced by the further argument that, even if (as Malthus and Ricardo thought) the prospects of human society were gloomier than Adam Smith had foreseen, it was still useless for governments to meddle or for the unfortunate to complain, since the world is governed by certain immutable economic laws which are not susceptible to human regulation. ‘There are miseries in the social state’, Ricardo wrote, ‘which legislation cannot relieve.’ Hence the futility of poor relief, and of attempting to raise wages by combining in trade unions. ‘They might as well attempt’, Cobden remarked, ‘to regulate the tides by force, or change the course of the seasons, or subvert any of the other laws of nature—for the wages of labour depend upon laws as unerring and as much above our coercive power as any other operations of nature.’
But most important of all was to stop the State meddling with the flow of foreign trade, to remove the hundred and one obstacles placed in the way of imports and exports and to establish freedom of trade. It was Cobden who made Free Trade the Ark of the Liberal covenant, but it was common doctrine to the Classical Economists and Philosophical Radicals long before the Anti-Corn Law League was formed and, as the Petition of the Merchants of 1820 shows, once the Napoleonic Wars were over, it was rapidly put in the forefront of their demands by the merchants and industrialists. Much the same is true of that dislike of colonies and imperialism which was closely connected with the advocacy of Free Trade. Some of the most famous pages in Adam Smith deal with the evils of the Old Colonial System, while long before he took up radical politics Bentham wrote Emancipate your colonies! addressed to the National Convention of France, Anno 1793. Shewing the uselessness and mischievousness of distant dependencies to an European State. Here, as in the case of Free Trade, there is a line of development which runs through English Liberal thought from Adam Smith to the 1906 Government of Campbell-Bannerman and beyond.
IV
An inveterate distrust of the power of the State was characteristic of 19th century Liberalism up to the last decades of the century, from Bentham to Acton. But there was a difference between the Liberal attitude towards the State in economics and in politics. The principle of a natural identity of interests which, in the economic sphere, meant laissez-faire, did not extend to the political sphere. As the Abbé Morellet wrote to Lord Shelburne: ‘Since liberty is a natural state and restrictions are, on the contrary, the state of compulsion, by giving back liberty, everything resumes its own place, and everything is in peace, provided only that thieves and murderers continue to be caught.’1 Governments were necessary, therefore, if only to make such provision; their job was to provide the framework of security within which the principle of the natural identity of interests could then come into play. ‘The essential business of government’, says Nassau Senior, ‘is to afford defence; to protect the community against foreign and domestic violence and fraud. Unfortunately, however, governments have generally supposed it to be their duty, not merely to give security, but wealth; not merely to enable their subjects to produce and enjoy in safety, but to teach them what to produce and how to enjoy.’2
The first task of reform, therefore, was to curb the pretensions of Governments and to confine them to that sphere which, even on the strictest laissez-faire views, was legitimate for them. The second was to provide security against the abuse of power in their private interest by those who controlled the Government. ‘All the difficult questions of Government’, James Mill writes, ‘relate to the means of restraining those, in whose hands are lodged the powers necessary for the protection of all, from making a bad use of it.’1 In practical terms this meant measures against Bentham’s two Sinister Interests, the Monarchical and the Aristocratic. The Whigs, conscious of the dangers from the first of these, though not from the second, relied on the mixed nature of the constitution to preserve a balance. Bentham had nothing but contempt for such a view. ‘Talk of balance: never will it do: leave that to Mother Goose and Mother Blackstone.’ As he went on to point out, it did not provide—indeed, it was not intended to provide—any guarantee against a cardinal feature of the unreformed political system, corruption and the abuse of power not by the Monarchical but by the Aristocratic Interest. For this the only remedy was a drastic reform of the parliamentary system which would safeguard the interests of all by the representation of all: in short by universal suffrage and the ballot.
Thus, in economics (which was the business of the middle class) the principle of utility pointed to laissez-faire and trust in the natural play of forces to produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number. In politics, however (which was still the business of the aristocracy and not of the middle class), the principle of utility pointed in the opposite direction—‘Minimise confidence’. In an iconoclastic frame of mind which was totally indifferent to Burke’s argument of prescription, the Philosophical Radicals demanded the submission of all institutions—legal, constitutional, ecclesiastical—to the rationalist criterion of utility. Utility meant the greatest happiness of the greatest number, interpreted in turn to mean the greatest happiness of the greatest number of individuals all pursuing their own enlightened self interest. ‘I asked myself’, Bentham records, ‘how this or that institution contributed to the greatest happiness?—Did it contribute?—If not, what institution would contribute to it?’2 It was this frame of mind which made Benthamite ideas the impetus behind the greater part of the reforming activity for which the years from 1815 to 1870 are remarkable. Yet all the time the Liberalism of these years looked on reform, not as the imposition of a blue-print upon society, but as the reverse of planning, as the liberation of natural, spontaneous forces in society which would of their own accord promote social improvement.
Any account of the influence of the Philosophical Radicals and the Classical Economists on English liberal thought needs careful qualification. The Benthamites and the Economists never founded a party of their own; their angular orthodoxies were too rigid for English politics. They exercised their influence through the permeation of both the existing parties with their ideas. In certain directions—an obvious example is commercial policy—that influence was very great, but it was never, even in its hey day between 1830 and 1870, the sole influence shaping the Liberal tradition, and it encountered considerable opposition inside the Whig as well as inside the Tory Party. A good instance of this is Macaulay. For Macaulay was certainly very much influenced by the ideas of the utilitarians and the political economists, but at times he was hotly critical of them and quite capable of taking an independent line of his own, as he did in his defence of the Ten Hours Bill in the teeth of laissez-faire prejudice, and again in his views on education.1
Moreover, in the last quarter of the 19th century the authority of these ideas, especially in relation to social problems, was badly shaken. To many Liberals the influence of laissez-faire economics and a doctrinaire Benthamite distrust of intervention by the State came to appear as a dead hand crippling the attempt to revise drastically the social and economic assumptions of Liberalism. From this point of view the influence of these ideas distorted the development of the English Liberal tradition, and from John Stuart Mill to Keynes the history of English Liberalism is principally concerned with the effort to shake itself free from the preconceptions of the early 19th century.
To identify the Liberal tradition with the views of the Utilitarians, the Classical Economists and the Manchester School is therefore to ignore its historical development. It is equally unhistorical, however, to underestimate the extraordinary influence which those ideas had up to 1870 and their persistence long afterwards. Possibly no other set of ideas has ever enjoyed such authority in England. In Keynes’ phrase, this was the true Church of England for a great part of the 19th century and later deviations into heresy have not yet obliterated all traces of the original orthodoxy.
V
The impact of these ideas on both parties was disruptive. The first to attempt to come to terms with them were the Tories. In the 1820’s it was a group of Tory ministers—Huskisson, Robinson, Wallace—who were impressed by the Economists’ arguments and took the first steps towards Free Trade; it was another Tory, Robert Peel, who began the reform of the English law which Bentham had long demanded. But Liberal Toryism was crippled by its own contradictions. Any attempt to put into effect, even partially, the views of Ricardo and Bentham must sooner or later run up against the demand for the repeal of the Corn Laws and for the reform of Parliament. No Tory minister, however liberal his sympathies, could entertain either of these demands without splitting the party. Liberal Toryism led down a blind alley at the end of which was a wall too high for any leader to get his party over intact. With Canning’s succession as Prime Minister in 1827 the split in the Tory Party became open: three years later the Tories’ long monopoly of office came to an end.
From the election of 1784 to the election of 1830 the Whigs had been continuously out of power, with the brief exception of a share in the Ministry of All the Talents. By 1818 they had brought their strength up to 173 seats in the Commons, but they lacked leaders and were divided by faction. Nevertheless, it was something to have an Opposition at all, something to have even a handful of men in Parliament who would defend civil liberty in the black years of distress after the war, as Fox had done in the 1790’s.
Nor was Whig criticism of the Government limited to home affairs and the panic legislation of 1817 and 1819, any more than Fox’s had been. Sharply critical of the Vienna Settlement and of the measures taken by the restored Governments in Europe after 1815, they were hostile to Metternichs Congress system and outspoken in their sympathy for the national and liberal movement in Greece, in Italy, in Spain and South America. It was from this sympathy with the Liberales of Spain that the word ‘Liberal’ as a party label came into English politics in the years after 1815. For this was the age of Byron as well as of Bentham, of the Romantics no less than of the Utilitarians, and Byron’s poems in praise of freedom—even more perhaps his death at Missolonghi—played a part in forming one of the most persistent traditions of English Liberalism, sympathy with peoples struggling to be free. It is a sympathy which has been arbitrary in its operation, more often than not misinformed, muddle-headed and unpractical, even more often raising hopes it was bound to disillusion, yet always generous in its nature and characteristic of English Liberalism from the Peninsular War of Napoleon’s time to the Spanish Civil War of our own.
The Whigs, however, were as much entangled in contradictions as the Tories. Although they sympathised with Spanish Liberales and Italian carbonari, they were certainly not prepared to go to war on their behalf. Although they had traditional ties with the commercial interest, they were much slower than the Tories to adopt Free Trade and the new ideas of the Economists. Although they had been playing with the idea of parliamentary reform since the 1780’s, they were distrusted by every reformer for the luke-warmness and fickleness of their support. Radical opinion was well summed up by Francis Place when he wrote: ‘There is no real difference between the Whig and Tory factions, except the difference which always existed: namely, that the Tories would exalt the kingly power that it might trample upon the aristocracy and the people, while the Whigs would establish an aristocratical oligarchy to trample on the King and the people.’1
The Whigs still saw politics in terms of an hereditary governing class, the handful of great families who constituted the Whig connection. They were as reluctant as the Tories to recognise that the social changes which had taken place in the fifty years—1780–1830—made political and economic reform imperative. Yet in the end, screwed up to the sticking point by spending most of those fifty years out of office, the Whigs made their bid for an alliance with middle-class Liberalism and passed the Reform Act of 1832. Forty years afterwards, the logic of Fox’s split from Burke in 1791 had worked itself out: the Whig connection and ‘the principles of 1688’ had been extended to include the middle class, and the unimpeachably middle-class Macaulay joined the unimpeachably aristocratic Russell to defend the first triumph of the new Whigs.
It was an uneasy combination with much recrimination on both sides. Roebuck expressed a view common enough among middle-class Radicals when he wrote: ‘The Whigs have ever been an exclusive and aristocratic faction, though at times employing democratic principles and phrases. . . . When out of office they were demagogues, in power they became exclusive oligarchs.’1 It was the Tories who had initiated the economic reforms of the 1820’s and a Tory Prime Minister, Peel, who repealed the Corn Laws in 1846. At that time Cobden urged Peel to come out and lead a new Liberal Party—‘You represent the IDEA of the age, and it has no other representative amongst statesmen.’2
A little earlier he had written to his friend George Combe: ‘The Whig leader (i.e. Russell) is great upon questions of a constitutional character, and has a hereditary leaning towards a popular and liberal interpretation of the Constitution. But his mind is less adapted for the mastery of economical questions, and he attaches an inferior importance to them. . . . He breathes the atmosphere of a privileged clique. His sympathies are aristocratic. He is sometimes thinking of the House of Russell, whilst Peel is occupied upon Manchester. They are in a false position; Peel ought to be the leader of the middle class.’3
But Peel declined Cobden’s advice and although Peel’s Liberal Toryism contributed Gladstone to the Liberal Party, that party when it was finally born in the 1860’s was a reconstituted Whig Party. Another forty years after 1832, the Whig Party of Fox and Grey and Russell had become the party of middle-class Liberalism. By the 1880’s it was Whigs like the Duke of Argyll and Lord Hartington who were defending the pure orthodoxy of laissez-faire against Radicals like Chamberlain who were abandoning it.
VI
Much the most effective political expression of middle-class Liberalism, before Gladstone created the Liberal Party, was the Anti-Corn Law League of the 1840’s. ‘I believe this’, John Bright said, ‘to be a movement of the commercial and industrial classes against the lords and great proprietors of the soil’, and his and Cobden’s speeches make clear how much both sides felt the issue of the Corn Laws to be the symbol of a deeper conflict. It was a conflict between two ways of life, two different views of the future of England. On the one hand was the landed class, accustomed to a monopoly of political power and social influence, especially locally. Heirs to a traditional set of values, they regarded land as the paramount interest in the country and were contemptuous of the Manchester ‘bagman’s millenium’, with buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest as the height of its social philosophy. On the other hand, as Cobden saw, was engaged the manufacturers’ pride as an order, the pride as well as the interests of a stubborn, hard-headed class of men. Bred in the values of the world of business and the Chapel, the manufacturers in their turn were contemptuous of the landlords as a parasitic class; they were hostile to both the virtues and the vices of the aristocratic ideal, narrow-minded, aggressive, but immensely self-confident that the future of the country lay with them and the industry of the North and the Midlands.
Cobden, however, was a good deal more than the successful organiser of a manufacturers’ pressure group. Out of the League grew the Manchester School and its attempt to build upon the principle of Free Trade a whole new system of policy appropriate to a country whose greatness was bound up with her commerce. Cobden was always attracted by the United States and he preferred the commercially-minded policies of the U.S.A. to the policies of the balance of power and Palmerstonian diplomacy pursued by England. He looked on trade as an activity which drew peoples together, which gave them a common interest in overcoming the barriers of race, language and religion; peace therefore was the natural corollary of trade. What threatened trade and peace alike was the intervention of Governments and the governing class which controlled them, insular, annexationist, aggressive, thinking only in terms of power and prestige, mercantilist in their politics as much as in their economics, believing that one nation could only gain at the expense of another. Cobden and Bright attacked such a policy on the grounds that it conceived of the relations between independent nations purely in terms of force, ultimately of war, and of the relations between England and her colonies purely in terms of supremacy and exploitation.
Cobden’s non-intervention was the policy of laissez-faire applied to international relations, and it rested on the same belief in a natural harmony of interests—if only governments would observe Bentham’s maxim, Be quiet. On the one side it shows the same distrust of government and the activity of the State, on the other the same hostility to the English ruling class with its traditional interest in foreign policy and diplomacy.
Neither Cobden nor Bright had the least sympathy with the extension of British rule over other peoples, but they were insistent on the obligations which an empire imposed on the metropolitan country. ‘I do not now’, Bright said in 1858, ‘make any comment upon the mode in which this country has been put into possession of India. I accept that possession as a fact. There we are; we do not know how to leave it, and therefore let us see if we know how to govern it. It is a problem such as, perhaps, no other nation has had to solve. Let us see whether there is enough of intelligence and virtue in England to solve the difficulty.’1 Bright approached the problems of Ireland in the same spirit. If it was Gladstone who made a settlement with Ireland the touchstone of English Liberalism, it was Bright who, long before Gladstone, pointed to the disgrace which the condition of Ireland represented to the good name of Britain and who, a quarter of a century before the Conservative Party was converted to land-purchase as the solution of the Irish problem, campaigned for the removal of every obstacle to the free sale of land in Ireland.
Cobden and Bright, however, commanded less and less support in the 1850’s. Middle-class Liberal England preferred Palmerston’s views on foreign policy. Time and again he beat them on their own ground in an appeal to the middle-class electorate; in the election of 1857 Cobden was defeated at Huddersfield and Bright in Manchester itself.
Palmerston was Palmerston. To call him a Whig or even a Canningite does less than justice to that extraordinary personality. To call him a Liberal sounds odder still. Yet in his support for Italian independence, in his generous, offhand encouragement to the Liberal cause in Europe, his dislike of tyranny, Palmerston did represent a side of the Liberal tradition. His Liberalism was unsystematic, a matter of temperament rather than principle, yet a part of the tradition which has to go in along with the Benthamites and the Manchester School.
The truth was that the middle classes had ‘arrived’ and in the process were shedding their radicalism. They were becoming respectable. ‘The result [Cobden wrote] has been to make a large increase in the number of Tories, and to cool down to a genteel tone the politics of the Whigs, until at last the majority find an earnest Radical not sufficiently genteel for their taste.’ If Liberalism was to develop further, it had to find wider support than in the middle-class electorate enfranchised by the 1832 Reform Act.
That meant a further extension of the franchise, and in 1858 Bright, transferring his seat from Manchester to the more democratic Birmingham, opened the campaign which was to bear fruit nine years later in the second Reform Act. For a long time Bright had to conduct this campaign single-handed: the official Liberal Party, still led by Palmerston, would have nothing to do with it. Not until 1865 did he find powerful support in the newly-converted Gladstone who declared in characteristic fashion to the crowded Free Trade Hall in Manchester, ‘At last my friends I am come among you, and I am come among you unmuzzled’.
It was a momentous conversion. In the same year Palmerston died and, after a brief interlude under Russell, Gladstone succeeded to the leadership of the Liberal Party. At the first election fought on the extended franchise, Gladstone won a clear majority and formed a cabinet which (with John Bright at the Board of Trade) was representative for the first time of all sections of Liberal opinion. With the controversial issue of the franchise removed, the conflicting elements in the Liberal tradition were brought into temporary equipoise and found in Gladstone a leader capable of uniting them in the most effective Liberal ministry of the century.
VII
To create an effective Liberal Party it was necessary, as Bright saw, to put it on a broader basis than that of a middle class which, once its interests had been recognised, was ceasing to be radical. A similar development was taking place in Liberal ideas.
Had English Liberalism remained what it was at the beginning of the 1850’s, a reflection of Peacock’s ‘steam intellect mind’ on the eve of the Great Exhibition, it would have been a more consistent but much poorer and less interesting view of politics than it became. In the first phase of its development, up to the 1850’s, Liberalism had expressed the needs, the interests, the prejudices and the beliefs of the manufacturing and commercial middle class which had been enfranchised in 1832 and made its power felt in the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. In the second phase of its development, however, Liberalism loses a good deal of this narrow character and turns into a social philosophy in its own right, a set of ideas no longer dependent for their validity or acceptance upon the extent to which they reflect the interests of a single class.
A few months after John Bright began his campaign for an extension of the franchise, John Stuart Mill published his essay On Liberty. Mill had been brought up as the child and heir of Benthamite Liberalism. He repaid the debt by producing in his Utilitarianism and in his Principles of Political Economy the most finished exposition of the system of ideas derived from that source. But, even at that early stage of his life, he was already in revolt against the narrowness of utilitarian thought and driven by his own honesty to make a series of damning concessions. In his later work the transformation is complete. To turn from James Mill’s essay On Government to his son’s On Liberty is to enter a different intellectual climate.
In his On Liberty (1859) and in his Representative Government (1861) Mill produces formal arguments which are designed to show that liberty, in particular liberty of thought and expression, is necessary for the development of human society. Progress, he argues, depends upon the freedom of individuals to innovate and experiment; conformity inevitably produces stagnation. This is the utilitarian basis of his argument against fully fledged democracy, that it is likely to produce a tyranny of the majority which will stifle those individual forces in society which give it life and meaning. For James Mill democracy had been a weapon to destroy the power of the ‘sinister interest’; for his son it was a potential threat to liberty and social diversity, the mainsprings of human progress.
But the heart of Mill’s argument for the cause of Liberty transcends the utilitarian. In pages which are the classical expression of English Liberal thought he argues the case for liberty and for representative institutions on the grounds that these are essential to that full and rich development of human individuality which he obviously values as an end in itself. When he quotes with approval von Humboldt’s remark, ‘It really is of importance not only what men do but also what manner of men they are that do it’, or states that, ‘If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind’, Mill is, in the first instance, arguing for a theory of self-realisation and, in the second, saying that freedom of thought has a value in itself which is superior to Benthamite considerations of the greatest good of the greatest number.
It is this belief, crystallised in his demand for ‘a social support, a point d’appui for individual resistance to the ruling power; a protection, a rallying point, for opinions and interests which the ascendant public opinion views with disfavour’ that led Mill to hold back from any scheme which involved the granting of sovereign power to a democratically elected legislature except under special conditions designed to guarantee the over-representation of minority groups.
Acton faced the same problem from a different standpoint. For him, too, ‘Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end’. But he concentrated his attack on the dangers inherent in the doctrine of equality, which he regarded as totally incompatible with liberty. Forced as an historian to admit the faults of the old order which was passing away, Acton could not regard a too rapid advance towards democracy with anything but distrust.
In his essay On Compromise (1874), John Morley, the most brilliant of the young Liberal intellectuals in the Gladstonian era, attempted to provide a practical political answer to these fears. On Compromise is really an exposition of the technique of gradualism. Small reforms are the key to ordered political progress, minimising at all times the dangers which arise when political parties move too far apart. Morley, therefore, is able to argue that ‘a right conception of political method . . . leads the wise conservative to accept the small change, lest a worse thing befall him, and the wise innovator to seize the chance of a small improvement, while incessantly working in the direction of great ones’. If no one reads Morley today, he showed real insight in pointing to the path which British politics have followed during the age of democracy.
In this middle period of Liberalism, then, not only has the argument for liberty taken a different form from the brash and aggressive utilitarian theory of Bentham and James Mill; it has become a defence of intellectual and moral freedom, valued for its own sake, against the dangers inherent in democracy. It is a striking fact that these dangers should have been recognised at a time when Liberals were coming to accept the necessity of a further advance towards democracy in the second Reform Act. It was in no easy spirit of optimism but with a clear understanding of the risks involved that men like Gladstone and Mill accepted such a step as necessary and right.
VIII
Matthew Arnold, in his famous essay Culture and Anarchy (1869), criticised the Philistinism and provincialism of English Nonconformist Liberalism and ascribed these qualities to the Hebraic inspiration of Nonconformity and its neglect of the Hellenic tradition of humanism. ‘Their idea of human perfection’, he wrote, ‘is narrow and inadequate; the Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion will never bring humanity to its true goal.’ The Philosophical Radicalism of Bentham and James Mill, another of the sources from which Liberalism had drawn inspiration, was open to the same sort of criticism. The liberalism of Mill’s essay On Liberty on the other hand represents an emancipation from influences to which the Liberal tradition owed much of its strength but also a certain narrow-mindedness in its earlier phase. This emancipation finds its clearest expression in Gladstone.
For Gladstone, as J. L. Hammond points out,1 combined the religious feeling of a Wilberforce or a Shaftesbury with a passion for the classical civilisation of Greece and Rome. His Christianity was illuminated by his love of Homer and Aristotle, Augustine and Dante. These, together with Bishop Butler and Burke, were the influences which had the deepest effect on him and gave him an intellectual approach to Liberalism wholly different from that of a man like Bright.
On one side of his complex personality Gladstone was an orthodox Liberal and it was this side which was uppermost in his career until his first retirement in 1874. Had Gladstone died then at the age of sixty-five he would have appeared as the man who had put into effect (as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1859 to 1865 and as Prime Minister from 1868 to 1874) the programme of Liberal reforms which Cobden had once called on Peel, Gladstone’s master, to carry out.2
Free trade, a commercial treaty with France, the abolition of the paper duties, the reduction of expenditure and taxation, the disestablishment of the Irish Church, the Education Act of 1870, the Ballot Act, the opening of the Universities to Nonconformists and of the Civil Service to competitive examination, Cardwell’s Army reforms, the Alabama arbitration and neutrality in the Franco-Prussian War—it was an impressive record, but all well within the canon of accepted Liberal ideas.
Where Gladstone made his own individual contribution and enlarged the Liberal tradition was in the two crusades which brought him back into politics after 1874: foreign policy and the Irish question. On both issues his attitude gave expression to the vivid conception of the place of the moral law in the relations between nations which made him the most controversial figure of his age.
Gladstone’s ideas on foreign policy were not those of Cobden and Bright. Far from advocating non-intervention, he insisted (for example, in the Eastern crisis of 1875–8) on England’s duty to intervene and to pursue an active policy. Where he differed from Palmerston and Disraeli was on the grounds of intervention and the objectives of an active foreign policy.
Although there are many anticipations of his views on earlier occasions, they find their clearest expression in the sustained attack which he made on Disraeli’s foreign policy in the 1870’s and which reached its climax in the Midlothian campaign of 1879–80.
Gladstone took as his starting-point the principle that foreign policy ought to be conducted in accordance with the demands of justice, not of expediency or power. He condemned ‘a vigorous, that is to say, a narrow, restless, blustering and self-asserting foreign policy . . . appealing to the self-love and pride of the community’ and setting up national interests selfishly conceived (‘a new and base idolatry’) as its sole objective. ‘I appeal to an established tradition, older, wiser, nobler far—a tradition not which disregards British interests, but which teaches you to seek the promotion of those interests in obeying the dictates of honour and of justice.’1
A policy based upon such principles, Gladstone believed, would always find support in ‘the general sentiment of the civilised world’ to which the statesman must appeal for those’ moral supports which the general and fixed convictions of mankind afford’. But even if such a policy was backed by the moral force of public opinion, how was it to be put into effect? Gladstone answered: by the Concert of Europe, by the European Powers engaging in joint intervention to see that justice was done. Common action alone, he argued, would unite the Great Powers for the common good and at the same time would ‘neutralise and fetter the selfish aims of each’.
Gladstone believed that there had been a good prospect of such joint intervention by the Powers in the Balkans in 1876 and that this had been destroyed by Disraeli’s determination to pursue a unilateral policy and break up the Concert of Powers—with the result that Russia too broke away and proceeded to intervene on her own in pursuit of her national, and not the common, interest.
Disraeli’s action angered Gladstone the more because he believed that it was the special role of Britain, as the one disinterested Great Power on the European scene, to take the lead in organising the Concert of Europe. This was her mission, to press for common action in the interests of justice and the common good, but it was a part which she could only play if she remained free from all taint of seeking material gain, a position destroyed in this case by the annexation of Cyprus.
Throughout his life Gladstone felt a passionate sympathy for peoples struggling to achieve national independence. This provides the other foundation of his views on foreign policy. ‘The powers of self-government’, this was his answer alike to the problems of the Balkans and those of Ireland. ‘Give those people freedom and the benefits of freedom’, he said of Turkey’s Christian subjects in 1880, ‘that is the way to make a barrier against despotism. Fortresses may be levelled to the ground; treaties may be trodden under foot—the true barrier against despotism is in the human heart and the human mind.’
From this sympathy it followed for Gladstone that all nations should enjoy equality of rights. ‘To claim anything more than equality of rights in the moral and political intercourse of the world is not the way to make England great, but to make it both morally and materially little.’ From this in turn sprang his condemnation of imperialism which proclaimed supremacy, not equality, and in its eagerness for aggrandisement brushed aside the rights of other nations to bring them under alien rule.
Back in office after 1880, Gladstone failed to put these principles into practice. The occupation of Egypt accorded ill with the spirit of the Midlothian campaign and his views on foreign policy proved less and less applicable to the rivalries of the Great Powers as the 19th century drew to its close. But the ideas to which he gave currency, far from losing their hold upon the Liberal imagination, have gained in strength since 1914. In the hopes placed in the League of Nations and the United Nations, in the attempt to organise collective security and the disappointed but constantly renewed appeals to world opinion against injustice and aggression, in the demand of the peoples of Asia, Africa and the Middle East for self-government, Gladstone’s beliefs have found a frustrated but passionate confirmation.
It was in his campaign for Irish Home Rule that Gladstone himself tried most tenaciously to carry out his ideas. He came to see the Irish question, not as a domestic problem of law and order—any more than the American question had been in the 1770’s—but as the claim of a nation to self-government, as much deserving of sympathy as the claims of the Italians, the Greeks and the Bulgars. Gladstone’s determination to satisfy this claim deeply affected the fortunes of Liberalism for years to come. It split the Liberal Party, put back the cause of social reform for a generation, necessitated a dangerous alliance with the Irish Nationalists, and, because of its unpopularity in England, was electorally disastrous. In spite of all this Gladstone and his followers were convinced that justice for Ireland was the great culminating work of the Liberal tradition. Ireland was the touchstone of that sympathy which Liberal England had shown so generously in the case of others: was it now to be overridden by self-interest when it was a question of Britain’s own empire?
Self-government had already been granted to Canada and the other colonies with the most felicitous results. No more was being asked for Ireland where, by contrast, ‘the first conditions of civil life—the free course of law, the liberty of every individual in the exercise of every legal right, the confidence of the people in the law and their sympathy with the law’ were entirely absent. It was only in Ireland that the sovereign Liberal remedy of freedom had not been tried. Elsewhere it had never failed and the settlement of Ireland, the thorniest question in British politics, would be its supreme justification.
IX
Gladstone had resumed the leadership of the Liberal Party after his retirement in 1874 with the limited objectives, first of challenging Disraeli’s foreign policy and later of achieving a settlement with Ireland. On the other issues, however, which were to play so great a part in the politics of the next half century, social reform and the condition of the working classes, he offered no lead at all. His preoccupation with Ireland heavily handicapped the efforts of those who were becoming alive to the need to question and revise orthodox Liberalism’s approach to social problems.
The Liberals of the Manchester School had assumed that with the destruction of the ‘sinister interests’ which stood in the way of the free development of social and economic forces, a natural harmony of interests would emerge of its own accord. This dream of a self-regulating society reduced to a minimum the role of the State. All the State had to do was to ‘hold the ring’, to ensure the conditions in which economic and political interests could have free play. Dissatisfied with this view, John Stuart Mill attempted to provide a new criterion for the intervention of the State by drawing a sharp distinction between ‘self-regarding’ and ‘other-regarding’ actions. ‘The only part of the conduct of anyone for which he is amenable to society’, Mill wrote, ‘is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute’. But Mill’s criticism did not go far enough. The distinction on which he sought to base his social philosophy proved untenable and was repudiated by the next generation of Liberal thinkers. The last quarter of the 19th century in fact produced a new philosophy of Liberalism and a new programme of radical legislation.
The old positions, built around the individual and his interests, were not given up without a fight, characteristically described by Herbert Spencer in the title he gave to a volume of his essays Man versus The State.1 In the political world resistance was much greater. Even when discredited intellectually, the orthodoxy of laissez-faire kept its hold on a large section of the Liberal Party, crippling its effectiveness as a vehicle of social reform. None the less, the new attitude to be found in the writings of T. H. Green, D. G. Ritchie, J. A. Hobson and Leonard Hobhouse marks a turning-point in the development of British Liberalism, leading half a century later to the ‘New Deal’ of Keynes and the Liberal Yellow Book.
The stumbling-block which Mill had been unable to overcome was the hackneyed antithesis between the individual and society which dominated Liberal thought for the greater part of the 19th century. To prophets of the New Liberalism it was the first idol to be abandoned. ‘Underlying all these traditions and prejudices’, wrote D. G. Ritchie in 1891, ‘there is a particular metaphysical theory—a metaphysical theory which takes hold of those persons especially who are fondest of abjuring all metaphysics. . . . The chief symptom of this metaphysical complaint is the belief in the abstract individual. The individual is thought of as if he had a meaning and significance apart from his surroundings and apart from his relations to the community of which he is a member. It may be quite true that the significance of the individual is not exhausted by his relations to any given set of surroundings; but apart from all these he is a mere abstraction, a logical ghost, a metaphysical spectre. . . . Now, along with this negative and abstract view of the individual there goes, as counterpart, the way of looking at the State as an opposing element to the individual. . . . Their relation is regarded as one merely of antithesis. . . . Such a conception is quite inadequate as a basis for any profitable discussion of the duties of Government.’2
With this stumbling-block removed, the way was open to a more positive view of freedom, something more (to quote T. H. Green) than ‘the mere removal of compulsion, the mere enabling a man to do as he likes’. ‘When we speak of freedom as something to be so highly prized, we mean a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying, and that, too, something that we do or enjoy in common with others.’1
The task of the State was to provide the conditions in which this sort of freedom could be pursued and, by the beginning of the 20th century, it had become a commonplace to describe the means as the provision of ‘equality of opportunity’. It was clear, too, that within the framework of a deeply rooted social hierarchy and a developed capitalist system such freedom, ‘the presence of opportunity’, could only be achieved by state interference. Freedom had emerged as a social conception, not one which involved the individual alone. Green did not claim that legislation could in itself promote moral goodness; his argument was that, in many situations, legislative intervention alone could bring into existence conditions in which men could exercise freely their faculties of moral judgment, enlarging, as it did so, the area of ‘positive freedom’.
The emphasis in Liberal thought remained, as it had always done, upon the individual, but he was now a social individual, and the aim of political activity was to enlarge the area within which he might enjoy an ever widening degree of freedom. ‘The sphere of liberty’, wrote Leonard Hobhouse, ‘is the sphere of growth itself.’ Such growth could only be ensured by State intervention, for every act of liberation involved for some individual or group a corresponding act of restraint.
Yet this was not a betrayal of Liberalism, as Spencer and other opponents suggested. The laissez-faire doctrine had, in its time, successfully transformed the social and economic system, but the development of capitalism and the move towards democracy now, in their turn, made necessary a new interpretation of the fundamental Liberal belief in liberty. Its evolution was a sign of intellectual strength, of a capacity to take account of changing circumstances. The new view of freedom, based upon the provision of opportunity for all, was essentially wider in scope and more humane than the narrow outlook of earlier generations. Liberalism had acquired a social as well as an intellectual conscience. Freedom, like Liberalism itself, had moved down the social scale.
X
The change in the philosophical assumptions of Liberalism was only part of a much wider process. The Radical wing of the Liberal Party was reaching similar conclusions at the level of party policy. The Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884 destroyed the electoral monopoly which the middle and upper classes had enjoyed since 1832. With the extension of the franchise to almost universal male suffrage, political success came to depend upon the ability to appeal to a predominantly working-class electorate. Such an appeal could, in the long run, only be based on a radical programme of social reform.
The older Liberalism, represented both by the Whigs and the heirs of the Manchester School, was hostile to any such programme. It preached self-help and laissez-faire as the answer to distress, stubbornly insisting that nothing could be done to relieve an industrialised nation’s problems of poverty and exploitation other than to leave their solution to the spontaneous action of those economic forces which had created them.
This view, or rather a watered-down version of it, continued until almost the end of the 19th century to colour the outlook of Gladstone and other Liberal leaders in Parliament. But, in the country, the younger generation of Liberals was quick to realise the implications of the Reform Acts and to take advantage of the opportunity which it gave them of implementing a programme of increased State and municipal intervention.
The first demonstration of what could be done was given in Birmingham in the 1870’s where, under the leadership of Joseph Chamberlain and the inspiration of an able group of Nonconformist Ministers, Dale, Crosskey and Dawson, the city was transformed by the technique of ‘municipal socialism’. It was in Birmingham and the other cities where Liberal Radicals gained control that public ownership and social welfare were first explored in miniature at the municipal level.
But the Radicals were not content to exercise their talents locally. Their success in Birmingham led them to take the initiative in the formation of the National Liberal Federation in 1877, an organisation which was designed to shake the hold of the Whigs both on the leadership of the party and on its parliamentary policy. Led by Chamberlain, Dilke and Morley, the Radicals engaged in a running fight which culminated in the Unauthorised Programme of 1885.1
The political arguments in favour of a programme which would appeal to a working-class electorate were reinforced by other considerations. The Golden Age of Victorian capitalism, the twenty years following the Great Exhibition of 1851, had ended. The depressions of the 1870’s and 1880’s removed the economic justification for the old untroubled confidence in the competitive system. The social investigations of men like Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree shattered complacency about its social consequences. The absolute faith in free competition which had marked earlier generations of Liberals was being eroded by harsh economic facts.
In any case, as that acute observer, J. A. Hobson, pointed out, the actual structure of the industrial and commercial system of the country at the end of the 19th century no longer corresponded to models derived from the classical economists. An economy which was increasingly dominated by the power of trusts, combines and the financial strength of the City of London could no longer be adequately diagnosed with the tools of Ricardian economics.
The trend towards collectivism, of course, extended far beyond the Liberal Party. It found expression in the Conservative Party as well as the Liberal, in the trade union movement as well as in the administrative practice of the Government, in the spread of socialist propaganda and in the foundation of the Fabian Society. For the Liberal Party, however, long identified with economic individualism and laissez-faire, it posed problems of peculiar difficulty. Could those who believed in the New Liberalism carry the party with them? Could they do it in time and with sufficient conviction to hold or win back working-class support? The Liberal Party was steadily losing to the Tories much of the support it had once been able to count on from the manufacturing and commercial classes as well as from the Whig connection. In 1888 Gladstone could say: ‘I do not disguise from myself the strength of the combination that is against us. . . . They have nearly the whole wealth of the country; they have the whole of the men of social station in the country; they have a vast preponderance in social strength.’ At the close of the century the Liberal Party, outside the Celtic fringe, was organised on a much narrower class basis than thirty years before. With the Tories re-establishing themselves as the party of property, the Liberals’ future had come to depend on success or failure in winning the working-class vote in the industrial constituencies of the Midlands and the North.
There is an obvious case for arguing that, once the franchise was widely extended, politics must inevitably come to reflect more and more the division between the satisfied and the dissatisfied classes and that this must eventually prove fatal to the Liberal Party. What chance had the Radicals of averting this by capturing the party and swinging it to the left? On a dispassionate estimate, this cannot be rated high at any time. Their best chance was in the 1880’s, but this was spoiled by the return of Gladstone to the leadership of the party.
Gladstone was the despair of the Radicals. As his Midlothian campaign showed, he could arouse Radical and working-class enthusiasm in a way that only Bright had equalled. In his attitude to imperialism and to the Irish question he was in advance of Radical opinion. But on social and economic issues his views remained those of the orthodox Chancellor of the Exchequer whose name has become synonymous with the strictest economy in public expenditure. Gladstone had little sympathy with the radicalism of the Unauthorised Programme. The passion and imagination of which he was capable when roused by the wrongs of the Christian peoples of the Balkans or of Ireland were wholly untouched by the ‘condition of the people’ question. Yet so long as he remained in politics, he dominated the Liberal Party and absorbed its energies in the single issue of Ireland.
In 1886 Gladstone’s determination to carry Irish Home Rule drove Chamberlain, the one man with the ability to put a Radical programme into effect, out of the party. Not until 1894—and then against his will-—was Gladstone forced to abandon his attempt to pass a Home Rule Bill and to lay down the leadership which he had first resigned twenty years before, leaving behind him a divided party without a policy. Those twenty years remain the most controversial episode in the most controversial career of the 19th century, a career which illustrates as no other the contradictions of the Liberal tradition, its greatness and its shortcomings.
Was the price which the Liberal Party paid for Gladstone’s crusades the loss of the opportunity to turn itself into a Radical Party? There were certainly Radicals at the time who believed this and it has often been repeated since. But it is also necessary to ask whether, even if Gladstone had remained in retirement after 1874, the Liberal Party—given its character and traditions—could have turned itself into a Radical Party. For our part, we are inclined to think that in answering this further question, too much importance has been attached to Gladstone, too little to the stubborn resistance which Chamberlain and the Radicals met in the party apart from Gladstone. If Chamberlain had secured the succession to the leadership in the 1880’s it could only have been at the price of an even deeper split in the party and one may well ask how long the working-class electorate would have remained content with the radicalism of the Unauthorised Programme.
At first sight the Liberal victory of 1906 seems to have offered the Radicals a second chance with a new leader in Lloyd George. ‘British Liberalism’, Lloyd George declared, ‘is not going to repeat the fate of Continental Liberalism. The fate of Continental Liberalism should warn us of that danger. It has been swept on one side before it had well begun its work, because it refused to adapt itself to new conditions.’
Yet there are solid reasons for doubting whether the prospects of Radicalism in 1906 were as brilliant as they have sometimes been made to appear. The pressure for direct working-class representation was growing and had already led to the formation of the Labour Representation Committee to be followed in 1906 by the foundation of the Labour Party. If the Labour Party failed to make much headway before the war, this was less because of working-class loyalty to the Liberal Party than because even an independent Labour Party failed to satisfy the growing impatience of the rank-and-file trade unionist, especially in the years 1911–14.
The Radicals succeeded in carrying a number of important measures between 1906 and 1911, but the politically conscious section of the working class was asking for something more than a programme of social reform by 1914; it wanted fundamental changes in the economic social system. Lloyd George’s identification of the landowner as the enemy might win support in rural districts or in Wales and Scotland but it aroused little enthusiasm in the industrial areas where the working class saw their enemy in the employer and the capitalist. In any case the most influential section of the Liberal Party remained unconverted to the Radicals’ bid for working-class support or only accepted it reluctantly without conviction.
As the fight over the powers of the House of Lords showed, a Liberal Government could still draw strength from and add to its past achievements. But the Parliament Act of 1911 was the logical conclusion to the extension of political democracy which the Liberal Party had championed in the 19th century; it did not prove the capacity of the party to meet the demands of social democracy in the 20th. Lloyd George’s Insurance Act pointed the way, but an impression of reluctance and hesitation remained which, after the war, was to be reflected in the Liberals’ steady loss of radical votes to the Labour Party. For, if the consequences of this were blurred at the time by other issues—the House of Lords, Ireland and the outbreak of war—after 1918 it became only too clear that the Liberal Party had been replaced by the Labour Party as the hope of those who sought for radical solutions to problems now pushed into the forefront of politics by the stagnation of trade and mass unemployment.
This is not the end of the story, however. The paradox of British Liberalism in the 20th century is that, while the Liberal Party has dwindled in strength, the Liberal tradition has in large part been taken over by one or other of the competing parties, each of which claims with some justification to be the heir of different parts of that tradition. More than that: Liberalism, as a distinctive political philosophy, has shown itself capable of an original approach to the problems which defeated every party between the wars. John Maynard Keynes, working, as he believed, within the framework of the Liberal tradition, went further than any other man towards resolving what many had come to believe were the incompatibilities of a free society and a relatively stable economy. Just before the publication in 1936 of the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money he wrote to George Bernard Shaw: ‘To understand my state of mind you have to know that I believe myself to be writing a book on economic theory which will largely revolutionise—not, I suppose, at once but in the course of the next ten years—the way the world thinks about economic problems.’1
Long before the theoretical refinement of his views, Keynes hammered away at their practical application during the 1920’s. In a series of articles, pamphlets and lectures, he argued the necessity for thinking out the Agenda of Government anew, the irrelevance of economic and political attitudes which still had their roots in the 19th century, the possibility of utilising resources which were running to waste in the misery of unemployment. The policy which he and a group that included Walter Layton, Hubert Henderson, Philip Kerr and Seebohm Rowntree, produced between 1926 and 1927 under the leadership of Lloyd George was, in effect, a comprehensive New Deal for Britain. But the Liberal Yellow Book represented a policy which, at that time, was altogether too bold for ‘the old gentlemen tightly buttonedup in their frock coats’—in all parties.
With the publication of his General Theory, Keynes moved from the field of practical remedies into an area where his views were, in the words of his letter to Bernard Shaw, to change the way the world thinks about economic problems.
Keynes’ refusal to accept the antithesis between socialism and capitalism which had marked almost all previous thought on the subject carried a stage further the rejection of the antithesis between the individual and the State by the New Liberalism fifty years before. Like that, it marked not the abandonment but the enlargement of the fundamental Liberal conception of liberty. In working out this theme in the technical analysis of the General Theory (a book, Keynes wrote, ‘chiefly addressed to my fellow economists’), he set the climate of Liberal thought in the mid-20th century as certainly as did the Classical Economists in the 19th, and brilliantly vindicated the vitality of the Liberal tradition in the changed conditions of a mass society and a controlled economy.
XI
The course of events outside Great Britain after 1870 confronted Liberalism with a challenge no less sharp and problems no less difficult than those raised by the course of domestic change. The relations of the Great Powers with each other, and with smaller, weaker peoples, were dominated by a crude and intensified struggle for power, prestige and profits, finding expression in the contest for colonies and spheres of influence, in the struggle for markets and the erection of tariff-barriers, in armaments races and the shrill aggressive nationalism which politicians and press alike found to be very much to the taste of the new electorate.
Imperialism split the Liberal Party in the 1890’s and produced a Liberal version in Lord Rosebery and the Liberal Leaguers, Haldane, Grey and Asquith. The outbreak of the Boer War sharpened the divisions in the party. The traditional Liberal opposition to imperialism, represented by Harcourt and Morley, was restated in more trenchant terms by writers like J. A. Hobson (whose Imperialism was to prove one of the most influential books of the century) and by Radical politicians like David Lloyd George. It was not, however, until the course of the war spread disillusionment that Campbell-Bannerman succeeded in reuniting the party. The split was finally healed by the attack which Chamberlain, in logical extension of his imperialist principles, launched on free trade.
Free trade was still the first article in every Liberal’s creed, whatever their other differences, and Chamberlain could have picked no issue more favourable to Liberal unity. In the Parliament of 1906, with its unprecedented Liberal majority, Campbell-Bannerman was able to put the seal on the Liberal repudiation of Chamberlain’s South African policy by the grant of self-government to the Transvaal and Orange River Colony, the essential foundation of the Union of 1909.
Balfour denounced Campbell-Bannerman’s South African settlement as ‘the most reckless experiment ever tried in the development of a great colonial policy’. The development of that policy in the 20th century has proved Balfour wrong. It has been the grant of self-government, first to the white Dominions, then to India, Pakistan, Ceylon, finally to African territories like Nigeria and to Malaya which alone has held the Commonwealth together. Indeed there is a good case to be argued for the view that the modern British Commonwealth, with its conception of a community of independent, self-governing nations, is one of the most spectacular triumphs of the Liberal tradition—its contradictions and inconsistencies included.
The fundamental problem of external policy remained the relations of the Great Powers, of which colonial rivalry was one, but only one, expression. Up to 1914, Liberals were still active in championing the Gladstonian cause of downtrodden peoples: Armenia, Macedonia, Persia. They welcomed the settlement with France but were decidedly critical of closer relations with Tsarist Russia. For the rest such attention as they paid to foreign affairs was strongly coloured by ideas inherited from Cobden and Bright: free trade, non-intervention, freedom from entanglements, distrust of the Balance of Power, and the reduction of expenditure on armaments.
Grey, however, faced with the responsibilities of office, could not afford to take so simple a view. The concealed premises on which the orthodox Liberal attitude rested were a stable balance of power in Europe and a naval supremacy which together guaranteed the invulnerability of these islands. But if these were threatened, as Grey came to believe they were by the growth of German power, then a Liberal Government, however reluctantly, must resist the demand of its supporters for the reduction of armaments and exert its power to correct the threatened balance.
Only once in these years was this issue threshed out, in the debate following the Agadir crisis of 1911 which roused Grey’s Radical critics with the revelation of how close Britain had been to war with Germany at the side of France. This was one of the rare occasions on which Grey defended his policy in public.
‘The ideal of splendid isolation’, he told the House of Commons, ‘contemplated a balance of power in Europe to which we were not to be a party, and from which we were to be able to stand aside in the happy position of having no obligations and being able to take advantage of any difficulties which arose in Europe from friction between opposing Powers. That policy is not a possible one now. . . . It is the negation of a policy, and if it were accompanied, as I suppose it would be accompanied, with constant criticisms about the internal affairs and proceedings of other Governments, constant pressure . . . to interfere and make representations . . . then I say that the disastrous consequences of such an attitude of mingled interferences and drift would soon become apparent in an expenditure on armaments even greater than the present, and sooner or later the very peace that people desired to preserve would topple over.’1
Grey’s critics failed to answer him but he did not press the issue between them and their concern died away, partly distracted by domestic and Irish affairs, partly lulled by renewed efforts to reach an understanding with Germany and by Grey’s success in making the Concert of Europe a reality at the time of the Balkan wars. When war came it caught the Liberal Party, as distinct from the Liberal foreign minister, unprepared and the instinctive reaction of Liberal opinion as represented by the Manchester Guardian under the editorship of C. P. Scott was to call for a policy of neutrality and to hold aloof from the European conflict.
The war sharpened Liberal dissatisfaction with the traditional methods of conducting foreign policy. In retrospect they became far more critical of Grey and the ‘secret diplomacy’ of the Foreign Office than they had been at the time. They found in President Wilson a man after their own hearts. His views and theirs coincided at many points: a just peace without annexations or indemnities; the map of Europe redrawn on the principle of self-determination; ‘open covenants openly arrived at’, arbitration and the rule of law; disarmament and the replacing of exclusive alliances by a League of Nations; above all, a devotion to the ideal of the brotherhood of man.
In the 1920’s Liberals were among the sharpest critics of the peace treaties, calling for their revison, for the strengthening of the League, disarmament and the outlawry of war. In common with the Labour Party they found themselves entangled in the contradiction of purposes involved in the simultaneous demands for disarmament and collective security and in the 1930’s discovered no more effective answer than anyone else to the dictators’ blackmail than the reluctant employment of the force they abhorred.
The Liberals’ search for an alternative means of conducting the relations between nations other than by force and the threat of force ended in frustration. Yet from Fox in the 1790’s to the League of Nations Union and the Peace Ballot there is nothing more characteristic of the Liberal tradition. Nor in a world still living under the threat of war is there any part of that tradition which finds so anxious an echo in the fears of ordinary men and women.
XII
The Liberal Party lasted as an effective political force for not more than seventy years. It can scarcely be said to have existed before Gladstone joined Palmerston’s government in 1859 and after 1931 it was reduced to a handful of members in the House of Commons. The Liberal tradition has had a longer history and a more lasting influence.
The permanent achievements of that tradition are embodied in the British Constitution; it is still to be found at work in both the other parties, Labour and Conservative. Outside party politics it has deeply affected education (especially in the universities) and the administration of the law. It has remained the strongest element in the philosophy of government evolved by the civil service and by local authorities. It has inspired the transformation of a colonial empire into a commonwealth of nations. There is not a single institution in the country which has not felt the impact of these ideas while at the deeper level of instinctive feeling they have become a part of the national character, finding expression in the tradition of ‘fair play’.
In the pages which follow two ideas recur again and again. The first is a belief in the value of freedom, freedom of the individual, freedom of minorities, freedom of peoples. The scope of freedom has required continual and sometimes drastic re-defining, as in the abandonment of laissez-faire or in the extension of self-government to the peoples of Asia and Africa. But each re-definition has represented a deepening and strengthening, not an attenuation, of the original faith in freedom.
The second is the belief that principle ought to count far more than power or expediency, that moral issues cannot be excluded from politics. Liberal attempts to translate moral principles into political action have rarely been successful and neglect of the factor of power is one of the most obvious criticisms of Liberal thinking about politics, especially international relations. But neglect of the factor of conscience, which is a much more likely error, is equally disastrous in the long run. The historical role of Liberalism in British history has been to prevent this, and again and again to modify policies and the exercise of power by protests in the name of conscience.
We began this introduction by underlining the intellectual incoherence of the Liberal tradition unless it is seen as an historical development. We end it by pointing to the belief in freedom and the belief in conscience as the twin foundations of Liberal philosophy and the element of continuity in its historical development. Politics can never be conducted by the light of these two principles alone, but without them human society is reduced to servitude and the naked rule of force. This is the truth which the Liberal tradition has maintained from Fox to Keynes—and which still needs to be maintained in our own time.
ALAN BULLOCK
MAURICE SHOCK
Oxford, 1956
