TWENTIETH CENTURY

POLITICS:

A POLICY OF NATIONAL EFFICIENCY.

By SIDNEY WEBB, L.C.C.

PUBLISHED AND SOLD BY

THE FABIAN SOCIETY.

PRICE ONE PENNY.

LONDON:

THE FABIAN SOCIETY, 3 CLEMENT'S INN, STRAND, W.C. PUBLISHED NOVEMBER, 1901. SECOND REPRINT MARCH, 1906.

It is not altogether an idle fancy that associates the change of century with a change of thought. The governing ideas to which we look forward, at the beginning of the twentieth century, will, we may be sure, not be those on which we looked back at the close of the nineteenth.

What is going to be the dominant note of Twentieth Century Politics? Certainly, I venture to assert, not the note of Nineteenth Century Liberalism or Conservatism.

What then is the matter with Liberalism? For fifty years, in the middle of the last century, we may recognize it as "a great instrument of progress," wrenching away the shackles political, fiscal, legal, theological and social-that hindered individual advancement. The shackles are by no means wholly got rid of, but the political force of this old Liberalism is spent. During the last twenty years its aspirations and its watchwords, its ideas of daily life and its conceptions of the universe, have become increasingly dis tasteful to the ordinary citizen as he renews his youth from generation to generation. Its worship of individual liberty evokes no enthusiasm. Its reliance on "freedom of contract" and "supply and demand," with its corresponding "voluntaryism" in religion and philanthropy, now seems to work out disastrously for the masses, who are too poor to have what the economists call an "effective demand" for even the minimum conditions of physical and mental health necessary to national well-being. Of all this the rising generations of voters are deadly tired, and Liberalism has collapsed in consequence.

The Decline of Liberalism.

I am aware that it is an amiable delusion of many good Liberals that the collapse of their party is due merely to recent, temporary causes to the South African war, to personal quarrels among the leaders or to the Home Rule Bill. But the smashing defeat of 1895 was only the culmination of a steady alienation from Liberalism of the great centres of population, which began to be visible even in 1874. London and Lancashire have ever since persisted in this adverse verdict. The most startling feature of the election of 1885still prior to the Home Rule Bill-was the extent to which Liberalism was rejected by the boroughs. All that has happened since that date has but confirmed the great centres of population in their positive aversion to Gladstonianism. This, and not the ephemeral dispute about the war, is the bottom fact of the political situation. Thirty years ago the great boroughs were enthusiastic for Liberalism. By an uninterrupted process of conversion they have now become

* A lecture to the Fabian Society, November 8th, 1901. Much of this lecture appeared, under another title, in the Nineteenth Century, September, 1901, and is here reproduced by permission of the Editor.

flatly opposed to it. The fact that to-day the Conservative Party finds its chief strongholds, not in the lethargic and stationary rural counties, drained of their young men, but in the intellectually active and rapidly growing life of the towns (containing two-thirds of the nation), proves that the Liberalism of Sir William Harcourt and Mr. Morley does not express the Progressive instinct of the twentieth century. It held that position for so large a part of the last century that it came to believe that it held it by natural right. How is it that it has now lost it?

A New England.

The answer is that, during the last twenty or thirty years, we have become a new people. "Early Victorian" England now lies, in effect, centuries behind us. Such things do happen. The processes which make one generation differ from another operate sometimes slowly and imperceptibly, sometimes quickly and even suddenly. At one period centuries may pass without any discoverable difference in the mind or character of a nation. At another new ideas are precipitated and new parties crystallized almost before the old parliamentary hands have time to prove their visionariness. Such an epoch of transformation we now recognize, to cite only one instance, in the reign of Elizabeth. We note, within a single generation, a distinct change in the content of men's minds. Their standpoints are shifted. Their horizons are suddenly enlarged. Their whole way of considering things is altered, and lo! a new England. In the same sense, the historian of the future will recognize, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the birth of another new England. Elizabethan England changed because Englishmen became aware of new relationships. They saw themselves linked on, almost suddenly, with the past in classic antiquity, and with the future in America. The England of this generation is changing because Englishmen have had revealed to them another new world of relationships, of which they were before unconscious. This time it is not a new continent that the ordinary man has discovered, but a new category. We have become aware, almost in a flash, that we are not merely individuals, but members of a community, nay, citizens of the world. This new self-consciousness is no mere intellectual fancy, but a hard fact that comes home to us in our daily life. The laborer in the slum-tenement, competing for employment at the factory gate, has become conscious that his comfort and progress depend, not wholly or mainly on himself, or on any other individual, but upon the proper organization of his Trade Union and the activity of the factory inspector. The shopkeeper or the manufacturer sees his prosperity wax or wane, his own industry and sagacity remaining the same, according to the good government of his city, the efficiency with which his nation is organized, and the influence which his Empire is able to exercise in the councils, and consequently in the commerce, of the world.

"Thinking in Communities."

Hence the ordinary elector, be he workman or manufacturer, shopkeeper or merchant, has lost his interest in individual "rights," or abstract "equality," political or religious. The freedom that he now

Union to bargain collectively, freedom for his co-operative society to buy and sell and manufacture, freedom for his municipality to supply all the common needs of the town, freedom, above all, from the narrow insularity which keeps his nation backing, "on principle," out of its proper place in the comity of the world. In short, the opening of the twentieth century finds us all, to the dismay of the old-fashioned Individualist, "thinking in communities."

Now the trouble with what I venture to call nineteenth century Liberalism is that, by instinct, by tradition, and by the positive precepts of its past exponents, it "thinks in individuals." It visualizes the world as a world of independent Roundheads, with separate ends, and abstract rights to pursue those ends. We see old-fashioned Liberals, for instance, still hankering after the disestablishment and disendowment of all State Churches, on the plea of religious equality; meaning that it is unfair to give any public money or public advantage to any denomination from which any individual taxpayer dissents. But if it be so, all corporate action is unfair. We are all dissenters from some part or another of the action of the communities of which we are members. How far the maintenance of a State church really makes for national well-being-how otherwise than by national establishment and public endowment we can secure, in every parish, whether it cares and can afford to pay for it or not, the presence of a teacher of morality and an exponent of higher intellectual and social life-is a matter for careful investigation. But the notion that there is anything inherently wrong in compelling all citizens to help to maintain religious observances or religious instruction of which some of them individually disapprove, is part of the characteristically Whig conception of the citizen's contribution to the expenses of the social organization, as a bill paid by a private man for certain specific commodities which he has ordered and purchased for his own use. On this conception the Quaker is robbed when his taxes are spent on the Army and Navy; the Protestant is outraged by seeing his contributions help to support a Roman Catholic school or university; the teetotaler is wronged at having to provide the naval ration of rum. Nineteenth century Liberalism was, in fact, axiomatically hostile to the State. It is not "little Englandism" that is the matter with those who still cling to such views; it is, as Huxley and Matthew Arnold correctly diagnosed, administrative Nihilism. So far as political action is concerned they tend to be inveterately negative, instinctively iconoclastic. They have hung up temperance reform and educational reform for a quarter of a century, because, instead of seeking to enable the citizen to refresh himself without being poisoned or inebriated, and to get the children thoroughly taught, they have wanted primarily to revenge their outraged temperance principles on the publican and their outraged Nonconformist principles on the Church. Of such Liberals it may be said that the destructive revolutionary tradition is in their bones; they will reform nothing unless it can be done at the expense of their enemies. Moral superiority, virtuous indignation, are necessaries of

See Fabian Tracts, No. 85, "Liquor Licensing at Home and Abroad," by E. R. Pease, and No. 86, "Municipal Drink Traffic."

political life to them; a Liberal reform is never simply a social means to a social end, but a campaign of Good against Evil. Their con. ception of freedom means only breaking somebody's bonds asunder. When the "higher freedom" of corporate life is in question, they become angrily reactionary, and denounce and obstruct the most obvious developments of common action as "infringements of individual liberty," "municipal trading," or-dreadest of all words— bureaucracy." They feel no desire to promote the greatest possible development of municipal activity, the most comprehensive extension of the Factory Acts, or the fullest utilization of the Government departments in the service of the public. They quite honestly consider such aims to be mischievous. They are aiming at something else, namely, at the abstract right of the individual to lead exactly the kind of life that he likes (and can pay for), unpenalized by any taxation for purposes of which he individually disapproves. They are, in fact, still "thinking in individuals."

Liberalism and the Empire.

This same atomic conception of society, transferred from the State at home to the British Empire as a whole, lay at the root of much of the feeling of nineteenth century Liberalism with regard to foreign and colonial policy, and may even be detected coloring the fervid propaganda of Irish "Home Rule." Twentieth Century Politics will be based, it appears to me, not on abstract rights of "nationalities," but on the concrete administrative necessities of definitely organized commonwealths; not on racial autonomy whatever the geography-an obsolete tribal notion which would give us an empire of the Jews-but on territorial democracy, whatever the mixture of race. Exactly what geographical areas will best serve as administrative units, and exactly what degree of local self-govern. ment each grade in the hierarchy of units will enjoy, is a difficult problem in political science, towards the solution of which the nineteenth century has contributed little. Meanwhile, Twentieth Century Politics for this country will certainly assume the maintenance, as against all external aggression, of that great commonwealth of peoples styled the British Empire*, including within itself members of all races, of all human colors, and nearly all languages and religions. We, at any rate, are precluded from assuming or admitting that any distinct "nationality," just because it imagines itself to have ends which differ from, and, perhaps, conflict with, the common interests of the Empire as a whole, has, therefore, an abstract right to organize an independent government and pursue those ends at whatever cost to its colleagues or neighbors. The abstract right to unfettered freedom in self-government, which we all see that we must deny to the individualt, cannot be accorded to the family, the tribe, the race, the parish, the city, the county, the province, or the state. Our obvious duty with the British Empire is, not to "run" it for our own profit, or with any idea of imposing Anglo-Saxondom on a reluctant world, but to put our best brains

• See Fabianism and the Empire (Grant Richards, London, 1900, Is.).

+ See Fabian Tract No. 45, "The Impossibilities of Anarchism," by Bernard Shaw.