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A SHORT HISTORY OF
ENGLISH LIBERALISM



BY

W. LYON BLEASE



    _No rational man ever did govern himself by abstractions and
    universals.... A statesman differs from a professor in an university;
    the latter has only the general view of society.... A statesman, never
    losing sight of principles, is to be guided by circumstances; and,
    judging contrary to the exigencies of the moment, he may ruin his
    country for ever._

    BURKE, "On the Petition of the Unitarians."



T. FISHER UNWIN
LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE
LEIPSIC: INSELSTRASSE 20

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TO
"THE MANCHESTER GUARDIAN"



_First Published in 1913_

(_All rights reserved._)

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CONTENTS

  CHAPTER                                                 PAGE

  I. LIBERALISM AND TORYISM                                  7

  II. POLITICAL CONDITIONS IN THE REIGN OF GEORGE III       42

  III. THE FIRST MOVEMENT TOWARDS LIBERALISM                69

  IV. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND ENGLISH OPINION            100

  V. THE DECLINE OF TORYISM                                142

  VI. THE MIDDLE-CLASS SUPREMACY                           168

  VII. THE MANCHESTER SCHOOL AND PALMERSTON                190

  VIII. THE BEGINNING OF THE GLADSTONE PERIOD              230

  IX. GLADSTONE VERSUS DISRAELI                            265

  X. THE IMPERIALIST REACTION                              294

  XI. LIBERALISM SINCE 1906                                324

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{7}

A Short History of English Liberalism

CHAPTER I

LIBERALISM AND TORYISM

This book attempts to trace the varying but persistent course of Liberalism
in British politics during the last hundred and fifty years. It is not so
much a history of events as a reading of them in the light of a particular
political philosophy. In the strict sense a history of Liberalism should
cover much more than politics. The same habit of mind is to be discovered
everywhere else in the history of thought, most conspicuously in religious
history, but not less certainly in the history of science and of art. The
general victory in these innumerable conflicts of opinion has been to
Liberalism, and the movement of the race, during the period with which the
writer is concerned, is precisely measured by the degree in which the
Liberal spirit has succeeded in modifying the establishments of the
preceding age. The object of this book is to investigate the course of that
process of modification in politics.

By Liberalism I mean, not a policy, but a habit of mind. It is the
disposition of the man who looks upon each of his fellows as of equal worth
with himself. He does not assume that all men and women are of equal
capacity, or equally entitled to offices and privileges. But he is always
inclined to leave and to give them equal opportunity with himself for
self-expression and for self-development. He assumes, as the basis of his
activity, that he has no right to interfere with any other person's
attempts {8} to employ his natural powers in what he conceives to be the
best way. He is unwilling to impose his judgment upon that of others, or to
force them to live their lives according to his ideas rather than their
own. They are never to be used by him for his own ends, but for theirs.
Each is to be left to himself, to work out his own salvation. The Liberal
habit of mind has its positive as well as its negative side. Just as it
leads its possessor to refrain from interfering with the development of
others, so it leads him to take active steps to remove the artificial
barriers which impede that development. Natural obstacles will remain,
though even these may be diminished. But the artificial conditions, which
prevent or hinder growth, are perpetually obnoxious to the Liberal. Upon
class distinctions in society, privileges of sex, rank, wealth, and creed,
he wages unceasing war. They are, in his eye, weights and impediments. To
one of two individuals, not distinguishable in natural capacity, they give
an advantage which is denied to the other. It is the object of the Liberal,
not to deprive any individual of such opportunities as are required for the
exercise of his natural powers, but to prevent the excessive appropriation
of such opportunities by members of the privileged class. The differences
between the practical aims and methods of Liberals at different times are
very wide. But the mental habit has always been the same. "The passion for
improving mankind, in its ultimate object, does not vary. But the immediate
object of reformers and the forms of persuasion by which they seek to
advance them, vary much in different generations. To a hasty observer they
might even seem contradictory, and to justify the notion that nothing
better than a desire for change, selfish or perverse, is at the bottom of
all reforming movements. Only those who will think a little longer about it
can discern the same old cause of social good against class interests, for
which, under altered names, Liberals are fighting now as they were fifty
years ago."[1] The constitutional Liberalism of Fox, the economical
Liberalism of Cobden, and the new collectivist Liberalism of Mr. Lloyd {9}
George exhibit great differences in comparison. But the three men are alike
in their desire to set free the individual from existing social bonds, and
to procure him liberty of growth.

The justification for this individual freedom is not that the man is left
to his own selfish motives, to develop himself for his own advantage. It is
that it is only in this way that he can realize that his own best advantage
is only secured by consulting that of his fellows. "The foundation of
liberty is the idea of growth... it is of course possible to reduce a man
to order and prevent him from being a nuisance to his neighbours by
arbitrary control and harsh punishment.... It is also possible, though it
takes a much higher skill, to teach the same man to discipline himself, and
this is to foster the development of will, of personality, of self-control,
or whatever we please to call that central harmonizing power which makes us
capable of directing our own lives. Liberalism is the belief that society
can safely be founded on this self-directing power of personality."[2] This
Liberalism has nothing to do with anarchy. Coercion may be consistently
applied wherever individual liberty is employed for the public injury, and
the imprisonment of burglars and the regulation of factories by law are
only two aspects of the same thing. But Liberalism restricts freedom only
to extend freedom. Where the individual uses his own liberty to restrict
that of others he may be coerced. But in spite of the modifications to
which all such political principles must be subject, the general rule holds
good. The ideal Liberal State is that in which every individual is equally
free to work out his own life.

The practical difficulty of working out the relations between the
individual and the society in which he is placed is of course very great,
and it will probably always be impossible to maintain a perfect
equilibrium. No doubt we shall always suffer from one or other of the two
unsatisfying conditions--the sacrifice of the individual to what the
majority thinks to be the right of the whole society, and the sacrifice of
the {10} society to the undue emancipation of the individual. But the
necessary imperfection of the result is no argument against this or any
other political system of thought. Politics are no more than a means of
getting things done, and when we have found a society of perfect human
beings, we can fairly complain that their affairs are not perfectly
managed. So far as he can, the Liberal aims at securing this balance of
social and individual good, remembering that the good of society can only
be measured by the good of all its members, and not by the good only of
some dominant rank, creed, or class. "Rights are relative to the well-being
of society, but the converse proposition is equally true, that the
well-being of society may be measured by the degree in which their moral
rights are secured to its component members.... The moral right of an
individual is simply a condition of the full development of his personality
as a moral being. Equally, the moral right of any community is the
condition of the maintenance of its common life, and since that society is
best, happiest, and most progressive which enables its members to make the
utmost of themselves, there is no necessary conflict between them. The
maintenance of rights is the condition of human progress.... To reconcile
the rule of right with the principle of the public welfare is the supreme
end of social theory."[3]

In practical politics the work of modern Liberalism has been to alter the
conditions of society so that this freedom of growth may be secured for
each member of it. The old conception of society was a conception of
classes. Human beings were graded and standardized. Certain privileges were
reserved for certain groups. Society looked, for its estimate of a man, not
to his natural powers, not to what he might make of himself, but to his
brand or mark. If within a certain degree, he had a free choice of his mode
of life; if without it, he found his condition prescribed, sometimes so
rigorously that he could hardly ever improve it. Liberalism has endeavoured
to go deeper into the man, to get beneath the outward complexion, {11} to
find out his intrinsic worth, and to give him that place in the social
estimate which his natural powers deserve. Arbitrary distinctions are
abhorrent to it. It is incapable of thinking in terms of class. Every class
is, in its eyes, only an aggregate of individuals, and to exalt one class
above another is to appreciate some individuals at the expense of others,
to place marks of comparative social worth upon the members of different
groups which do not correspond to the relative values of their natural
qualities. Against a privileged race, rank, creed, or sex Liberalism must
fight continually. By the artificial elevation of one above another, it is
made to count for more in society, its members are aggrandized and those of
its rivals are depreciated; and while the first are encouraged to abuse,
the second are hampered and fettered in their growth. The Liberal asserts
that no man, because he happens to be of a particular sect, or to be born
of a particular family, or to possess a particular form of property, or to
hold particular opinions, shall be invested by Society with privileges
which give him an advantage in social intercourse over his fellows. He does
not assert that all human beings are equal in capacity, but he demands that
their natural inequalities shall not be aggravated by artificial
conditions. For what he is worth, each shall be free to realize his highest
capacity.

The Liberal conception of equality as between individuals is extended to
the case of Churches, of nations, and of sexes. These classes are indeed
not regarded by the Liberal as classes, but simply as associations, for
limited purposes, of individuals, who are, in all essential respects,
separate and distinct. To confer a privilege upon one Church or nation or
sex is simply to confer a privilege upon the individuals who compose it,
and whether the privilege is the monopoly of political power or the sole
right to take part in a public ceremony, it does in greater or less degree
affect the relative social values of the members of the two groups, and
places the members of the inferior at the disposition of those of the
superior. To give the Established Church the sole right to take part in the
coronation of the King is a violation {12} of Liberal principle of the same
kind, though not of the same degree, as to exclude Dissenters or Catholics
from Parliament, and if men were content to exclude women only from the
legal profession, they would be arrogating to themselves a superior value
no less clearly than when they refuse to them the right to control their
own government.

The same general habit of mind is applied to foreign policy. The
acknowledgment of the equal worth of individuals within the nation becomes
the acknowledgment of the equal worth of nations among themselves.
"Nationalism has stood for liberty, not only in the sense that it has
resisted tyrannous encroachment, but also in the sense that it has
maintained the right of a community to work out its own salvation in its
own way. A nation has an individuality, and the doctrine that individuality
is an element in well-being is rightly applied to it. The world advances by
the free, vigorous growth of divergent types, and is stunted when all the
fresh bursting shoots are planed off close to the heavy, solid stem."[4]
The interference of one with another, attempts to prescribe the limits or
the cause of development, are as obnoxious in international as in
intra-national relations. It was in fact in connection with this idea of
nationality that the words "Liberal" and "Liberalism" came into use. The
first English Liberals were those statesmen who followed Canning in his
championship of Greece and the South American Republics, and some of them
were very far from being Liberals within the borders of their own State.[5]

This extension of Liberalism from individuals to nations is easy as a
mental process, but very far from easy as a matter of practical politics.
Nationality is not difficult to define in general terms. It is sometimes
infinitely difficult to decide in a particular case whether the general
definition applies. John Stuart Mill has perhaps given as much precision to
the Liberal conception of nationality as it can bear. "A portion of mankind
may be said {13} to constitute a nation if they are united among themselves
by common sympathies which do not exist between them and others. This
feeling of nationality may have been generated by various causes. Sometimes
it is the effect of identity of race and descent. Community of language and
community of religion greatly contribute to it. Geographical limits are one
of the causes. But the strongest of all is identity of political
antecedents, the possession of a national history and consequent community
of recollections, collective pride and humiliation, pleasure and regret,
connected with the same incidents in the past."[6] Nationality is not a
thing of sharp outline, any more than any other political conception, and
community of interest, the management of common concerns over a long period
of time, has triumphed over differences so potent as those of race and
creed. Such has been the fortune of Switzerland, of Canada, and of white
South Africa, and it is the hope of Liberalism that such will also be the
fortune of Ireland. Without attempting to draw hard lines between
communities, the Liberal sees in them distinctions of worth and capacity
such as he sees in individuals, and he would give the same freedom of
self-development to a nation as to a human being.

The idea that nations are to be bound by moral rules as much as individuals
is only another application of the general rule that one man is to be
treated as equally entitled with every other to the development of his own
faculties. The same rule is extended to nations as to single persons. No
one people has the right to interfere with the free development of another,
until it is clearly and unmistakably proved that that free development will
be generally injurious. Once this principle is accepted, it becomes
impossible, as in the case of single persons, for one nation to decline to
recognize moral rules in its dealings with others. Morality is nothing but
the subjection of individual wills to the common will, as expressed in
defined rules. Immorality is only the arrogance of the individual will,
refusing to submit itself to general rules, while it endeavours to enforce
general rules upon {14} others. The Liberal State is that which recognizes
the universal application of its own principles of conduct, declines to
thrust its own ideas upon unwilling associates, and works in harmony with
other races instead of in opposition to them.

It is not suggested here that it is any part of the Liberal doctrine to
seek peace at any price, or to turn the other cheek to the smiter. A vital
condition of the existence of morality is that moral persons shall be ready
at all times to defend it. To suffer wanton aggression is as fatal to a
nation as to an individual. It is a mere encouragement to the general
infringement of rights which means the dissolution of international
morality. Liberal patriotism exists, though it is of a different kind from
that patriotism which is so conspicuous a feature of our modern
Imperialism. Imperialist patriotism is often a vulgar assertion of selfish
power. Liberal patriotism is a means of diminishing national selfishness.
Just as the Liberal believes that the best life within the nation is
produced by the growth of free individuality, so he believes that the best
life in the race at large is produced by the growth of free nationality.
"If there is one condition precedent to effective internationalism or to
the establishment of any reliable relations between States, it is the
existence of strong, secure, well-developed, and responsible nations.
Internationalism can never be subserved by the suppression or forcible
absorption of nations; for these practices react disastrously upon the
springs of internationalism, on the one hand setting nations on their armed
defence and stifling the amicable approaches between them, on the other
debilitating the larger nations through excessive corpulence and
indigestion. The hope of a coming internationalism enjoins above all else
the maintenance and natural growth of independent nationalities, for
without such there could be no gradual evolution of internationalism, but
only a series of unsuccessful attempts at a chaotic and unstable