The Project Gutenberg eBook of On England
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: On England
and other addresses
Author: Earl Stanley Baldwin Baldwin
Release date: July 17, 2026 [eBook #79118]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Philip Allan & Co. Ltd., 1926
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79118
Credits: Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON ENGLAND ***
ON ENGLAND
_And other Addresses_
BY
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
STANLEY BALDWIN, M.P.
FIRST LORD OF THE TREASURY AND PRIME MINISTER
OF GREAT BRITAIN
LONDON
PHILIP ALLAN & CO. LTD.
QUALITY COURT
First impression April 1926.
Second impression May 1926.
Third impression May 1926.
Fourth impression July 1926.
Fifth impression October 1926.
Cheap Edition April 1927.
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, GLASGOW.
PREFACE
I have allowed, with some misgivings, some of the speeches or
extracts from speeches made by me in the last two years or so to be
put together in the following pages. They were in general delivered
amidst the press of thronging duties and urgent preoccupations, and
in this book they appear as the faithful reporter set them down at
the moment of delivery. Without revision subsequently, without at
the time the advantage of the _ultima manus_, they must not be judged
as the leisured product of the study now that they are brought
together in the fashion of a book.
It is a sound, if onerous, tradition which compels our public men to
travel beyond the bounds of Party and to interpret, so far as each
has power, the thought and striving of the Nation at its best,
whether in politics, in industry, in art or in the practice of
charity.
Public speeches are of use if they lead men to dwell on the thoughts
of service to their country and of help to one another: and if these
lingering echoes of former words of mine avail, in however small a
measure, towards that end, those who wished to publish this book will
have been justified.
STANLEY BALDWIN.
10 DOWNING STREET,
_7th April_, 1926.
CONTENTS
ON ENGLAND AND THE WEST
England
My Native Town
Stourport
Worcester Memories
ON PEACE IN INDUSTRY
Peace in Industry. I
Peace in Industry. II
Industry and Psychology
The Gospel of Hate
ON POLITICAL LIFE
Service
Democracy and the Spirit of Service
Truth and Politics
Rhetoric
ON LITERATURE AND THE ARTS
The Classics
Shakespeare
Byron
W. H. Hudson
Art
Artists and Politicians
ON EDUCATION
Self-Education
Political Education
Teachers and Taught
ON SOME GREAT MEN
Bonar Law
Lord Curzon
Lord Milner and Arnold Toynbee
Lord Oxford
ON THE NATION AND THE CHURCHES
Religion and Politics
The Church Army
Christian Ideals
ON THE EMPIRE
Empire Day Message, 1925
Democracy and the Empire
Disarmament
MISCELLANEOUS
Scotland
Ireland
Wales
Glasgow
Anglo-American Friendship
Friendly Societies
Harrow
Some Ancestors
A War Memorial
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
STANLEY BALDWIN
29th Feb. 1908. Mr. Baldwin succeeds his father as Member
for Bewdley.
6th Dec. 1916. Resignation of Mr. Asquith and formation
of 2nd Coalition Government by Mr. Lloyd
George. Mr. Bonar Law becomes
Chancellor of the Exchequer.
22nd Dec. 1916. Mr. Baldwin is appointed Parliamentary
Secretary to Mr. Bonar Law.
30th Jan. 1917. Becomes Junior Lord of the Treasury.
18th June, 1917. Becomes Joint Financial Secretary to the
Treasury.
4th Dec. 1918. General Election.
17th March, 1921. Mr. Bonar Law resigns office in the Coalition
Government.
1st April, 1921. Mr. Baldwin appointed President of the
Board of Trade.
19th Oct. 1922. Carlton Club Meeting.
19th Oct. 1922. Mr. Lloyd George resigns.
24th Oct. 1922. Mr. Bonar Law forms his Government.
24th Oct. 1922. Mr. Baldwin becomes Chancellor of the
Exchequer.
20th May, 1923. Mr. Bonar Law resigns.
22nd May, 1923. Mr. Baldwin becomes Prime Minister.
28th May, 1923. Mr. Baldwin elected Leader of the Unionist
Party.
25th Oct. 1923. Mr. Baldwin's speech at Plymouth on
Protection.
6th Dec. 1923. General Election.
22nd Jan. 1924. Mr. Baldwin resigns.
29th Oct. 1924. General Election.
4th Nov. 1924. Mr. Baldwin again becomes Prime Minister.
_ON ENGLAND AND THE WEST_
ENGLAND
AT THE ANNUAL DINNER OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY
OF ST. GEORGE, AT THE HOTEL CECIL.
6_th May_, 1924
Though I do not think that in the life of a busy man there could be
placed into his hands a more difficult toast than this, yet the first
thought that comes into my mind as a public man is a feeling of
satisfaction and profound thankfulness that I may use the word
"England" without some fellow at the back of the room shouting out
"Britain." I have often thought how many of the most beautiful
passages in the English language would be ruined by that substitution
which is so popular to-day. I read in your Dinner-book, "When God
wants a hard thing done, He tells it," not to His Britons, but "to
His Englishmen." And in the same way, to come to a very modern piece
of poetry, how different it would be with the altered ending, "For in
spite of all temptations to belong to other nations, he remains a
Briton."
We have to-night to celebrate our country and our Patron Saint. It
always seems to me no mere chance that besides being the Patron Saint
of England, St. George was the Patron Saint of those gallant sailors
around the shores of the Adriatic, and that in his honour there
exists one of the most beautiful chapels in Venice to-day. The
Patron Saint of sailors is surely the most suitable Patron Saint for
men of the English stock; and I think to-night amongst ourselves we
might for a minute or two look at those characteristics,
contradictory often, peculiar as we believe, in that great stock of
which we are all members.
The Englishman is all right as long as he is content to be what God
made him, an Englishman, but gets into trouble when he tries to be
something else. There are chroniclers, or were chroniclers, who said
it was the apeing of the French manners by our English ancestors that
made us the prey of William the Norman, and led to our defeat at
Hastings. Let that be a warning to us not to ape any foreign
country. Let us be content to trust ourselves and to be ourselves.
Now, I always think that one of the most curious contradictions about
the English stock is this: that while the criticism that is often
made of us is not without an element of truth, and that is that as a
nation we are less open to the intellectual sense than the Latin
races, yet though that may be a fact, there is no nation on earth
that has had the same knack of producing geniuses. It is almost a
characteristic of the English race; there is hardly any line in which
the nation has not produced geniuses, and in a nation which many
people might think restrained, unable to express itself, in this same
nation you have a literature second to none that has ever existed in
the world, and certainly in poetry supreme.
Then, for a more personal characteristic, we grumble, and we always
have grumbled, but we never worry. Now, there is a very great truth
in that, because there are foreign nations who worry but do not
grumble. Grumbling is more superficial, leaves less of a mark on the
character, and just as the English schoolboy, for his eternal
salvation, is impervious to the receipt of learning, and by that
means preserves his mental faculties further into middle age and old
age than he otherwise would (and I may add that I attribute the
possession of such faculties as I have to the fact that I did not
overstrain them in youth), just as the Englishman has a mental
reserve owing to that gift given him at his birth by St. George, so,
by the absence of worry he keeps his nervous system sound and sane,
with the result that in times of emergency the nervous system stands
when the nervous system of other peoples breaks.
The Englishman is made for a time of crisis, and for a time of
emergency. He is serene in difficulties, but may seem to be
indifferent when times are easy. He may not look ahead, he may not
heed warnings, he may not prepare, but when he once starts he is
persistent to the death, and he is ruthless in action. It is these
gifts that have made the Englishman what he is, and that have enabled
the Englishman to make England and the Empire what it is.
It is in staying power that he is supreme, and fortunately, being, as
I have said, to some extent impervious to intellectual impressions as
a nation, he is equally impervious to criticism--a most useful thing
for an English statesman. That may be the reason why English
statesmen sometimes last longer than those who are not English. I
admit that in past generations we carried that virtue to an excess,
and by a rebound the sins of the fathers are being visited on the
children. For instance, there was a time when this particular
epithet was more in vogue in political society, and the Englishman
invariably spoke of the "damned" foreigner. Those days are gone, but
the legacy has come to us in this, that by the swing of the pendulum
we have in this country what does not exist in any other, a certain
section of our people who regard every country as being in the right
except their own. It largely arises, I think, among a section of the
population who hold beliefs which they cannot persuade their
fellow-countrymen to adopt.
There is yet one other point. I think the English people are at
heart and in practice the kindest people in the world. With some
faults on which I have touched, there is in England a profound
sympathy for the under-dog. There is a brotherly and a neighbourly
feeling which we see to a remarkable extent through all classes.
There is a way of facing misfortunes with a cheerful face. It was
shown to a marvellous degree in the war, and in spite of all that he
said in criticism of his own people, Ruskin said one thing of
immortal truth. He said: "The English laugh is the purest and truest
in the metal that can be minted. And indeed only Heaven can know
what the country owes to it." There is a profound truth in that. As
long as a people can laugh, they are preserved from the grosser vices
of life, political and moral. And as long as they can laugh, they
can face all the ills that fortune may bring upon them.
Then, in no nation more than the English is there a diversified
individuality. We are a people of individuals, and a people of
character. You may take the writings of one of the greatest and one
of the most English of writers, Charles Dickens, and you will find
that practically all his characters are English. They are all
different, and each of us that has gone through this world with his
eyes open and his heart open, has met every one of Dickens's
characters in some position or another in life. Let us see to it
that we never allow our individuality as Englishmen to be
steam-rollered. The preservation of the individuality of the
Englishman is essential to the preservation of the type of the race,
and if our differences are smoothed out and we lose that great gift,
we shall lose at the same time our power. Uniformity of type is a
bad thing. I regret very much myself the uniformity of speech. Time
was, two centuries ago, when you could have told by his speech from
what part of England every member of Parliament came. He spoke the
speech of his fathers, and I regret that the dialects have gone, and
I regret that by a process which for want of a better name we have
agreed among ourselves to call education, we are drifting away from
the language of the people and losing some of the best English words
and phrases which have lasted in the country through centuries, to
make us all talk one uniform and inexpressive language.
Now, I have very little more that I want to say to you to-night, but
on an occasion like this I suppose there is no one who does not ask
himself in his heart and is a little shy of expressing it, what it is
that England stands for to him, and to her. And there comes into my
mind a wonder as to what England may stand for in the minds of
generations to come if our country goes on during the next generation
as she has done in the last two, in seeing her fields converted into
towns.
To me, England is the country, and the country is England. And when
I ask myself what I mean by England, when I think of England when I
am abroad, England comes to me through my various senses--through the
ear, through the eye, and through certain imperishable scents. I
will tell you what they are, and there may be those among you who
feel as I do.
The sounds of England, the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the
country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the
scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a plough team coming
over the brow of a hill, the sight that has been seen in England
since England was a land, and may be seen in England long after the
Empire has perished and every works in England has ceased to
function, for centuries the one eternal sight of England. The wild
anemones in the woods in April, the last load at night of hay being
drawn down a lane as the twilight comes on, when you can scarcely
distinguish the figures of the horses as they take it home to the
farm, and above all, most subtle, most penetrating and most moving,
the smell of wood smoke coming up in an autumn evening, or the smell
of the scutch fires: that wood smoke that our ancestors, tens of
thousands of years ago, must have caught on the air when they were
coming home with the result of the day's forage, when they were still
nomads, and when they were still roaming the forests and the plains
of the continent of Europe. These things strike down into the very
depths of our nature, and touch chords that go back to the beginning
of time and the human race, but they are chords that with every year
of our life sound a deeper note in our innermost being.
These are the things that make England, and I grieve for it that they
are not the childish inheritance of the majority of the people to-day
in our country. They ought to be the inheritance of every child born
into this country, but nothing can be more touching than to see how
the working man and woman after generations in the towns will have
their tiny bit of garden if they can, will go to gardens if they can,
to look at something they have never seen as children, but which
their ancestors knew and loved. The love of these things is innate
and inherent in our people. It makes for that love of home, one of
the strongest features of our race, and it is that that makes our
race seek its new home in the Dominions over-seas, where they have
room to see things like this that they can no more see at home. It
is that power of making homes, almost peculiar to our people, and it
is one of the sources of their greatness. They go overseas, and they
take with them what they learned at home: love of justice, love of
truth, and the broad humanity that are so characteristic of English
people. It may well be that these traits on which we pride
ourselves, which we hope to show and try to show in our own lives,
may survive--survive among our people so long as they are a
people--and I hope and believe this, that just as to-day more than
fifteen centuries since the last of those great Roman legionaries
left England, we still speak of the Roman strength, and the Roman
work, and the Roman character, so perhaps in the ten thousandth
century, long after the Empires of this world as we know them have
fallen and others have risen and fallen, and risen and fallen again,
the men who are then on this earth may yet speak of those
characteristics which we prize as the characteristics of the English,
and that long after, maybe, the name of the country has passed away,
wherever men are honourable and upright and persevering, lovers of
home, of their brethren, of justice and of humanity, the men in the
world of that day may say, "We still have among us the gifts of that
great English race."
MY NATIVE TOWN
AT BEWDLEY
8_th August_, 1925
I have assisted at many functions during recent years, but at none
more calculated to touch the hidden springs of the heart than that in
which I have participated to-day. Bewdley, as most of you know, was
in distant ages a sanctuary town to which a man, whatever his sins,
might flee and be safe from justice. So whenever the rude waves of
the outside world buffet me with more than usual vigour, I have only
to remember that in Bewdley there is a sanctuary even for a Prime
Minister.
This day has, at any rate, shown that there can be an exception to
the truth contained in the words, "A prophet is not without honour,
save only in his own country." I have never failed to find in my own
country understanding, sympathy and support, and even when life seems
most difficult and the fences in front unclimbable, I can turn back
in memory and recollection to this peaceful spot by the side of the
river, where I first drew breath, and in the memory of which I am
able to draw strength.
There could have been no more typical English surroundings in which
to cherish the earliest memories. I remember as a child looking up
the river from the bridge into that mysterious and romantic land of
Shropshire, so close to us, from which my people came only three
generations before, and watching the smoke of the train running along
the little railway through places bearing names like Wyre Forest,
Cleobury Mortimer, Neen Sollars and Tenbury--names steeped in romance
and redolent of the springtime of an England long ago passed, but
whose heritage is ours. Those names must have been familiar to
Langland as he lay on the slopes of the Malvern Hills while the great
poem of _Piers Plowman_ shaped itself in his brain. I remember, too,
the thrill of names like The Welch Gate and The Warden of the
Marches, which brought back to me even in childhood days the fact
that Bewdley, long before it was incorporated in Worcestershire, was
one of the most important towns in the great Marches separating Wales
from England; the title of Lord Warden of the Marches seemed to me
most romantic and dignified. There were memories, too, of the
long-forgotten strife between Welsh and English, of Ludlow, where the
big castle still stood, and of Woodbury Hill where Owen Glendower
came before the great fight beneath its slope, as the result of which
the bones of English and Welsh have lain in common ground for five
centuries. And one has seen how warfare may yield to peace.
It may be the recollection of those far-off days, and the intimate
connection which we in the Marches had with Welshmen, that has given
me a kind of affection for them, and even a sneaking affection, after
all that has passed, for the greatest living Welshman, Mr. Lloyd
George. I have often felt that if it were possible for His Majesty
to revive the great title of Lord Warden of the Marches, I would like
him to offer it to Mr. Lloyd George, on condition that he lived for
three months in the year in Bewdley.
My friend the present Mayor of Bewdley has long been honourably
associated with a house called The Old Pack Horse. That name reminds
me of a day before grass grew on the wharves of the Severn, when
Bewdley and not Liverpool was the natural export depot for
Manchester, and when strings of pack-horses used to come down from
Lancashire to discharge their goods at Bewdley's wharves into the
"prows" which went down daily to Bristol for export to all parts of
the world. Manchester and Liverpool were then smaller towns than
Kidderminster is to-day. The Bridgwater Canal had not been made, and
I have no doubt that in the early years of the eighteenth century the
name of Bewdley was as well known in England as the names of those
cities.
I think it is good for us, on an occasion like this, to dwell on
these things, which show the continuity of history and bring before
us the progress and the changing fortunes of our country. I spoke of
the grass that has grown on the wharves on Severnside. That is true.
But we still have Severn with us, and I think Severn can teach us
something to-day. Rising on the slopes of Plinlimmon, she has flowed
from and through Wales into England, and through our part of England.
For centuries she served as a boundary and dividing line, respected
by Rome and by the Celt; yet the time came when she was no longer a
dividing line, but the proof of union and friendship; and while long
years ago she poured her waters through country full of strife and
fighting, she now waters peaceful meadows and passes through peaceful
towns, with dismantled castles. It may well be that, just as she has
seen strife in this country turn to peace, so again to-day, in an age
when the clouds are heavy and charged with electricity, she may once
more see the storm pass. But she reminds us that these things change
and are effaced like the eddies on her stream; and, as of old, her
deep waters will flow on through Bewdley, carrying their peace to the
dwellers on Severnside, and their healing message into the heart of
England.
STOURPORT
AT STOURPORT
12_th January_, 1925
I suppose there have been many ceremonies at which I have been
present which were more magnificent than this, and made much more
noise in the world, but I have never been to one that has touched me
more, or one in which all the elements that can grip the heart of man
can have been more present. It is a curious feeling to come down to
one's own home, and to receive in one's lifetime a tribute like this
of affection and goodwill, not only from one's neighbours, but from
those who have known one from infancy. It is no good here for me to
pretend to be anything which I am not. If I were to pretend here to
have greater abilities than I have you would soon find me out, and if
I pretended, as I may have done in the course of my career, that I
was more simple than I really am, then again you would know exactly
how far I was deviating from the strict letter of the truth. I think
it is good sometimes that one should come back into that atmosphere
and environment.
I think it is also a good thing that the outside world should know
one or two things about Stourport, known well to us, but known very
little to them. How many people in London, where they know so much,
realize that Stourport was lighted with gas before the City of London
was? Indeed, had it not been for the railways--and as an old Tory I
am against all that kind of progress--Stourport would have been a
very large town by now. We were essentially a creation of those days
when people looked to the canals as being the principal method of
England's navigation, and for that purpose the site of this town was
chosen, I think, with uncommon skill: and, if indeed it be a
desirable thing, of which I am not convinced, to grow to be a big
town, we missed our chance in the early days of the railways, when
the main lines running through the country passed this district by.
Stourport has the inestimable advantage of doing its work in rural
surroundings. If there is anything--I will not say that has made me
fit to succeed, because whether success or not will attend me I
cannot tell, and any way it does not very much matter if one does
one's best honestly--it is my training, which has given me, whether I
can use it or not, a knowledge and a sympathy very difficult for any
man to attain who has had an exclusively political training. I
regard it as of the greatest value to myself that during the
formative years of my life, and during the ten and twenty years when
I first started work in the world, I worked in close contact with all
classes of people in this country, and enjoyed, through no credit to
myself, the goodwill which I have inherited from generations that
have gone before me and left behind a name for honesty, fair play,
right judgment, and kindliness to those with whom they worked.
Through that, whether I succeed or not, I believe I have an
understanding of the mind of the people of the country which I could
have gained in no other way. It is through this that I have that
ineradicable belief and faith in our people which sustains me through
good times and evil, and it is because of this that I have every
confidence that, whatever troubles may come to this country, or in
this country at any time, the native strength and virtue of our
people will overcome everything. There is only one thing which I
feel is worth giving one's whole strength to, and that is the binding
together of all classes of our people in an effort to make life in
this country better in every sense of the word. That is the main end
and object of my life in politics.
WORCESTER MEMORIES
AT WORCESTER
7_th November_, 1923
This is the second ceremony of the kind which I have attended within
a short space of time, each of them of the greatest interest and
honour. For any Englishman to receive the Freedom of the City of
London is looked upon as one of the greatest tributes which can be
paid to a man for his work; but to receive a similar tribute in one's
own home county touches the heart far more, and is an honour that,
perhaps, in some ways is more highly appreciated than any honour that
can possibly fall to one at any time, because it is a message of
sympathy and encouragement from all those who know you best, from
those amongst whom you sprang and were reared, those who know you and
whence you came, what you have done, all your faults and your few
virtues; and yet in spite of that they combine to do this thing, and
the feeling with which it is done, the unanimity, the appreciation,
the goodwill, are exactly the kind of encouragement that a man needs
when he has to perform such a task as mine.
As a Worcestershire man, and standing in the heart of the city of
Worcester, it is very natural that one's thoughts should go back to
many things--to the rock from which you were hewn, the pit from
whence you were digged; and one thinks of those who went before one,
whose work has contributed to make one's own life task possible. One
thinks of those of one's ancestors, who left their old home in
Shropshire about 150 years ago to seek their fortunes four miles
inside this county at a little place that was then growing up, where
Brindley had brought his new canal into Severn. One knows the
struggles that they had in those days, and one knows the hard work
and the careful thought and the thrift and the human kindliness that
went on from generation to generation. It is interesting to remember
the connection, which has lasted for about 120 years, between my own
family and the old bank in Worcester. It was from the old bank 120
years ago that we raised with infinite difficulty £500. It was the
old bank that helped to carry us through the crisis in the 'twenties
of the last century, and much credit is due to them for having
survived a period which brought down so many of the private banks
throughout the kingdom. Time and time again did they stand our
friends in days when we were less able to stand on our own feet than
we are now, and I shall never forget it.
Having been, as it were, an emigrant from another county into
Worcestershire, and having become Worcestershire by adoption, and
finally Worcestershire by birth and ties for so many years, one knows
in one's bones now that one is a Worcestershire man, and that there
is nothing like it. One came out of this red soil, and one will
return to it and lay one's bones in it, and there is no soil like it
in this country. It is remembering all these things, these
innumerable ties that bind one to the city and the county, that makes
a ceremony of this nature so touching at a time like this.
I am just one of yourselves, who has been called to special work for
the country at this time. I never sought the office. I never
planned out or schemed my life. I have but one idea, which was an
idea that I inherited, and it was the idea of service--service to the
people of this country. My father lived in that belief all his life,
and behind him members of my family, in an obviously more restricted
way, practised the same thing. It is a tradition; it is in our
bones; and we have to do it. That service seemed to lead one by way
of business and the county council into Parliament, and it has led
one through various strange paths to where one is; but the ideal
remains the same, because all my life I believed from my heart the
words of Browning, "All service ranks the same with God." It makes
very little difference whether a man is driving a tramcar or sweeping
streets or being Prime Minister, if he only brings to that service
everything that is in him and performs it for the sake of mankind.
It is natural, perhaps, quite apart from one's parentage, that one
should feel this, because I lived as a child in the heart of
Worcestershire, by the side of one of the last of the iron forges
that were left in the rural districts of England, and the impressions
of childhood are those that last, and as you get older come back more
strongly. Among the chief friends that I had in those days--they
represented two sides of life, the industrial and the
agricultural--one was a shepherd who could neither read nor write,
but like many men of those days who could neither read nor write, he
was a great deal more intelligent than many who can do both now. He
had a face like an old pippin, and he talked the undiluted tongue of
our fathers. I learned much from him. Another man that I learned
much from was one who had been a workman, and who rose to be a
manager, and who went to work at ten years old on a twelve-hours'
night-shift, thus being a link with an industrial past which, thank
God, has passed away for ever. But with such friends of one's
childhood, it is little wonder that one learned a profound sympathy
with and affection for the common man, of whom I am one, which has
never deserted me and never will.
I learned instinctively and unconsciously another very useful lesson,
and that is that a man is a gentleman by what comes from within, and
I have known many in my life in all walks. I do not want to go on
"reminiscing," easy as it is, but I did want to say these few things
to you, because if you do not scheme and plan your life, and if you
leave it perhaps in higher hands than yours, and you look back, you
will see how wonderfully the little things which you never noticed at
the time all seem to fit into the ultimate scheme, and that the
preparation for life which you have had, which you did not understand
at the time, turns out to have been the very best preparation that
you could have had. I am quite sure that that intimate knowledge
that I had of working people, both industrial and rural, when I was a
boy, has stood me in extraordinarily good stead in the last two or
three years, because that natural sympathy that I had as a child,
that came from acquaintance and friendship, has so ripened that one
feels when one is giving one's life in service for the people of this
country one is not working for any kind of abstraction or any large
party of voters, but for the human men and women who are carrying on
the daily toil of the world, with whom one has worked oneself and
whom one has known on terms of intimacy. It is a great strength and
a great help.
_ON PEACE IN INDUSTRY_
PEACE IN INDUSTRY. I
AT BIRMINGHAM
5_th March_, 1925
However hardened a public speaker may be, and in however many places
he may have spoken, he cannot rise for the first time in Birmingham
Town Hall before a Birmingham audience without feeling a thrill of
emotion. For a generation this great hall was associated throughout
England with the names of two of our greatest orators--John Bright
and Joseph Chamberlain.
Though we who are called, so far as we are able, to fill their places
in the struggle to-day, may fall far short of them in eloquence, we
can at least be stimulated by their example, so that we do not fall
short of them in sincerity of purpose and in truth, and in an honest
endeavour to improve the condition of our people.
To-night I have no desire to ask you to join with me in a pæan of
victory. You and I are thankful for the decision to which the
country came at the beginning of the winter, but we want to look
forward now and to devote a short time to-night to looking at some of
the problems which lie before us, to see what progress has been made,
and to see in what direction the people of England should look for
their own security.
I think we can best preface such an investigation by casting our eyes
for a few moments at the continent of Europe, a continent separated
from us indeed by a narrow strip of ocean, but joined to us by a
hundred links of commerce and of humanity, indissolubly bound up with
our fate, whether we like it or whether we do not. I think we may
fairly claim that although there is much to be done in Europe, yet
there are signs to-day of what has not been seen hitherto, and that
is a general desire for stability, and what proceeds from desire, and
is more important, the will to achieve stability.
It is only determination that will produce it, and until you have
stability you can have no confidence, and until you have confidence
you can never get that increased productive power which is one of the
absolute necessities for the bettering of our own trade in England.
Now, not long ago Austria, for example, was on the verge of
bankruptcy. Her administrative expenses were all in arrear; her
industries were paralysed. Largely owing to the action of the League
of Nations, and largely owing to the action of her own countrymen,
she has been saved, and she has been put in a path, strait, indeed,
but one which is leading her, and will lead her, into a position
where once more she can make her contribution to the well-being of
Europe, instead of being a black spot from which might spread the
seeds of disease into other countries.
The same with Hungary--the same process, the same contribution, and
the same results. And we see the new states brought into being since
the War--Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Jugo-Slavia--slowly, but surely,
establishing their industries, buying raw material, which is the
beginning, coming once more into the comity of industrial and
commercial nations, and helping to start again that wheel of the
circulation of industrial life which alone can bring health to
Europe, and, by bringing health to Europe, health to us.
And in France, and in Belgium, there is a healthy and progressive
increase in the industrial life of those countries, and bit by bit
over the three years you have seen the healthy spots forming in
Europe and spreading outwards, and gradually driving back the
unhealthy parts, so that we are beginning to have a hope that before
too long the body itself may be whole.
And Germany! The Dawes plan, which has settled--at any rate on
paper--the reparations question has by that very factor increased
confidence in the public finance of Germany, which means confidence
in the public finance of that vast population of Central Europe. The
fact that a successful loan was issued, that the Reichsbank has been
reconstituted, and that the currency has been restored, has enabled
private credits once more to function in Germany. The negotiation of
a commercial treaty with this country means that if she will now play
the game, there is no reason why the interrupted trade with Central
Europe should not commence again to join in the increase of European
and world trade for the ultimate betterment of everybody.
Her internal troubles are diminishing. We in England have, in the
last year or two, made once more foreign loans to help to repair the
shattered edifices throughout the world, and the United States has
come in with loans, contrary to her usual practice, in Europe, to set
in motion the creative energies of the peoples, which energies will
be gradually reflected in the growing purchasing powers of the
peoples.
The failure of that purchasing power and the financial chaos which
followed on the War have been, I was going to say amongst, but I
would say the chief reason for that appalling depression from which
we are only just beginning to emerge in this country.
But what is it that has prevented the recovery of Europe proceeding
at a greater speed than it has, and what is it to-day that is the one
check and the one blight on an outlook which is beginning to look
more hopeful? It is that cursed and diabolic suspicion between man
and man and nation and nation that robs Europe of that sense of
security that is essential to the unity of spirit which we must have
before the world can function aright.
It is to help to abolish that suspicion, to help to show the better
way, that Mr. Austen Chamberlain leaves England to-morrow to see what
he can accomplish amongst the nations of Europe. It is his attempt
to execute that great mission that has prevented him from having the
pleasure of being here to-night, and has prevented you from having
the pleasure of giving him the welcome he so well deserves in
Birmingham. There is no member of the Government who has a more
arduous task than he; there is no one better qualified by training
and by temperament at this time to make a success of that mission.
Now, having said a few words about Europe, let us look nearer home.
There is much the same story to be told--a story of constant
struggle, and, on the whole, a story of ground gained and hope for
the future.
But while in England we can put our finger here and there on the
hopeful signs, there are many that cause us anxiety. We have only a
very partial prosperity, an industry here and there, sometimes one,
sometimes another; but for four years we have hoped against hope that
we might be able to show prosperity in all our industries.
Two years ago the coal industry enjoyed a brief spell of prosperity,
due partly to the conditions in the Ruhr; and in the wake of the coal
trade followed the trades in iron and steel. But, as prospects in
the Ruhr looked better, and greater prosperity seemed in store for
them, so the temporary improvement here gave way to depression. As
those industries tailed off, there has been improvement in cotton,
there has been fairly good trade in the electrical industry; but we
are denied still that all-round and simultaneous improvement which is
necessary before we can feel ourselves in that position of security
and stability which we all desire to see.
If we look at the figures of our foreign trade as a whole, we do
indeed find some ground for moderate hopefulness. We find that the
balance of imports over exports is not larger proportionately than we
are accustomed to, and that our invisible exports come to our rescue
as they did before the War, and we cannot yet say that we have an
adverse balance.
But whatever conclusions people may draw from the examination of
figures of exports and imports, I never can help translating this
story into terms of unemployment. At the end of January there were a
million and a quarter on the registers--practically the same as a
year ago--no real substantial improvement.
Now, you know well enough in Birmingham how the steel and heavy
engineering trades, and you know well enough by repute how the
shipbuilding trades, are suffering to-day. These heavy trades have
in their numbers something like 10 per cent. of the insured
population of this country, but among these trades to-day their
unemployment represents more than 20 per cent. of the total
unemployment. They are trades closely interlocked, and they are
trades closely dependent and immediately reacting on the coal trade;
and I think I ought to say a word or two on the subject of this trade.
The production of coal in Europe last year increased by scores of
millions of tons at a time when there was a heavy under-consumption
of coal compared with the pre-war standard. It is not surprising in
these circumstances that our export of coal dropped by 18 million
tons. The increased cost of production here wiped out all that
margin of profit at which some of the older and less efficient pits
worked.
And you find pits closed, especially in the North of England and in
North and South Wales; and here and there, the unexampled spectacle
of pools of unemployed labour in the mining industry, where they have
little immediate prospect of a resumption of work.
Now, the iron and steel trades have been specially hit by the
condition of the shipbuilding trade. There you have fewer ships
being built; you have an intensively increased foreign competition,
and you have at home an immensely increased capacity in point of
output and a largely increased technical capacity; and you have at
places like Sheffield and Barrow, where there were enormous
accumulations of labour during the War for special purposes, the
almost impossible task of finding in works of peace sufficient
employment to take over not only their old population but the men who
were attracted there for munition work in time of war.
And so it is, seven years nearly after the War, that we yet see this
prolonged and intensified depression, and this horrible figure of
unemployment.
Now, if you look back you will find that in 1908 you had very nearly
as bad a time of unemployment, and you had it in those industries of
which I have just spoken to you.
But what is the difference? In 1908 it was of comparatively short
duration. To-day, we have lived through four years of it, and who
can say whether we are yet at the end? There are, of course,
international factors largely beyond our power to deal with, but
there are national factors within our own control. We stand to-day
at a point where, roughly speaking, one out of every ten of the
insured population is out of work--a thought sufficient to arrest the
imagination of the dullest and the most thoughtless amongst us--and a
challenge to all of us to use every power we have to remedy this
state of things. But there is no direct remedy from the State alone.
There can be no direct remedy by private men alone.
Nothing can be done unless we can all pull together with a will. And
I am--and I speak seriously--quite profoundly thankful that the
Labour Party have been in office, and for this reason: that they now
know that they, no more than any other Government, have been able to
produce a panacea that would remedy unemployment. And in their
hearts they must admit that they have no remedy which can be
guaranteed to cure this disease and at the same time maintain
unimpaired the international position and power of the British Empire.
And it is at this moment, with one in ten of the working population
unemployed, at this moment when in some industries there is a faint
hope of a revival, at this moment when other industries, with the
utmost endeavours on their part, can but just hold their own, that we
witness in England signs of an industrial storm gathering, which, if
it were to break, would spread misery far and wide, and sweep back,
possibly for years, all chance of returning and reviving prosperity.
By the natural evolution of our industrial life in England we are
confronted to-day, and shall be more and more, with great
consolidations of capital managed by small concentrated groups, and
by great organisations of Labour led by experienced and responsible
leaders. That position must be accepted. It is the natural
accompaniment of the large-scale production which is gradually
becoming the predominant force in all the industrial countries of the
world.
It is perfectly true that if the great trade unions of this country,
such as the miners, the transport workers, and the railwaymen, unite
on a policy of trying to enforce a demand for higher wages in their
own trades by means of a strike, they have it in their power to hold
up at the same time many industries in this country, and do them
irreparable damage.
Now, I said when I concluded what I had to say about the state of
affairs on the Continent of Europe, there was one element that must
be removed before you could get stability, before you could get
security, and before you could get what follows on
security--disarmament. That was suspicion, and suspicion must be
removed.
I am whole-heartedly with those men who talk about disarmament on the
Continent, peace on the Continent, and the removal of suspicion on
the Continent, but far more do I plead for disarmament at home, and
for the removal of that suspicion at home that tends to poison the
relations of man and man, the removal of which alone can lead us to
stability for our struggling industry, and create the confidence in
which our people may be able to move forward to better things.
By all means let us aim at having our conferences abroad for these
good ends. Let us not neglect to have these conferences at home for
these good ends, which touch us far more closely and far more nearly
than anything which happens across the Channel.
Why must we reserve all our talk of peace and our prayers for peace
for the Continent, and forget to have our talks and our prayers for
peace at home? It is one of the paradoxes of public life that from
the very lips which preach pacifism abroad we hear the cries for war
at home. Who was it said of Rousseau that he was a lover of his
kind, but a hater of his kin? The children of such a philosophy can
only bring damnation to this country.
Having said that, I want to recognise, in the most generous way that
I can, that there have been speeches made amongst the leaders of
Labour to-day which would endorse every word that I have uttered; and
I recognise the courage of those speeches, because the men who
uttered them are trying at the same time to do their duty to those
whom they represent and to that greater community, their country.
When a man is in public life, whether he be a Labour leader or the
leader of the Tory Party, if he speaks the truth that is in him and
that he burns to tell, often enough he will find many who will be
ready to deride him for what he has said. I want to endorse the kind
of speeches to which I have referred.
I want to plead for a truce.
In the Middle Ages, when the whole of Europe was in conflict, one
part with another and one fragment with another, men of goodwill
strove in vain to get what they called a truce of God, in which
people might compose their differences and live like brothers.
I want a truce of God in this country, that we may compose our
differences, that we may join all our strengths together to see if we
cannot pull the country into a better and happier condition.
It is little that a Government can do; these reforms, these
revolutions must come from the people themselves.
The organisations of employers and men, if they take their coats off
to it, are far more able to work out the solutions of their troubles
than the politicians. Let them put the State out of their minds and
get down to it, as the Foreign Secretary is getting down to it to-day
to try to improve the relations of foreign countries by seeking peace
and pursuing it through every corner and alley that he may. So let
those who represent labour and capital get down to it, and seek and
pursue peace through every alley and every corner of this country.
And just as those who want peace in Europe have ever before their
minds, if they fail in their object, what war may mean to the
Continent, so let those who are working for peace in England realise
that the breach of the peace in industry can mean nothing more than
the prolongation of what is already too much misery among those who
are suffering from unemployment to-day.
Indeed, how much there is for those responsible for the conduct of
the industry--and I mean masters and men just the same--how much
there is for them to-day to try to discover, and to try to understand.
Let me give one illustration. I have a letter before me now from a
British firm which has works in this country, works in France, and
works in Germany. And the making of a machine of exactly similar
type costs £565 here, in Germany £520, and in France £400. Now all
those concerned in industry should try to get at the root of the
reason why a thing of this kind is possible.
Look for a moment at the employers' side.
Are the reasons for our failure to compete connected with
over-capitalisation, are they connected with defective management,
with wasteful use of plant and of material?
Are they due at all to the absence of facilities for economic
marketing?
Are State subsidies granted on the Continent?
Is there a freer use abroad of unskilled labour in various processes?
What is the cause?
And on the men's side, should not they look into the question of
whether in the allocation to different branches of labour, there is
not greater fluidity and absence of demarcation disputes which make
it easier for the Continent to compete?
These are questions no Government can settle, that no Government can
interfere with, and no Government can solve; but to get a correct
answer is life and death to those in industry, whether they be
employers or employed.
These are the kinds of issues that want to be examined by both
parties round a table, and to be approached, not with a view on the
one side to get an increase of wages, or with a view on the other to
get a reduction of wages, but to get at the reasons and see where the
fault lies. All should take counsel together and see where and how
improvement can be made in this country to achieve the desired result.
And there should be an end once and for all of that secretiveness in
business which has so often poisoned the atmosphere by causing
suspicion.
When you discuss disarmament there must be all the cards on the
table. Is not mystery of any kind the mother of suspicion?
Confidence breeds confidence, and I would give it in the fullest and
largest degree.
I would like to see firms who have factories as I have described,
place on the table carefully prepared analyses of the comparative
costs in the different countries for the men to examine, for
accountants to examine--no mystery, no secretiveness, but a common
desire to get at facts, and a common desire to help.
I do not pretend for a moment that all is easy if you simply gather
men around the table. There are differences--differences of
education, of early environment, psychological differences,
differences of training. I was struck once by a remark made, I think
it was, by Mr. Hodges in stating the miners' case in the recent coal
dispute, that he never felt less nervous than in presenting it at No.
10 Downing Street, to members of a Government which he had no reason
to believe was particularly anxious to agree with him.
I understand what he meant, and it has often struck me that it might
be of real help to conferences in trades between the employers and
the employed if they were presided over by a neutral person, a man
qualified by his own character and ability, by his detached and
independent outlook, and by the confidence which people felt in his
fairmindedness--that the presence of such a chairman might enable two
parties to get on with greater ease, with greater freedom, and with
more success in ultimate results.
There are other things arising to which our leaders of industry,
whether they be from the ranks of the employers, or from the ranks of
the men, must devote their attention at this present day, if they do
not wish to make confusion still worse confounded.
It is not wages alone that have to be studied, and that we must keep
our eyes on. If you fix on paper minimum standards of pay it does
not follow that those standards will, in fact, apply to all the men
in the industry. What often results is the stoppage of the marginal
factory or the marginal coal-pit, or you may find that some of them
near the margin will have to go on short time, and you often find
that many men are thrown out of employment.
In the same way you often hear men's leaders to-day speaking about
the necessity for rigorous efficiency on the part of employers, but
rigorous efficiency again often acts hardly on many of those
employed. You have to take the long view as well as the short; and I
think in these days what those most concerned in industry have to
study is what can be accomplished in the way of insurance benefit,
and what burdens can be borne by industry--this in consultation with
the Government--and how far regulations and rules made in trade
unions to fit circumstances of many years ago are fitted to meet the
circumstances not only of to-day, but the circumstances that lie
ahead of us.
Here, again, there is ample room, ample scope, for such conferences
as I have advocated, and, mind you, for the very best brains and the
best hearts that the best men among the employers and the men
themselves can put forward. This is not work for hacks, it is work
for the statesmen among us.
I don't know whether things may be different and happier in Russia,
for I have not had the advantage of having six weeks in that country.
But in England let us never forget this: that under our system trade
expansion depends so much on initiative and enterprise, and on the
willingness of our people--men and women--to embark their savings in
industry in anticipation of making something rather more out of
industry than they could make if the savings were kept in a stocking.
Now, the element of risk and uncertainty cannot be absent from
industry--it is inseparable from our system of production--but
readiness to embark on that form of investment is a question of
confidence. Nothing can destroy that confidence more surely than
what destroys confidence on the Continent--no sense of security. The
present unsettlement in this country is in itself a clog on the
wheels of progress.
There may be a better industrial system imaginable than ours, and I
hope indeed we may be slowly moving towards something better; but
there is no doubt in my mind that if it were possible to destroy the
present system in a moment, those who destroyed it would cause a
shipwreck, and they would not bring into being a ship in which to
take away the survivors.
Short, too, of any deliberate destruction of our industry, such as we
have seen advocated in a few quarters, I dread that subtle poison of
hatred which is being preached in some quarters, which weakens the
faith of men in their own efficient service and sound
workmanship--the very things which have built up the reputation of
our great country, on which we still live. You may have one of the
finest fleets of liners in this world, you may have it owned by the
State, and you may have it run by the State; but if you have a crew
bent on defying all that makes for co-operation and discipline you
will bankrupt that fleet.
It has not come to that in this country, and in my belief it never
will. The power of managing our own affairs in our own way is the
greatest gift of Englishmen. We have demonstrated that fact in the
past, and we shall demonstrate it in the future, It has been ours in
a growing degree for a dozen centuries. And I cannot put that
thought before you better than in the words of a distinguished Oxford
man, the late Master of Balliol, who wrote:
"Nowhere was the village community so real and so enduring a thing as
it was in England for at least twelve centuries of its history. In
every parish men met almost daily in humble but very real
self-government, to be judged by their fellows or fined by them, or
punished as bad characters, to settle the ploughing times and harvest
times, the fallowing and the grassing rules for the whole village.
To these twelve centuries of discipline we owe the peculiar English
capacity for self-government, the enormous English development of the
voluntary principle in all manner of institutions (clubs,
associations, hospitals, joint stock) and the aptitude for
colonisation. Our politics, our commercial enterprise, our Colonial
Empire, are all due to the spirit of co-operation, the spirit of fair
play, and 'give and take,' the habit of working to a common purpose
which tempered the hard and grim individuality of the national
character."
And if I have a message to-night for you and the people of the
country, it is just this. I would say:
"England! Steady! Look where you are going! Human hands were given
us to clasp, and not to be raised against one another in fratricidal
strife."
PEACE IN INDUSTRY. II
IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, ON THE SECOND
READING OF THE TRADE UNION (POLITICAL
FUND) BILL.
6_th March_, 1925
In some ways this is a very difficult speech for me to make. The
matter of the Bill itself digs right into one of the most difficult
and fundamental questions in the country to-day, and it touches at
various points questions which have interested me during the whole of
my working life. I have thought so much about them, and I feel that
I have so much to say about them, that my difficulty will be in
choosing the little that I can possibly say to-day and finding words
to express clearly to the House what is in my mind.
I often wonder if all the people in this country realise the
inevitable changes that are coming over the industrial system in
England. People are apt either to get their knowledge of the
industrial system from textbooks, which must be half a generation
behind, or from some circumstance familiar to them at a fixed and
static point in their lives, whereas, as a matter of fact, ever since
the industrial system began in this country, it has been not only in
a state of evolution, but in a state of evolution that, I think,
historians in the centuries to come, when they write its history,
will acknowledge to be an evolution that has developed at a far more
rapid rate than was visible to the people who lived in these times.
I hope the House will bear with me and forgive me if I draw for a few
minutes on my own experience, because it so happens that, owing to
the peculiar circumstances of my own life, I have seen a great deal
of this evolution taking place before my own eyes.
I worked for many years in an industrial business, and I had under me
a large number, or what was then a large number, of men. And it so
happened, as this was an old family business, with an old and, I
venture to say, very good tradition, that when I was first in
business I was probably working under a system that was already
passing. I doubt if its like could have been found in any of the
big, modern industrial towns of this country, even at that time.
It was a place where I knew, and had known from childhood, every man
on the ground; a place where I was able to talk with the men not only
about the troubles in the works, but troubles at home and their
wives. It was a place where strikes and lock-outs were unknown. It
was a place where the fathers and grandfathers of the men then
working there had worked, and where their sons went automatically
into the business. It was also a place where nobody ever "got the
sack," and where we had a natural sympathy for those who were less
concerned in efficiency than is this generation, and where a large
number of old gentlemen used to spend their days sitting on the
handles of wheelbarrows, smoking their pipes.
Oddly enough, it was not an inefficient community. It was the last
survival of that type of works which ultimately became swallowed up
in one of those great combinations towards which the industries of
to-day are tending.
I remember very well the impact of the outside world that came on us,
that showed how industry was changing in this country. Nothing had
interrupted the even tenor of our ways for many years, until one day
there came a great strike in the coal-fields; it was one of the
earlier strikes, and it became a national strike.
We tried to carry on as long as we could, but, of course, it became
more and more difficult to carry on, and gradually furnace after
furnace was damped down and the chimneys ceased to smoke, and about
1,000 men, who had no interest in the dispute that was going on, were
thrown out of work, through no fault of their own, at a time when
there was no unemployment benefit.
I confess that that event set me thinking very hard.
It seemed to me at that time a monstrous injustice to these men,
because I looked upon them as my own family, and it hit me very
hard--I would not have mentioned this, only it got into the Press two
or three years ago--and I made an allowance to them, not a large one,
but something, for six weeks to carry them along, because I felt they
were being so unfairly treated.
But there was more in it really than that. There was no conscious
unfair treatment of these men by the masters. It simply was that we
were gradually passing into a new state of industry when the small
firms and the small industries were being squeezed out, and business
was all tending towards great amalgamations, on the one side of
employers, and on the other side of the men, and when we came in any
form between these two forces, God help those who stood outside!
That has been the tendency of industry. There is nothing that could
change it, because it comes largely, if not principally, from that
driving force of necessity in the world that makes people combine
together for competition and for the protection they need against
that competition.
Those two forces with which we have to reckon are enormously strong,
and they are the two forces in this country to which now to a great
extent, and it will be a greater extent in the future, we are
committed. We have to see what wise statesmanship can do to steer
the country through this time of evolution until we can get to the
next stage of our industrial civilisation.
It is obvious from what I have said that the organisations of both
masters and men--or, if you like the more modern phrase invented by
economists, who always invent beastly words, employers and
employees--these organisations throw an immense responsibility on the
organisations themselves and on those who elect them, and, although
big men have been thrown up on both sides, there are a great many on
both sides who have not got the requisite qualities of head and heart
for business.
There are many men with good heads and no hearts, and many men with
good hearts and no heads.
What the country wants to-day from the men who sit on this side of
the House and on that is to exercise the same care as the men who
have to conduct those great organisations from inside.
I should like to try to clear our minds of cant on this subject, and
recognise that the growth of these associations is not necessarily a
bad thing in itself, but that, whatever associations may call
themselves, it is the same human nature in both, and exactly the same
problems have to be met, although we hear a good deal more of some of
those problems than of others.
Now, if you look at an employers' organisation for a moment--and we
will assume that it has come into being to protect the industry in
the world market--we cannot lose sight of the fact that in that
organisation, just as much as in the men's organisation, the mere
fact of organising involves a certain amount of sacrifice of personal
liberty. That cannot be helped. Everybody knows that perfectly
well, both employers and employees.
To a certain extent both these organisations must on one side be
uneconomic.
A trade union is uneconomic in one sense of the word when it
restricts output and when it levels down the work to a lower level.
It is an association for the protection of the weaker men which has
often proved uneconomic.
Exactly the same thing happens in the employers' organisation.
Primarily, it is protective, but in effect it is very often
uneconomic, because it keeps in existence works which, if left to the
process of competition, would be squeezed out, and whose prolonged
existence is really only a weakness to the country.
Also it has another very curious effect, not at all dissimilar from
that of the trade union reaction which shows that both those
organisations are instinct with English traditions. The workmen's
organisation is formed to see that under the conditions a workman
cannot get his living in a particular trade unless he belongs to that
union. An employers' organisation is formed in that particular trade
for the protection of the trade, and it has the result of effectively
preventing any new man starting in that trade.
In this great problem which is facing the country in years to come,
it may be from one side or the other that disaster may come, but
surely it is plain that the only progress that can be obtained in
this country is by those two bodies of men--so similar in their
strength and so similar in their weaknesses--learning to understand
each other and not to fight each other.
It is perfectly true that trade unionism has its weak spots. We are
primarily discussing trade unions, and that is why I shall content
myself to speak about trade unions only. It is perfectly true that
my hon. and learned Friends [Mr. Macquisten and Mr. Greaves-Lord, who
moved and seconded the Second Reading of the Bill] have laid their
finger on three points which trade unionists themselves know are
their weak spots. That can be seen by the interruptions that came
from the Labour benches.
Those three points are, the question whether in all cases the subject
of the levy is treated fairly, the question of the ballot, and the
question of bookkeeping. To my mind it is impossible to dissociate
one of these questions from the other, and they really all hang
together.
The whole tradition of our country has been to let Englishmen develop
their own associations in their own way, and with that I agree. But
there are limits to that. I spoke a little earlier--and I spoke with
a purpose--about the recognition of the change in the industrial
situation in those works with which I was connected, when for the
first time what was done in the way of organising the coal strike
suddenly came and hit thousands of men who had nothing to do with it
and had no direct interest in it.
As these associations come along and become more powerful, on
whichever side they are, there may come a time when not only may they
injure their own members--about which probably there would be a good
deal of argument--but when they may directly injure the State. It is
at that moment that any Government should say that, whatever freedom
and latitude in that field may be left to any kind of association in
this free country, nothing shall be done that shall injure the State,
which is the concern of all of us and far greater than all of us or
our interests.
I have not very much more to say. I have just tried to put, as
clearly as I can in a few words, my conviction that we are moving
forward rapidly from an old state of industry into a newer, and the
question is: What is that newer state going to be?
No man, of course, can say what form evolution is taking. Of this,
however, I am quite sure, that whatever form we may see, possibly
within this generation, or at any rate in the time of the next
generation, it has got to be a form of close partnership, however
that is going to be arrived at; and it will not be a partnership the
terms of which will be laid down, at any rate not yet, in Acts of
Parliament, or from this Party or that.
It has got to be a partnership of men who understand their own work,
and it is little help that they can get really either from
politicians or from intellectuals.
There are few men fitted to judge of and to settle and to arrange the
problem that distracts the country to-day between employers and
employed.
There are few men qualified to intervene who have not themselves been
right through the mill.
I always want to see, at the head of these organisations on both
sides, men who have been right through the mill, and who themselves
know exactly where the shoe pinches, and who know exactly what can be
conceded and what cannot, and who can make their reasons plain; and I
hope that we shall always find such men trying to steer their
respective ships side by side, instead of making for head-on
collisions.
Having said what I have said about that, what am I to say about the
attitude of the Party of which I have the honour to be the head?
I do not know whether the House will forgive me if I speak for a
minute or two on a rather personal note.
For two years past, in the face of great difficulties, perhaps
greater than many were aware of, I have striven to consolidate, and
to breathe a living force into my great Party. Friends of mine who
have done me the honour to read my speeches during that time have
seen clearly, however ill they may have been expressed, the ideals at
which I have been aiming.
I spoke on that subject again last night at Birmingham, and I shall
continue to speak on it as long as I am where I am.
We find ourselves, after these two years, in power, in possession of
perhaps the greatest majority our Party has ever had, and with the
general assent of the country. Now how did we get there? It was not
by promising to bring this Bill in; it was because, rightly or
wrongly, we succeeded in creating an impression throughout the
country that we stood for stable Government and for peace in the
country between all classes of the community.
Those were the principles for which we fought; those were the
principles on which we won; and our victory was not won entirely by
the votes of our own Party, splendidly as they fought. I should
think that the number of Liberals who voted for us at the last
Election ran into six figures, and I should think that we probably
polled more Labour votes than were polled on the other side.
That being so, what should our course be at the beginning of a new
Parliament? I have not myself the slightest doubt. Last year the
Leader of the Labour Party [Mr. Ramsay Macdonald], when he was Prime
Minister, suspended what had been settled by the previous Government,
and that was further progress for the time being on the scheme of
Singapore. He did it on the ground that it was a gesture for peace,
and he hoped that it would be taken as such by all the countries in
the world. He hoped that a gesture of that kind might play its part
in leading to what we all want to see, that is, a reduction in the
world's armaments.
I want my Party to-day to make a gesture to the country of a similar
nature, and to say to them: "We have our majority; we believe in the
justice of this Bill which has been brought in to-day, but we are
going to withdraw our hand, and we are not going to push our
political advantage home at a moment like this. Suspicion which has
prevented stability in Europe is the one poison that is preventing
stability at home, and we offer the country to-day this: We, at any
rate, are not going to fire the first shot. We stand for peace. We
stand for the removal of suspicion in the country. We want to create
an atmosphere, a new atmosphere in a new Parliament for a new age, in
which the people can come together. We abandon what we have laid our
hands to. We know we may be called cowards for doing it. We know we
may be told that we have gone back on our principles. But we believe
we know what at this moment the country wants, and we believe it is
for us in our strength to do what no other Party can do at this
moment, and to say that we at any rate stand for peace."
I know, I am as confident as I can be of anything, that that will be
the feeling of all those who sit behind me, and that they will accept
the Amendment which I have put down in the spirit in which I have
moved it. And I have equal confidence in my fellow-countrymen
throughout the whole of Great Britain.
Although I know that there are those who work for different ends from
most of us in this House, yet there are many in all ranks and all
parties who will re-echo my prayer:
"_Give peace in our time, O Lord._"
INDUSTRY AND PSYCHOLOGY
AT THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF INDUSTRIAL
PSYCHOLOGY
12_th November_, 1925
We are met to-night to celebrate the invasion of the realm of
industry by psychology. We have all of us been familiar for many
years past with the study that economists have made of industry and
the study that moralists have made of the development of the
personality of the individual; but the systematic study of industrial
society by psychologists is a matter, as I understand, of the last
three or four years. Certainly it is something quite new since I had
the pleasure of being in business.
Within the present century there has been a drastic overhauling of a
great many of the assumptions with which some of us were familiar in
our youth, whether the assumptions were those of the economists, the
moralists, or of the psychologists. Psychology has been applied not
only to the handling of the individual, but to individuals in groups,
or in the mass, in association. The results of this change in the
line of investigation are now just beginning to penetrate our
economic thinking. The Institute, to celebrate which we are here
to-night, is a striking example of this change, and it has had from
its start the support of two men whom I am proud to think I may call
my friends--Lord Balfour and Lord Haldane. It has also enlisted the
support of employers and employed.
There exists a certain interesting and harmonious relation between
this voluntary body and one that has been set up by the
Government--the Industrial Fatigue Research Board, which works as a
branch of the Medical Research Council. Roughly speaking, the
Industrial Fatigue Board initiates work and undertakes experiments
which are likely to have fruitful results and be of interest, though
unremunerative in themselves. Your Institute spends private money,
and it obtains support from among those who stand to benefit by the
results of your investigations, but who are undoubtedly attracted to
the work of the Institute through the interest which they take in the
problems you are attacking. The Institute, so far as I have been
able to learn, is surveying the vast realm covered by the operation
of the Factory Acts, and it is striving to introduce into that realm
improvements--not improvements which require legislation, but
improvements in mental and bodily conditions of work. The study of
such things as lighting, heating, ventilation, movement of the body,
cultivation of interest, the avoidance of fatigue, occupational
guidance--in other words, the study of the whole human factor in
relation to the machine and the job--that, as I understand it, is the
field of study of the industrial psychologist.
A movement of this kind has this in common with the League of
Nations: it has two principal obstacles to encounter--the prejudice
of people who think it can do nothing, and the support of people who
think it can do everything. In the first place it met, not
unnaturally, with the resistance of those who thought that, in spite
of its name, it was another capitalist dodge to rivet the chains of
the wage slave more firmly than before. I think it is now clear, not
only among the leaders of the employers and among the leaders of the
men, but also among the men themselves, that in this Institute they
have a real friend.
The fundamental question is how to make the most of the individual,
with all his idiosyncrasies, in his work. If you consider the matter
in the realm of sport, there seems really much less to wonder at in
the work of the Institute than if you regarded it in the realm in
which they are now working. Consider what is meant by training for a
boat race. It means nothing more nor less than true co-operation of
effort, rhythmic movement, distribution of energy in the proper
place, and at the right time, with the minimum fatigue and the
elimination of wasted effort. That is all. And there you have a
very suggestive parallel with industry. It is quite true that the
changes which accompanied the Industrial Revolution have been far
more costly in human life and human wear and tear than they would
have been had our ancestors been as wise as we sometimes think that
we ourselves are. But these depressing features of the Industrial
Revolution, whatever they have brought in their train inside
workshops, have had a tendency to bring in their train outside
workshops one very bad thing, and that is a dislike of work itself.
If work can be presented in a palatable form, I am not sure that the
ordinary human being does not like it, provided that he gets a
reasonable amount of play. The real enemies are overwork,
under-payment, insecurity and bad conditions. These are the real
evils, to the assuaging of which the work of this Institute, as I
understand it, is directed, and in that we wish more power to its
elbow.
We must not exaggerate what is possible. You cannot abolish
repetitive work; you cannot, even in a Socialist State; and, after
all, the monotony of the workman's life is very much due to the
monotony of the consumers' demands. If a man wants the same thing
every day, the man who provides it will have a monotonous task.
I am no mathematician, but I believe a straight line is, or was, the
shortest way between two points, but I am told that curved movements
are preferable to straight lines--whether on grounds of aesthetics or
comfort I am not sure--and there is no doubt, as Mr. Myers has
discovered, of the economic importance of rhythm, which has been
gradually recognised in industry, I understand, and made use of.
There must be something in rhythm which appeals to human nature.
Witness the popularity at present of dancing, and witness also the
vogue of the Volga Boat Song, which always makes me want to run along
the bank and pull the barge.
Under the aegis of the Institute I am told that the miners, some of
them, have been able to pick coal with greater regularity and have
gained happiness thereby. That opens up a new field, and I am
thinking seriously of asking Mr. Cook to bring in that which Mr.
Thomas knows so well--that Welsh gift of music--and to set his men
swinging their picks to the tune of "The Men of Harlech" or, better
still, "The Rising of the Lark," and give us an output that will defy
foreign competition.
But, seriously, if solutions can be found along these lines--if
anything can cause the man, the woman, the boy and the girl at the
heavy or monotonous job to find ways of doing that job with as great
or with greater efficiency and with less strain, more comfort, more
happiness--you will add more, perhaps, to a combination of human
efficiency and human happiness than we politicians can hope to do by
anything that lies in our power.
And there is another line on which you are working. You are always
paying attention, I understand, to boys and girls who are leaving
school in finding suitable occupations according to their fitness.
This is a matter of tremendous importance, and involves practically
what so many of us talk about--equality of opportunity. But I expect
even this Institute has got a good deal to learn in that direction.
One's first inclination is to smile at the idea of testing
intelligence and vocational aptitude. I should be extraordinarily
sorry at my age to have either of those things tested by anyone. We
must not expect from this Institute infallible results, but I shall
watch the results with intense interest, not only because I believe
you may do a great work among the young people, but because I see an
infinitely lighter task before my successor when he is able to apply
the tests of this Institute to candidates for the Cabinet. If I can
only draw on the resources of the psychologist to test the
suitability of all candidates for Cabinet rank in initiative and
self-control under criticism, intuitive insight into what Lancashire
is going to say to-morrow, and when trade is going to revive, how
much easier it would be; and if we could only test also their
physical qualifications for all-night sittings, and how long they can
speak without boring an audience, then, indeed, Mr. Myers, you will
rise up, and we shall call you blessed.
THE GOSPEL OF HATE
FROM A SPEECH IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS
16_th February_, 1923
One word about the speech delivered last night by the hon. Member for
Motherwell. (Mr. Newbold.) I have always been a student of history,
and I learned from him several things that I had not known before.
There was only one remark of his on which I wish to comment. He said
that when the Labour Party had been in power, and failed, he was
coming in. I believe that the hon. Member for Silvertown (Mr. J.
Jones) expressed dissent. I am myself of that somewhat flabby nature
that always prefers agreement to disagreement, and I welcome the
opportunity of recording the fact that I find myself in hearty and
uncompromising agreement with the hon. Member for Silvertown. When
the Labour Party sit on these benches, we shall all wish them well in
their effort to govern the country. But I am quite certain that
whether they succeed or fail there will never in this country be a
Communist Government, and for this reason, that no gospel founded on
hate will ever seize the hearts of our people--the people of Great
Britain. It is no good trying to cure the world by spreading out
oceans of bloodshed. It is no good trying to cure the world by
repeating that pentasyllable French derivative, "Proletariat." The
English language is the richest in the world in thought. The English
language is the richest in the world in monosyllables. Four words,
of one syllable each, are words which contain salvation for this
country and for the whole world, and they are "Faith," "Hope,"
"Love," and "Work." No Government in this country to-day, which has
not faith in the people, hope in the future, love for its fellow-men,
and which will not work and work and work, will ever bring this
country through into better days and better times, or will ever bring
Europe through or the world through.
_ON POLITICAL LIFE_
SERVICE
AT THE LEEDS LUNCHEON CLUB
13_th March_, 1925
I want to begin by going back a few years and trying to voice to this
room thoughts that perhaps have not been expressed in public, but
which were common to a vast number of thinking men during the years
of the war. I am one of those (of whom there are many here) who when
the war broke out were too old for active service, but who were
possessed in those days of the war with a consuming desire to do
something for our country, and to look round to find where we could
most usefully give service.
I think probably everybody here, members of such a club as yours,
found their vocation at that time. But as the war went on, the
effect of it psychologically was curious. Many of the things that
had played a large part in our lives before shrank into
insignificance, and we felt that the world could never be the same
again to us who had grown to maturity in the years of peace. I think
some of us found that we were getting to cling much more loosely to
material wealth, and to realise that wealth was made to be a servant
and not a master--that as a servant it had a most useful function to
perform, that as a master it meant damnation.
I think, too, we felt this: we were not peculiarly impressed with
speeches that talked of the glorious time that was coming after the
war. We realised what the war meant in the world. We felt the
foundations of civilisation in Europe cracking. We knew as business
men that for a generation this country and the world would be as a
whole far, far poorer, and we realised early the struggle that must
result to repair the cracks in the foundations of our civilisation
and to restore to the country that level of prosperity which she had
enjoyed before the war. I think, too, many of us had little faith in
supermen. I think that our experience in business had taught us
that, as a matter of fact, there are no such things as supermen, and
that we should have to rely on the innate common-sense, integrity,
courage and faith of the common men and women of this country if we
were to make good.
I think probably those thoughts which I certainly had, and which, I
gather, you had, were pretty common throughout the country. It was
for that reason, feeling as I did, that I was driven into the course
which I embraced in December, 1916, when I accepted Mr. Bonar Law's
offer to serve as his Parliamentary Secretary. I did that
deliberately, because I believed that at my time of life, having
already sufficient means to be independent of the active business in
which I had passed my life up to then, I had the opportunity of
giving my services to the country without any feeling that it was
necessary to be remunerated for them.
There is nothing singular in that. There must have been millions of
men who felt as I did. I have never said, or believed, that that
service which I had the opportunity of rendering was one whit higher
or better than any other. All service ranks the same, according to
the spirit in which it is performed.
One of the sources of the great strength of our country in every part
of the kingdom is that there are men who have no personal ambition
for themselves to get where the limelight is brightest and publicity
is greatest. And as long as our country can go on producing that
type, which I am thankful to say it is producing from all classes of
the community--so long as that is the case, I should never despair of
England.
There is another observation I would like to make about the war
before I pass on. It became evident to me long before the war was
over that the effect of it, which would hit this country hardest in
the years immediately succeeding, was the tragedy of the loss of the
men who were just qualifying and getting ready to be the leaders of
our younger men--the men who had already been at work in the factory
and the mill, in all kinds of business and in the professions, who
were just beginning to be masters of their own work--men of about
thirty years of age, who by now would have been qualified to be
leaders in their respective spheres.
There is nothing in the first twenty years after the war that can
make good to this country the loss of so many men of that age. And
that was an additional reason why we men who were middle-aged already
when the war began should have banded ourselves together by the time
the war ended under a vow to our better selves that we would give for
the rest of our lives, as a thank-offering to the dead, nothing but
the best services we could render to our country. It has become our
lot not to seek the ease that we might legitimately seek, but to
carry on to the end and help the next generation that is coming
along--the generation that was too young to fight--help that to take
its place as and when the time comes. It is, and it will be, a
tremendous burden on the older men, but it is their proud
contribution--the giving of the best they can to help a broken and a
shattered world.
Among the problems that we have to face to-day there are some with
which you are peculiarly fitted to deal, and where your advice,
knowledge, understanding and enthusiasm may be of the greatest
service to your country. In few things is it more difficult to make
sufficiently rapid progress than in the problem of housing, and that
problem in the big towns and cities of our country is linked up with
kindred and greater problems of the planning of our cities. I spoke
last night (not for the first time) of the rapidity with which the
change had transformed our country, the change wrought by the growth
of our industrial system. It was so unexpected, so unforeseen, and
so incalculable in its effects that men were unable, and they had not
the imagination, to plan and to look forward. If they had only done
so how much easier our task would have been! But we to-day not only
have to devote ourselves to undoing the evil effects of things left
undone by those who went before us; we in our time must look ahead to
plan that we do not leave problems for our descendants as grave as
have been left for us.
In the growth of our big industrial centres to-day let us, while
there is yet time, look forward and plan to see where the factories
of the future are to be, and where the houses of the future are to
be, and where the open spaces and the playing fields are to be, and
how people are to be got to and from their work--that complicated
system of transport. All these things need thought, sympathy,
imagination and vision. In a gathering like this there are men who
are capable of doing most useful work of this kind.
One centre after another of the big populations in this country can
make its own plans and contribution to the common stock of knowledge
and enter into a glorious competition to make in the progress of
years their city more beautiful, more convenient, more commodious,
and happier for the human beings who live in it.
In the same way in a city like this, where the intelligence and the
moving spirits of industry meet round this table, what an opportunity
you have for making your contribution to the solving of the most
difficult problem we have to face to-day! There are few here,
probably, who believe that the industrial system is static and here
for all time. You are all mainly engaged, as I have been, in
industry, and have gone through the mill, and we have to move on and
realise, as I do, that so far from industry being static it is
dynamic. We have to move on into a state of things that has yet to
be a better one both for efficiency and in its spirit than anything
else that we have yet come through. There will have to be much hard
thinking on the part of all who are engaged in industry, whether they
be masters or whether they be men; and it will be impossible for the
change that I believe to be necessary in the future to come about
until there is a very different atmosphere in which to discuss and
negotiate those changes than has been the case in the last twenty
years.
The atmosphere in those years has been, in many parts of the country,
poisoned. I do not wish to say anything here about where the faults
may lie. But I do want to say that I realise, as you do, that a
great deal of the propaganda which has been done during the last
twenty years--the propaganda of a kind that teaches class hatred--has
in many places done its evil and its poisonous work.
I am thankful to say that I see signs throughout the country to-day
that those who believe that permanent progress can be made by that
method are not an increasing number, but the work that has been done
in that direction cannot be undone in a moment. And it will mean the
utmost goodwill, the utmost force of example to bring about, to any
great extent, something better and something on which we may erect a
permanent and stable building. In industrial matters I believe in
publicity. I believe, in spite of much that we fear, that the
agreement that was made in the mining industry has taught the country
a great deal. As you pass away from the days of small businesses
into the days of big limited liability companies, your problem is
completely altered, and what we have to do--and here nothing can be
done without your help--is to humanise the system of limited
liability. That is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do, but
after all, let us remember publicity. Where there is ignorance there
is always suspicion, and until you on your side--I will say we on our
side--get the men who work for us to understand our problems, as they
do not understand them to-day, you can never hope for progress.
I have often said I regard it of the greatest importance for workmen
in industry, and particularly their leaders, to have what some of
them already have, a knowledge of the industry that they are in--a
knowledge of the finances of that industry, a knowledge of the costs
of that industry, a knowledge of the costs of that industry abroad
(that they may understand what competition means), a knowledge of the
methods of marketing those commodities abroad. It is far more
important for them to have that knowledge than to have even the
amount of knowledge that may be accumulated after six weeks' sojourn
in a foreign country of the language of which they are ignorant.
I am catholic in my views. I would exempt no class to-day from
working hard at their own problems. I think those who lead Labour
and those who lead the employers have got to work harder at their
task of comprehension and of explanation than they have ever worked
before.
There is one thing that I have always felt as an employer, and it is
this. A good employer is very apt to devote his whole time to his
own works, and to refrain from coming out into public life, because
he has not time for it, and it perhaps does not attract him, and for
some reason he is often reluctant to leave his own place of work.
There is one cause in which he should be prepared to sacrifice
himself--and it is a sacrifice. I want to see the ranks of employers
throw up a man who will lead his men, making it the principal task of
his life to be the mediator in all subjects affecting their work,
whilst standing up, as he is entitled to do, for the order he
represents. There can be no finer career for a young man than to go
into business, not with the object only of making a fortune, as he
probably would--for any man is worthy of his hire--but with the idea
of making his contribution towards getting the whole of these
relations on a firmer footing.
There can be no finer work for men who, as boys, went out to France,
and learnt what a British regiment was, than to try to get something
of the spirit of the British regiment into their industry.
DEMOCRACY AND THE SPIRIT OF SERVICE
FROM A SPEECH AT THE ALBERT HALL
4_th December_, 1924
The responsibility for progress rests not only on the Government, but
on every man and woman in the country. The Government can go no
faster in progress than the people will allow them to do. Willing
co-operation in new methods is essential, and without the will to
work progress is not possible, and with constant stoppages of
industry progress is not possible. Progress can be obtained by the
people of this country if they have the will to obtain it. But just
as it can be helped by them, so it can be impeded and retarded and
stopped altogether. The ultimate responsibility is with the people
more even than with the Government. It is a testing time for
democracy. Many are those who would pay, and do pay, lip service to
it. But I remember that democracy is after all but the government of
the people by the people through their freely elected
representatives, and unless the responsibility for that government is
felt throughout the length and breadth of the country, from top to
bottom, by men and women alike, democracy itself will fail.
Democracy, democratic government, calls for harder work, for higher
education, for further vision than any form of government known in
this world. It has not lasted long yet in the West, and it is only
by those like ourselves who believe in it making it a success that we
can hope to see it permanent and yielding those fruits which it ought
to yield. The assertion of people's rights has never yet provided
that people with bread. The performance of their duties, and that
alone, can lead to the successful issue of those experiments in
government which we have carried further than any other people in
this world. Democracy can rise to great heights; it can also sink to
great depths. It is for us so to conduct ourselves, and so to
educate our own people, that we may achieve the heights and avoid the
depths.
Closely akin to that comes the subject of our great Empire, on which
I would say a word or two. When we speak of Empire, it is in no
spirit of flag-wagging. What we feel, I think, is this: we feel that
in this great inheritance of ours, separated as it is by the seas, we
have yet one home and one people, and we want the realisation of that
to be so vivid to our own people that men may ask themselves, as they
come to manhood, "Where, in this great inherited estate, can I do
best for myself? Where have I a better opportunity of bringing up my
family? Where can I do best for the Empire?" When the answer given
is "overseas," let us do everything we can to see that the path is
made easy for those who desire it, that we may help to spread the
peoples of our Empire, the ideals of our Empire, the trade of our
Empire from one side of the world to the other. After all, great as
the material benefits are, we do not look primarily to them. I think
deep down in all our hearts we look to the Empire as the means by
which we may hope to see that increase of our race which we believe
to be of such inestimable benefit to the world at large; the spread
abroad of people to whom freedom and justice are as the breath of
their nostrils, of people distinguished, as we would fain hope and
believe, above all things, by an abiding sense of duty. If ever the
day should come when an appeal to that sense of duty falls on deaf
ears among our own kin, that day indeed would be the end of our
country and of our Empire, to which you and I have dedicated our very
lives.
And, if I may, a few words in conclusion to you workers from all over
the country and to the new members of Parliament who sit behind me.
We have to-day perhaps the most magnificent opportunity of service to
our country that has ever been given to any party. You who have just
been elected to the House of Commons are, by the testimony of your
fellow-countrymen, their natural leaders for the next four or five
years. It is your duty, your primary duty, to educate that great
democracy of which we are all a part. Let me put this to you, to all
of us who have passed through the experience of the recent election.
Can there be anything that stands before us more clearly or
poignantly than the groups of our fellow-countrymen who listened in
faith to what we had to say, who trusted us and have given us their
confidence, and who believe in their hearts that we have come to
London to do what we can to right those things that are hard and
difficult for them, and to help them in what is always the difficult
struggle that they have in life? Don't ever lose touch with your
constituency; don't ever mistake the voice of the clubman and the
voice of the Pressman in London for the voice of the country. It is
the country that has returned you; it is the country which will judge
you.
I was struck two or three days ago by reading the words of an old
Oxford economist, with whom I disagree in almost everything else that
he ever wrote. He said: "Consider not only the process by which the
machinery of our social condition has been made, but much more the
opinion and action which has developed and moulded the character of
the English people." Do not ever forget the character of the English
people, in which character and in love of which character pursue your
work and help them.
I want to see the spirit of service to the whole nation the
birthright of every member of the Unionist Party--Unionist in the
sense that we stand for the union of those two nations of which
Disraeli spoke two generations ago; union among our own people to
make one nation of our own people at home which, if secured, nothing
else matters in the world. I urge on you all as workers in that
great Unionist Party to render all the service you can to the common
weal in the districts in which you live. There is always work and to
spare for human betterment in every parish in the country. And to
all those workers for the Party and members of Parliament, I say this
in conclusion: You cannot better serve your Party, and through the
Party your country, than in dedicating your lives to that service.
TRUTH AND POLITICS
ON INAUGURATION AS LORD RECTOR OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
6_th November_, 1925
The first duty of a Lord Rector is to thank his constituents for the
honour they have done him in electing him to that great and historic
office.
But beyond the honour, of which they are no less conscious than he,
lies the unique service unconsciously rendered to a Rector who is
normally immersed in public affairs.
Though "to be at sea" is a phrase used by landsmen to denote
instability of purpose and absence of sense of direction, it must be
acknowledged that we landsmen have much to learn when we are at sea,
if we will. We learn that there are two things on a ship that are
not done. A sailor does not spit on the deck, thereby strengthening
his self-control and saving unnecessary work for someone else; nor
does he speak to the man at the wheel, thereby leaving him to devote
his whole mind to his task and increasing the probability of the ship
arriving at or near her destination. In matters of State, having
selected a man for the wheel, we do everything we can to distract his
attention and to prevent him, if possible, from having time in which
he may consider for a moment where he is going.
Therein is the service of which I spoke, that you compel your Rector
to make time, though it be out of fragments, in which he may reflect
on the course of national affairs in a more objective and detached
way than is usually possible for him. You force him to pause and
ponder and present his reflections for your consideration. It is not
surprising if the result is that his thoughts should turn towards you
and that he should find himself driven to ask: what is the special
contribution which men and women educated at our universities can
make to the world?
You who are students in Edinburgh have a high reputation to maintain.
It was of this University that it was once declared by a competent
witness:
"I may truly say that it is not easy to conceive a university where
industry is more general, where reading is more fashionable, where
indolence and ignorance are more disreputable."
I hope you recognise yourselves to-day in the words of Sir James
Macintosh, written a hundred years ago.
I shall not pitch my expectations too high. The fraction of life
which you spend at the University is small, and there have been other
forces continuously at work before you came here moulding your lives.
It is the education received unconsciously that counts for most in
the making of a man. The University can only work within the limits
of the human material which it receives from the homes and schools of
the country. It can provide a favourable soil for the developing
intelligence under the supervision of expert gardeners, but it cannot
grow figs from thistles.
The University is a rich storehouse of knowledge, and some fragments
of its treasures do somehow find their way into the possession of the
students. The University is also an instrument for increasing
knowledge, and some students, a small proportion, do contrive to add
to the accumulated learning of the ages. They settle "οτι's]
business, properly base ουν, and give us the
doctrine of the enclitic γε."
But, besides, or rather in the process of, transmitting and
increasing knowledge and training ability, the University is a school
of character. That is true not only of the common room and the
playing field; it is also true of the lecture room and laboratory.
The ideal character is a harmony of many virtues, and it is a
tradition amongst us to give to truthfulness the position of the
cardinal virtue. Hence, for example, the curious power of Lord
Althorp, who was known to have said to the House of Commons, "I know
this to be right. I cannot remember why--but you may take it that it
is so," and they believed him. And if the noblest exercise of
freedom is the pursuit of truth, the best equipment for the search is
to be truthful. The inculcation of the practice of truthfulness, no
less than the acquisition of knowledge, is the motive force of our
educational system. The student is here to learn habits of accuracy
in measurement, precision in statement, honesty in handling evidence,
fairness in presenting a cause--in a word, to be true in word and
deed. That is the goal of British education, because it is
recognised that no man can be a worthy citizen whose word cannot be
trusted and whose deed is compounded of deceit.
Men think by means of words and communicate with each other through
their medium. This "most noble and profitable invention of speech is
man's proudest triumph over nature, without which there had been
amongst men neither commonwealth nor society, nor contract nor peace,
no more than amongst lions, bears, and wolves."[1] Words are the
currency of love and friendship, of making and marketing, of peace
and war. Nations are bound and loosed by them. Three or four simple
words can move waves of emotion through the hearts of multitudes like
great tides of the sea: "Lest we forget." "Patriotism is not enough."
There is a well-known passage in the writings of John Stuart Mill,
where he doubts whether all the inventions of machinery have on
balance added to human happiness. I am always reminded by that
passage of another in John Locke, where he is so impressed with the
defects of language as to affirm that if anyone "shall well consider
the errors and obscurity, the mistakes and confusion, that are spread
in the world by an ill-use of words, he will find some reason to
doubt whether language, as it has been employed, has contributed more
to the improvement or hindrance of knowledge among mankind."[2]
The Scottish are cautious, it has been said, because they have lived
with one another for so long. You are capable of practising great
restraint and economy in the use of words, but I do not think that
even you will go as far as Locke and wish to put us all into a
Trappist monastery. Such knowledge as there is in the world has been
built up by the help of words. A civilisation without words is
perhaps conceivable, but under it the life of man would be "solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish, and short." But if we cannot go all the way
with Locke, we can agree with his successor, Bentham, that "error is
never so difficult to be destroyed as when it has its roots in
language." "Improper terms are the chains which bind men to
unreasonable practices. Every improper term contains the germ of
fallacious propositions; it forms a cloud, which conceals the nature
of the thing, and presents a frequently invincible obstacle to the
discovery of truth."[3] It is in a similar mood that Mr. Wells
complains of the fluidity of thought and the fixity of language.
Master of English as he is, he finds its terms solid, opaque, and
stable, and therefore "incurably inaccurate." That is not merely a
defence of philosophic doubt, but a conclusion of despair which, if
we accepted it literally, would close all universities to-morrow and
destroy all foundations of belief.
No small part of education lies in learning the right use of words,
in tracing their birth and behaviour, in fitting them closely to
facts and ideas. That is why you are here invited to study the
Humanities not only for their own fair sake, but for the discipline
which is experienced in the manipulation of two of the finest
instruments ever devised to express the minds of men. Through the
Humanities you should learn not only something of the polity and law,
the poetry and eloquence of the ancient world, but you should learn
the value of the words of your own native tongue. No man who can do
good Greek and Latin prose can deceive people with words except he
sin against the light. He can no longer be deceived himself. He
will know that to use words equivocally is prostitution. Nor does he
need to use italics in speech or writing. Headlines cannot hypnotise
him, and the latest sensation is already stale.
Through mathematics we learn on the very threshold a lesson which, if
universally known and applied, would prevent most of the ills to
which the world is heir. To know and realise that two and two make
four and can in no circumstances make anything else is to be equipped
with knowledge that will save us daily from mistakes, unpleasant to
ourselves, and possibly disastrous to others. I know that some of
Euclid's axioms, which appear to common sense to be necessary, are
now declared by mathematicians "to derive their appearance of
necessity from our mere familiarity with actual space, and not from
any _a priori_ logical foundation. By imagining worlds in which
these axioms are false, the mathematicians have used logic to show
the possibility of spaces differing from that in which we live."[4]
But even these daring speculators assure us that in any possible
world they feel that two and two would be four and that this is not a
mere fact, but a necessity to which everything actual and possible
must conform.[5] Whatever be the case in a world of Einsteins, or in
Russia, over most part of the world two and two are still believed to
make four. Without that knowledge or in the belief that two and two
may in a certain environment make five, you may indeed upset a
constitution, but you will never make an engine, nor, if you were in
possession of a ship, could you bring it into any port in the world.
Those, therefore, who would navigate the ship of State, if they would
avoid shipwreck, had better base their sailing orders on this
platitudinous verity.
Through all your studies of the physical sciences you are being
taught a similar lesson. Principles are constantly being subjected
to the test of fact, purified in the furnace of experiment. Working
hypotheses are being confronted with masses of detail, and as a
result are discarded, revised, or quickened. You strive to compel
the material facts of the world to reveal their nature, you watch and
record their behaviour, and truth is the accurate statement of the
facts observed. By means of this discipline you learn that things
are what they are and the consequences will be what they will be. In
other words, that as you sow you will reap, and a wrong combination
of elements will send you through the roof when your desire is to
remain with your feet firmly planted on the earth.
Lastly, there is the study of the ultimate science, the science of
sciences, of moral philosophy for which this University has been so
justly famous. There was a time when it might be said that the chief
export of Scotland, measured in values, was metaphysics. It was to
this University that more than one Prime Minister came from England
to sit at the feet of Dugald Stewart. The penetration of English
practice by Scottish reflection was one of the most fruitful results
of the Union, and is still happily proceeding in the person of our
distinguished Chairman (the Earl of Balfour).
Philosophy forces the student to examine the assumptions on which all
the other sciences rest, the hypotheses by which they all work. You
ask not only How? but Why? You challenge all appearance; you doubt
science itself in your search for reality. Magic, myth, ritual,
religion; the mysterious and emotional story of human belief; the
theological speculations of mankind; the very instrument by which man
knows anything at all--all are cross-examined as facts of experience,
and an attempt is made to interpret them and fit them into some
coherent explanation of our life and destiny. You cannot go any
distance on this road without arriving at the distinction between
true assertions and false ones, and you will not need to travel much
farther before reaching the distinction between right and wrong.
Throughout all these activities in which you are engaged in this
University there is the double motive of acquiring knowledge and
learning to think truly. The latter is the more important task. The
greatest service this or any university can render the modern world
is to discharge well this duty which is laid upon it, and to send
forth year after year generations of young men and women who have not
only a stock of ideas but minds which turn on the poles of truth.
Ability to read is not synonymous with ability to reflect on what is
read. Better to doubt methodically than to think capriciously.
Education that has merely taught people to follow a syllogism without
enabling them to detect a fallacy has left them in constant peril.
And as with the fallacy so with its near relation, the half truth.
For though it has been accepted through the ages that half a loaf is
better than no bread, half a truth is not only not better than no
truth, it is worse than many lies, and the slave of lies and half
truths is ignorance. Ignorance, static and inert, is bad, but
ignorance in motion, as Goethe once observed, is the most terrible
force in nature, for it may destroy in its passage the accumulated
mental and material capital of generations.
You will need this habit of truth when you leave this home of
learning and reflection. It is our greatest national asset. The
industries and commerce of this country, its enormous foreign trade,
involving innumerable transactions with known and unknown customers,
has been made possible not only by the enterprise of our merchants,
but by their integrity. There is nowhere in the world, I believe, a
higher standard of commercial honour than that which prevails in this
country. And the same is true of our Courts of Law, which enjoy a
world-wide prestige, nowhere better exemplified than in the Admiralty
Court, to which shipowners from all over the world resort, even in
cases where no British ship is in the collision or salvage operation.
Why is it, then, that when we turn to politics a lower standard of
habitual truthfulness is alleged to prevail than in the world of
science or of business? I am not now talking of this country more
than another. I think our reputation is at least as good as that of
any other country in this regard, and it has grown in the last 100
years, and is growing. The scientist is assumed to be a truth-lover;
honesty is proverbially the best policy in business; but politicians
have been despised for hypocrisy and dishonesty in all the
literatures of the Old World and the New. I open the work of a
brilliant Cambridge scholar and theologian, and this is what I read
on the first page:
"In regard to truth, the more one reads of man's notions about the
meaning and method of civil society, the more often is one inclined
in despair to say that truth has as little to do with politics as it
has with most politicians."[6]
And this is the verdict of a learned foreign observer at the end of
an immense treatise on the pathology of party government: "To the low
types which the human race has produced from Cain down to Tartuffe,
the age of democracy has added a new one--the politician."
What is the explanation of this evil reputation which attaches not to
politicians of one party, but to the whole race? Primarily, I
suppose, it is due to the fact that ever since States began to be
they have been in peril and have trusted to force for their safety.
War has been their normal history. Savagery has never been far away
from the realm of law. How long is it since that ceased to be true
in Scotland? With war and the preparation for war go the stratagems
of diplomacy, the dropping of the ordinary code of morals, a holiday
for truth, and an aftermath of cynicism. Force and fraud are in war
the two cardinal virtues, wrote the author of _Leviathan_. The
statesman's goal is the preservation of the State, and reasons of
State have been held to justify all policies whatsoever. In the
arena of international rivalry and conflict men have placed
patriotism above truthfulness as the indispensable virtue of
statesmen. "When the entire safety of a country is at stake, no
consideration of what is just or unjust, merciful or cruel,
praiseworthy or shameful, must intervene,"[7] is a copybook maxim
from the pages of a well-known exponent of the art of Government.
And it was a statesman much nearer our own time who said to a group
of friends: "If we had done for ourselves the things which we are
doing for Italy, we should be great rascals."[8] That sounds less
shocking to our ears to-day than it would have done a dozen years
ago. Machiavelli's conception of mankind has not been dispelled or
disproved. He is, as Lord Acton said, a constant and contemporary
influence. He is in all our hearts.
We have recently been celebrating the tercentenary of the publication
of the work of Grotius on International Law. Dr. Figgis, the
Cambridge historian and divine, whom I quoted a moment ago, points
out that the fundamental difference between Machiavelli and Grotius
is concerned with the question before us. The contention of Grotius,
which is denied by Machiavelli, is that human life is essentially a
society, and that certain laws, of which fidelity to plighted word is
the most important, are therefore as immutable as human nature.
These two thinkers represent two tendencies in our public life. The
principles of Machiavelli were accepted in Europe at any rate as late
as the days of Cavour and Bismarck. I wish to avoid the twentieth
century and examples from among the living. It was the prevailing
view for centuries, openly avowed and defended, that you could have
one code of morals among nations and another and much more exacting
one among individuals, that you could be a Machiavellian abroad and a
Christian at home. Whatever may have been our lapses we have never
in this country accepted this view in the bald and summary form in
which I am putting it. It was, nevertheless, a British Prime
Minister who said that "No great country was ever saved by good men,"
which is perhaps why Lord Acton said that great men were nearly
always bad men. But the shifts to which statesmen and diplomatists
have resorted in the field of foreign affairs, especially in time of
strain or open conflict, have helped to give all politicians a bad
name.
The party system is perhaps a contributory cause. The system has its
advantages, its team work, its loyalties, and others which I need not
stop to describe, especially as the whole subject was most ably
analysed by my colleague, Lord Cecil, in his address to the students
at Aberdeen a few days ago. To our sporting countrymen it appears a
game, and as such it has its rules, and these for the most part are
honourably obeyed and are an important help to probity in our public
life. But the party system does put a certain embargo on complete
frankness of speech in the arena of debate.
But it is to a third explanation that I want to direct your attention
for a few minutes more. There is a profound difference in the study
of the physical and the human sciences, between the study of
particles of matter and of men in society. You cannot measure and
weigh, combine and distribute men as you do chemical elements.
Spinoza tried something of the sort, but he did not succeed. You
remember a famous passage, where he says how he had made it his
especial care neither to mock, to bewail, nor to denounce men's
actions, but to understand them, how he had tried to consider the
emotions and agitations of men's minds, love and hatred, anger and
envy, honour and pity, just as a scientist would regard heat and
cold, storms and thunder. But though we sometimes speak of rhetoric
as hot air, the state is not a cloud, nor, I fear, do we politicians
often return in scientific showers the popular vapour which we are
said to absorb.[9]
The material of politics is human nature, its motives honourable and
base, its appetites for power and for service, its passions, its
prejudices, its memories and aspirations. But the politician cannot
work with scales and forceps, with test tube and mortar. His
instruments are the written and spoken word. Politics can never be
an exact science. Democracy is government by discussion, by talk.
Politicians must talk, and they cannot to-day, like Pitt, confine
their speeches to the House of Commons. The perils of the platform
orator have been pointed out from the days of Cleon. Words have lost
none of their equivocal character since his day. The difference
between the Greek sophist and the modern demagogue, it is said,
consists in this: the one displayed his ingenuity by appearing to
prove that which his hearers knew to be false, the other displays it
by appearing to prove that which his hearers wish to be true.[10] It
is the business of the universities to change all this, and they are
doing it.
The politician is much nearer in type to the barrister and advocate
than to the scientist. The latter has no case to prove, he sits
humbly before the facts and lets them speak. The advocate and the
politician are more interested in persuasion than in proof. They
have a client or a policy to defend. The political audience is not
dishonest in itself, nor does it desire or approve dishonesty or
misrepresentation in others, but it is an audience only imperfectly
prepared to follow a close argument, and the speaker wishes to make a
favourable impression, to secure support for a policy. It is easy to
see how this may lead to the depreciation of the verbal currency and
to the circulation of promises which cannot be cashed.
Closely allied with this is the pressure laid upon the politician in
a democratic state to speak while important negotiations are in
progress, however inconvenient the moment. The result once more is
inevitably to place a veto on complete frankness, and to tempt
recourse to words which are nebulous, hesitating, ambiguous, or
misleading. Some of us have become as adept as the Prague poet who
went to see Béranger in 1847, and had to answer a few questions. Was
Prague in Hungary or in Poland? In neither one nor the other. Was
Bohemia in Austria or in Germany? In both. Was the Prussian
monarchy absolute or conditional? Partly one, partly the other. At
last Béranger lost patience: "Frenchmen," he cried, "like things to
be clear. What is not clear is not French."[11] If the subject is
one of high foreign policy the wrong words may raise issues not
settled by dropping pieces of paper in a ballot box but by dropping
bombs on cities. That is the essential difference between the
methods of politics and of business.
In these directions we may discover some mitigation of the harsh
epithets used of the politician.
I come back to where I began. False words, said the dying Socrates,
are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.
Although the use of words may be abused and the fight for their
honour may at times seem hopeless, we must never give up the struggle
to use them solely in the service of truth. Let us aim at meaning
what we say, and saying what we mean. The price man has to pay for
the good things he enjoys is constant watchfulness lest they be
employed for evil. Has not this been the case from the dawn of
history with drink, language, and liberty? Let us--in the language
of _Leviathan_--use perspicuous words, having first snuffed and
purged them from ambiguity and made them luminous. Let us take our
stand on public right and a law of nations with Grotius rather than
with Machiavelli; let us seek to moralise our public intercourse and
reduce the area of casuistry and duplicity. That is not only the
accepted principle of the best amongst us, but it is, I am sure, in
harmony with a widespread instinct in the British people. It
asserted itself in August 1914 when it was made plain that ethics was
not a branch of politics, but the reverse. It is at the root of our
support of the League of Nations at Geneva--a city with which
Scotland has had spiritual ties for centuries, and from which your
Churches derive their system of regulated freedom. It is truth alone
that will "destroy the face of the covering cast over all people and
the veil that is spread over all nations" (Isaiah xxv. 7). There is
much that is profoundly wrong and remediable in our civilisation, but
let us not lightly discard the gains so hardly won from the savagery
which so readily besets us. In stretching forth our hands to the
farther shore, let us realise that civilisation itself is but the ice
formed in process of ages on the turbulent stream of unbridled human
passions, and while this ice seemed to our fathers secure and
permanent, it has rotted and cracked during the agony of the Great
War, and in places the submerged torrent has broken through, leaving
fragments in constant collision threatening by their attrition to
diminish and ultimately disappear. The more need for you, the
lampbearers of your generation, to guide your own steps by the truth,
and to light the way for the wandering people of the world.
[1] _Leviathan_, I, iv.
[2] _Essay Concerning Human Understanding_, Book III, Chapter XI,
Par. 4.
[3] _On Evidence_, Book III, Chapter I.
[4] Bertrand Russell: _Introduction to Philosophy_, p. 320.
[5] _Ibid._, p. 121.
[6] Figgis: _From Gerson to Grotius_.
[7] Machiavelli: _Treatise on Livy_.
[8] G. M. Trevelyan: _Garibaldi and the Making of Italy_, Chap. I.
[9] _Tractatus Politicus_, quoted in Pollock's life, p. 300; cf. Von
Hügel, _The German Soul_, p. 67, and Acton, _Historical Essays and
Studies_, p. 479.
[10] C. Cornewall Lewis: _Use and Abuse of Political Terms_, p. 12.
[11] Acton: _Historical Essays and Studies_, p. 474.
RHETORIC
AT THE CAMBRIDGE UNION
_March_, 1924
I sometimes think that possibly a man's views of rhetoric may be
coloured according to whether he possesses it or is without it; this
may be the reason why Mr. Mitchell Banks, who has made such an
eloquent plea, finds himself in opposition to me. I have never been
a rhetorician or an orator. I attribute this largely to the fact
that, much as I used to enjoy reading speeches, I was greatly struck
when I was about eighteen, at coming across a phrase in Froude,
"Oratory is the harlot of the arts," illustrated, as Froude could
illustrate it, with a wealth of eloquence! There is nothing odd
about that, because you will remember that there was no one who
fulminated more against rhetoric than Carlyle, probably the greatest
rhetorician who ever put pen to paper. I was reading in him only the
other day that the best thing man could do was to doom himself to
eternal silence, which Carlyle never could do, except when he was
smoking a pipe with Tennyson.
Mr. Theobald (the mover of the resolution) made a most characteristic
remark in his definition of rhetoric, a definition on which a good
deal depends. He defined it as a marshalling of facts which were
likely to persuade people. I entirely agree with him, except that he
has left out the other half of the sentence, which is the essence of
my case: "Concealing the facts which are likely to dissuade people."
There is a good deal more in rhetoric than the marshalling of facts,
otherwise the _Origin of Species_ would have been the greatest work
of rhetoric the world has produced.
To tell the truth needs no art at all, and that is why I always
believe in it. We have each attempted our own definition of
rhetoric. I would rather define it by illustrations of what I mean
by rhetoric, which I regard as one of the greatest dangers of modern
civilization. I am going to give you two or three phrases which I
call rhetorical phrases, and each of them, to my mind, is pregnant
with darkness and confusion. Consider this one of three words from
one of the greatest rhetoricians of the ages: "Bulging corn bins."
"The democratic control of the means of production" is another. I
tried in the House of Commons to get that last phrase translated from
rhetorical English into English that I could understand, and the only
answer I got was that it was impossible to produce rabbits from a top
hat. "Self-determination" is another rhetorical term that may some
day lead the nations into a bloody war. That is what rhetoric does.
"Homes fit for heroes to live in," and "A world safe for democracy!"
These, to my mind, are the quintessence of rhetoric, and it is
against rhetoric in this sense that I am going to vote to-night.
I suppose every one will admit that a great rhetorician was Charles
Fox, who said something which illustrates my point very clearly: "If
a speech reads well it must be a damned bad speech." I mean by this
that Mr. Mitchell Banks will read his speech to-morrow morning with
less pleasure than that with which he heard the cheers for it
to-night. Rhetoric is meant to get the vote of a division or at an
election, but God help the man who tries to think on it!
Such speeches as have been quoted in support of rhetoric could not be
delivered nowadays. The character and temper of the audience and the
people have so changed that what may have been possible for Macaulay
is impossible to-day. The rhetoric of to-day, the rhetoric we have
to consider, is the rhetoric of the "Bulging corn bins." I suppose
that this gift has been responsible for more bloodshed on this earth
than all the guns and explosives that have ever been invented. If we
look back only over the last century, was there anything more
responsible for the French Revolution than the literary rhetoric of
Rousseau, fanned by the verbal rhetoric of Robespierre and others,
just as the Russian Revolution was due to the rhetoric of
Kerensky--flatulent rhetoric which filled the bellies of his people
with the east wind?
That appalling twopenny-ha'penny gift of fluency, with the addition
of a certain amount of training and of imagination in word-spinning,
is the kind of rhetoric which stirs the emotions of the ignorant mob
and sets it moving. It is because such forces can be set in motion
by rhetoric that I have no regard for it, but a positive horror.
Very rarely do we find the gift given to men who have wisdom and
constructive power, and for the time being it would seem that it was
in this world a force far beyond its merits, although in the more
advanced countries I sometimes hope that it is past its prime. At
least I believe that in England and Scotland at any rate rhetoric of
the kind I have tried to describe no longer makes that appeal to the
people.
I think it may be that the people of this country are getting just
the least bit suspicious of the literary rhetoric of our Sunday
Press, and of our daily Press, and that this very wholesome dread,
this wholesome nervousness, is being transferred from the Press to
the platform. I think that throughout this country there is to-day a
far greater desire than there has ever been before to hear plain,
unadorned statements of cases. I believe that anyone who has taken
part in recent elections--a few constituencies excepted--will agree
with me that one of the most remarkable features is the way in which
large audiences all over the country will listen to a statement of a
case, whether they agree with it or not, provided they feel that the
statement is made honestly and fairly, and with due consideration for
the opposite view.
Let us always remember this: when we come to big things we do not
need rhetoric. Truth, we have always been told, is naked. She
requires very little clothing. After all, St. Paul was no orator,
and yet his speeches and his teaching seem to have spread and to have
lasted a long time. I cannot help feeling that if we were to go back
two thousand years I would back St. Paul and the results of his
teaching against all the rhetoric of a Sunday paper or of the leading
orators of the age.
If there is one thing which those who have been in any other
profession than the Bar distrust more than another it is the eloquent
man. In the business world, other things being equal, the man who
has the power of talking is not the man who gets promotion. To be
able to express oneself in business is always to be written down as
being not quite first-class, and it is a joyous fact that in most of
the towns of the kingdom we find that the men of business who talk
most in such places as Chambers of Commerce are not the men who are
making a success of the big businesses in the country. From this I
argue that it is not necessarily the man most fluent of speech to
whom we should entrust the destinies of the country.
_ON LITERATURE AND THE ARTS_
THE CLASSICS
TO THE CLASSICAL ASSOCIATION
8_th January_, 1926
The Classical Association flings its boundaries far and wide,
embracing as it does the learned and the simple, the just and the
unjust, the half-timers, the whole-timers and the over-timers, the
leisured, the wealthy and the poor. All that is asked of a
prospective member is that he should love the Classics. Love does
not necessarily imply comprehension, or which of us could say that he
loved a woman?--but it does mean love of the beautiful, love of the
best, love of the ideal. Such love is not rare, and it is well that
those who have it should join together and gather strength and
refreshment by such communion as the present. I can speak of these
things with understanding, for I am an original member of the
Association, and I well remember the pleasure with which I sent my
first subscription from the depths of the country in which I was then
living and received in due course the annual volume of the
_Proceedings_, together with the President's Address for the year.
It seems to me now, as it seemed to me then, that there could be no
greater honour than to be invited to give the Presidential Address.
It never occurred to me that that honour was to be mine. I certainly
had no qualifications for it, nor indeed have I now. But I take
heart from the thought that though the lamp of classical learning
must be trimmed and kept burning by the scholars, yet the light which
is diffused depends to some extent on the fuel, and that is provided
by an army of plain folk with conviction and enthusiasm in their
hearts.
The Classics will never perish out of the land so long as they are
cherished by ordinary people. And so it seems to me good that you
should have a President occasionally who is not a scholar, who is not
particularly distinguished, but who can speak for the common folk as
an ordinary man.
I wonder how many of you remember your Eginhard? I have always had
in mind a passage of his which I read forty years ago. Charlemagne
was a statesman, but not a scholar. He acquired such knowledge of
Latin that he used to repeat his prayers in that language as well as
in his own. Greek he could understand better than he could
pronounce. But he was an ardent admirer of the liberal arts, and
greatly revered their professors, whom he promoted to high honours.
He also tried to write, and used to keep his tablets and writing-book
under the pillow of his couch that when he had leisure he might
practise his hand in forming letters; but he made little progress in
a task too long deferred and begun too late in life. _Absit omen_!
And since I have alluded to the weakness of so great a man in his
pronunciation of Greek, perhaps I may take advantage of this
opportunity to seek on my own behalf your indulgence if, in the few
Latin words that I may use hereafter, I pronounce Latin as it was
taught to me fifty years ago. I have lived for many years in a
backwater, and the flood of culture has swept forward far away from
me. I speak not as the man in the street even, but as a man in a
field-path, a much simpler person steeped in tradition and impervious
to new ideas. To pronounce Latin as our Association has decreed may
be to Professor Postgate the breaking of an adhesion; to me it is to
convert it at once into a foreign language. And I have been the more
impressed that my experience is not void of truth because I noticed
with interest, when my own University did me the high honour of
conferring a doctor's degree upon me, each learned man who had
occasion to speak the Latin tongue spoke it with a different accent.
Is my apology accepted?
Before I attempt to tell you what I conceive to be the debt of the
ordinary man to the Classics, may I, as one whose work has for many
years past been given in the field of politics, pause a few moments
to inquire what help our studies may bring to the ordinary man who is
attempting the task of government?
To be an Englishman, native of a country which was an integral part
of the Roman Empire for a period as long as from the Reformation
until this present night, and to be ignorant of the history of that
Empire, is to be without that sense of perspective in viewing both
the change of events and their day-to-day reactions which is
essential to see our national life and to see it whole.
_Ne sutor supra crepidam_ may be true for the cobbler, but the
statesman must endeavour, like the sculptor, to envisage the whole
figure, and he must be steeped to the lips in the historical sense.
It was not for nothing that Western Europe was forged on the anvil of
Rome, and who can say how much we owe to those long years of Roman
law, Roman discipline, Roman faith, and partnership in a common
Empire?
During the first four centuries of the present era Roman thought and
Roman manners imposed themselves upon our island and made themselves
a home here. Rome must have seemed very real and present to the
children of the near-by hamlets as they saw the great roads creeping
towards them, past them, and ever onwards in ruthless and undeviating
course, making the farthest ends of the island pervious to the
legions' tread. Shy traffickers coming from wild fastnesses as they
chanced upon a Roman highway and, shading their eyes with their
hands, saw it pass into the horizon, must have been awed at the
thought of the great heart that beat at the end of that giant artery.
Beautiful buildings, kindly plants and flowers now so familiar came
in the wake of the eagles and sank their foundations and their roots
in English soil. It may well be that subconscious memories of those
days and the mingling of blood for four centuries played their part
no less than the arrival of the Normans in modifying certain
characteristics of our Teutonic invaders and saved us from becoming
what Carlyle called "A gluttonous race of Jutes and Angles, capable
of no grand combinations, lumbering about in pot-bellied equanimity;
not dreaming of heroic toil, and silence and endurance, such as leads
to the higher places of this universe and the golden mountain-tops
where dwell the Spirits of the Dawn."
Only a few short centuries before the age of Pericles, only a few
short centuries after the fall of Troy, there was but a settlement of
shepherds on the Palatine Hill. Yet within a thousand years the
tramp of the Roman sentinel was heard along the Wall; his watch-fires
illuminated the waters of Euphrates; the hand of Rome reached from
the Biscay to the Euxine, from the Danube to the Nile.
Here is the greatest, most fascinating problem in all history for the
scholar and the statesman. Why did the Empire come into existence at
all, and why, having come into existence, did it perish? Volumes
have been written on the subject and will continue to appear; but is
it not allowed to the statesman whose material is human nature to
dwell on one aspect of the story to the exclusion of others, equally
obvious and equally true? Surely the character of the Roman played
as great a part in the rise of the Empire as his character played in
the fall? I can imagine no historian of the British Empire
neglecting the study of the character of the Englishman, as shown,
for example, in the Elizabethan age and through the period of the
Rebellion. And to me the outstanding and peculiar strength of the
Roman character lies in the words _pietas_ and _gravitas_. These
were the foundations of a patriotism which alone could carry the
burden of Empire, a patriotism innate, a motive force of incalculable
power, yet something at its best so holy that it was never paraded,
sought no reward, was taken for granted, and had no single word to
express it.
Bounded at first by the confines of the city, it differed from Greek
patriotism in that it had in it the seeds of life and growth, and it
expanded with the spread of the Roman name. Such patriotism is not
unknown amongst us, and so long as it exists it will leaven much. As
has been well pointed out, the highest gifts devoted to public
service were expected; to dedicate and employ them for the sake of
the Republic was merely your duty. Aristides would not have been
called the Just in Rome, and in what country in the Ancient World but
Rome would a Fabricius have refused all rewards, or a Cincinnatus
have returned to his farm? Again, a character founded on pietas and
gravitas had its roots in truth, and I am proud to think that the
English word has been held in no less honour than the Roman. It
would be an interesting study to trace the changes in the Roman
character which accompanied the social developments through the
chequered history of the Empire. This is the happy task of the
historian, and it must suffice for me in these few minutes to pause
before certain salient facts. It is from Ammian, who wrote while the
legions were leaving Britain, that we learn that the Roman word could
no longer be trusted. That is to me a far more significant portent
than the aggregation of the population in cities, the immense luxury,
and the exhaustion of the permanent sources of wealth, all of which
combined to sap that very character whose continued existence was
necessary for the life of the State. We hear through these later
centuries cries with which we are only too familiar to-day, cries
against the burden of armaments and the weight of taxation. But
above and beyond these things, dangerous and symptomatic as they are,
we detect a greater cause for anxiety. It would almost appear that
the human stock is like the stock of fruit-trees where the best kinds
tend to work themselves out after many generations of useful and
productive service. Mr. Mackail, in one of his recent Essays, has
laid fresh stress on this point when he says there were not enough
Romans left to carry on the work of Rome. A gradual atrophy of
intellectual energy and public spirit spread over the body politic,
and the instinct of self-government was lost. There are fears
amongst those who are responsible for government to-day, fears not
yet gripping us by the throat but taking grisly shape in the
twilight, that the Great War, by the destruction of our best lives in
such numbers, has not left enough of the breed to carry on the work
of Empire. Our task is hard enough, but it will be accomplished; yet
who in Europe does not know that one more war in the West, and the
civilisation of the ages will fall with as great a shock as that of
Rome? She has left danger-signals along the road; it is for us to
read them.
And as we do so we may look, as she did, at another history. That
Roman Empire, of which we were once a part, embraced all the
countries occupied by people of Hellenic blood. Less in the direct
historical succession, though more in the spiritual, the statesman
has much to learn from Greece. Her history, as has often been
pointed out, is one long failure to create an Empire. Her problem
was nearer ours in kind than that of Rome, for her solution, had it
been effected, would have resulted in a Commonwealth of Nations
rather than an Empire on the Roman model. There was no experiment
she did not try to win organic unity, but she was defeated by those
very characteristics of intellect and temperament which raised her to
such heights in poetry, art, and philosophy. Civic unity she could
never achieve, and her attempts to weld together people of the blood
were foiled on the very threshold. Failure is in many ways a more
potent teacher than success, and the tragedy of her history only
throws into more radiant relief the debt we owe her in those arts
wherein she was supreme. She spoke the last word in beauty of speech
and of form; her creations are the touchstone to-day as they were two
thousand years ago, and it is a comforting thought, in these days
particularly, that whatever fails to pass this test must ultimately
perish from among us as barbarous and exotic.
And here, perhaps, we may take two thoughts to heart which come to my
mind as I try to look forward. Believing as I do that much of the
civilisation and culture of the world is bound up with the life of
Western Europe, it is good for us to remember that we Western
Europeans have been in historical times members together of a great
Empire, and that we share in common, though in differing degrees,
language, law, and tradition. That there should be wars between
nations who learned their first lessons in citizenship from the same
mother seems to me fratricidal insanity. It should rather be our
endeavour to help ourselves and to help each other to recover those
qualities of character so peculiar to the Romans, the _pietas_, the
_gravitas_, and the truth of the spoken word. On such foundations
alone can civilisation be built; on such foundations alone can
civilisation stand.
But what of us, the _ultimi Britanni_, the youngest member of the
great family? I like to feel that the fortune of the youngest son is
ours. I like to picture the procession of the nations through the
ages as a great relay race of heroes. Over a course infinitely hard,
with little experience to guide her, Rome ran her mighty race bearing
her torch on high. Of those who came before, of those who followed
after, none ran so far, none so surely. And when her course was run
the torch came into other hands who bore it forward according to the
strength and guidance that was in them, until after many centuries it
was passed to us, the youngest son. Our race is not yet run. But we
shall run more worthily so long as we base our lives on the stern
virtues of the Roman character and take to ourselves the warnings
that Rome left for our guidance.
Here I feel these modest reflections may well be brought to an end.
I can imagine you saying, "Well, there may be an element of truth in
what you have said, but it is all rather jejune and second-hand.
What we want to know is, the impression the small amount of Latin and
Greek which you possess has made upon you; what you think you have
derived from it, whether you are in any way richer than you would
have been had you been nursed on the Loves of the Triangles." A
perfectly fair question, and I will bid the statesman fly away and
the ordinary man step forward.
Most of those whose real application to the Classics came to an end
with their school-days will recall their early studies as being in so
large a measure a struggle to acquire the form that the matter at the
time impressed itself only secondarily on the mind. The strange
words betrayed an obstinate angularity; no inflection was so minute
that it could be disregarded without prejudice to sense; even their
place in the puzzle was significant; and if in use they were roughly
treated or jumbled together without due order, they refused either to
reflect things or to express ideas. But imperceptibly this very
quality disciplined the mind to realise that the words had a definite
value. When rightly used, moreover, it seemed that these unworn
words would give forth our thoughts or express a meaning with a
directness and immediacy lacking even in our own speech. Perhaps it
is that many centuries have elapsed since those words had been
bandied about in everyday speech, and hence they have a freshness and
keenness of impression which no vulgar association has had the chance
to blur. In our own time the words which build up the most exquisite
poem, we have known to be used in other contexts--to have provided a
rhyme for a sentimental song or patter for a low comedian. It may be
that when the trireme's rating in the Piraeus found his rations
short, or the centurion was jostled in the crowded byways of the
Suburra, winged words used by Homer or Virgil were pressed into the
service of each to become the vehicle of their complaint and abuse,
and that these same words in their day had many a frivolous or
debasing task to do. But none of this has reached our ears; all the
multitude of tongues which echoed in the Agora and Forum are hushed
in silence and oblivion; and to listeners across the centuries alone
of all the sounds of ancient Greece and Rome "still are their
pleasant voices, their nightingales awake." Ruskin once said, "All
inferior poetry is an injury to the good, inasmuch as it takes away
the freshness of rhymes, blunders upon and gives a wretched
commonality to good thoughts; and in general adds to the weight of
human weariness in a most woeful and culpable manner." But the
literary works of Greece and Rome which have reached us come burdened
with no such poor relations; the poets whose reciting in the month of
August was such a plague to Juvenal and his contemporaries have not
survived to weary us, and everything second-rate has long fallen by
the way into the gap of centuries over which only an eternal merit
has enabled the survivors to waft themselves. Due again to the
freshness of the words is another feature of the ancients' writing,
its clarity and its conciseness. It cannot fail to strike the merest
beginner who tries to translate our tongue into Greek or Latin, or
_vice versa_, in how much fewer words in the old languages the
thought can be expressed. It is distressing to find ourselves saying
in ten lines what the Roman said in five; but at least it may give
rise in us to a conscious effort to tighten up the belt of our
speech, when we see the sentences of the ancients clean run like
athletes and fit for their work as compared with the prolapsed and
slovenly figures of so much of our own diction. Moreover, the
ancients did not over-elaborate their thought, being content to leave
something to the mental processes of their readers. How different
from so many of our English scribblers who seem to have taken to
heart Wilde's dictum that "nothing succeeds like excess," and who
swathe the thinnest of thoughts in a profusion of words in the hope,
maybe, that it will appear larger from its wrappings. Even our great
writers are sometimes too eager that nothing that can be said on the
theme they take shall remain unsaid, or any germ remain undeveloped
to which the reader's own mind might give increase; and they are apt
so to run their thought to a standstill that no potentiality remains
in it to set the reader's mind agog. Why do we all know about the
beauty of Argive Helen? Not because Homer gave us a catalogue of her
charms with exhaustive precision, but just because he gave a hint and
left it to us. I think he says no more than that, as one day she
passed upon the walls, the elders said it was no wonder that for such
loveliness men should die and cities should be sacked. Her
loveliness is left to each of us to envisage as we will, and thus it
is that it lives afresh in a myriad forms, newborn throughout the
centuries in each man's heart.
The form then is ever fresh, and I have spoken of it first because to
many of us so barely initiated this has made the earliest and most
immediate impression. It is perhaps only as we get older that the
beauty of the matter unfolds itself and reveals its eternal
significance against our day-to-day experience.
The literature in which peoples with such an outlook found
entertainment and instruction was not composed of novels or problem
plays dealing with heroes and heroines struggling in the little traps
that their own weakness had sprung for them, or with situations
brought about by mean mistakes or obliquities of character. What was
portrayed in the tragedies of the Greeks was nothing less than the
human spirit at grips with the toils of destiny itself. As Seneca
said, "A strong man matched with fortune is a sight for the gods to
witness." For their characters and situations they had their
beautiful mythology to draw on, and the materials which this provided
eclipsed altogether the themes which ordinary everyday life could
suggest. Always in these tragedies we are secure in the confidence
that the characters will not prove unequal to the doom they have to
bear; as it becomes more instant and inexorable so their spirit
becomes more indomitable to meet it, and it is never otherwise than
the mighty who is "mightily laid low." Whether it is a demi-god like
Prometheus or a man like [OE]dipus who is on the rack; whether their
sacrifice to what they deem their duty is demanded of a wife like
Alcestis, or a young girl like Antigone, they show us one and all the
spirit which is unperturbed by trial and undiverted by catastrophe.
It may be said that this high bearing in trials so profound or so
remote avails little to guide us among our practical daily
perplexities; but surely the Greek tragedy, though not drawing on the
smaller issues of life for its themes, shows how these should be
faced by portraying to us the serene and the right spirit towards the
ultimate issues.
If I may now strike a personal note, I think what I have gained is
some sense of proportion, a standard of values, and a profound
respect for the truth of words, which have been of use to me in my
daily life. Add to these the perennial happiness I am fortunate
enough to find in the sheer beauty of Latin and Greek and the
thousand images they call up in the mind, and I am indebted to my
early training more than I can ever hope to repay. I remember well
the first election I fought. It was what was called an old-fashioned
election in an ancient borough now disfranchised. The candidate was
expected to spend three evenings a week during the time of his
probation in one or another of the public houses which jostled each
other through the constituency, listening to and vociferously
applauding what, for want of a better name, was called, on the _lucus
a non lucendo_ principle, comic or humorous song. After a time I
felt the need of a moral purge and a literal sedative. It was the
work of a moment to find what my soul needed. When I came home at
night from these orgies I seldom went to bed without reading
something of the _Odyssey_, the _Æneid_, or the _Odes_ of Horace. By
the date of the election I had read all the last-named, and most of
the others, not without labour in the dictionaries, not always with
ease, but with care and increasing joy; and with the desired result
that, though defeated, I had passed through the fire and the smell of
burning was not on my garments.
Two years later, by my admission to the House of Commons at a
by-election, I entered formally on political life. The possession of
a sense of proportion, of a standard of values, and of respect for
the truth of words proved an inestimable aid to political judgment.
So far as I have had a sense of proportion it has helped me to assess
the personal equation of the individuals, distinguished and
undistinguished, who form the House of Commons. So far as I have
acquired a standard of values, it has helped me to estimate speech
and the written word, and has saved me many a time from bowing to the
idols of the market-place. So far as I have had respect for the
truth of words, I have been helped to detect the fallacy and the
equivocal phrase lurking in the tropical growth of oratory, and I
have endeavoured to use a speech plain and unambiguous. I have also
been able to enjoy with unmixed pleasure the choice of words and the
phrasing of those speakers who model themselves on the classical
tradition. Without a rival in that style I would place one of the
most distinguished members of this Association, the Earl of Oxford.
Amongst our great speakers we have those whose inspiration is
obviously of Athens and those whose debt is to Rome. The Earl of
Oxford is a Roman in his lucidity, in his phrasing, in his felicity.
It requires but little stretch of imagination to picture him in the
Courts delivering a defence, shall we say, _Pro Georgia_, or in its
greatest day addressing the Senate in a speech which for its incisive
and dexterous advocacy, its compact and pregnant sentences, would be
the despair alike of the translator and the most experienced writer
of Latin prose.
And let me add in a sentence, a political leader should know his
_Knights_ by heart, for there is no profounder truth than that the
sausage-seller lies ever on the flank of Cleon.
But over and above these qualities which delight the intellect, there
is the more subtle, deeper something which touches the heart and
soul. The voices that speak to us across the death and rebirth of
nations touch every emotion of each succeeding generation in these
later days, as they touched those who had ears to hear in Athens and
in Rome; but they reach us with the added solemnity and pathos which
cling to remembered sayings of those we have loved and lost. Every
ultimate problem was theirs, as it is ours, and the more you open
your soul to their appeal the more profound your pity for stumbling
humanity, the more eager your effort to bind together the family of
man rather than to loosen it. It is no blind chance that has led one
of our greatest scholars to devote his life to the ideal of the
League of Nations. Rather it is his desire to make his contribution
to redeeming the failure of those very Greeks whom he, more perhaps
than any living man, has helped this modern world to understand.
But we are linked together in the shallows no less than in the deeps.
Need I quote _Diffugere nives_ to those whose first home was in the
country? Is not everything in those lines?--the passing of winter
and the feathering out of the trees, the assurance of every spring in
every world that ever was? How many a holiday and home-coming are
recalled by the words,
peregrine
Labore fessi venimus larem ad nostrum
Desideratoque acquiescimus lecto.
Have we not the eternal youth of the world in _dulce ridentem_ and
_gratus puell[oe] risus ab angulo_?--a score of words and we see our
own childhood, our children's, and every generation from the
beginning to the end of time. What memories such lines call up!
They knock at the heart like the drum taps of the Fifth Symphony.
I have little more to add. If I have convinced you of my sincerity
as a member of the Association, I am happy. I may repeat to you what
I have said to my friends, that when my work in politics is completed
I shall take down all my old companions from my shelves and work once
more with dictionary and grammar. I have always kept the embers
aglow that they may easily be blown into flame to warm my senile
bones.
I cannot end without an allusion to the Anthology which my dear
friend Mackail has done much to make known to English readers. I
would remind you of the epitaph on the Athenians who fell at Plataea:
the lines might have been written for our own youth which hastened
out to Flanders that late summer, eleven years ago:
Ει το καλως Θνλσκειν αρετης μερος εστι μεγιστον
ημιν εκ παντων τουτ απεεινειμε Τυχη
Ελλαρδι γαρ σπευδοντες ελευθεριην περιθειναι
κεινεθ αγηραντω χρωμενοι ευλογιη.
We stand together with bowed heads in a sorrow and pride that reach
across the centuries.
I remember many years ago standing on the terrace of a beautiful
villa near Florence. It was a September evening, and the valley
below was transfigured in the long horizontal rays of the declining
sun. And then I heard a bell, such a bell as never was on land or
sea, a bell whose every vibration found an echo in my innermost
heart. I said to my hostess, "That is the most beautiful bell I have
ever heard." "Yes," she replied, "it is an English bell." And so it
was. For generations its sound had gone out over English fields,
giving the hours of work and prayer to English folk from the tower of
an English abbey, and then came the Reformation, and some wise
Italian bought the bell whose work at home was done and sent it to
the Valley of the Arno, where after four centuries it stirred the
heart of a wandering Englishman and made him sick for home.
Thus the chance word of a Latin inscription, a line in the anthology,
a phrase of Horace, or a "chorus ending of Euripides" plucks at the
heart-strings and stirs a thousand memories, memories subconscious
and ancestral.
SHAKESPEARE
AT THE CITY OF LONDON SCHOOL
13_th June_, 1924
I vividly remember a Prime Minister, no less a man than Mr.
Gladstone, coming down to my school. Politically opposed to him as I
was, I waited eagerly for the message. Just before Mr. Gladstone's
visit I had had a difference of opinion with my Headmaster, and
relations were somewhat strained. When Mr. Gladstone opened with the
words "Your admirable Headmaster," I felt that the Prime Minister was
so out of touch with the whole of the life I was leading that I never
listened to another word.
You who are here are entering into a blessed heritage that is the
peculiar right of our own people. I am proud to be on the platform
with Sir Sidney Lee, against whose shield all the iconoclasts of the
world break their spears. Some wish to tear the laurels from
Shakespeare's brow to place them on the brow of Bacon; others say
that _Wuthering Heights_ was not written by Emily Brontë: and some
even say that Mr. Lloyd George did not offer ninepence for fourpence.
Long may their spears be broken!
I understand that Shakespeare is a compulsory subject at the School:
do not rush to the conclusion that a man is any the worse for being a
compulsory subject. When I was a boy I knew the _Odes_ of Horace
backwards and forwards, and when I came to manhood year by year those
odes came knocking at the door of my heart at the most unexpected
times and places. So, even if you do not realise it now, the time
will come when you will be thankful that you were steeped in
Shakespeare as boys. In him we not only have, as Sir Gerald Du
Maurier said here not long ago, perhaps the greatest man the world
has ever seen, but one who had a profound knowledge of human nature
and of the world. Shakespeare was one of those few poets in whom we
find the magic which comes straight from heaven, and which is the
prerogative of the very greatest: such magic as we find in the poetry
of Keats, in the first scene of the last act of _The Merchant of
Venice_, and throughout the sonnets.
Shakespeare's plays, no matter of what country he may be writing, are
redolent of our own soil and of our own country people. The habit of
thought and the outlook of Shakespeare's country people and of those
wise men, Shakespeare's fools, may be found to-day in our rural
counties. It is no mere coincidence that the School's "Beaufoy Day"
was originally 23rd April, for besides being Shakespeare's birthday,
it was St. George's Day. That brings us back to England.
The City of London is famed for so many things that people sometimes
fail to realise what she has done for the education of our country
people. Your School is the last of the great foundations for sending
trained men into the world that is left within the boundaries of the
city. One by one they have gone--Christ's Hospital, the
Charterhouse, the Merchant Taylors'. I hope the City of London
School will always remain as a witness to the great light that has
burned throughout the ages in this great city.
You have a tremendous responsibility on your shoulders. Not all the
tradition, not all the great men who have gone before, can keep our
country as she should be kept, unless in each generation are found
the men who will take the torch from the generation that is passing,
keep it bright and hand it on.
To-day there are many things we have to struggle against in England,
but the greatest is the loss of the men from the ages of twenty-six
or twenty-seven to forty, the flower of the nation's early manhood
that lies in France and Belgium. Not only have we lost the benefit
of the work they might be doing to-day, but the natural leaders of
the young men coming along are the school generations immediately
preceding them, and the generations coming to manhood now are
deprived of that natural leadership of the elder brothers who were at
school about a decade before. The burden and the responsibility
falls heavier, therefore, on those who have just come to manhood and
on those about to do so. Never has the need of the country and of
the world for men trained as you are being trained, been so great.
When you come out into the larger world, though you may find the
struggle harder than it has ever been, yet there is a warm welcome
awaiting you from those who to-day are bearing the burden and the
heat. You will find, too, a world that has never been more in need
of the service that can be given by men with trained minds and clean,
sound bodies.
BYRON
AT THE BYRON CENTENARY LUNCHEON
29_th April_, 1924
It is very difficult during a man's lifetime, or in the years
immediately succeeding his death, to make any just estimate of his
fame. The Reverend John Todd, who wrote a _Students' Guide_ shortly
after Byron's death, told his students to beware of bad books, and
included Byron's works and Walter Scott's together. As was his duty,
he had read those books, and was convinced that Byron's works would
quickly pass from notice and be exiled from the shelves of virtuous
men. That is a contribution of literary taste and puritanism from
the United States.
About the same year a young critic wrote of the peculiar strength
evolved by Byron, a man who gave the world a better heart and a new
pulse. That was Alfred Tennyson, who at the age of twenty-five put
his finger on one of the causes why Byron's Centenary is being
celebrated to-day.
What magic is it that brings people together a hundred years after
the death of a famous man? The man who finds new pulses in the world
is the man who will enjoy immortality. Byron was, if anything, a
sower of new seed that had a great germinal force. It is difficult
to realise what that force was when it first appeared, unless we can
put ourselves in the place of the men who read his first poems. At
the time the first cantos of _Childe Harold_ appeared the Continent
for nearly a generation had been a sealed book to travellers, owing
to the European wars; the Mediterranean, now known to almost everyone
in England, was practically an unknown sea; and too often those who
had escaped abroad went with no eyes to see. Byron found the eyes of
the people sealed, and opened them, and for that reason the gratitude
of the nation should be given to him. The spirit at home and in
Europe was waiting for such a revelation as Byron had for it. In the
epoch which immediately followed he pushed the Romantic movement
begun by Scott with a strength and power which Scott himself could
not achieve, and no one was quicker to recognise the genius of the
younger man than that great-hearted poet himself. The spirit
existing both at home and in Europe at, and after, the end of the
Napoleonic War was the spirit that was waiting, all unconsciously,
for the revelation that Byron had for it. It wanted, perhaps,
without knowing it, force, strength and movement, and those things
Byron gave as they had never been given before.
These things alone might not have made his name to-day what it was in
his lifetime, but there was added the personality of which his
contemporaries told, the loss of which made Scott say, "It is as if
the sun had gone out."
The side of Byron which impresses me most is that of the great and
persistent workman in his high profession of literature. He worked
as an artist must work if he is to leave his mark on coming
generations. That is the part of his life which he kept to himself
as the holiest and best to him, and he knew, as great artists do, the
worth of his own work.
Beyond all men Byron was happy in his death. I could not help
thinking as I walked to this commemoration what a different history
it might have been, what a different celebration might have been held
in after years, if Byron had lived to return from Missolonghi. But
in his death he established his immortality, and words not to be
lightly used of any man might be used of him:
"If to die nobly be the chief part of excellence, to us of all men
fortune gave this lot, for, hastening to set a crown of freedom upon
Hellas, we lie possessed of praise that grows not old."
It is praise, which grows not old, for a man who grows not old, that
is his immortality, and it is that immortality we are here to salute.
W. H. HUDSON
AT THE UNVEILING OF THE HUDSON MEMORIAL IN
HYDE PARK
19_th May_, 1925
We are gathered together this May morning to honour a rare and
remarkable spirit. It is more than eighty years ago that Hudson was
born in a land where, to use his own words, he heard "the little
yellow finches in thousands amid the millions of pink peach blossoms,
pouring out wonderful music against the blue sky." Yet just as those
who grow older feel increasingly the pull of that earth from whence
they are sprung--and to none is that pull stronger than to those who
have had the joy to be raised in the red earth of England--so he felt
the pull of that soil of Devonshire whence his forefathers had come.
Fifty years ago he landed in England, unknown, unheralded,
unadvertised, and the greater part of those years were years of
infinite struggle and toil. There is one thing which is not
generally known, and which is a tribute rare in itself and
significant of that high sense of honour and pride which was his.
Early in the century the Civil List did honour to itself by giving
him one of those small pensions which are within its competence.
Then, a few years ago, when his wife died and his meagre income was
minutely supplemented, he surrendered that pension at his own desire
and in spite of the protests of those administering it, because he
felt he could do without it and that, infinitesimal as the relief
would be, he did not wish to let another grain of sand add to the
weight of the already overburdened taxpayers of the country.
It has been a frequent experience in our history for Englishmen and
Scotsmen to go out into the wilds of the earth and to come back and
tell us what strange things they have seen; but Hudson came from the
ends of the earth and rediscovered to the people, many of whom even
if they had eyes saw not, and if they had ears heard not, something
of the beauty of their own country. He it was who made familiar to
thousands the hidden beauties of our southern counties. He taught
Londoners who had never heard of them the names of places like
Whitesheet Hill, Chilmark, Swallowcliffe and Fonthill Bishop--names
of beauty and romance which always fill me with profound gratitude
that the names of flowers, of villages, of stars and birds, were
given in those dark centuries, long before our people were educated
and had the advantage of cheap literature and a popular Press.
There were a few things which raised passion in Hudson: one certainly
was the felling of the big elms in Kensington Gardens and the
destruction of the Rookery; another was the sight of people whose
palates could only be tickled by larks' or plovers' eggs; and another
was the sight of ladies who had ransacked the hidden corners of the
earth to decorate their hats. I think that to-day we are doing
national penance for the sins we have committed in the past, and are
resolving so far as we can to abstain from offence in the future.
It is not for me to say anything of Hudson as a writer, but I would
like to remind you of Joseph Conrad's remark: "One can't tell how
this fellow gets his effects; he writes as the grass grows." We
cannot tell how anyone in the finest literature gets his effects, but
we thank God for the effect.
There was one thing which bored Hudson, and that was politics, but it
is only fair to remember the impartiality of Hudson's admiration for
politicians. There were only two he could tolerate: one was a
Liberal, Lord Grey, and the other a Tory, Lord Banbury. He was
attached to them for obvious reasons: to Lord Grey for his love of
nature and to Lord Banbury for his hatred of cruelty to living
creatures.
In making this sanctuary a memorial to Hudson, we are doing something
that would have touched his heart. The world never needed
sanctuaries more than it does to-day. In old days it was
comparatively easy for a man to run away and hide himself for a time
in the desert or the monastery, but the spread of civilization has
rendered that impossible. Mr. Cunninghame-Graham has spoken of St.
Francis feeding the birds, but to-day St. Francis would be
snapshotted, birds and all, to form an exclusive picture the next
morning. There are three classes which need sanctuary more than
others: birds, wild flowers and Prime Ministers. Prime Ministers
want some place where they will not be snapshotted, where they can be
private, and where they can perch for a moment on a fence and look at
the landscape without being "shooed" off. Thanks to Lord Lee, I have
my sanctuary at Chequers, and therefore I feel it incumbent upon me
to be here to-day to open this sanctuary for my fellow-sufferers who
find London at times a little crowded and a little lacking in that
privacy they require for their best development.
There is another reason why we are beginning to feel the necessity
for something of this kind. Those of us who love the country and
country things feel in our bones the urbanisation of our land and the
need that something should be done to preserve our birds and our
flowers. It behoves us all to act because of that love which exists
in English people wherever they may be found, the love and craving
for beauty which they can rarely see, rarely know, and rarely realise
in their own lives. We ought to do everything we can to foster that
spirit, and it is in the belief that this day we are helping to draw
people's attention to bird life that I rejoice to be allowed to
unveil this memorial.
ART
DINNER OF THE ARTISTS' GENERAL BENEVOLENT
INSTITUTION
6_th May_, 1925
On an occasion such as this I recall my boyhood days, when some of my
excitements consisted in coming to London from Worcestershire to
visit my uncle, Sir Edward Poynter, who then lived in Wood Lane. It
was a little old-fashioned country house with a garden, where now
there is the power-station of an electric light company, and
opposite, where the White City stands, were open fields. The
friendship which I enjoyed with my uncle was one which lasted from
the earliest days I can remember to the day of his death. I made my
first acquaintance with Italy as a young man in his company.
It is strange and curious to look back on those days, and to remember
that atmosphere of art and culture, of wit and humour, and to
recognise what one owes to it. One learns, in having the privilege
in youth of mixing with men like that, and their friends, the
inestimable value of such an association for after life, even for one
who has taken a far different career, and who, owing to a strange
concatenation of circumstances, finds himself to-day Prime Minister.
I learnt there, all unconsciously, the value of work. The men I am
thinking of were workmen, first and foremost. They were men who
worked at what they loved and who felt that it was due to the art
they loved to give it every power that God had given them. If, at
any time, they went for holidays they painted all the time, because
they liked it. That is the secret of good work, and the secret,
incidentally, of happiness. They would never tolerate scamped work.
Burne-Jones, a keener critic of himself than any of his outside
critics were, knew perfectly well where his own defects lay, and he
worked for years in middle life to master that draughtsmanship that
he had not learnt as a young man, because his decision to become an
artist was only taken after he had left Oxford. All men who love
their craft, and who believe in it and live for it, are their own
best critics. I learnt from this man, in addition to the value of
work, a complete indifference to all criticism, except that which
combines the two essential gifts of sincerity and truth. I also
learnt from the quality of those men and their friends, and from the
conversations I unconsciously heard, to form my own standards of
value in after life, rather than to attribute brilliancy, as I am so
often asked to do in London, to something that I know is in itself
essentially second-rate. I say these things to explain why I am
present on this occasion. I know that if any relations of mine, to
whom I have referred, had happened to die before they had achieved
fame and reputation, their widows and orphans would have been
dependent upon the funds of this institution (the Artists' General
Benevolent Institution) for their livelihood. Therefore, I feel that
I owe it to the memory of those I loved, who have played so large a
part in my own spiritual and mental development, to help in however
small a degree by saying something in aid of this great charity.
Art, in popular estimation, is going up in the world and politicians
are going down; but the time was, and not so long ago, when if a man
died who had been an artist, unless he had the good fortune to be a
baronet and a millionaire, the newspapers always said, "The deceased,
much against his family's wishes, became an artist." At that time it
was thought a very desirable thing to be a statesman. I am not sure
that to-day in the obituary notices you may not read that the
deceased, much against his family's wishes, had embraced politics as
a career.
I would like to emphasise the absolute necessity of the artist giving
his whole time to concentration on his work, just as in political
life a man has to devote his whole mind and strength to the almost
superhuman task which is imposed upon him, and to confine his
attention strictly to his work, lest the quality of that work should
suffer.
The present are difficult times for those who try to live by the
profession of art of any kind. They are difficult because times are
bad. There is not a great deal of money about in this country, and
we are not a people who naturally spend money on the encouragement of
art if we can spend it on anything else. Those who have the most
money, millionaires, not unnaturally are in the hands of the dealers.
One of the great difficulties always seems to me, as an outsider
knowing nothing of these matters, to be that there has been worked up
an entirely fictitious value in the pictures of the dead. I hope
this may arise from a high motive; from a feeling that having let
many artists and poets in the past starve in their lifetime, we
should allow them to provide a living for anyone who can make it out
of them. When a very rich man wants to invest money in pictures, he
wants to invest it in something that will not lose its value, and as
long as the dealer keeps up the value of the old masters he knows it
is safe. But if he wants to buy a modern work of art he has to
exercise his own judgment, and if his judgment is wrong he loses his
money. So the artist to-day, however good he may be, has everything
militating against him. There may be prizes from a worldly point of
view for the few, but in these days there must be, financially, only
too many failures; though whether they fail or succeed they have a
real pleasure in the actual performance of their work. Taking
artists as a whole, whether they have been what the world calls
successful, or not, they are a very happy confraternity. The artist
and the poet can, and often do, solace themselves with the thought
that if the people of this generation do not appreciate their work,
they may yet be painting or writing for generations to come, and the
thought of recognition by posterity, provided that the wolf is kept
from the door, is in itself a great comfort and strength.
ARTISTS AND POLITICIANS
AT THE ANNUAL BANQUET OF THE ROYAL ACADEMY
2_nd May_, 1925
I should like, if I may, on behalf of my colleagues who are here
to-night, to congratulate you, Mr. President, on your election to the
great office which you hold, and to express our sympathy with the
Academy in the loss they have sustained in the death of Mr. John
Sargent--a great man, as well as a great artist. His memory will be
cherished through his paintings, and his art will be a prized
possession of posterity. And, Sir, I should like to congratulate you
on this singular achievement in getting together an assembly of such
distinction in London on a Saturday night. I remember trying to
secure an eminent Englishman as a much-desired trustee of the
National Gallery. He was a master of English and a scholar, and so
he was able to express himself as I could not when he declined that
great honour. He wrote to me: "No; they have a damnable habit of
holding their meetings on a Saturday."
Now I understand these are friendly gatherings at which confidences
may be given and exchanged, and I should like to tell you something
of the difficulties of a Prime Minister's life. A Prime Minister has
to form a Cabinet. I reflected when I was making mine that I should
have to appear to-night at Burlington House, and I thought the
greatest compliment I could pay the Academy would be to include, if
possible, a painter in the Cabinet. I thought I would choose someone
who could paint with a broad brush, and I regret extremely that he,
at the last moment, had to cancel his engagement here to-night. I
need hardly say I refer to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. When I
had secured my artist, the question was where to put him. I at once
decided that the right place for him was where he would have problems
to study of currency and exchange, and where he would be dealing with
mathematics. Many of my critics were hostile, but they were not
astonished. If they had known their Plato they would have known at
once why I asked him to go to the Exchequer. Many here will remember
what Plato said to the Delians. When the oracle set a problem, Plato
said: "It must be supposed not that the god specially wished this
problem solved, but that he would have the Greeks desist from war and
wickedness and cultivate the Muses, so that, their passions being
assuaged by philosophy and mathematics, they might live in innocent
and mutually helpful intercourse with one another." It is an
extraordinary thing how the solution of many of our difficulties was
really found many years ago.
Now I said there were many points of resemblance between your careers
and ours. Neither artists nor politicians can by any figure of
speech be said to belong to organised labour. Labour, yes;
organised, no. What power have we to strike? If every artist in
this country laid down his brush to-night, would a ripple pass over
the country? If I laid down my brush to-night, are there not fifty
men who would be ready to take it up? But then, on the other hand,
you cannot be nationalised, and neither can we. It is sometimes to
your advantage, and sometimes the advantage rests with us. Now take
criticism. We both either suffer or enjoy criticism. There I think
the advantage is with us. We, if we think fit, can answer back.
These canvases on the wall have to take it in contemptuous silence.
Your instruments by which you work so well are dumb--pencils and
paints. Ours are neither dumb nor inert. I often think that we
rather resemble Alice in Wonderland, who tried to play croquet with a
flamingo instead of a mallet.
Then, again, with both of us, to achieve success it is necessary to
mix our colours, so as to produce a harmonious whole. But your
colours have an advantage over those which are mixed on our palette.
In the language of the trade, your colours are fast; ours are not so
necessarily. You mix your colours to form a harmonious result, but
it may be after four or five years some of the colours, which you
thought the most beautiful, have faded and have been unable to stand
the bright light of day, and those which you thought mixed well in
the general scheme have come up hard and crude and dominate the whole
picture. We politicians are, and must of necessity be,
impressionists--impressionists, because we want to catch the public
eye, and we hope that we can make our meaning clear. We also
trust--my colleagues and I--that people will not examine our
workmanship too closely, lest they find defects in it which are not
visible at a distance. But there is one thing in which you have a
great advantage. If when you complete a piece of work you do not
like it, you can put your boot through it. With us the boot is on
the other leg.
I have noticed sometimes that advice is given to the artists of this
country to make a clean sweep of the Academy. It is always a
revolutionary people who think a clean sweep must result in something
which will give keen satisfaction. While, in the last four years,
the Academy has remained without great change, we have made a clean
sweep of three Governments, and we have a fourth in--and yet people
are not satisfied. So may there not be something said even for
keeping an Academy or keeping a Government?
There is one thing that we do have in common. No man in politics can
ever hope to achieve his desire--he can never accomplish the veriest
fragment of what he would will to do. In the same way, in the breast
of every artist who is an artist--and it is not everyone who uses a
brush who is an artist--there is a secret known only to himself and
spoken of to none--that ideal which he is ever seeking and ever
following up, and never in this world captures. It is that which
drives men on to their best and finest work. I doubt if any real
artist has ever satisfied himself. Occasionally, there comes what
Kipling has called the "magic," whether it be in poetry, in prose, or
in art, before which the voice of criticism is dumb--the art that
speaks straight to the soul of the world. Few of us can hope to
achieve that, and I think perhaps if I were to choose any words with
which to conclude, I would choose those that may be taken either for
your work or for ours--the words that Browning put into the mouth of
Andrea del Sarto:
I, painting from myself and to myself,
Know what I do, am unmoved by men's blame
Or their praise either.
_ON EDUCATION_
SELF-EDUCATION
AT BIRKBECK COLLEGE
20_th March_, 1924
The faith that can remove mountains was the faith of the pioneers of
Birkbeck College, and some of them lived to see the College as we
know it to-day--a solid, stable and permanent institution. It is a
great and triumphant story of which you may well be proud. But I
think that it would be useful to remember that if you wished to
understand history and sympathise with the founder and pioneers of
the College, you must not make the fatal mistake of reading our
history to-day, or of a hundred years ago, in the light of the
present time; you must try to throw yourselves back a century, and
consider a few of the ways in which the training you have had may
help you in your after life.
A hundred years ago popular education, so far as any one thought of
it, was regarded as a dangerous explosive. Those times have passed.
A hundred years ago London was a comparatively small city compared
with the one we know. There were no police. The parish constables
were not allowed to go beyond the confines of their own parishes, and
the night watchman kept the peace of the city. Old London Bridge was
still in existence. Waterloo Bridge had only just been built. Gas
had only just been introduced into the streets when the first
students came to the College. Contrast the position of the Press
to-day with what it was in those days. At that time there was a
bye-law under which no man who contributed to the Press was eligible
to be called to the Bar, and the Lord Chancellor of the day caused
great consternation and indignation amongst his friends by asking the
editor of the _Times_ to dine with him. To-day, which of us would
not feel proud if we were asked to dine with a newspaper proprietor?
Again, to touch upon another aspect of life, the Elizabethan Poor Law
was still the law of the land. Of the million and a quarter people
in London at that time one in every eight was in receipt of Poor Law
relief.
But hardly ever in the history of our country, or of any other
country, was there a more wonderful and brilliant period in the
literature of England than in and around the years when the College
was founded. It shows that, although in many ways the country was
what the people of to-day would call backward and unprogressive, yet
a literary movement was going on which would be a glory to any
country for all time. I need only name Sir Walter Scott, Wordsworth,
Byron (who died in 1824, within two years of Keats and Shelley),
Carlyle, Tennyson, John Henry Newman (one of the greatest masters of
English prose), Thackeray, Browning and Dickens. There was a galaxy
of talent of the highest order in a literature that stands second to
none in the world, and it was a great thing that the College took its
origin from such a time. No country can compare with our own in the
literature of that period, and yet at that time there was Goethe in
Germany, while Dumas had just gone to Paris and was to present in the
succeeding year his first play. That amazing efflorescence in
literature was accompanied, as sometimes it is, by an efflorescence
in art and music.
I have always firmly held that there is no race with more ability
latent than our own, or with a higher aptitude for mechanical genius.
When the College was founded, Hargreaves, Arkwright and Crompton, all
sons of working men, were inventing the machines which brought in the
cotton industry. I mention these names to show the stuff of which
our people are made, and how that stuff is worth training and
educating. It would be a very interesting subject, for anyone who
cared to explore it, to see how many of the mechanical inventions
which are light-heartedly attributed to Americans are really the
product of British brains, whether they were British brains which
have gone to work in that country, or the brains of children of
British parents who have gone there. But, having regard to the
foundation of this College and the men who went to it in its early
days, it is a wonderful thing to reflect that practically the
Industrial Revolution, for good or evil, was the work very largely of
six or seven men who sprang from the ranks of the people, with no
advantages such as you have had; and that they were men who changed
the face of the country and the habits of the lives of the people.
It is probably true that the great number of men who sacrificed their
time and their leisure to work and study did so to help themselves to
get on in life. But that was not the fundamental reason: there lay
behind it the desire of knowledge for its own sake, the will to force
a way through those doors that lead to a kingdom of beauty,
literature and art.
I am a fair sample myself of the evening student. Many people tried
to educate me, but the reaction was not always successful. A great
part of my education took place after I had gone into business, on
railway journeys and at odd moments, and for some years, when I was
working all day, I would read nearly every night. This was the
education, I feel, that did me most good. I learned that all of us
have to work hard for our living. Some may do work they enjoy; some
may not. Then there comes a time when one feels that one is no use,
and that the work itself is difficult and sordid. It is at these
times that we may thank God for what we have learned in any school
which will enable us to get away from our surroundings into an inner
secret chamber. From this we may go with renewed strength to any
work that is toward.
There are many definitions of education. The first thing is to be
master of our own job; but to be educated we must know enough of the
other man's job to be able to understand the part he is playing in
life, and to play our own part in sympathy with him. We have also to
learn to play our part as members of the commonwealth, or, in other
words, to have humanity, by which I mean the knowledge of the things
that pertain to humanity, of the way to go about among our fellows,
ready to help and to sympathise with them. Do not go through life as
a perpetual blister.
If it be not heresy to say so, do not pay too much attention to
examinations. Do not be afflicted with pride of intellect. In my
view, pride of intellect is more vulgar that the pride of the
_nouveau riche_ in his wealth, for the simple reason that the
_nouveau riche_ has made his own money, whereas your intellect is the
gift of God. You may polish it up and get the best out of it, but
for the instrument you are less responsible than any man.
Just as I would advise no man to become a political leader--although
political leaders are necessary--so I would strongly advise no man to
become merely a specialist. Always have other interests which will
keep you in touch with your fellow-men and women. There is no real
republicanism except that of literature. If I find a human face
light up at some quotation which everyone ought to know, that man, be
he duke or dustman, is my brother. That is the bond of literature.
Study it, the glorious literature of the first country in the
world--your own.
POLITICAL EDUCATION
AT THE PHILIP STOTT COLLEGE
27_th September_, 1923
Amidst all the multifarious duties that fall to my lot, some pleasant
and some less pleasant, you have combined to give me to-day a really
happy afternoon's outing. I have the greatest admiration, Sir
Philip, for this great work upon which you have embarked. It is the
grain of mustard seed which will become a great tree that may
overshadow the earth, and I am proud to meet so many of those who are
fired with the same enthusiasm that you have and that I have for
education of the kind that you provide here. It is a great privilege
to be allowed to speak to you for a few minutes on that subject.
There are few movements in this country in my view that augur better
for the future, or that in themselves bear a higher and truer tribute
to the best that is in our nature than the great, voluntary efforts
that are being made in this country for adult education; and if there
be anyone here who may at times feel a passing regret for the closing
of the great houses of England, it must be an immense consolation to
see from the ashes of the past springing up a new and hopeful life
like this within their walls. That can do nothing but good for the
men who come here, and for the country of which they are a part.
I have a peculiar sympathy with adult education, because I have
followed it to the best of my ability all my life. I was very much
interested to find a peculiar instance recently of that interest
which all English people take in education, not always instructed,
but always present, because, when I became Prime Minister, a
well-known lady in society whose acquaintance I had not had the
pleasure of making, asked this question of a friend of mine: "Is the
new Prime Minister what you would call an educated man?" I doubt
very much whether she knew what was implied by the word "educated";
but it showed, at any rate, that she felt that education was a good
thing in itself, and a thing which it was desirable should be
possessed by anyone aspiring to the post of Prime Minister. That is
all to the good. But I expect all of you have learned, as I have,
that education is a process and a thing that is never finished. And
it is a wonderful thing that here, in this movement, we find one more
instance in our history of that triumph of voluntary effort from
which have sprung all the best movements and the best things in our
country from the beginning of its history. You take a movement like
that of the Boy Scouts; it did not originate with the War Office.
You take the Salvation Army; it did not come from Canterbury. The
Franciscans did not come from Rome; and in the same way this great
movement of education did not take its origin in Whitehall. It
sprang--where all these things have sprung from--it sprang from the
very heart of the people, and that is what gives it its strength, and
that is what is going to continue to give power to the movement.
I was very impressed by a few words that I read in a prospectus of
the College, that the aim of the curriculum here is "to furnish
instruction which will equip the trade unionist or the co-operator,
on the one hand, to take an active and effective interest in the
affairs of his or her society, and on the other, a Parliamentarian or
a business man to discharge with greater knowledge and insight such
duties of citizenship as may devolve upon him."
These words go right down to the root of the matter, because the
great task of this generation, in my view, is to save democracy, to
preserve it and to inspire it. The ideal of democracy is a very fine
one, but no ideals can run of themselves, and if democracy is to be
preserved and yield the fruits that those who believe in it would
fain see, the only way it can be done is by all the individuals,
according to their power, equipping themselves sufficiently to keep
the whole mass sweet and true, and to preserve in their plenitude and
sanity the ideals that inspire them. I have used this figure of
speech before, but I want to use it again. All government of the
people can be represented, as it were, on the circumference of a
wheel, and government runs in very, varying degree from the most
complete and absolute autocracy, step by step, to chaos, and you find
instances in history of governments passing through every phase on
that circumference; often autocracy will end in chaos, and chaos
will, with equal infallibility, lead back once again to autocracy.
Now we are at a point in that wheel, and that point is Democracy,
with representative government. We have to remember that the price
of liberty is eternal vigilance, and, I may add, eternal knowledge,
eternal sympathy, and eternal understanding; and it is our duty in
this generation to keep the State steady at the point to which we
have attained, knowing full well the risks that lie on either hand by
slipping back in the one direction of the wheel or the other, the one
direction drawing to a curtailment of our liberty, the other
direction being that in which liberty tends to licence.
Now, surely, when we want to educate ourselves for the purpose of
citizenship, whatever the immediate course of study may be, whether
it be history or economics, whether it be humane letters, whether it
be mathematics, the object of such education must always be the same,
and to my mind the purpose of such education--a purpose which we try
to put in our mind--is always twofold; it is, in the first place, to
clear the mind of cant, and in the second place not to rest content
with having learnt enough to follow the syllogism, knowing perfectly
well that to follow the syllogism alone is a short cut to the
bottomless pit, unless you are able to detect the fallacies that lie
by the wayside. If you can clear the mind of cant and detect the
fallacy, whatever guise it may be wearing, I think you have made a
long step forward in the education that every citizen in a democracy
that may hope to endure must have. I think that we all of us realise
to-day that no civilised community is bound necessarily and by an
inscrutable fate to progress, that there are such things in
civilisation as checks, that there is such a thing as retrogression,
and that the mere existence of a civilised community is no guarantee
either for its continuance or for its progress--in other words, that
unless we are the faithful guardians of such civilisation as we have
already attained to, we run the risk of seeing the whole of the
progress that has been made with such infinite labour up to our own
time gradually slipping back and back and back.
No one had harder words to say than Lord Morley about teaching
carried on in any other spirit than that which I have endeavoured to
describe. Teaching, above all things in this world, ought to be
absolutely honest and absolutely free. The teacher should never be
the servant of the State in this way, that he preaches and teaches
what he thinks the Government would like to have him do, whether that
Government come from the Right or from the Left or from the Centre.
The whole object of the teacher should be to set forth the truth as
he conceives it, and the whole object of the pupil should be so to
prepare and develop his mind that he may, as occasion arises, when he
leaves here, find himself prepared by will and competent by training
to exercise a right judgment in all things.
Lord Morley, when he had laid stress on the everlasting importance of
sifting the value of evidence and recognising how the bias of human
nature so often prevented men from acquiring the necessary ability so
to sift evidence, referred to those who taught with bias and for
propaganda in this way: "There are limits to our patience with the
quackish fungoids," and it is the "quackish fungoids," wherever they
may be found, that you have to go out into the world to fight.
"Quackish fungoids" are found in all sections of the community and in
all schools of thought. They are not inherent in any one class.
They are not necessarily inherent in any one party; but they are
growths which must be cleared away if progress is to be made in our
country, and they are growths which the training you receive here
will enable you to do your part in clearing away when you leave these
pleasant surroundings for the stress and the struggle of the larger
world outside.
We have to learn--and it is no easy lesson--to submit all the
passions and prejudices which the best of us find to be component
parts of ourselves at times to the stern and acid test of the
discipline of truth. That is not an easy lesson to learn, or more
people would have learned it; but I think one of the most hopeful
signs of the times to-day is that all over the kingdom--north and
south and east and west--there are men and women who, in dreaming of
a better and higher future for their country, are yet well aware that
that future cannot be attained by dreams alone, and they want so to
qualify and equip themselves that in that struggle for better things
they may be able to play a potent and a worthy part. There is no
better and there is no higher ambition, and I am perfectly certain
that it is to help that ambition that Sir Philip Stott was moved to
do what he has done, a great work for which every one in this room is
indeed grateful, a work for which, if I am right, generations yet
unborn may arise and call him blessed.
This country of ours has been the birthplace and the home of some of
the greatest movements that have yet arisen for human freedom and
human progress, and the strength of our race is not yet exhausted.
We have confused ourselves in Great Britain of recent years by a
curious diffidence, and by a fear of relying upon ourselves. The
result has been that many of those who have been eager for the
progress of our country have only succeeded in befogging themselves
and their fellow-countrymen, by filling their bellies with the east
wind of German Socialism and Russian Communism and French
Syndicalism. Rather should they have looked deep into the hearts of
their own people, relying on that common sense and political sense
that has never failed our race, from which sufficient sustenance
could be drawn to bring this country once more through all her
troubles. There will be found that sense which, far from following
at the tail of exploded Continental theorists, is ready once more to
lead the way of the world as she was destined to do from the
beginning of time, and to show other peoples, many peoples who have
not yet learned what real political freedom is, that the mother of
political freedom is still capable of guiding the way to her children
and her children's children.
Do not let us ever be confused by the advance in material prosperity
and material knowledge, and let us never confuse mere acceleration
with civilisation. Civilisation is a far deeper and more profound
thing than that, and there is a very real danger, in an age when
science makes such wonderful advances and can bring so much in the
way of material comfort and material knowledge before people without
any trouble on their part to acquire it or understand--there is at
that time a very great danger that the higher, the more spiritual,
the only lasting qualities of civilisation may be submerged in the
lower and inferior, so that the last state of that community may be
worse than the first.
Then, I think, there is one other great advantage to be derived from
the whole-hearted pursuit of knowledge, which has been the impelling
force that has brought you from all over the United Kingdom to take
advantage of the course which you can obtain here. I think you
learn--not by being taught, but by that instinct which comes with
wider knowledge--you learn a healthy distrust of rhetoric. If there
is any class to be regarded with suspicion in a democracy it is the
rhetorician--the man who plays on half-educated people with fallacies
which they are incapable of detecting. More than one democracy has
been wrecked by that. We do not want to see a democracy like ours,
in which we have faith, and which we believe is destined to do such
great things for the world, wrecked on any such ignoble rocks. When
I was about eighteen years of age, I remember reading a verse of
Froude's, in his _Short Studies_, which made a profound impression
upon me at that age, because, when I was a boy, as is the case with
many other boys, I was rather the slave of fine language and
beautiful expression, and I suddenly came with a shock on the words:
"Oratory is the harlot of the arts." There is profound truth in
that, and I should like very much, if I had time, to give the members
that as a text for an essay. It would be very interesting to see the
illustrations which historical students might give in proof of the
words of that thesis.
There are few things, again, to which, at the present day, we should
pay more attention than this--and this again needs education, and the
education which you are giving yourselves to enable you to accomplish
the end in view--and that is to judge of the value of evidence. I
suppose there is no man to whom the cause of the education of the
people in this country--and very largely adult education--is nearer
the heart than it was to a great Englishman who has just died, I mean
Lord Morley. Lord Morley spoke on this subject nearly fifty years
ago, and he came back to it again and again; so recently as just
before the war, speaking to the Manchester students, he used these
words, which I feel I must read to you:
"Generous aspiration, exalted enthusiasm, is made to do duty for
renewed scrutiny. The ardent spirits see every fact or circumstance
that makes their way and are blind to every other. Inflexible
preconceptions holding the helm, they exaggerate. Their sense of
proportion is bad."
There can be no greater object of true education than to teach and to
preserve a sense of proportion, and it seems to me that the great
advantage you have here over what I may call the definitely
propagandist schools is that you have every opportunity of learning
to exercise a trained sense of proportion, because the teachers here
are chosen in exactly the same way as the teachers are chosen in the
free and open universities. They are chosen because they are masters
of their subjects. They are chosen not to give propaganda; they are
chosen to speak the truth, and those who are responsible for the
conduct of this college know that it is only by giving students the
opportunity of exercising to the full the ability that is in them
that they will be able to choose the truth honestly and freely, and
will exercise their minds to the solution of the problems to which
they have to devote themselves, without bias and without preconceived
notions. They will clear their minds of cant, and try to see things
as they are.
We all of us want understanding--understanding of ourselves and
understanding of our brothers and sisters--and that true
understanding is the salt that savours the whole life of the
community. It was never more needed than it is to-day, and those who
understand will realise that there is no greater need in the world,
abroad and at home, than peace, peace from the warfare of arms and
peace of spirit. Those are the things I intend to fight for during
the time that I am Prime Minister, whether that time be long or
short, and it is with that object--the object of peace above and
before all things--that I am endeavouring to-day to deal with the
situation in Europe.
This is not the place to talk about foreign politics. The Imperial
Conference meets next week, and it must be that at one of their early
meetings the whole question of the present situation in Europe and in
the world must be set forth and debated. I would only say here these
few words. When this Government came into office, now some ten or
eleven months ago, there was an atmosphere of restraint, almost of
distrust, between France and ourselves; and I have no doubt that if
Mr. Bonar Law had been spared to us as Prime Minister a little
longer, he, with his knowledge, with his instinct, with his
transparent honesty, would have dissipated that atmosphere once and
for all. But he left us before that task was accomplished, and it
was my good fortune in an interview which I had last week with the
President of the Council in Paris to help, as I believe, to restore
that atmosphere of confidence which had for some time been lost. No
more and no less. But I think there is now, both in Paris and in
London, a recognition of the importance of the Entente--in this way,
that without it a European settlement is far more difficult. Indeed,
the events of the last two or three weeks have proved that, to those
who have eyes to see, the best hope of settlement lies in intimate
relationship between France and this country, and if anything
occurred that might keep our two countries apart, then I fear it
would make the problems which we have to face incomparably more
difficult than they are to-day.
You have been extraordinarily kind to me in the reception you have
given me here, a reception which touched my heart, and I just want to
tell you before I sit down what a close sympathy I have with you in
the work you are doing here. I am a sort of half-educated fellow
myself. I worked fairly well at school. I did nothing at the
University. I have been trying hard ever since to try to catch it
up. You have come here to try to catch it up. I wish you all
success and happiness in that task. There is no joy in this world
like learning. The great joy of life is that it is a task which is
never done. Go on learning all your life. I am learning now, and I
mean to go on learning if I live to be a hundred. There is nothing I
look forward to so much when I am out of office as to start learning
again in real earnest. Until that day comes I am afraid I shall have
to leave the learning to you, but I do wish you the best of luck in
this high task you have undertaken. Do not let yourselves be
dispirited when you get into the world again, but hold fast to what
you believe to be true and what you believe to be right wherever it
leads you, and whatever difficulties you may encounter. Whatever
troubles you may have you will, at all events, always have the
comfort of a conscience which will tell you that you have tried to
act up to the highest lights that are in you, and you will feel that
you are playing your part in helping to bring your country, your
fellow-men and women, through one of the most difficult times that
she has ever had to face in her history, and that you are laying, or
trying to lay, the foundations of a happier, healthier and saner life
for those with us now and for those who will come after us.
TEACHERS AND TAUGHT
AT THE ANNUAL DINNER OF THE LONDON TEACHERS'
ASSOCIATION
28_th November_, 1924
Great as your necessities may be, mine are greater. I was invited to
be your guest when I was but a private individual, before I became
Prime Minister. I would add that forty years ago all the king's
horses and all the king's men would have failed to have drawn me into
the presence of a company of schoolmasters, and in relation to them I
once had every qualification as a passive resister and a practiser of
very skilled "ca'canny." But times have altered, and I with them,
and I am proud to be your guest to-day, to stand before you, not as
an educational expert, nor--God forbid!--as an intellectual, but
merely to convey to this representative body of London teachers my
own appreciation as head of the Government and that of my colleagues
of the work that the whole body of teachers throughout the country
are doing for the people of this country. Nor do I propose to do
what is so common, and to take a gloomy and pessimistic view of the
state of our country and of education. I am not going to tell you
that in foreign countries they do these things better, and I would
observe in passing that we have had some respite recently from that
continuous praise of German systems of education to which we were so
accustomed in our younger days, and which ceased with such startling
suddenness ten years ago.
The progress of education in our own country has, indeed, been
remarkable, having regard to the fact that we have only occupied
ourselves seriously with the problem for two generations. I know as
well as you that there are still too many, far too many, insanitary
schools, and that there are many ill-nourished and defective
children; but let us remember that the standard by which we judge
these matters to-day has risen immeasurably from the standard adopted
by our parents.
You have only to read Sir George Newman's reports of recent years to
see the progress that has been made, and, while we can still point to
shortcomings, to apathy and negligence on the part of parents here,
local authorities there, and possibly even sometimes of a Government
or a teacher, yet we have to remember that the average health of the
children is, and has been, steadily improving, and you have a
steadily diminishing quantity in the number and the danger of the
children's ailments. Thanks to the co-operation with you of the
medical and nursing agencies, of the devoted services of many
voluntary agencies, and thanks, too, to the increasing co-operation
between teachers and parents, there has never been so much organised
effort in this country on behalf of child welfare as there is to-day.
We do not ignore the blemishes and the spots, but let me remind you
again that we regard them through a far higher magnifying lens than
we used to; but that need not prevent us from advancing all the time.
I am credibly informed that the children to-day actually enjoy going
to school. That is a revolution for which no historian or
sociologist has given you adequate recognition. I do it to-night,
but I confess that if I am correctly informed you have succeeded in
working a miracle which would have been incredible in my younger days.
I agree with Mr. Samuel in this, that no one who lived through the
Great War, and was in a position to observe what was taking place,
will ever forget the qualities displayed by the men and women of this
country, men and women who had had no other education than the
elementary schools had afforded them. There are some words of Mr. H.
G. Wells which are well worth remembering in this connection. He
says that education is one of the newest of the arts and sciences.
The idea of particular exceptional people pursuing learning has been
familiar to the whole world for scores of centuries, but the idea of
preparing the minds of whole classes or communities for co-operation
and common action by a training in common ideas is a comparatively
new one. And that is the gigantic task to which you, and, I may add,
we, are all committed. We are living in days in which the powers
that used to be inherent in birth and privilege are passing rapidly
away. You have a franchise vested in millions where it used to be
vested in thousands, and we live in an age when the preservation of
such civilisation as we have already succeeded in attaining to can
only be maintained by the spread and continuance of education of the
people. And it has never been more urgent to wage the war of reason
against the passion that may be stimulated by mob psychology.
Scientific men--and I am afraid I must confess I am not a scientific
man--are rather pessimistic, and one of our leading biologists has
recently declared that the more representative Parliament becomes,
the more unintelligent, as things are, it is and will be. That was,
as a matter of fact, written before the election. But I never allow
myself to be depressed by the utterances of theorists, and I mean to
go on, in conjunction with Lord Eustace, Mr. Samuel, and all of you,
to try to make things better. You have handicaps to fight against,
handicaps of the bad environment where your children are raised,
handicaps of heredity. We can do something to help you, and we
intend to do it.
But I always think that those who speak of us who try to direct
affairs of State, and of you, use the wrong analogy when they speak
of us as builders and architects. Our task is more homely, and, if I
may go to the country for my illustration, our work is more the work
of the gardener. We have to do our utmost to secure for the child
what the gardener does for his plants--the best soil and the best
exposure. We must remove the noxious weeds, we must do root pruning,
we must prepare and enrich the soil. But we have to wait in faith
for what comes later, and that is the flowers and the fruit, and we
must remember that we can never hope to gather grapes from thistles.
I said the Government might do something to help. I said in the
Albert Hall some months ago that I wished to see secondary and
university education brought within reach of all children who were
fitted to take advantage of them, and I stand by that.
I hope that before we reach the middle of this century the country
will have dealt effectively with the problem of the children between
the ages of twelve and eighteen. It is not simply a school problem;
it is a school problem and an industrial problem. We must by
voluntary agencies and by our own work deal with that problem, or we
run the risk of allowing a generation to grow up in the country which
can only be a peril to itself, and a peril to the nation.
But all the State can do will be of little avail if you have no
regard to the one thing that matters,--as always, the personal
equation. That, in this case, is the general body of the teachers
who are both in love with their work and properly equipped for it.
It is for that reason that I welcome the improvement in the pay of
the whole profession which came into force in this country of recent
years. The personality of the teacher is the crucial fact of the
whole work of education. It is you who have to transmit to the
children some appreciation of the growth of the human spirit, some
insight into our national traditions of liberty and fair play, into
the material achievements of science, and into the wider problems set
by racial and national divisions of mankind; and somewhere through
those lessons, through you, there must reach the children some of the
"murmurs and the scents of the infinite sea."
It is not for you, fortunately, to undertake the political education
of the children, but it is for you to see that if they have to hear
of these things they hear both sides, and they hear them
dispassionately, because you cannot prostitute your position to
sectarian ends. The primary concern of those who have such a sacred
trust as you have is the unfolding of the child's personality, and
not the victory of party.
We all know that industrialism has its ugly side; we all know we
cannot maintain our population without strenuous competition, and we
have a hard task in harmonising the claims of industry and the claims
of an enlightened humanism. The harshest features of poverty we may
hope to get rid of, and to provide against the worst crises of life,
and perhaps in time to lift the level of our people; but none of
those things are of avail unless we can raise their character. Mr.
Bertrand Russell wrote truly when he said: "It is true that poverty
is a great evil, but it is not true that material prosperity is in
itself a great good. If it is to have any real value to society, it
must be made the means of advancement of those highest gifts that
belong to the life of the mind"--and I would say the life of the soul.
In concluding, I would stress once more what I have said to you of
the pre-eminent value in the teacher of character, for, if you look
back upon your own childhood--as I look back upon mine--is it not a
fact that all unconsciously we were the strongest moral judges of
those set in authority over us? It is not the clever teacher that we
remember, or the man who taught us most--unless we gave our lives to
scholarships; what we remember is the man whose character all
unconsciously impressed us, the man who was patient, who was honest,
who was fair, and who brought into the performance of his daily task
a spirit which, when we look back over the gulf of years, makes us
feel even to-day, when we are faced, as we are faced day by day, with
problems that test our character, that we should be almost afraid, as
it were, to take the part that we know to be the less right one,
because we feel somehow that that was the one thing that would not
have met with the approval of him whom we knew all those years ago.
I will give you one sentence, if I may, which I read recently with
great pleasure in a work by a schoolmaster, which seems to me to
embody what I have been trying very feebly to express. He is
speaking of the influence in after years of the schoolmaster on the
pupil, and he speaks of the pupil, as an elderly man, looking back,
in these words:
"Enlightened by the experience of fatherhood, they will see with a
clear remembrance firmness in dealing with their moral faults or
patience in dealing with their intellectual weakness, and, calling to
mind the old schoolroom, they will think it was good for us to be
there. For unknown to us therein were three tabernacles--one for us,
one for our schoolmaster, and one for Him Who is the friend of all
children and the Master of all schoolmasters."
If words like those can be said of us long after we have taught our
last lesson or made our last speech, we shall not have done our work
or lived our lives in vain, and the generations to come will rise up
and call us blessed.
_ON SOME GREAT MEN_
MR. BONAR LAW
IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS
13_th November_, 1923
The House to-day meets under the shadow of a great loss--a public
loss and a personal loss; and I am sure it would not be the desire of
Hon. Members to proceed to the ordinary business to-day without
paying a tribute to the memory of a very great leader. Others will
speak with greater eloquence than I can of his rare gifts in
Parliament and in Council; I should like, if I may, to speak to the
House for a few minutes of some of the more personal aspects of the
man. There is no doubt that Mr. Bonar Law gave his life for the
country, just as much as if he had fallen in the Great War. The work
he did during the War could only have been done by a man of great
physical endurance and great intellectual capacity. It is difficult
for all of us to realise what is meant by a man having served
simultaneously in the War Cabinet--which sometimes used to sit for
hours every day--as Chancellor of the Exchequer at a time when the
Exchequer problems were more numerous and more difficult than they
have ever been, and as Leader of the House of Commons--work which,
however easily the business may be going, is always of a most
exacting nature. Night after night when we had gone home the lights
might have been seen burning in the room which I now occupy, where he
would be working into the small hours of the morning on Departmental
work, and nothing was more remarkable than the rapidity and accuracy
with which he dealt with the difficult problems that came before him
there. Mr. Keynes, no mean judge--and this is a great tribute from
such a man--told me once that he often disagreed with Mr. Bonar Law,
and that often he did not like his arguments, but he said that he was
invariably right. I think there is nothing more remarkable than the
general accuracy of his decisions at the Exchequer during the time
that I had the honour of working so intimately with him, and the way
in which, over a great matter such as the War Loan, he took a strong
stand against a unanimous expert opinion, and proved himself by the
results to have been in the right.
But hard as the work was, he never complained, and he was always full
of kindness. He was always willing to let others have the credit for
what was done. If the history of the time ever comes to be written,
it can be proved that perhaps he did greater service in preventing
the doing of things which it was wiser not to do, rather than in
initiating things which ought to have been done.
The courage that he showed in his work was equally striking in other
aspects. I remember on the 23rd March, 1918, when men's hearts were
failing, he remained confident. He told me at the time that nothing
could shake his unquenchable faith in the British soldier. It was
the same with regard to air raids. I can see him now, with his
family around him--and he was never happy at these times unless they
were around him--sitting in the middle of them, working away, with
the deafening noise outside, paying not the slightest attention to
it, and the only time that I remember when he failed to work during
an air raid was when one of his children was absent, and was reported
to be making her way to Downing Street from some other part of
London, and we lost Mr. Bonar Law, and we discovered that he had
wandered out in his slippers on to the Horse Guards' Parade, in the
middle of a heavy barrage, to look for his own child.
He had few illusions, and he was of a critical temperament, and yet
with that I have never heard him say a single bitter, unkind or
unfair word about a living soul. He looked for the best side in
everybody, and if occasionally I may have said something to him hasty
in criticism of this or that individual, he never would acknowledge
it, but he immediately countered me by pointing to one of his good
points. Like many men, he was changed by the War. He was a man of
strong domestic feelings, and I think probably he never recovered
from the loss of his wife fifteen years ago. From the loss of the
boys during the War he certainly never recovered, and I think what
changed him in the War was what changed many people. He lost
entirely that personal ambition which was his when he entered the
House of Commons, and he lost it in this way. He felt so strongly,
as many of us did, that while the youth of the country was being
sacrificed on the battlefields it had really ceased to matter what
happened at home to the older men, provided they did everything in
their power and strength to help their country in any capacity in
which they might be called.
It was that work, it was those personal sorrows, which led directly
to the breakdown in the spring of 1921, and it was that loss of
ambition to which I referred that made him refuse so stubbornly for
so long to come forward a little over a year ago to re-enter
politics, even with the chance of taking up a position to attain
which so many men are supposed to be capable of any sacrifice. It
was then, as it had been throughout his career, only the strongest
sense of duty which made him resume the heavy task of public life.
But it killed him. I remember when I came back from America at the
end of January I found him plunged in a state of depression which
never left him. Looking back, undoubtedly it was partly--must have
been partly--caused by the early stage of the disease from which he
suffered. But it was in the early part of January that the breakdown
with the Paris Conference had occurred, and I know how that weighed
on his spirits, because he told me, as late as July, that he felt
that the contemplation of what he regarded as the hopeless situation
of Europe weighed upon him day and night. He said he could see no
way through it, and he himself attributed his own illness to anxiety
caused by that.
He was, indeed, a most lovable, elusive and wistful personality, and
when the end came I could not help recalling to mind the passage in
the _Phaedo_ which I remember reading in the Sixth Form at school,
which left a very deep mark upon me. It is the one where the
argument is being urged against the right of a man to take his own
life, and it was said that God had placed the soul of each man, as it
were, on guard, and he had no right to leave that guard until the
trumpet sounded the retreat. He waited expectantly for the sound of
that trumpet. When it came he recognised it, and heard it cheerfully
and thankfully; and we must be thankful, too, that he was spared
further suffering and for the sweet memory and the brave example left
to all of us.
LORD CURZON
IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS
23_rd March_, 1925
I hope, Sir, with the permission of the House, to make a few
observations on the loss the Government and the country have
sustained by the death of one of the greatest men and the most vivid
personalities of this generation. I do so before this House in the
knowledge that there are few here who can remember him in his earlier
years, when, as a young man, he was a distinguished Member of this
House, and one to whose future everyone looked forward with hope and
with confidence. But I am particularly anxious, in a case like this,
to try to give Members of the House some impression of the man
himself, what lay behind, and what was the real man, which has been
somewhat obscured in more recent years when he had withdrawn more
from debates and from appearances in public.
It is difficult for us, who knew Lord Curzon after great honours had
come to him, earned during a long life of service, to realise that he
started many years ago with few advantages except his natural
abilities and such advantages as might have accrued to him from
belonging to a noble family. He was, in many senses of the word, a
self-made man, because it was his natural ability, his fierce
industry and his courage which made him, from an early period of
life, map out the scheme of what he would do. He was the architect
of his own fortune; he made his own friends; and he qualified himself
for the great tasks of his life, not only by ceaseless study from
early years, but by travel in what were then comparatively unknown
parts of the world, by books, and by consorting with men of all kinds
and in all countries.
His interests were exceptionally wide, and he proceeded to make
himself a master of every subject in which his keen mind took an
interest. So it is that the death of one primarily known to us as a
statesman and a politician leaves more gaps in the public life of
this country than would be the case with almost any other living man.
As a student of the classics, a deep student of history, of pictures
and of archaeology, his loss will be felt as much among the Trustees
of the British Museum and the Trustees of the National Gallery as in
the Cabinet, and his loss will perhaps be greatest in that Oxford
that he loved so much. Oxford, as we know, whispering from her
towers the last enchantments of the Middle Ages, spoke to him as she
speaks to all her sons who have ears to hear, and to him perhaps more
than most. Especially so, I think, because one of the keys to Lord
Curzon's life is to remember that his roots had struck deep into
pre-industrial England, and it is from an early England that he drew
the sources of his strength. So it was that he had, possibly, less
acquaintance with and interest in many of these strange currents of
modern life in England, his mind turning naturally more to England in
foreign and Imperial politics; and yet--let there be no
misunderstanding here--no proposal that could be made for the
betterment of our people at home was welcomed more eagerly than by
him, in very much the same spirit that it would have been welcomed by
young England in the days of Disraeli's youth, of which period, in
many ways, he seemed to be, even to-day, a member.
His learning, the learning of years, and the natural aptitude which
he had, gave him a power of natural expression, whether in writing or
in speech, that would have been remarkable at any time. Perhaps the
most remarkable feature of it was that, great as it appeared to us
when we heard him speaking in either this House or in another place,
his quickness of mind was such that it was no less great when
impromptu and without notice. The subject-matter and the humour
bubbled up afresh and at a moment's notice.
With that equipment and that training, and with the training he
obtained in this House, it is little wonder that he was able to enter
upon one of the greatest phases of his life's work in India at so
early an age for one occupying a position of such immense authority.
There is no doubt that while he has always been a man whose heart and
soul were for England and the Empire, yet his best friends would own
that it was India and the East that held his imagination from his
early youth until the end of his life. He regarded the presence of
the Englishman in India as the presence of a man with a mission, and
he regarded him as the servant of our country on a sacred mission.
He never flinched from those high ideals and earnest endeavours, and,
in spite of all, he held the scales of justice even in that great
country.
But there, just as in his life afterwards, and in his political life,
while he never sought popularity, he was always grateful for
appreciation. He was, it is true, exacting towards others, and he
demanded a very high standard, but he was not nearly as exacting
towards others as he was towards himself. The standard that he
demanded from others he demanded in a triple measure from himself.
But these things I have said are well known, and they may be found in
biographies, and I want, if I may, for a few minutes to try to look a
little more under the surface. Lord Curzon was a man who erected a
façade about himself, and a façade which deceived many people and was
the product of a natural shyness, an intense and exquisite
sensitiveness. It is no uncommon thing, as each of us may know in
our own lives and moving amongst the men we know, that human beings
in this world who suffer from sensitiveness do put something between
themselves and their fellow-men to ward off the shafts which they
dread; yet underneath there beats the kindest, warmest human heart.
There was a nature, contrary to what many might believe who did not
know him, of the uttermost simplicity--the eternal boy lived in him
until the last week of his life. He was the soul of loyalty to his
colleagues, he bore no grudges in political life, he pursued a
straight course; and all this in the face of daily and constant
physical suffering. Of that many knew nothing, because it was a
thing of which he never spoke. But I have seen him at the Cabinet, I
have seen him at a dinner party, and if he were not able to have the
necessary cushions to support his back, his suffering would be as the
suffering of a man on the rack, and that he fought against day by
day. When we look back upon him, I feel that what Lord Rosebery said
of William Pitt is so true of him, that whatever men may feel about
his life or his acts, they must be agreed that England had in this
generation no more patriotic spirit, none more intrepid, and none
more pure.
I want before I sit down to say one or two things that no one but I
can say. A Prime Minister sees human nature bared to the bone, and
it was my chance to see him twice when he suffered great
disappointment--the time when I was preferred to him as Prime
Minister, and the time when I had to tell him that he could render
greater service to the country as Chairman of the Committee of
Imperial Defence than in the Foreign Office. Each of those occasions
was a profound and bitter disappointment to him, but never for one
moment when he had faced the facts did he show by word, look or
innuendo, or by any reference to the subject afterwards, that he was
dissatisfied. He bore no grudge, and he pursued no other course than
the one I expected of him, of doing his duty where it was decided
that he could best render service.
I felt on both those occasions that I had seen in him, in that
strange alloy which we call human nature, a vein of the purest gold.
He died as he would have desired, and as we should all desire to die,
in harness, a harness put on himself in youth and worn triumphantly
through a long life, a harness which he never cast off until his feet
had entered the river. It may well be when we look back on that life
of devoted service to his country, and of a perpetual triumph of the
spirit over the flesh, that in some places in this earth, early on
that Friday morning, may have been heard the faint echoes of the
trumpets that sounded for him on the other side.
LORD MILNER AND ARNOLD TOYNBEE
FROM A SPEECH AT OXFORD
15_th May_, 1925
I feel to-night that I cannot do better than say something to you
about what Lord Milner stood for in this world of ours, what he has
meant for his generation, and what the message is that he has for our
party and for the whole Empire. It is thirty years since Lord Milner
paid a great tribute to another Oxford man, a friend of his own,
whose name I hope is not forgotten yet in Oxford. I mean Arnold
Toynbee. Arnold Toynbee was a product of his generation, but he was
more than that. He lived at a time when the industrial revolution of
this country had so far succeeded that those who worked with their
hands were being more vocal and more clamant about their position,
and what they conceived to be their rights, and the duties of those
whose lot in life was more fortunate, and at a time when the
consciences of the well-to-do were beginning to be stimulated and to
react to the touch of those who in the middle of the last century had
been but voices in the desert. Toynbee, by his friendship, by his
own ardent nature, and by the social experiment that he made in his
short life, in supporting the movement[1] for university settlements
put in the poorer quarters of our great towns, and by stimulating
interest throughout the educated and the more fortunate classes in
what was going on around them in worlds they knew but little, was
more than anyone perhaps of his generation the pioneer of much that
has happened since and the father of movements begun in but a small
way, but which have helped to change the whole outlook of the English
people in the matter of social life and social reform. It was that
devotion, that unselfish devotion, of Toynbee and his friends to
social service that captivated Milner in his youth and that, in spite
of all the vicissitudes, political and others, that attended his
life, remained with him as an abiding inspiration; and, indeed, it is
from that inspiration that we who are here to-night as members of a
revivified and triumphant Conservative Party draw our breath and have
our being.
[1] The original inspiration of the movement was given by the late
Canon Barnett and Mrs. (now Dame Henrietta) Barnett, who founded
Toynbee Hall.
It is difficult to realise the change that has come over the thought
of our country in the course of one short or two short generations.
When Milner came up to Oxford the old _laissez-faire_ school still
reigned unchallenged in all matters, social and economic. If I may
quote his own words, he said: "All the recognised authorities were
orthodox economists of the old school, but within ten years the few
men who still held the doctrines in their extreme rigidity had come
to be regarded as curiosities." And Milner said himself, in answer
to a question that was often asked at that time, "Was Arnold Toynbee
a Socialist?"--and his words, I think, are full of wisdom, applicable
to the present day even more than they were applicable to the day
when he said them: "If by Socialism you mean collectivism, the
abolition of individual property, or if you mean social democracy,
the paternal government of an omnipotent, all-absorbing State, then
Toynbee was certainly no Socialist. But on the other hand, he was
convinced of the necessity of social reorganisation. The Industrial
Revolution had shattered the old social system. It had left the
industrial life of this and the other great civilised countries of
the West in a state of profound disorder, and society, left to
itself, could not right itself. Salvation would only come through
deliberate corporate effort, inspired by moral issues, though guided
by the scientific study of economic laws." And I do not think that
that is any bad definition of the ideals which we to-day are working
for.
Going back once more for a moment to the time of Toynbee and when
Milner was a young man, there were published some other books which I
daresay are unknown to this generation, but the contents of which and
the ideas of which ran through all thoughtful England like a heath
fire, and those were the revelations which appeared in General
Booth's book on _Darkest England_, and the scientific investigation
or poverty by Mr. Charles Booth, who devoted a remarkable natural
ability, great wealth, and tireless industry for the first time to
the tabulation of facts regarding the condition of the people under
our industrial system in our great towns--books which have been for
years after their publication a mine of wealth of knowledge to all
who sought to do work, in whatever capacity, in trying to amend the
social conditions of our people.
Much has been done since those days. Much has been done to grapple
with the problems of unemployment, with the problems of health and of
housing, which the reformers of that generation would have rejoiced
to see, more perhaps than many of them could have hoped to see. But
yet we are not satisfied, and we have to take stock at the present
time, and we have to ask ourselves if those great men who preceded us
would have been satisfied to rest now in the conditions in which we
find ourselves. Now Lord Milner, with his highly trained intellect,
waged war against twin evils which always struck his mind perhaps
more than any others--inefficiency and waste--and his whole life was
a protest against these things. All the efforts that he made in
inspiring other public men in the course of their work were directed
to combat those evils. He had no patience with what we in England
are often only too proud of--our capacity for muddling through. He
had no sympathy with muddling, whether you got through or not.
But people who did not know him often failed to realise the profound
humanity that lay underneath that shy and reserved exterior, and
which accompanied--and profound humanity does not always
accompany--great gifts of intellect. No one who worked with Lord
Milner could ever forget this--that, in every social problem that he
approached, whether at home or abroad, the question he always asked
himself was this: "How can we help those who have to carry the burden
and heat of the day, and how will what we propose to do affect those
who have to work with their hands for their daily bread?" He
believed that the right way towards social prosperity and the
reorganisation of this country lay through the scientific
organisation of our productive power, and it was his belief in the
practicability of accomplishing this that made him always turn a deaf
ear to those who argued that the first necessity of bringing about
capacities for industrial production and competition was a lowering
of wages and standards of life. He was always opposed to that. But
it is probable that with his great intellectual gifts, and with a
certain intellectual detachment, and from not having mixed for long
or very freely with all classes of people in this country, he failed
perhaps to realise the natural, dare I say obtuseness? of his
fellow-countrymen--or, let us say, the difficulties owing to the
English temperament of giving effect speedily to what he desired.
I think that in what he desired to do he was very largely right,
because, whether you look at home or throughout the Dominions and
Colonies, there is no doubt there is an immense amount to do in the
way of scientific development and of co-ordination--much as I dislike
that word co-ordination--both with regard to improving the productive
capacity of the Empire, and no less with regard to co-ordinating,
which is equally important, the scientific work which has been done
in different parts of the Empire with regard not only to production,
but with regard to health and sanitation. We have allowed our Empire
for too long to proceed on haphazard lines. He felt that we were
handicapped as against the world, compared with what we ought to be,
by an unnecessary economic backwardness prevailing in so many parts
of the Empire. To use his own words, he said "that such backwardness
is a discredit alike to our generosity and to our intelligence."
* * * * * * * *
The word Imperialism still has to many people in this country a
rather sinister meaning. They associate with it--wrongly in my view
and in your view--the idea of exploitation, of riding roughshod over
the world, of jingoism and of selfishness in public policy. It was
not that to Lord Milner, and it is not that to us. It is rather
this--the spreading throughout such parts of the world as we control,
or in which we have influence, of all those ideas of law, order, and
justice which we believe to be peculiar to our own race. It is to
help people who belong to a backward civilisation, wisely to raise
them in the scale of civilisation--an extraordinarily difficult task,
and one which needs wisdom for its consummation. There is no country
in the world upon whom that task has been imposed to the same degree
as our own country, and it is undoubtedly by the way in which we
fulfil that task that we shall be judged at the bar of history, not
perhaps so much to-day, but by those who come after us of our own
blood.
We have made a start, so far as our own Empire is concerned, by
setting up an Imperial Economic Committee to try to bring about still
closer bonds commercially between the Dominions and the Mother
Country. All attempts to-day must be to a certain extent tentative.
But I am quite convinced, having regard to the sentiment throughout
the Empire, that we are approaching along a line that affords the
best chance of our laying the foundation to-day for something upon
which a far mightier edifice may be built in years to come. I am
convinced, too, we are only at the beginning of what can be done by
intelligent co-operation of the Mother Country with the Colonies and
the Empire in developing them for the benefit not only of themselves
and ourselves, but of the Empire as a whole.
It is upon that point I want to say a few words to you in Oxford. I
often used to wonder whether it was possible that this world of ours
had existed an unknown period, and mankind had struggled on in its
upward course through countless generations of toil and tribulation,
so that a few of us might be able to come to Oxford and Cambridge to
enjoy ourselves and to pass on, taking the cream of civilisation. It
always seemed to me that if all we have to show for what humanity is
suffering was a little privileged generation in a corner of the world
like this, the whole thing, creation and evolution, became something
puny and ridiculous. It seemed to me that for us who have the
enormous inestimable privilege of being born into this country in
positions where we can come here, and where to a certain extent we
choose what we do in the world, that really after all that has been
given to us, and after all that we have enjoyed, and with a vivid
recollection of what this world has passed through within the last
ten years, there is nothing else for this generation to do than to
devote itself as no generation has done in the past to the betterment
of its millions of people who have not got our advantages.
We have, or we can have if we like, what the whole of this country is
crying out for to-day, and that is education. Never was the need for
educated men in each country of the Empire greater than it is to-day.
The greatest loss that the war has imposed on this country is the
loss of a whole generation of men who to-day would be between the
ages of thirty and forty-five, able to carry on and take over the big
jobs; and they were wiped out. Where many years ago there were men
to be reckoned in dozens to take over responsible and arduous duties
throughout the Empire and at home, now there are but handfuls, and
never was the call to service and the demand for service more clamant
than to-day. Now there are many kinds of service for which you can
offer yourself; for those who have fitted themselves for it, if there
is no immediate call for you into professions at home, think how the
Empire needs you to-day to make the rough places smooth in all the
corners of the world, to train and educate people lower than we are
in the scale of civilisation, to go out to the great Dominions and
help them in the problems set before them. And, apart from all
those, what a field there is to-day for the best men that we can send
to India, for this reason--for this and the next generation, the most
difficult work in the Empire must necessarily be in that great
country, work demanding sympathy, knowledge, courage, and
intelligence of the highest order.
I hope it may never be said that in any part of the Empire when the
call comes for workers, the one part where the call is most urgent,
where the work is most difficult, and the future is most obscure,
could be the one part where the call is not answered. If that should
be the case it would be a proof of what I deny, but what some people
maintain, that the courage, the initiative, and the spirit of
adventure of our people, to which we owe the Empire and all that we
are--that that spirit, if not dead, is dormant. I will never believe
that.
Let me tell you at this point one story of Lord Milner, which I
expect will be new to most of you. I tell it to you, not only to
show you, if you have any doubt, what manner of man he was, but to
show you what the finest type of Englishman at his best can be; the
type that all of us would wish to emulate. Twenty-two years ago Lord
Milner had completed about two years of work in the restoration of
South Africa, one of the most difficult tasks to which any man had
ever been called upon to devote himself, and, by confession on all
hands, he had accomplished a work which it is doubtful if anyone else
could have accomplished. His praise was in all men's mouths. He was
a man who loved his own home in his own country, never so happy as
when in England, and there came to him at that moment an offer from
Lord Balfour to come home as Secretary of State for the Colonies, a
task for which he was peculiarly fitted, and in every way he would
have delighted in the work. He declined--and why? He declined it
because he knew that, in spite of the success he had achieved, there
were coming years of the utmost difficulty in South Africa, years in
which probably he would lose all the popularity he had won, years in
which possibly his success might be turned into failure, and he said,
"No, no, I am not going to go away from here and take the credit of
accomplishments up to this point and leave someone else to come out
now to face what must be years of difficulty and distress. I am
going to see them through myself."
The public did not know that. That shows the finest temper, the
finest spirit in which an Englishman could possibly do and face his
work, and I would like to take to myself as an exemplar and a pattern
that method of looking at my problems and facing my work. I would
ask all of you, happy to have your lives before you, to keep a model
of that kind ever present in your hearts and minds to be with you if
you are ever called upon to face times of hardship and of difficulty.
I make no apology to you when his loss is fresh, and I am sure is in
all your hearts, and when it is weighing heavily on all of us who
knew and loved him, for putting before an Oxford audience the
inspiring example of one of her greatest sons, especially as the
objects at which he aimed and the spirit in which he worked are the
objects at which our party aims to-day, the spirit in which I hope
and believe we work at a time like this, when the party to which we
all belong is more united in its determination than it has ever been
to follow in the steps of those who have set before everything the
improvement of the material condition of our people, and of the whole
of our Empire. Work to that end is to be achieved only by keeping in
ourselves a bright and burning spiritual ideal, which alone can give
us strength to perform the task to which we have set our hands.
LORD OXFORD
AT THE GUILDHALL
13_th May_, 1925
I propose to dwell, not on Lord Oxford the statesman, but on the Mr.
Asquith whom we, in the House of Commons, whether we agree with him
or not, have always respected and admired for a generation. For many
years, as a humble back-bencher, I had my individuality, my hopes and
my ambitions trampled under foot by those marching legions of which
for so many years Mr. Asquith was the head. But all through that
time I recognised, as all of us do, the stability of his character,
the serenity of his temper, his freedom from jealousies and enmities,
the magnitude of his mind and the plenitude of his utterance. We
felt that in him we had a master of our tongue. In his speech he
could be not only sonorous, but, what does not always go with it,
luminous; not only massive at times, but really humorous. And he
never supported his arguments with any extraneous helps, such as Dr.
Johnson alluded to when he spoke of orators "who employ laboured
gesticulation and think that they can impress themselves on audiences
by rolling their eyes, puffing their cheeks, spreading abroad their
arms, or stamping on the ground." There was with him always that
reticence and reserve that belong essentially to the Roman and the
Englishman rather than to the Greek and the Celt.
It is a curious thing that there was a Lord Oxford who preceded him
by some two centuries, and if we look back on what was said about him
by Swift, particularly, you get a not wholly imperfect picture of the
Mr. Asquith whom we knew and respected so much. Listen to these few
sentences, which, I think, might with very little change have been
written to-day about Lord Oxford:
"Easy and disengaged in private conversation with such a weight of
affairs upon his shoulders: of great learning, and as great a
favourer and protector of it; intrepid by nature, as well as by
consciousness of his own integrity; a despiser of money, a firm
friend, and a placable enemy: sacrificing his justest resentment not
only to the public good, but to the common intercession and
acknowledgment. Yet with all these virtues"--here, I think, the
truth will hold--"there is some mixture of human infirmity. His
greatest admirers must confess his skill at cards and dice to be very
low and superficial. Of horse-racing he is entirely ignorant."
I would like to finish on the note on which I began. My own
admiration for Lord Oxford arose primarily from the admiration I have
for his speeches, and I can recall three outstanding ones, very
different in their kind, but which, I think, every old House of
Commons man will agree with me were instances of perfect speech. One
was the speech Lord Oxford made on the death of Alfred Lyttelton.
The second was the last speech he made in the House of Commons, a
speech full of humour and Parliamentary skill, and one which led more
than anything else directly to the fall of the late Government.
Lastly, there was the great speech he delivered on 6th August, 1914,
in which he put before this country and the world the principles of
constitutional freedom as opposed to despotism in a manner in which
they can never have been stated since the time of Edmund Burke.
He has taught us--those of us in the House of Commons and all
students of politics to-day--not only to love our mother tongue more,
if possible, than we have loved it in the past, but also the
possibilities of that tongue when it is properly used. He has given
us an example by which some of us, if we apply ourselves, and if we
have the ability to profit by his example, may some day be able
ourselves to speak English.
_ON THE NATION AND THE CHURCHES_
RELIGION AND POLITICS
FROM A SPEECH AT THE LANGHAM HOTEL
11_th February_, 1926
Many people, I fear, to-day fail to realise the very critical
character of the period through which the world is passing. There is
nothing the country needs so much as another Wesley or Whitefield.
Those spiritual movements, such as occurred in the eighteenth
century, led largely by Wesley, have come up from time to time in the
history of the human race. Their spirit is always the same, though
the form is different. Had Wesley been born four centuries earlier,
he would have been Wesley just the same, but he would have worn a
rough robe girded with a cord and have founded a great body of
preaching friars. I confess I am not sure, if a Wesley or a St.
Francis arose to-day, that to found a body of preaching friars would
not be the best thing they could do for the world. To-day the world
seems more irreligious than it has ever been in the Christian era.
Irresponsible pleasure-seeking and prodigal luxury abound;
church-going has lost the hold it had in our childhood; and
candidates for the Ministry are less in number than in years past.
But I believe this condition of affairs will pass. The side of
Christianity which takes into view all kinds of activities for the
social betterment of the people is the side which most appeals to the
present generation. Undoubtedly there is as much philanthropic and
altruistic work done by all kinds of people as has ever been done.
I find the study of the various types in the House of Commons a very
interesting occupation. I find there, especially among the Labour
Party, many men who fifty years ago would inevitably have gone into
the Christian Ministry. They have been drawn into political life
from a deep desire to help the people. Such men are common in all
parties to-day. These are facts which relieve the darkness of the
outlook. Things will change again. We must not let ourselves
imagine, amidst the changes of the day, though the very foundations
are cracking, that the things we hold most precious are going to pass
away. I certainly agree with many observers that since the war the
manifest forces of Satan have been more conspicuously at large. But
the very manifestation of these forces is calling other forces into
the field.
On this account I feel it to be so important that a Church like yours
should send its quota of young men into politics to-day. Political
work is of enormous importance at this time. We do not all realise
in what a changed world we are living. Superficially it is a
frivolous world, full of "jazzing" and pre-occupation with pleasure,
but under the surface it is intensely serious. I believe the
electorate is intensely anxious to listen to men who have sincerely
at heart the uplifting of the nation.
Many of those who seem to be running most wild in their political
views are men who have been led astray by insufficient education or
experience, but are truly desirous of bettering their country.
Therefore, I believe that men who will sincerely and honestly embrace
political life with the idea of helping the community (no matter to
what party they belong), are wanted in these days. This, coupled
with the desire of service, will defeat the menacing forces which
threaten us. If, in consequence of words spoken this night, some of
the young men connected with the Wesleyan Methodist Church feel the
call to political work, it will be of great advantage to the
Commonwealth, for the political career properly viewed is really a
kind of Ministry.
THE CHURCH ARMY
AT A MEETING OF THE CHURCH ARMY IN QUEEN'S HALL
7_th May_, 1925
I am afraid I have been talking too much during the last few days.
On Tuesday I was talking to newspaper men about truth; on Wednesday I
was talking to artists about beauty; and now I am at this great
meeting, the note of which and the key to which are goodness, truth
and beauty, which surely make a perfect trinity, since no man can be
leading the ideal life unless he has these things combined in unity
in himself.
I think that perhaps we are awakening more and more to the deeper
spiritual impulses and to their importance in the life of the
country. When we read (or used to read) history, we find a great
deal one hundred and two hundred years ago about politics, kings and
battles, but very little about a man called John Wesley. Yet, as the
years go by, historians have begun to say that it was the lives of
men like Wesley and Whitefield, and what they taught the people of
this country, that really were the significant factors in moulding
the character of the people and of the leaders of the people, and
that it is largely owing to the spirit which they, and men like them,
breathed throughout England, that the immense impetus was given to
the reforms--social and religious--which took place in the country
during the last century, and which helped, in spite of a thousand
difficulties and evil things on the other side, to make the rough
path smoother and to kindle afresh the Divine spark in the hearts of
men.
So, when the history of the nineteenth century comes to be written, I
believe there will stand out the names of two men, William Booth and
Wilson Carlile, who represent the spiritual revolt voiced before them
by Ruskin and many another against the ugliness of life, and its sin
and its blind devotion to nothing but material progress. I have
always thought that if Mr. Carlile had lived many centuries ago,
instead of to-day, he would have been one of the first of the
Franciscans. He has shown the country what the Church of England can
do, and there has been no risk for him of sharing the fate that fell
to John Wesley, and of another schism being unnecessarily caused
among the people of God in this land.
The record of the Church Army is a modern chapter in the Acts of the
Apostles, and its work is as inspired as anything of which we read in
the sacred Scriptures. The Church Army is a living testimony of what
a life of Divine love can mean in the hearts of ordinary men and
women. Whatever controversies rage--doctrinal, theological--among
men who profess religion, they go on their way and combine to give a
glorious demonstration of personal devotion in the service of men.
The activities of the Church Army are innumerable--in emigration,
recreation and good, honest mirth, preaching--but, above all, coming
to the rescue of fallen humanity. When I think of this I cannot help
feeling, as I look around this room, that there can be no life on
this earth in which men may be more sure to find real happiness than
in this life of perpetual self-sacrifice. We may look in vain in the
faces of those whose life is one constant search for illusive
pleasures to see the radiant expressions which I have noticed in all
parts of this great audience.
The work of many of you is not only among the poor and unfortunate,
but among men and women who are the broken results of life in this
age--men and women who, in many cases, have lost not only work and
health, but what is far more difficult to make good, their spirit,
temper, morale, courage and faith. Yet the Church Army goes out to
its work preserving that spirit of health and happiness which is its
motto. It shows that the more men will give their lives to service
and the more impossible the tasks they try to achieve, the more is
the grace given them in that fight, the brighter their faith burns,
and the more they are able to radiate among those with whom they work
that spirit of confidence, hope and happiness which the world needs
and desires so much. I have watched your work with the deepest and
most heartfelt sympathy and admiration, and I only wish that I
personally was competent to do it. You look in the most unlikely
places for that spark of the Divine which exists in every human soul.
You search until you find it, and then you blow on it with the spirit
of love till you have blown it into a flame, however feeble; and so
you have one more to testify to the eternal truth that love alone in
this world is the conqueror, and that by love alone can the nations
be brought into the paths of peace, and that to pursue and attain
love is the one thing needful.
CHRISTIAN IDEALS
AT THE NATIONAL FREE CHURCH CONFERENCE
12_th March_, 1925
You have taken the opportunity to waylay and entrap a singularly busy
man on his way to make an ordinary political speech, and you have
brought him to speak to you this afternoon for a few moments before
an assembly distinctly representative of a great deal of the
religious movement and religious thought of the country. Curiously
enough, this is the first occasion, I think, on which I have ever
addressed a body directly concerned with any of the churches. I have
in the past always been reluctant to speak at those gatherings,
possibly from the Englishman's fear of saying in the excitement of a
public audience more than he really felt or really believed, knowing
as a public man the temptation of winning easy applause by saying
comfortable things, by saying things that perhaps are an exaggeration
of what one really feels oneself, with the inevitable result, so
often seen, that the more popular one becomes as a speaker the
greater is the tendency to spiritual atrophy in the individual.
Now, the first thought that naturally occurs to me at an assembly of
this kind is the difference between the work that lies before the
politician and the work that lies before the Christian minister. I
represent here and in this visit the State; you represent the Church.
You are the Guelphs and I am the Ghibellines, and there are some
marked points of difference that it may help us to dwell upon for a
few moments. But, tempting as the theme would be, I have neither the
time to-day nor even the inclination to dwell on the struggles, the
secular struggles, that have taken place between Church and State,
and the great part played in these struggles and the development of
life in our country by the Free Churches of England.
In many ways, in that struggle, I think we may say that we have often
been in religious life far in advance, as we ought to be, of
political life. For, while it is true that in distant ages long past
representatives of Christianity tried to drive mankind into their
fold by stern measures, by execution and by fire, we have left those
things far behind us, and it has remained in the last century for
wild and extreme men in some parts of the world to apply, in trying
to make mankind believe their political doctrines, weapons which have
been given up by the Christian for more centuries than I like to
think of.
I, in my capacity as a politician, have to deal with mankind in the
mass. You, in the life of your churches, have to deal with the
individual; and the difference lies in this, that the problems of
life come to us wholesale, as it were. We have columns of figures
before us of unemployment, for instance. You don't trouble about
columns of figures, but you all, in your lives and in your ministry,
when you think of unemployment, think of the man and the woman and
the child; and while we are devising methods of helping, so far as we
can, you have vividly before you the daily increase in the
hopelessness, the daily increase in the lack of skill, the daily
increase in the lack of morale. It may well be that you feel, as you
must at times, impatient with those, to whatever party they may
belong, who are attempting to govern this great country, for their
inability at once to find something that will alleviate the troubles
from which our people suffer to-day.
There is another aspect of this. Parliament represents all the
citizens in a way that religious bodies cannot. Your membership is
voluntary. We are all born members of the State, and you have an
excluding discipline which we in politics have not. You can supply
selective tests both to your members and to your ministers--tests of
character, tests of knowledge, tests of belief--and you can make them
obedient to a rule of life. I can do none of these things and,
indeed, I have only to try to do the best I can with the tools I
have, which means to work the existing institutions of the country so
far as I conceive it to the best advantage of the multitudinous
interests of her citizens. Then again, while you have, and all
churches have, their rule of life, you cannot say that there is any
definite code laid down for all political parties. My party have no
political bible. Possibly you might find our ideals best expressed
in one of Disraeli's novels, but I have no power to make people read
them, and I have no power to compel them to belief.
It would ill become me to say what may be the bible, if there be such
a book, of the Liberal Party. The party that can claim more than any
of the others to have a religious code to-day is the Labour Party,
because they still have the Marxian _Capital_, but, as a matter of
fact, that book has been subject, as other books, to the higher
criticism for some years past, and what will happen when the results
of higher criticism percolate to the lower intelligence I have little
idea.
There is yet a third difference: we of the State do possess--to a
certain extent--the power of compulsion. We can enforce the law, and
we can enforce it upon the unwilling. But the sense of the State in
the minds and hearts of most men is still feeble and undeveloped.
The State wears an extravagant guise to them, and they are apt to
serve it with a grudging assent. In a supreme crisis men will lay
down their lives for it, but they don't lay down their lives
conscientiously so much for what we call the State as for the country
behind it. We in politics--let me say politicians--even at the
moment of the greatest popularity cannot, and perhaps ought not to,
command the love and enthusiasm that the Church, if it is to be the
instrument it might be, can command, and ought to command, from her
sons and daughters.
But after looking for a few minutes at the obvious differences, one
comes to the more congenial topic of how we are able to help one
another.
What can the Christian Church do for the State? Now, here again we
have many voices speaking to us to-day, and, while it would ill
become me to say anything on any difference of opinion that may exist
among you, I think I may take two typical voices in the Church of
England which do express to-day two different lines of thought, and
which yet seem to me to converge if you only go down underneath the
surface. The Bishop of Durham and the Bishop of Manchester represent
two very different schools of political thought. The Bishop of
Durham stresses the individual appeal of the Gospel, and the Bishop
of Manchester the social application of the Christian message. Those
are two sides of the same thing, and I think we ought to look at both
sides at once.
To my mind, the distinctive Christian motive is the individual
transformation of character. The making of that character reacts on
the national life, and I think the Bishop of Durham quite truly
pointed out that, so little effect, looking at it historically, has
the quality of the social order had on individual morality with all
varieties of social organisation, that sometimes even the worst
periods of history have been found compatible with and to co-exist
with the very finest development of the Christian character. And I
venture to agree with him when he stressed what I spoke of in my
first sentence, the danger of people thinking they can satisfy their
consciences by talking at large on sacred subjects and on general
amelioration, and amelioration to be brought about by social
improvements, unless at the same time they never lose sight of the
fact that you must come back ultimately and all the time to the
individual; and that you must not let the joy of beautiful visions or
discussions on dogma or any other things make you forget that it is
the ethic, it is the life, it is the transformation of life, that is
the thing which really matters. Work up from that to the other, and
don't try to work down from the other to that.
He also reminds us of what I think many need to be reminded, that
this world is a much harder place to live in and do your duty in than
we sometimes care to remember. It is so much more comfortable to
make easy speeches. Browning has said, "How very hard it is to be a
Christian," and he never said anything more true. But, of course,
this does not express the whole truth. It is quite true that you
cannot identify Our Lord with any academic theory or school, Tory,
Manchester or Marxian, and when we try to do that I think we make a
profound error; yet, living in this world, the bodies of Christian
people, united by a common ideal, have to act not only as individuals
but as corporate bodies and communities, and it is when they come to
act in that way that their real difficulties, it seems to me, begin.
This is a point which the Bishop of Manchester stresses, and, if I
may say so with respect, quite rightly. His desire is to see the
Christian Churches really influencing public life in this country,
not taking sides, but raising the standard of the country's ideals,
criticising, judging, with Christian charity where possible, but
criticising and judging, that we may be told where we fall short of
the highest ideals in trying to apply political and social remedies
in this country.
It is quite right to tell us, and to tell us emphatically, that the
Christian Churches should give themselves to helping in the elevation
of the social condition of the country, and not be satisfied with
things as they are. You have the double message, and I am sure you
have it in all your Churches through your different teachers and
different types--the cultivation of the spiritual life of the
individual, the regeneration of the mass through the individual, and
the reaction of the regenerated mass on the country at large.
That should be the process, and I think that in these days we all of
us want, perhaps more than anything, and more than at any time, to be
bound lightly and loosely to the luxuries and the good things of this
world. We cannot all of us embrace poverty as St. Francis did, but
we all know the difference between the man who cherishes the
treasures of this world and the man who sits lightly to them, and it
is only by sitting lightly to them that you have the right to say
much that wants saying in these days; for it is only in that way that
you can hope to influence those amongst whom you work, rich and poor
alike. It is a spirit essential to-day in the present conditions of
our country, and I believe and recognise with joy that it is more
common to-day amongst those who are directly relieved from poverty
than it was in the years before the War.
People often say that this is a materialistic age. There is much
truth in that, but I do feel, too, that there has never been an age
in which there are more people struggling, some with more success and
some with less, to live to the highest ideals that are in them, and
doing something to help to better the moral and the physical
conditions of the people among whom they live. And it is only
natural, in a time when you have active and strong the spirit of
things that make for good, that you have co-existent with it the
spirit that makes for evil no less active and strong. I think that
that is possibly one of the reasons why you see the great contrast
that you do see to-day, and that while it is true that there is
throughout Europe a great deal of gross and crass materialism, you
have at the same time all over Europe eager souls who are struggling
to impress themselves on their day, to improve themselves and to
improve the world.
Now, in that struggle we all have to take our part. That struggle
exists everywhere, and is round us every day, and in that struggle
what help to the country can the churches of England give? They
stand reminders day by day of that truth in which they have been
born--to teach us to shun the luxury that divides us so much from one
another, to spread the education that ought to unite us, to supply us
with an inspiration to sustain us. In ways such as this the churches
of England can hold up the right arms of the politicians of England
and join in the common work of making the crooked paths a little
straighter and the rough places a little smoother for our own people.
I think it is well in an assembly like this to remember one other
thing. Some people talk as though Christianity had done its work in
the world--a singular lack of imagination in that remark, seeing that
the work has hardly yet been begun. There is not one of you in an
assembly like this who has not known at one time of your life a
character which can only have been formed on the model of Our Lord
and Master--some man, some woman, it may have been someone among the
highly educated and fortunate in the world, it may have been a
working person. But we have all known, at one time or another, such
a one, and it has been a great help to us in our pilgrimage through
life to look to that example and to walk to some extent in the light
that they cast on their path as they passed along. Now churches may
rise and churches may fall, but the influence of lives like that will
go on for ever, and it is through the light of such lives that the
redemption of this world will ultimately come; for they will survive
persecution, and derision, and coldness, and apathy. We shall never
see those times, nor our children, nor our children's children; but
it will be by the succession of such lives as I have endeavoured to
depict that some day the Kingdom of Heaven will come on earth. If we
cannot hold fast in the most difficult times to an ideal of that
kind, we shall find that we shall be suffocated in the daily toil
which most of us have to undergo, and as a people we shall go down
and perish for lack of vision.
_ON THE EMPIRE_
EMPIRE DAY MESSAGE, 1925
Twenty years ago Empire Day was first celebrated throughout His
Majesty's Dominions. Twenty years hence the Prime Minister of Great
Britain may be able to make his voice heard, not only--as I am
to-day--to listeners in the home country, but to men, women and
children in all parts of the Empire. We, too, in Great Britain may
listen to Empire Day messages spoken by the Dominion Prime Ministers
and by leaders of the Crown Colonies and the Dependencies. Such a
consummation of scientific progress makes a strong appeal to the
imagination. The direct interchange of speech would bring home to
every dweller under the Flag a vivid sense of the unity of the
British Empire. Yet, to my mind, the existence of that unity to-day,
and in all past days since the foundations of our Empire were laid,
is a far more impressive phenomenon.
Our Empire grew from the adventurous spirit of our fathers. They
went forth, urged by the love of adventure, by the passion for
discovery, by the desire for a freer life in new countries. Wherever
they went, they carried with them the traditions, the habits, the
ideals of their Mother Country. Wherever they settled they planted a
new homeland. And though mountains and the waste of seas divided
them, they never lost that golden thread of the spirit which drew
their thoughts back to the land of their birth. Even their children,
and their children's children, to whom Great Britain was no more than
a name, a vision, spoke of it always as Home. In this sense of
kinship, the Empire finds its brightest glory and its most essential
strength. The Empires of old were created by military conquest and
sustained by military domination. They were Empires of subject races
governed by a central power. Our Empire is so different from these
that we must give the word Empire a new meaning, or use instead of it
the title of Commonwealth of British Nations. The great Dominions
are free self-governing States; in their freedom they render
unshakeable allegiance to the Throne. The ties that bind them to
each other and to us are, in the eloquent words of Burke, "light as
air, but strong as links of iron." Each is a daughter in her
mother's house, and mistress in her own.
We British are supposed to be a dull, unimaginative race. But I am
sure that none among us can think upon this Commonwealth of British
nations, which men and women of our own race have created, without a
stirring of our deepest feelings. If anyone should ask for proof
that the unity of the Empire is a reality, let him cast his mind back
to the hour when the living structure of Empire was put to the
supreme test. When war came the response of the Empire was instant,
spontaneous and whole-hearted. You and I can never forget how our
hearts were uplifted by the messages which came, in those critical
days of August 1914, from the great Dominions; and not only from
them, but also from India and the Colonies which were still under our
rule. The Empire came through the ordeal of a long and exhausting
war, strengthened, confirmed in its loyalty.
To-day our minds are engrossed with the problems of restoration after
war. What brighter hope have we, in the solution of these formidable
problems, than our intimate union with countries of great achievement
and still greater potentialities? These are not times when we can
afford to belittle the material side of partnership in Empire. If
we, in these crowded industrial islands, can serve the interests of
newer countries; and if they, in turn, with their fertile spaces and
unlimited natural resources, can serve our interests, we are more
than justified in making common cause with them in repairing the
waste of war. This sense of a common purpose, this desire for mutual
aid, gives a practical touch to the ideal of Empire as a family of
nations. When each member of the family seeks to give its aid,
freely, ungrudgingly, for the good of all, the fabric of the
Commonwealth is more and more closely knit.
It is the task of statesmen in this country and throughout the Empire
to devise the ways and means by which the progress of the British
family may be directed and encouraged. Each one of us, from the
highest to the lowest, has nevertheless an individual share in this
great responsibility. The Empire is not only our master hope; it is
our greatest heritage, the widest opportunity for patriotic service.
It is something infinitely precious which we hold in trust from our
forefathers and for our children. To be worthy of that trust, we
cannot be merely passive admirers of its achievement and its promise.
We must all, in our several degrees, be active learners in the school
of Empire. Over and over again our friends from overseas complain of
the ignorance displayed by people at home regarding the Dominions,
Colonies, and Dependencies. I think that our ardent and friendly
critics are inclined to overlook the difficulty which our busy folk
experience in gathering clear and comprehensive knowledge of all
parts of the Empire. It is no little task for people to know all
that goes on in our great Dominions, to understand the problems
confronting our Crown Colonies, and to enter into the life of the
Indian Empire and the Dependencies, where a handful of our countrymen
labour for the benefit of millions of native races in all stages of
culture. But the difficulty of the duty is no reason why we should
neglect it. Rather is it a stimulus to exert ourselves to widen our
knowledge of the countries and the nations which share with us in the
obligations of Empire.
I feel sure, however, that since the opening of the Empire Exhibition
at Wembley last year, this affectionate grumble from our brothers
overseas has lost much of its point. The Exhibition enabled, and
still enables, our people to learn in a few days much which could not
otherwise be appreciated save by a tour of the Empire. No one can
adequately measure the value of such a demonstration of the arts and
industries of the Commonwealth of British nations. In more than one
sense the Empire came home to us at Wembley. There are many ways,
apart from such exhibitions, by which we can study our Empire at
second hand. But nothing, to my mind, can prove so enlightening as
personal visits overseas, and personal intercourse with dwellers in
our Dominions and Colonies. We are accustomed to look upon the
oceans as dividing us from our brothers and sisters in the Imperial
family. I prefer to regard the seas as highways which unite us. The
progress of communication has made it possible for us to visit
Canada, South Africa, Egypt, the West Indies, and other portions of
the Empire with less trouble and expense than our fathers incurred in
making their Continental tours. It should be the ambition of all of
us to pay at least one visit, however brief, to Britain overseas.
Apart from that, we can do something to foster the interchange of
visits for educative ends. The Empire Parliamentary Association has
done invaluable work in bringing together legislators from different
parts of the Empire. Recently a number of Australian school children
visited Great Britain, and public interest was awakened to the value
of similar visits by our children to the Dominions. All such
movements deserve the fullest encouragement.
Empire Day affords us an opportunity for joining with other parts of
the Empire in expressing our common pride in our Imperial heritage,
and our common determination to build worthily upon the foundations
which the great Empire-builders so well and truly laid. If I were to
attempt to crystallise its message in a phrase, I might take the
words, "Know Thyself," in which the ancients expressed the duty of
the individual man, and widen it to embrace the duty of the British
citizen of to-day--"Know Your Empire."
DEMOCRACY AND THE EMPIRE
FROM A SPEECH TO THE JUNIOR IMPERIAL LEAGUE
3_rd May_, 1924
Your generosity in your reception of me to-night is no less than the
generosity which you showed me when, immediately after defeat in the
country, and before my leadership had been ratified by the party in
London, you asked me to come here to-night as your guest. You are,
indeed, the friends that I would have--friends in bad times as well
as in good, and we shall see the good times together. I think I will
begin by saying a few words to you following on something that I said
yesterday in the Albert Hall, because by your very presence here you
show your keenness, you show your desire to do something for your
party and for the country, and I want to say something, if I can,
that may be of help to you in the work that you have to do.
I spoke about the difficulty of a democracy keeping an Empire. Now,
democracy is a word often used very loosely, but it is really only a
certain form of government, and it is the form of government which
exists in our country to-day. I think it is very important for all
those who are entering on politics and the study of politics to
realise, as I have said before on other occasions, that there is very
little difference in space between tyrannies, autocratic governments,
popular governments, complete democracies like our own, and
governments of licence and anarchy. In other words, you may
represent the forms of government which mankind have tried as lying
round the circumference of a wheel with tyranny at the top, and
working round, as I have described, to anarchy, which inevitably
leads back once more to tyranny; and human governments are always
moving imperceptibly in that course. From that fact it has been
truly said that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance; and that
is what you have to exercise, to maintain your liberty on the one
hand that we may never slip back into tyranny, and to guard that
liberty with your lives, if need be, against that licence that leads
to anarchy and to unreason, which inevitably, after having destroyed
the Empire, would come back to tyranny for its life.
Democracy is the most difficult form of government, and therefore the
more worthy of our giving our lives to make it a success. Let us
remember that many kings have been ruined by the tongues of
well-meaning courtiers. Let our statesmen take care that our people
are never ruined by the tongues of able and inspiring friends of
democracy. Democracy is no new thing. More than two thousand years
ago, in one of the most famous democracies that ever existed, a very
great poet, in a play, put these words into the mouth of one of his
political characters: "If two orators proposed, one to build ships of
war, and the other to increase official salaries, the salaries-man
would beat the ships-of-war-man in a canter." Within a generation of
the day on which those words were written, that democracy, whose
power was based on the sea, perished.
In the British House of Commons there have been found members who
have voted, within the last few weeks, both against the construction
of new cruisers and in favour of free railway passes. There is
nothing new under the sun, and there is nothing that I have ever
heard or read of that can be uttered by the extremest of our
opponents in any party in their attempt to catch votes that has not
already been said in the plays of Aristophanes. Now the instances to
which I alluded yesterday as showing incapacity to take a long view,
which is so often the great weakness of leaders of a democracy--that
incapacity has been shown in the last few days by the decision of the
Government in the case of Singapore, and in the case to which Lord
Plymouth alluded of certain items of preference with the Dominions.
It is a want of imagination and the fear of taking the risk of what
could only be a temporary and a local unpopularity, but it is that
very cowardice that, in the long run, does so much harm to this form
of government. A good motive to my mind can hardly be a sufficient
excuse for an act of unwisdom.
Now you here show by your very title that you care sufficiently for
your ideals to make sacrifices for them, and to try to induce other
people to make sacrifices too. You are not afraid of the word
"Empire." I know that there are people who dislike it. They think
that it has a militaristic tinge. We may call it a Commonwealth of
Nations, a fine title, if we will, but let us remember that the
Empire, as we know it, is different from any that has existed
hitherto; for it has not been the creation of conquering armies,
although armies have played their part, but our Empire arose from the
bone and sinew of our people. It was in the first place commercial
adventurers who won our Indian Empire, and how much of our Dominions
has not been called into being by men and women who, for reasons of
conscience, or desire to find a country in which they could lead a
wider, freer life, left our shores voluntarily in a high spirit of
adventure? Thus were the beginnings of our Empire created of our own
people and by our own people. And that is why it is our work, and
the work of our own people of all classes, to see that that heritage
is preserved.
Study these things for yourselves. Learn the history, talk to your
friends from the Dominions, and get so lively a sense of what it
stands for that you can talk to others about them and teach the real
meaning of these great things. Many years ago no task could have
seemed more impossible than the creation of a United States; yet the
strength and perseverance of the settlers in that country, and the
discoveries subsequently made, enabled them to bring into a United
Empire or Commonwealth that great country with its three thousand
miles' width of territory and with its varied climates. Some day it
may well be that our dream may come true of an Empire whose ways are
the great waterways of the world, and in which men shall move for
their industry and for their homes from end to end with as little
concern as to-day they move from the State of New York to that of
California. These ideals have long been among the most cherished
ideals of our party. We have attempted to teach the people what we
believe would lead to the more speedy fruition of them. We have not
yet wholly succeeded, but you have joined yourselves to us although
you know that at times we have failed, bringing to us a new
enthusiasm of youth and confidence that will carry everything before
it.
* * * * * * * *
There is only one more subject on which I should like to say a few
words, because it is one that I refer to nearly every time I speak,
and by this time those who criticise my methods would call them
platitudes. Platitudes they may be, but I am going on repeating them
until they have some effect. I think it was Sir William Harcourt who
said that you had to repeat a thing a dozen times before anyone took
any notice. I shall be proud to follow the example of so
distinguished a Liberal statesman. I want to speak on one aspect of
peace in industry. Now much has been written, and much has been said
on that subject. I will only touch on one point. I am convinced,
and I am not without experience, that one of the chief things we want
is more knowledge and more light--knowledge on the part of each party
of the position of the other. Now, to a certain extent, that is not
difficult to get. What is difficult to get, and what is of vital
importance, is that the men should have knowledge about the
industries in which, and for which, they work. What commended to me
the miners' agreement was that there you have, in an agreement in one
of the greatest trades of the country, that which gives you to a
considerable extent what I have always wanted.
Let that example continue and flourish, and let it be modified
wherever modifications may be found desirable in practice, but let us
see that kind of knowledge made familiar throughout the great
industries of the country. The men want to know for their own sakes
just these points: something about costs, where the goods they make
have to be sold, and in competition with whom they have to be sold,
and the conditions under which those goods are produced, where they
are produced in competition, and the wages paid. They should also
have some knowledge of the amount a business should set aside to meet
its repairs and its reserves, and when they have that knowledge they
will then know when is the time that they may hope to improve their
own condition, they will know then what the imponderables (as they
have been called) are, and they can realise, in a way they cannot
now, whether or not those who were arguing against them are basing
their claims upon facts and are speaking in truth. In other words,
it will tend to dissipate that horrible suspicion which causes an
atmosphere in which no healthy plant can flourish, and give light and
publicity by which alone men can tell whether they are getting a
square deal.
Everyone of us here, we hope and believe, by throwing our influence
into political life, may do something to better the conditions of our
own country. We want to help to better the conditions for our own
people. We want to see our people raised, not into a society of
State ownership, but into a society in which, increasingly, the
individual may become an owner. There is a very famous sentence of
Sir Henry Maine's, in which he said that the progress of our
civilisation had been of recent centuries a progress on the part of
mankind from status to contract. Socialism would bring him back from
contract to status.
It is an immense encouragement to me to see a gathering like
this--the generosity, the enthusiasm--if we had it through all
classes of our party we should be in office for life. You are
showing in your youth that you mean to take up the burden, and I say
"Good luck to you," for it is the only burden worth taking up. You
realise that the State is no cold entity. It is just the sum of all
the men and women of our country. If we look at it in that
individual way, that it is the men and women of the country we are
out to help and to serve, it will lend us enthusiasm. Nothing can
help the men and women who compose the State to make the State worthy
of this country--nothing can help them more than the kind of service
which you are prepared to give--service that will relieve the burden,
and service that will make straight the path, never losing in that
the sense of the importance of the individual, and the responsibility
of each one of us and of all of us to one another and to our Maker.
DISARMAMENT
FROM A SPEECH IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS
23_rd July_, 1923
Very little, if anything, has been said to-day about one of the
greatest difficulties which we find facing us in dealing with this
question, and that is that fighting instinct which is part of human
nature. I propose to say a few words about that first, with a view
to explaining how, in my view, we have to attempt to eradicate it,
or, at least, to combat it, so as to produce that will to peace
without which all efforts by legislation, arbitration, rule or
otherwise, must be vain. That fighting instinct in man is the
instinct of the tiger. It dates from his creation, and was probably
given to him to enable him to fight for the survival of his species,
for the provision of space in which to bring up his race, and to
provide food for it; and we find through the ages that that instinct,
whether in democracy or empire, or among individuals, has had full
play. We find it even among men whose political views can be classed
as pacifist, and that is the reason why we have often found in
history that men of pacifist views were advocating policies which
must end, if carried to their logical conclusion, in war.
I need only remind Hon. Members that there was a considerable
agitation some little time ago, with which I personally had great
sympathy, and which was conducted very largely by those who, in all
other respects, were of a peculiarly pacific turn of mind, and that
was that this country--if there is any work to be done in this world,
it is always our country, and I am thankful for that--that this
country should in some way or other rescue Armenia. The only means
by which Armenia could have been rescued was at the point of the
sword. I may remind Hon. Members that for the thirty years preceding
one of the longest and bloodiest struggles in history, the Civil War
in America, the anti-slavery agitation in the North-Eastern States
was very largely, if not entirely, in the hands of professional
pacifists and anti-militarists, and when the agitation had brought
matters to the point that it meant either surrendering the principle
of anti-slavery or going to war the pacifists, quite rightly in my
view, said: "It shall be war," realising, as was said during the late
War, that there are times when moral issues may even triumph over
peace.
In the same way some of those to-day who are loudest in their
protestations of international pacifism are loudest in their
protestations that nothing but a class war can save society. No
truer word was ever said by a philosopher than was said by Kant, a
century ago or more, that we are civilised to the point of
wearisomeness, but before we can be moralised we have a long way to
go. It is to moralise the world that we all desire, and I have
merely mentioned these innate characteristics of human nature to make
us realise, as I think we sometimes fail to do, what difficulties
there are before us in carrying out a policy with which everyone in
this House is in sympathy. We have to remember one more thing
besides that, that since the War we must not make the mistake of
thinking that what may be war weariness is necessarily an excess of
innate good will; and we cannot help noting that there has arisen in
Europe, in the few years since the peace, a strong local feeling in
different places of an extreme nationalism which, unless corrected,
may bear in what is not of itself an evil thing the seeds of much
future peril for the peace and harmony of Europe.
But, taking into full consideration these points, on which I have
touched somewhat summarily, I think there are compensations, and I
think before I have finished I shall be able to show that the human
race is progressing, though slowly, and is full of a conscious,
though hardly as yet articulate, desire for further progress in the
same direction.
I have often thought, with reference to the late War, that one of the
most terrible effects of it--possibly a double effect--has been that
it has shown the whole world how thin is the crust of civilisation on
which this generation is walking. The realisation of that must have
come with an appalling shock to most of us here. But more than that.
There is not a man in this House who does not remember the first air
raids and the first use of poisoned gas, and the cry that went up
from this country. We know how, before the War ended, we were all
using both those means of imposing our will upon our enemy. We
realise that when men have their backs to the wall they will adopt
any means for self-preservation. But there was left behind an
uncomfortable feeling in the hearts of millions of men throughout
Europe that, whatever had been the result of the War, we had all of
us slipped down in our views of what constituted civilisation. We
could not help feeling that future wars might provide, with further
discoveries in science, a more rapid descent for the human race.
There came a feeling, which I know is felt in all quarters of this
House, that if our civilisation is to be saved, even at its present
level, it behoves all people in all nations to do what they can by
joining hands to save what we have, that we may use it as the vantage
ground for further progress, rather than run the risk of all of us
sliding in the abyss together.
The conscience of the world is not stilled yet, but on the Government
side of the House there rests a responsibility which cannot, in the
nature of things, be felt by those who sit in opposition. We have to
remember that a great deal of what has been said to-day, and if I may
use the phrase in all good faith, some of the dreams which have been
mentioned to-day are no new thing. We have to remember that in the
French wars of Queen Anne's reign there was just the same longing
for, and the same dream of, universal peace that so many of us feel
to-day. One hundred years ago that same feeling, in different forms,
animated many different breasts. Napoleon at St. Helena had dreams
too late for him, but dreams of a united Europe with a united
congress on the American model, of which he would be the chief and
the dictator. At Vienna such dreams were heard of. The Tsar
Alexander, a prototype of the late Tsar, whose dreams of peace were
shattered only too cruelly, propounded a scheme of Holy Alliance
which at that time came to nothing, because he spoke to a world that
was not yet ready for it.
We believe that any attempt at this moment to convene an
international conference would not only not lead to success, but
would lead to the indefinite postponement of any possibility of
achieving the ends which we all desire. In my view the moment cannot
arise to approach this problem, with any chance of success, until the
conditions of Europe with regard to Reparations and the security of
frontiers is settled, and I feel that it would be hopeless to expect
a definitely favourable answer--to give only two instances; and I do
not wish on this occasion to be more explicit--from France, for
instance, before she had obtained a settlement of Reparation and
security, or from Poland until she could feel that her frontiers were
secure against that gigantic and powerful neighbour along her eastern
borders.
The first step to be taken is the step that we are taking now. That
is, to attempt a settlement of these existing problems of Reparation,
and in taking that step I am animated by as ardent a desire that it
may lead ultimately, and at no distant date, to the consideration of
these questions which we have been discussing to-day, as I am
desirous of it leading to a discussion and settlement of those
questions which have kept the countries of Europe apart during all
the years which have succeeded the Great War. Let us never forget
that sometimes in the darkest day the beginnings of better things are
not only attempted but successfully achieved. It was in the darkest
days of the struggle of the Thirty Years' War that Grotius worked on
international law and led to the foundation of that science which,
though it has not brought peace to the world, has yet brought into
being a code which has helped the world in its peaceful development,
and will continue to do so.
It has been during those dark days of the last three or four years
that the Washington Conference was held, which has led to a
limitation of naval armaments that, until that Conference was held, I
am convinced the statesmen of all countries would have considered to
have been impossible, impossible even to have been debated, and
impossible in its fulfilment. This year, some of the most valuable
exploratory work has been done, and is being done, by the League of
Nations. The League of Nations has been occupied in considering this
very question of disarmament, and the possibility of linking it up
with guarantees of security, universal in their application as such
guarantees must be: and such a universality is, indeed, a first and
absolute essential to make any prospect hopeful of limitation of
armaments.
Now, those efforts of the League of Nations are on the point of
taking concrete form in the shape of proposed Treaties, which will be
submitted to the Governments of Europe for their consideration,
probably after the meeting in September of the General Assembly of
the League of Nations. I can promise, at least for this Government,
and I am certain that the same will be true of all the leading
Governments of Europe, that the work that the League of Nations has
done, the form in which their work will be presented, will be
examined, not only with the sympathy and the interest that such work
deserves, but with an earnest desire, at the first moment when it
appears to be practicable, that the aims of the League, if not in the
exact form in which they have suggested they should be brought about,
shall be brought into effect in Europe.
As was well said by the Hon. Member for Preston (Mr. T. Shaw), in the
course of his speech, there is one great instrument of peace in this
world, and that is the British Empire. It is a great instrument, not
only in its size, and its population, and its wealth, but more than
ever a great instrument in this, that it is not only an Empire, but
it is a large assembly of free nations, not all of the same kin or
the same tongue, but animated largely by a common purpose, and all
alike equally desirous of seeing extended in every corner of that
Empire or Commonwealth those ideas of liberty, and justice, and
freedom which we believe are in our hearts, and which we hope to see
spread throughout our Empire and throughout the world. In that
collection of nations, which now spreads throughout the world, there
is something of hope for the human race, because though it may seem a
dream, it may yet some day be possible for peoples in so distracted a
Continent as Europe to feel there may be something for them to learn
from the development, from the union, and from the ideals of our
great Empire, and we may possibly be able to show them a better way,
which in years to come they may tread, and find the solution that
to-day seems so difficult.
As I have tried to explain to the House we cannot see our way to
accept this Motion and take immediate steps, believing as we do that
such steps would be rather a bar to future progress than a help. Yet
I do say this, that when we are sufficiently fortunate, as I pray we
may be, to have seen brought about, with our aid, such a settlement
in European conditions as I indicated earlier on, then the time will
be ripe and we shall be ready to take our part, in so far as we can,
whether through such schemes as have been proposed already or through
others, in bringing about that limitation of armaments which we
believe to be essential for the future progress of civilised mankind.
It is an easy thing to say, as many men say to-day, that this country
should cut herself adrift from Europe, but we must remember that our
island story is told, and that with the advent of the aeroplane we
ceased to be an island. Whether we like it or not, we are
indissolubly bound to Europe, and we shall have to use, and continue
to use, our best endeavours to bring to that Continent that peace in
which we and millions of men up and down Europe have an equal belief
and an equal faith.
_MISCELLANEOUS_
SCOTLAND
ST. ANDREW'S DAY FESTIVAL OF THE ROYAL SCOTTISH
CORPORATION
30_th November_, 1925
It is a great honour for one who is not hundred per cent. a Scot to
preside over the anniversary of the Corporation. The Charity goes
back even further than 261 years. It goes back to the time when the
throne was transferred from Edinburgh to London, and in the wake of
that throne began the migration southwards which, in after years,
attained such great proportions. It being a Scottish army, the
casualties by the way were few, but it is a great tribute to the race
that from the beginning they made preparations to deal with those
casualties. Attempts were made to succour the fallen, attempts which
have gained in force from generation to generation as the need
becomes greater, so that, as the years go by, there is hardly a
family which has attained prosperity in London whose name may not be
found in the annals of the Corporation as having helped to make
provision for their less fortunate brothers and sisters. In the face
of a patriotism so insistent and so persistent it is not necessary
for me this night to beg for this great organisation. You have
responded to its call already with your traditional and your national
generosity.
Now, I would like, as an Englishman, not without connection with a
certain part of Scotland, to offer a few observations on the virtues
of the Scot and on the impression that the Scot has made in England;
and I think perhaps, speaking as an Englishman, that there is one
thing above all others which we owe to you, and one thing in which
the Scot has set an example, which we would do well to imitate.
There is nothing that fills me with more admiration than the way in
which your people for generations have held up that standard of plain
living and high thinking--a lesson which to-day a world that would,
if it could, be a world of high living and plain thinking, needs more
than ever before. Nothing has made Scotland what she is more than
the magnificent system of parochial education, which she had years
before any other part of the British Isles. The picture of the
Scottish student with his sack of oatmeal, leaving his work for part
of the year, living and drawing on the frugality and self-sacrifice
of father and mother, brother and sister, in the pursuit and
attainment of knowledge for the sake of knowledge, is an example to
the whole world, and what your Scots have to be mindful of is that in
this age, when education is tending to become spoon-fed, you do not
allow yourselves to lose sight of the ideals of the past generations.
When I think of all the lessons you have to give us, I am always
struck by the fact that of Scotsmen, I think, perhaps alone, the
English people are in no way either jealous or envious. Whatever be
the reason, the English have always taken the Scots to their hearts
as blood brothers. I do not think it is difficult to give the
reason, and I think the reason may be traced to one man of genius.
For a long time after the Union it would seem that the Union itself
afforded no stimulus--whatever else it may have done--to Scottish
literature. One of your own most famous writers in the last century
said that at that time you had "theologic ink and Jacobite blood,
with gall enough in both cases to have blotted out the intellect of
the country"--and when David Hume and Adam Smith came they were still
drawing from France rather than from their own soil. But a few years
later, by the grace of God, you threw up two men of genius, Walter
Scott and Robert Burns. You had, as no other nation ever has had, a
man of yourselves to interpret you to the neighbouring kingdom--that
was Walter Scott; for however ardent an admirer of Burns you may be,
no one could call Burns an interpreter to Englishmen. Scott did a
great deal for your country. There was, of course, patriotism before
Scott appeared, but he deepened, enriched and ennobled it in a
thousand ways for the Scots themselves. All that honours the
ancestry of the Scot and the kindred of the Scot, the virtues and the
noble deeds of your ancestors, the heroism of the common people--all
that he gave you, and through that many in his generation, and in the
generation that came after, have felt more than they had ever felt
before that they had a country to live for, an ancestry to live up
to. It was a tremendous stimulus.
But the greatest service he rendered was the interpretation of
Scotland to England. Take myself as a typical Englishman. By the
time I was ten I had read the _Tales of a Grandfather_, and had read
all his poems and half his novels. Since then, I suppose, not a year
goes by that I do not read some of them again, and whenever I go to
Edinburgh I go down to Castle Street and look at the bay window where
he stood and the door where he welcomed Pet Marjorie. He said when
he first wrote that he wished to do for Scotland what Maria Edgeworth
did for Ireland; but how many people of to-day outside those who love
books--which is not the same thing as borrowing from Mudie's--ever
read Maria Edgeworth? Had there been a Walter Scott for Ireland
there would have been no Boundary Commission sitting to-day, and I
should have been able to have devoted my week-end, as I had intended,
to preparing a speech worthy of this occasion.
That is not all that Walter Scott did. How impossible it would have
seemed to Boswell and Dr. Johnson, when they travelled in the
Hebrides, if anyone had told them that within sixty years there would
arise a genius who would bring the English King to Edinburgh and put
him in a kilt, that a genius would arise under the spell of whose
wand the Lowlander would adopt the garb of the robbers of the North.
I remember when I was in Scotland this autumn I was asked humorously
why I did not wear a kilt when in Scotland. I said the last time my
ancestors wore a kilt was at Culloden, and I leave it for the English
to wear it when they go to Scotland. If it had not been for Walter
Scott you would never have seen the kilt south of the Grampians, and
the result is that we English--a prosaic race--cannot look at
Scotland or at a Scot except through those glasses tinted with
romance and history, those glasses that Walter Scott made us wear;
and, while we are looking at you with the vision of the Wizard of the
North, wrapped in admiration, you attend strictly to business! When
Scott wrote his first novel the "Forty-five" was only sixty years
back. It seems long years away from us. The Industrial Revolution,
which Scott hardly understood, has almost submerged us.
"The successor of Monkbarns does not exchange ideas with the
successor of Edie Ochiltree. He meets his fellow lairds in a London
club. Edie Ochiltree has left the bonny burnsides for the city
slums; Mrs. Mucklebackit sells her ware to a London fishmonger; and
Captain M'Intyre hires his moor to a wealthy American; while Mr.
Blattergowl is not the unique minister of a unique parish."
And yet, though there is an element of truth in these things, there
remains in you that indestructible love of your own people and your
own soil; and, in my view at least, it is largely for this reason
that you, in spite of a certain amount of industrialising of your
country, have not yet been submerged by industrialism to the extent
that a large part of the southern portion of Great Britain has been.
So long as you keep your contact with nature, so long as the
Highlands are left, so long as your great agricultural country is
left, those roots are left in the soil which alone can propagate that
plant of tradition which means so much to you, as it does to the
countryman in England.
If you ask an Englishman what he thinks of Scotland in
contradistinction to what comes in his mind when he thinks of
England, we think of the heather and the moors, and we see your
northern country as we should see it in June, ablaze with the glory
of the broom. Those are the pictures that rise in our minds, and if
I were asked what represents the soul of Scotland I could not answer
better than by the reply which was given many years ago to a relative
of mine in New Zealand by an old Scottish farmer. My relative asked
him how long the traditions that your people bring from home last in
a new country, and the old settler replied, "The porridge and the
heather and the Psalms of David last to the third generation as a
sustenance for body and spirit." And may they abide for ever,
because--and I speak as an Englishman--were the Scot to pass, with
his history, with his tradition, with his character, there would pass
at the same time from earth a large part of the heroism and the
romance of the world, those intangible qualities which, perhaps more
than anything else, make us capable of plain living, high thinking
and great deeds.
IRELAND
ST. PATRICK'S DAY BANQUET
17_th March_, 1926
No man can stand here to-night before an audience like this,
occupying the position which I do, without asking himself what has
happened that such a gathering, that such a company, is possible in
London to-night. I feel, perhaps, it means that the secular struggle
is drawing--has drawn--to a close; it means that you recognise too
generously the little that I have been able to do with my colleagues
to help Ireland over a stile.
Having safely surmounted the stile, two facts stand out before the
statesmen of Ireland and the statesmen of England. It is not for me
in my position to speak, as Mr. MacVeagh did, with the yearning of
the Irish for an Ireland one and indivisible, but I still say this,
that the fact that by that recent settlement it was recognised in
Ireland that there was a problem in the North has, for the first
time, rendered the solution at some time possible, because as the
Minister for Justice of the Free State said, it is a problem not
perhaps soluble at the present time, but one that possibly only time
can solve. To solve any problem the first essential is the
recognition of it.
Secondly, Ireland is governed to-day from Merrion Street, not from
Dublin Castle or from Whitehall. That, I believe, marks the close,
as I said, of a secular conflict; but before we glance at the future,
in the few words I have to say to you to-night, I do not think we
shall waste our time in dwelling for a few minutes on the paths that
we have trodden in the past, and the paths we are treading to-day.
We have been too used through the generations and the centuries to
conflict between our peoples and our nations, and we know--now that
we can look at these things from afar, I trust--that the root of that
conflict went deep down into the characters of the two peoples, and
that those characters themselves were moulded by their very different
histories. In Ireland you look back, as the Celt always will look
back, to the golden age. You were nourished on memories of that time
when Ireland was, according to the tradition of her historians and of
folk-lore, the island of saint and scholar. You look back to the
work of St. Patrick, who, I may remark, first converted Ulster before
he took in hand the rest of Ireland. We have relics of those days in
the luminous pages of your manuscripts and in the rare work of cross
and chalice which now lie in your museums. All that time, while we
in England were growing slowly into a united nation, with a
consolidated government, in Ireland, whatever the reason, the great
privilege was not yours because for centuries there was disunion, and
the stable government which broadened from age to age, following
precedent with us, had no such chance with you. This struggle for
centuries culminated at a time when hell was let loose throughout the
whole of Europe, and it is good that we should now forget those days.
With you, as with the rest of Europe--to use the words of one of your
own historians--"The soul of man was bloodied and bruised," but now
murdering hate is a dead thing, and once more in this struggling
world the love of God has some chance to contend against the eternal
stupidity of mankind.
The rule of reason is slowly emerging from the riot of violence, and
is throughout the world cleansing the foul parts of the infected
world with its medicine. In that process the veil of illusion has
been rent, but as compensation the rhetoricians are silent, and it
always seems to me that, with the first sense of responsibility and
the passage into full freedom, one of the most difficult times that
can face the Celt confronts you. For the Celt of all nations is a
man who has dwelt with his dreams, and to be plunged from his dreams
into the white light of the twentieth century is indeed a staggering
shock, and in that fierce light it is little wonder if with many
another man he finds himself precipitated from the heights on which
he fancied he dwelt into a pit of depression and of cynicism. But
all these things will pass. They are but the consequent evils of the
day, and the people will learn that salvation comes to them by the
industry of their own hands and by the work of their own brains.
If they cannot achieve it in that way, they will be no more able to
achieve it from Merrion Street than from Whitehall. The people must
save themselves. It is a hard and painful task, as we all know, to
build up. It is easy enough to destroy. It is easier to face death
for an ideal than it is to face the daily duty and the daily drudgery
against the forces of vice and ignorance, which have to be faced in
the attainment of any ideal. But Ireland is fortunate in this, that
in the North she has a statesman, an Irishman and a man of deep
wisdom; and in Dublin, in the Free State, you have as statesmen men
who have looked into the eyes of both life and death. They are
facing an almost insuperable burden to-day with courage and honesty
rare amongst statesmen.
We in England wish them well with all our hearts. We want the two
Governments of Ireland to have fair play from the world. We want
them to have a fair chance of settling down to their work, and so far
as we are concerned I think we have given proof of the sincerity of
our desires for the prosperity of Ireland. I have only one word more
to add. I have been told that just as the virtue of truth, on which
perhaps we English are apt to credit ourselves, is sometimes
presented in a form not dissimilar from aggressiveness and
insolence--I have been told that by those who do not love us--so I
have been told that the Celtic virtue of courtesy is sometimes
extended to a point where it almost becomes insincerity. As an
illustration, I have been told that if you ask an Irish peasant how
far you are from your destination, he is always more anxious to give
you satisfaction than information, and the illimitable distance you
have to travel before you reach your journey's end--the land of
heart's desire--is to him only "just beyond the hill." That is a
failing of all people with prophetic souls.
That ideal state, to which Mr. Cosgrave would lead his people along
an Irish road, and to which I would lead mine along an English road,
we tell each other is just over the hills. We know in our hearts we
shall never reach it, but if we did not believe that it was only just
over the hills we should never have the strength to go through that
dreary, dusty walk in attending to the needs of the caravan on its
journey day by day throughout this world. Our courses are set the
same. Our goal is the same. Our method of travelling may be
different, but it is because our paths run alongside, and because you
have asked me here to-night, that I feel we may now fairly join hands
as we proceed across that narrow strip of water, those of us who live
on this side and you who live on that.
WALES
AT THE ST. DAVID'S DAY DINNER
2_nd March_, 1925
I suppose that when an Englishman comes to dine with you he tries to
find some link by which he may explain his presence. In asking me
you have asked one that was born and bred, and whose people have
lived for a very long time, in those border counties where in the old
days we knew a great deal about you. In Shropshire, whence my family
migrated into Worcestershire to get a little farther from the border,
there are still to-day, I believe, about one-fifth of all the castles
that exist in England. Why they were crowded into that narrow area I
have no idea. And when I do go home and look from my garden, four
miles across the valley is the hill on which, according to tradition,
Owen Glendower had his camp, on, I think, the last invasion of our
county by the Welsh.
My family has some connection with Wales if you go back far enough.
Long, long years ago there were two Baldwins who tossed a coin at
some remote place on the Continent, and one went East, where he
became King of Jerusalem, and thereby preceded by about a thousand
years Sir Herbert Samuel, and another went West, crossed over, first
into England and then into Wales, where his name was softened, as you
soften everything in Wales, and he gave his name to what we in
England call the county of Montgomery.
Another century slipped by, and an archbishop of my name, translated
to Canterbury from Worcester, went on a pilgrimage into Wales. He
went with a very specific object. He knew that the Welsh were
devout, and he had been told that they made most admirable foot
soldiers, so he tried to secure them for the Crusades, and he took
with him an eloquent archdeacon and journalist by name Giraldus. I
regret to say, however pure one's motives, the twelfth century
differed little from the present. There were those who said that my
ancestor, if I may call him so, really went to Wales because he
wished by celebrating Mass at the High Altar of each of the four
Welsh cathedrals to establish the supremacy of Canterbury. I don't
know whether that was true, but some of the priests in Wales,
thinking that it was, did their best to impede his progress, though
without success, and the only part of Wales in which this holy man
met with an unfavourable reception, I regret to say, was in the
county of Carnarvon. It is a source of infinite regret to me that
the distinguished representative of that part of Wales[1] is unable
to be present to-night, for we might then have got to the bottom of
this secular trouble. But so undisturbed am I by what happened all
those centuries ago that I am thinking this summer of starting on a
pilgrimage myself, not by palfrey, but by motor-car, and I shall
leave Bewdley by what we still call the Welsh Gate and go to preside
over--a word of ten letters signifying a national festival--to be
held at a little town of eight letters.[2]
It is strange, indeed, to look at the border country to-day and to
think that it was for so long by Severn and Wye a scene of
interminable raids. Now there is no more peaceful part of England
than that of which the Shropshire poet wrote:
In valleys of springs of rivers,
By Ony and Teme and Clun,
A country of pleasant livers,
The quietest under the sun.
We tried, it is true, in those days to keep you out of England, and
now we come to do homage to you in our own capital, of which you have
almost taken possession. Not for the first time in history have the
Greeks defeated their conquerors, and, indeed, this country had a
very narrow escape in the years immediately succeeding the War from
the imposing of Welsh as the diplomatic language of Europe.
There are times in the life of a Prime Minister when he is able, not
without difficulty, to get away from his arduous work and disappear
for a short time unseen by the public and unknown to the Press. I
had the good fortune so to disappear and find myself by accident in
the studio of a Chelsea sculptor. When there I saw an exquisitely
beautiful statue of a young shepherd, the original of the figure
which now stands in a mountain village in Merionethshire--the figure
of a poet (Hedd Wyn) who took his part in the Great War. You have
all heard of the story of this private soldier in the trenches who
had written a poem for your great festival at Birkenhead, and how he
was killed on Pilkem Ridge before he received the crown that would
have been given to him; and the sculptor explained to me that the
poet's Hero had been composed of Prometheus and the Man of
Nazareth--the energy that makes for kindliness and beauty; whenever I
think of Wales, it is not of her industrial areas, but of the
country, and I look upon that figure as a type of what our rural
civilisation can produce. That poet has again proved the truth of
the old saying that "The Celt goes forth to battle and has always
fallen"; but there is the additional truth that there are some
defeats which mean more than victories, and which are in themselves
victories everlasting.
Finally, I would like to remind you of the beautiful words used by
St. David the last time he spoke to his own people:
"Be joyful and keep your faith, and believe and perform the small
things which you have heard and seen with me, and I will go the road
which our fathers have travelled. Be courageous while you are upon
the earth, for you will not see me any more in this world."
If that can still be a message to the people of these islands, and if
they will listen to it, we shall have nothing to fear in the future,
and the name of St. David will go down the ages blessed by the
English as well as by the Welsh.
[1] Mr. Lloyd George.
[2] Pwllheli.
GLASGOW
AT GLASGOW
1_st October_, 1925
It is a matter of peculiar pride to become a burgess of a city which
is one of the most famous in the world. There can be few corners of
the world into which the fame and name of Glasgow have not
penetrated, and where there cannot be found some product of your
manifold energies, and, in these latter days, where the echoes of the
voices of your Parliamentary representatives have not been heard. I
know full well that the honour you have done me is to me as first
Minister of the Crown, and I believe you have made me this
presentation as a recognition that I have tried, at any rate, to
discharge my duties as the chief servant of the people in no party
spirit, and that you mean it as an encouragement to try to go forward
and do better.
I am receiving the great honour from you at a time of very grave
difficulty. No progressive country has ever been free or ever will
be free from difficulties. We have come through a prolonged and
terrific struggle for our very existence, we are borne down under a
burden of taxation resulting from that struggle, we are perplexed by
the changes occurring under our eyes in the channels of the world
trade on which we are so dependent, and we are profoundly depressed
at the thought of the numbers of unemployed, and of the continuance
of unemployment.
Nothing could be easier than to paint a sombre picture full of
shadows, and to ask ourselves: "Does Scotland stand where she did?"
or "Is England played out?" But that would not be a true picture.
The life of Glasgow is the story in miniature of the whole
country--the gradual evolution, the increase in population, power and
prosperity. It was not so long ago, as the generations of men are
reckoned, that Glasgow was but a village, and almost before the
people realised what was happening her traders began to go out over
the seas of the world. The Clyde was deepened, coal and iron were
discovered in your neighbourhood, your great series of pioneers and
inventors from James Watt to Lord Kelvin made their names and the
name of the city known throughout the world, and in two short
centuries Glasgow passed from being a little country town into a
mighty city of a million souls, which has drawn into its vortex not
only the people from the glens of the North, but from the farming
country and, indeed, from overseas, so that you now have a fourth
part of the population of Scotland packed together in this area in a
density greater than that which exists in most of our English towns.
The story of Glasgow is thus a story of stupendous adventure and
achievement, answering to some of the deepest instincts of human
nature. Such a story has not been achieved without strain and
conflict, and even loss. Past generations have left to us a city,
and we have to maintain its character, noted particularly for the
fierce energy of its people, the high quality of their workmanship,
and the boldness of their municipal enterprise. It is true to say
that the labours of Glasgow, industrial, commercial and municipal,
have profoundly affected the current of modern civilisation in all
parts of the world, and have affected it largely for good.
This has been done by the co-operation of mind and brain. There has
been no standing still; there is no standing still to-day. We have
to remember that while in the time of our fathers the changes that
always came, came slowly, what is apt to disconcert us is the speed
at which changes come to-day--changes social, industrial and
commercial. To-day the chemist is revolutionising industry. We are
beginning to make various things by artificial processes which might
have seemed like miracles a quarter of a century ago. To-day I am to
have the pleasure of seeing a great municipal experiment which you
are making in order to learn whether you cannot light your city, dye
your clothes, clear your atmosphere and drive your motor cars out of
coal. It is this ceaseless activity that has made Glasgow what she
is, and that is the hope of her future.
What Burke said of the State is true of the city. We have a
partnership, not only between those who are living, but a partnership
over many generations with those who have gone before us and with
those who will follow us. The life of a city is a continuous thing,
a living organisation, and its citizens are members not only of one
another but heirs of those who went before. And so, while we inherit
a civilised way of life and opportunities and comforts and pleasures
far beyond the dreams of our ancestors, it is also true that we
cannot escape inheriting the very texture of city life, the results
of the failings of good men and of the sins of evil men.
No problem which faces Glasgow is greater than that of housing, our
inheritance from an age when the Industrial Revolution swept so
quickly through the land that it had done its work before people
realised that it had come at all. Quite apart from the essential
wrong of such conditions of housing as still exist to-day, there is
no doubt that those conditions are the most fertile source of that
social discontent which is known so well in this city, as in other
congested parts of the kingdom. Grievous as it may be to see social
discontent, it is yet a better thing than cynical indifference or
lazy acquiescence in conditions such as I saw in this city yesterday
afternoon. I know how aggravated the problem is here, particularly
through the tenement-house system and through the rush of
immigration. It is not for us to apportion blame; it is a waste of
time to do so. We are all to blame, and we have all come short of
perfection. Let us see that our sympathy is not wasted in noisy
declamation or in mere fault-finding. Let us rather wed the social
enthusiasm that does exist here to experience and reason. The task
of improving the worst quarters in our great cities is hard enough to
demand the co-operation of the best men and women of all classes, and
those who withstand such an aim, whether from a selfish regard for
their wealth or property, or from a desire to monopolise their skill
and exploit the city--these people, in whatever ranks of life they
are found, are the worst enemies of the communal life.
I am convinced myself that the day will come when we shall have to
eviscerate our great cities, a tremendous task, but one to which the
imagination and the vision and the wisdom of the best of us may well
be devoted. The task is enormous, and therefore it is all the better
worth doing. I like to think that even at a time like this, when we
are preoccupied with unemployment and the hardship arising out of it,
we are yet giving our minds to try to raise up in this kingdom
better, healthier, more beautiful communities than exist to-day, and
I should like to think that I am becoming a burgess of your city at a
time when the public conscience is stirred on these matters as never
before, and when in Glasgow there are those who are striving might
and main to make Glasgow what she once was and might be again,
namely, one of the fairest cities in the kingdom. In that high task
I would fain be associated with my fellow-burgesses. I shall follow
you in your struggle to solve the problems that surround you, knowing
that as you accomplish them you are not only making Glasgow better,
happier, healthier and more prosperous, but are contributing in large
measure to the security, prosperity and happiness of the people at
large in these islands which are our home.
ANGLO-AMERICAN FRIENDSHIP
THE ANNUAL RE-UNION DINNER OF THE BRITISH
WAR MISSIONS TO THE UNITED STATES
29_th April_, 1925
Looking back, I think that if there was one thing that struck our
delegates, on whatever task they were engaged in America, it was the
amazing and the generous hospitality showered on all alike by their
new friends in every part of the United States. Apart from the
personal side they were struck by the immense effort that the United
States made in those early days of the war, when they showed an
example of enthusiasm, of hard work, and of receptiveness to
ideas--when they showed that natural characteristic of hero-worship,
and came forward to do everything in their power to help their Allies
to bring to a successful issue the terrible undertaking in which they
were engaged.
Living as I was at that time in London, and working at the Treasury,
I cannot help in a gathering of this kind recalling the day when the
first American troops appeared in London. I do not know how the
reception of those troops affected the Americans themselves. The
outlook was different to them from what it was to us, but I shall
never forget standing on the Horse Guards Parade watching them
marching by, not to a storm of cheers, which perhaps some had
expected, but in a deep, profound silence, which to me was far more
moving than any cheers.
Speaking for myself, I understand what was passing through the minds
and hearts of that crowd. As we looked at these young men, the pick
of their nation, so fresh, so keen, so enthusiastic, with their fine
military bearing, the thought that was prominent in my mind was how
they had come three thousand, four thousand and five thousand miles
to Europe to help us.
I wondered how it looked to them. I thought of the homes from which
they had come, the strangeness of the surroundings to them, their
feeling of fresh enthusiasm, of our feeling of worn but grim
determination begotten of the three years of hell through which we
had passed, and I could not help thinking how little, in the triumph
of that march, they could realise what that fiery furnace was towards
which they were going, and from which few of those early regiments
could ever hope to return. It seemed to me then as impossible to
cheer as I always find it impossible to applaud when I have heard the
most beautiful music that stirs the soul rather than the head.
But, after all, we are here to-night to celebrate friendships which
were made in a time such as I have endeavoured to depict, friendships
which certainly individually, I believe, in hundreds of cases have
only grown stronger with the passage of time. We thought then much
of our combined and united influence on the world. Possibly the
freshness of that feeling, maybe in both countries, has to some
extent evaporated in the strenuous years of peace which have
followed. But there is just as much need, if not more need, to-day
for that understanding, for that co-operation, and for that mutual
help, as ever there was in the time of war. Strangers as many of us
were to each other, we rapidly became acquaintances, and
acquaintances became friends, and gatherings such as these will keep
those friendships alive, if indeed anything be necessary for that
purpose, and we hope that through us they may help to keep alive the
friendship of the nations.
If I may say one more word to the English here--it is not necessary
to you, but it is necessary to our country people, and I look to you
to teach our country people--it is this: it is quite true that we and
the Americans have much in common, but what most English people who
do not know America forget is that the essential thing for mutual
understanding is to realise what we have not got in common.
The root of any differences which may occur at any time between our
two peoples is the root of most of the trouble in this world--it is
the root of ignorance. And it is because it is one of the objects of
this society to dispel and eradicate that ignorance that I rejoice in
its existence and in its continuance. I think probably many of you
taught America something of the nature, the quality, and the
character of our people, just as many of those who came from America
during the war taught the same lesson to our people. But it rests
with you, and I am glad to hear it from Sir Thomas Royden to-night,
to carry out the good work and to teach those who have not had our
advantages what we ourselves have learned, because friendship at the
best of times is fragile; a friendship will not run long of itself;
friendship requires care and consideration.
I do not think there is much more on that subject I can say to you,
and I think that what I would say has been far better expressed by
others than I could express it myself. I will content myself by
using some words which were uttered more than sixty years ago, which
epitomise all that I would say, and all that I hope, and all that I
believe:
"Whatever else may happen, whatever misfortune may befall your
country or my own, the peace and friendship which now exist between
the two nations will be, as it shall be my desire to make them,
perpetual."
These were the words of Abraham Lincoln. Since those words were
uttered we have passed through Armageddon together. May the
friendship between the two nations, based on mutual knowledge and
understanding, be perpetual for the benefit of the whole world.
FRIENDLY SOCIETIES
AT STOURPORT, AT THE ANNIVERSARY DINNER OF THE
ANCIENT ORDER OF FORESTERS (STOUR VALLEY)
18_th February_, 1924
It is not wasting words to try to realise what the great friendly
society movement stands for. Like many other good things, it is of
pure English growth, and owes its origin to the common people from
whom many of the best things have come. It springs, as it were, from
the soil, and has been a great instrument during a period of rapid
change in instructing our people in some of the greatest of the
principles which should guide their lives, as well as in branches of
work and learning in many subjects in which they could have no other
teacher.
Immersed as my life has become in political work, I am glad that in
the friendly society movement we know no politics. Politics have
such powers of penetrating most things that I am thankful that this
movement has never been captured by any of the political machines,
and I hope its leaders will see to it in the future that it remains a
thing apart.
A man entering a court or lodge gets his first insight into the
common problem of Government; learns to control himself by working
with others; learns to work with others for the benefit of others,
and to exercise discrimination and judgment. I have also seen how
the savings of the many can be utilised to fertilise the public
services and the social activities of the country. The whole spirit
of the movement is service for others, a spirit which is more wanted
in England and in every country of the world to-day than any other;
but because of the great influence and position of our own country
there is no other in which that spirit needs to be more manifested,
since the greater part of mankind looks to us as to the one country
which they hope and believe will set the example to the world in the
stability and probity of its finances and in its willingness to be of
service to the rest of the distracted world. By teaching our own
people the spirit of service which the friendly societies inculcate,
we are playing our part in making our democracy fitter and nobler,
and by doing that we are not only helping ourselves but the whole
world.
HARROW
AT THE DINNER OF THE HARROW ASSOCIATION
19_th July_, 1923
Thanks be to Heaven there is in every English boy an unconscious but
impregnable resistance to every form of pressure made by any
schoolmaster who works him too hard or tries to put too much inside
him. I know that was so in my own case and in that of many who have
done far more work in the world than I have. It is to this that
Englishmen owe so largely the careful cultivation of their physical
growth. They let the body grow, undisturbed by mental storms, until
they got into their early twenties, and then they go out into the
world able to graft the sane mind on to the sane body. They have not
worked out their minds before they come to tackle the problems of the
world.
I cannot help going back into the past, seeing so many faces which
call up memories of forty years ago. When a small boy at a private
school I was taken, wearing a new top hat and an Eton jacket, to
Lords, where I watched the Harrow Eleven winning a great victory. I
remember that at the tail of the team there walked from the pavilion
by far the largest schoolboy I had ever seen. The first ball that
boy got he put well into the old pavilion. The boy's name was Ronald
M'Neill.
I can single out to-night a man, whom I remember as captain of my
house football eleven, who has just returned after a most
distinguished period of service in Persia and Mesopotamia. He is
known to the whole Empire as Sir Percy Cox. Not far from him is
another whose name I hardly dare mention, because in those distant
years he was my fag. He combined immaculate cleanliness with an
immaculate manner. I am proud to call him my Right Honourable
learned and gallant friend Jack Seely. Sprinkled here and there
throughout the room, some of them disguised in clerical dress, are a
lot of distinguished men whom I remember as ruffians in the football
field.
There is no feeling that remains longer in life than the feeling that
one has at thirteen or fourteen years of age, and I assure the
Captain of the Eleven here to-night that in the breasts of all the
small boys at Harrow to-day, that feeling of awe and reverence with
which he is personally regarded will be as vivid in their bosoms
fifty years hence as it is to-day.
I must pay tribute to the Fourth Form Room. The first time I made
its acquaintance was when I sat for an entrance examination, and I
remember so well my disappointment at finding I was among the
rejected. I got over it, however, in subsequent years, when I learnt
that two of the most distinguished men in public life to-day had
shared my fate: one is the First Lord of the Admiralty, and the
other--it is the first time I have ever been classed with first-class
brains--no less a person than the late Lord Chancellor, the Earl of
Birkenhead. Happy the school whose outcasts and rejected can yet
make good in after life!
When the call came to me to form a Government, one of my first
thoughts was that it should be a Government of which Harrow should
not be ashamed. I remembered how in previous Governments there had
been four or, perhaps, five Harrovians, and I determined to have six.
To make a Cabinet is like making a jig-saw puzzle fit, and I managed
to make my six fit by keeping the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer
for myself. I think we have good reason to be content. I am very
proud that it has fallen to my lot to be the next Prime Minister
after Palmerston to come from Harrow, and it is a special source of
pride and joy to me to know that Mr. Yates Thompson is here to-night,
for he was the Head of the School when Palmerston was Prime Minister.
I hope with all my heart that the present Head of the School may live
to be as old as Mr. Yates Thompson, be as much respected, and be able
to look back with as much pleasure at the share he took in our
gathering this evening.
I have known no occasion on which it has been more difficult to find
the right word to express my feelings. I stand here to-night among
men who have made good in this world for their own sakes and for the
sake of the School in every walk of life. I think they will agree
with me--stern self-critics as all men must be who have made
good--that there is only one form of congratulation in this world
that is worth anything, and that is the expression of good will and
the expression from your own peers--that is, from the men who
themselves are working in the hard places of the world and trying to
make those rough places smooth--that you have tried to do your duty.
I realise as well as anyone here that the kindness you have shown me
and the welcome you have given me are not so much a tribute to
achievement--that, please God! may come later--but as holding out the
hand to one from the same School who is now taking on himself the
heaviest burden in the world. You mean by your greeting to assure me
that you wish me well, as I know you do, and that whether I succeed
or fail you have the belief in me that as a son of the Hill I will
run straight; that I will bear my share of the burden; that if I fail
I will not whine; and that if success is mine I shall not be puffed
up; but that I will try in all things to follow in the footsteps of
those who have trodden this same difficult path before me; and that I
will, with God's help, do nothing in the course of an arduous and a
difficult career which shall cause any Harrovian to say of me that I
have failed to do my best to live up to the highest ideals of the
School.
SOME ANCESTORS
FROM A SPEECH TO THE NONCONFORMIST
UNIONIST LEAGUE
8_th April_, 1924
I owe a great deal of my public and private life to my Nonconformist
ancestry. It is curiously crossed with two very strong strains which
work sometimes comfortably and sometimes very uncomfortably side by
side. I have a Quaker strain that goes back to the earliest days of
the Quakers, when one of my ancestors went out in the reign of
William III. as a missionary to the American Colonies. He devoted
half a century mainly to missionary work there and in the West
Indies, where ultimately he died, leaving a name which was perhaps
the most prominent and the best known of the Quaker missionaries in
those Colonies.
This Quaker blood is peculiarly persistent, and I attribute to it a
certain obstinacy which I find co-existing with one of the most
placable dispositions that ever a man had. I find sometimes that
when I conceive a matter to be one of principle I feel I would rather
go to the stake than give way. It sometimes brings me into trouble,
and has brought my friends into trouble, but I am afraid that
characteristic will remain with me as long as I live.
But all these things have their compensations. The Quakers were by
far the most persecuted body of the Nonconformists, and that strain
of Quakerism makes one absolutely impervious to the abuse which
necessarily occurs in public life.
To come to more modern times, I have a rather remarkable record--no
less than half my great-grandfathers were Presidents of Conference.
I am immensely proud of this ancestry, because they set an example
which it is not easy to live up to, and up to which, in the earlier
part of my life, I failed signally to live. I quoted the instance
while I was in Scotland of one of my great-grandfathers who was the
son of a man who fled from Scotland after the "Forty-five." He was a
personal follower of John Wesley, and was, if I remember aright,
ordained by him to the Wesleyan ministry. He was a man who never
could have had more than a couple of pounds a week, but he was a
natural scholar. He taught himself many languages, and, more
remarkable still, he educated his own eldest son to take a
scholarship at Cambridge, and in the next generation the same
performance was repeated by the gaining of a scholarship at Oxford by
the son of a father who must have been brought up on something very
like that narrow and meagre income. It was, indeed, a time of plain
living and high thinking.
If there is one thing more than another of which I feel ashamed
to-day, it is to think how I, with the chances I had in youth--and I
venture to think with the capacity to take equal advantage of
them--wasted so much time when I was at the University and failed to
follow in the footsteps of those who had gone before me, with far
less advantages. But these things come home to us as we get older.
I think, as years go by, we look more and more to those who have gone
before us, and we want to feel that when our time comes to pass away
we may leave some record behind us to make those who follow less
ashamed of us.
A WAR MEMORIAL
AT THE UNVEILING OF THE BOARD OF TRADE WAR
MEMORIAL
19_th December_, 1923
There is no greater honour that can fall to a man than to be asked to
unveil a memorial of this kind. I am grateful to those who asked me
to perform this ceremony to-day. All over the land, in stone and
bronze, have arisen these memorials; memorials to help us in our
recollections and to tell the world and the unborn generations of the
magnitude of the sacrifice by which we attained our victory. And the
unborn generations in some way are happier than we, for to them will
be revealed in their true perspective the magnitude and the issues of
the contest, and from them will be hidden some of the controversies,
the sordid things, the selfishness and the greed which arose among
the good deeds like poisonous fungi, the recollection of which will
pass away with our generation. But even now, those who are here can
see and estimate what the endurance and the courage of our own people
were during those years, and it should be an inspiration to us for
the rest of our lives.
There never was a war before this, at any rate for our country, in
which the whole people was engaged directly or indirectly; a war in
which men went forth to fight in the full consciousness of what they
did. Not a man, whose name is commemorated on this tablet, but went
forth with the full knowledge that he was fighting for what he and
his countrymen believed to be right, for the liberties of the world,
and those who fell, fell in a belief, perhaps hardly uttered by
themselves, that somehow or another their lives might be given to
promote the betterment of this world.
Seven millions perished in Europe, and here we commemorate but a tiny
fraction of that vast host. Not one of those seven millions in all
the countries of Europe and of the New World, but his death broke
some tie of friendship, made a vacant place in some home, and the
mourning for them will last with our lives. It is no use our asking
that question which has so often come to the lips of disconsolate men
and women, "Were their lives sacrificed in vain?" "The true sorrow
of humanity consists in this, not that the mind of man fails, but
that the course and demands of actions and of life so rarely
correspond with the dignity and intensity of human desires." So said
Wordsworth more than a hundred years ago, and his words are as true
now as when he wrote them.
To many the last five years have been a disenchantment. Every cloud
has a silver lining, and we take strength from the fact that, through
all the difficulties of the time, the strength and moderation of the
character of our people has once again shown itself, and in our
country, almost alone in Europe, have we had freedom from
unconstitutional rebellion. And more than that, I think we may say
of our own people that feelings of hatred and vengeance have no
permanent root in their hearts.
I think we ought to remember at a gathering like this, that in the
Civil Service, different perhaps from many other services, only a
limited number could go and fight, and the Civil Service contained
many men who, had they been able, would have been in the forefront of
the battle, and who, not being able to go, devoted themselves to the
work of the country in their various stations in a manner deserving
of the highest praise. Many lives were sacrificed in the war,
sacrificed under the strain of continuous overwork as truly and in
the same spirit as those who gave their lives in battle. Of no
department can that be said with greater truth than of this great
department to which we are proud to belong or to have belonged.
Of those whose names we commemorate here, "In the sight of the
unwise, they seem to die: and their departure is taken for misery,
and their going from us to be utter destruction: but they are in
peace." Peace is theirs, and we have to remember that, and it is a
peace that we cannot share. Lincoln said, and I think his are words
we should take from here to-day, "We must show an increased devotion
to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion."
In many ways our task is the harder, for, after all the sorrows that
most of us here have been through, we have to face the world with a
high courage and brave heart for the allotted time that may be left,
and devote ourselves each in his own vocation to the service of our
common humanity, knowing well that it is only by the united efforts
of men and women that we can maintain our civilisation at the level
to which it has been raised, and that only by super-human effort can
we better it. To try to do that is the least we can do for those who
gave their lives for us. It is only in proportion as we go out into
the world to do what we can for the world, that we can answer that
question at the end and say, "They have not died in vain."
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, GLASGOW.
PUBLISHER'S NOTE
Our thanks are due to the Editors of the _Times_, the _Morning Post_,
the _Daily _Telegraph_, the _Yorkshire Post_, the Student_ and the
_English Race_, and to Mr. John Murray for the permission they have
kindly given us to make use of the texts of the Prime Minister's
addresses published by them.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON ENGLAND ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may
do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
license, especially commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg License when
you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg work (any work
on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg™ License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
to the owner of the Project Gutenberg trademark, but he has
agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 41 Watchung Plaza #516,
Montclair NJ 07042, USA, +1 (862) 621-9288. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
