KARL MARX: Poverty, hatred shaped life of a great revolutionary.

 Does the spread of Communism menace world security? Is it a sane political doctrine, or a new form of Fascism? This study of Communist No. 1, Karl Marx, helps to answer these questions.

THIS week, Mr. Churchill told the British House of Commons: "It is in the Kremlin, if anywhere, that the seeds of a new World war are being sown."

 What are Russia's plans?

 How is the original doctrine of Communism, as defined by the intellectual father of the Soviet regime, Dr. Karl Marx, likely to affect our future?

 The world would like to know.

 Marx, the most influential political economist of the past century (if not of all time) died in London 63 years ago.

 Today he is a sort of demigod to Communists throughout the world; to them his doctrines, as interpreted by Lenin and currently by Stalin, are an official gospel with the force of a religion.

 To others, including some non-Marxian socialists as well as many believers in individual freedom, Marx is one of history's most wicked men, a brilliant but depraved apostle of hate whose doctrines would destroy most of the values of Western civilisation.

 Some people believe that the Russian Revolution and Soviet international policy are the living embodiments of Marx's doctrines. Others regard them as a complete negation of his doctrines.

 The truth lies somewhere between.

 But, however narrowly limited is the possibility of understanding current Soviet manoeuvres through Marxian texts, a study of Marx helps to illuminate some basic attributes of Soviet thought and behavior that have puzzled Western observers.

 Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, a Rhineland city near the French border, the son of a well-to-do lawyer and a descendant rabbis on both sides.

 Heinrich hoped that his son would follow in his respectable footsteps. He was overjoyed when at 18 Karl became engaged to the 22-year-old girl next door, Jenny von Westphalen, beautiful daughter of a baron.

 Although Heinrich died when his son was only 20, he had already foreseen disappointment.

 After Karl had gone to the university (first at Bonn, where he soon got in trouble for radical activities and "nocturnal drunkenness and riot," then at Berlin), the paternal letters were filled with foreboding and reproach; for the boy's egoism, for his neglect of his parents, for his extravagance and "wild frolics," for the "demon" that seemed possess him, for fear that his heart was not as great as his mind, for the "dangerous and uncertain future" he was preparing for Jenny.

 Despite occasional "frolics," Marx was already displaying a prodigious intellectual energy.

 In one of his infrequent letters to his father, he reported that during the past term, in addition to reading an astonishing variety of books and writing summaries and reflections on them, he had written three volumes of poems to Jenny, translated the "Germania" of Tacitus and the "Elegies" of Ovid, plus two volumes of the "Pandects" (Roman civil law), written a play and an original philosophy of law that he tore up as worthless, and, "while out of sorts," got to know Hegel "from beginning to end." 

Hegel, who had died only a few years before, was to remain a major influence on Marx's thinking.

 The first of Marx's political articles that got him into trouble was written early in 1842. It was a blast at the Prussian censorship.

 Soon the young rebel began writing for Cologne's liberal Rheinische Zeitung. In October he became its editor-in-chief.

 A few months later the paper was suppressed because it had criticised the Russian Czarist regime.

 Marx, after a seven-year engagement, married Jenny and went off to Paris to study socialism.

 In Paris he swiftly developed from rebellious youth to full-fledged revolutionary, resolved to destroy existing society and bring about a "complete rebirth of mankind." 

In Paris, too, began the great friendship and collaboration of Marx's life. Friedrich Engels, two years younger, was also a Rhinelander, the son of a prosperous textile manufacturer with mills in Prussia's Barmen and in England's Manchester.

 Friedrich Engels' revolutionary zeal had been spurred by the degradation of Barmen's industrial workers and by the harsh bigotry of his grimly Calvinistic father. 

Outwardly Marx and Engels were almost complete opposites.

 Marx was short, stocky, powerful-chested, with a swarthy skin and shaggy mane and beard of coal-black hair. Engels was tall, slender, blue-eyed, fair-haired.

 Marx was grim, brooding, academic, awkward, unconventional. Engels was gay, gregarious, a devotee of fencing, fox-hunting, and other sports, a lover of wine and music.

 But when Engels stopped in Paris to pay a call on Marx in 1844, the two found their ideas and sympathies so closely matched and mutually so stimulating that they talked steadily for 10 days. Thereafter, whether they wrote jointly or discussed and encouraged each other's individual efforts, their lives and work were indissolubly joined. 

Marx was no mere armchair revolutionist.

 In Brussels, after being expelled from Paris, he and Engels joined the League of the Just (soon renamed the Communist League and transformed from a hole-and-corner conspiracy into a propaganda society with unconcealed revolutionary aims) and set about fanning, by means of writing and speeches, the fires of revolt that were to sweep Europe in 1848.

 In 1847, in the "Communist Manifesto," they produced one of the most forceful pieces of propaganda ever written. 

The next year, after the beginning of the revolts and Marx's expulsion from Brussels (in the course of which Jenny, jailed over night, was forced to share a cell with a prostitute), they hurried to Cologne to publish a revolutionary newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

 Engels even fired some rifle shots against the Prussian Army when it invaded the Palatinate. The revolution failed.

 Marx brought out the last number of his paper in red ink; it sold 20,000 copies. 

Years later, in 1864, after the Communist League had broken up, the two friends helped found the International Workingmen's Association — the first International. 

One of his sons-in-law compared Marx's mind to a warship with steam up, always ready to move in any direction on the sea of thought.

 He won arguments — but never any large personal following. He was handicapped not only by his metallic voice and general lack of stage magnetism, but more seriously by his passion to dominate, his fierce intolerance of any ideas or leadership except his own.

 Sooner or later he quarrelled with nearly all of his fellow socialists and other radicals. The failure of the 1848 revolution and the suppression of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, into which he had poured all that he could raise on his and Jenny's inheritances, left Marx penniless.

 Banished from Germany, he abandoned his Prussian citizenship. Now, for the rest of his life, he was a man without a country.

 After a short time in Paris and one last expulsion, he went to London to stay. There, determined to follow his goal "through thick and thin," he resolutely refused to let "bourgeois society turn me into a money-making machine."

 Marx was not entirely "practical" in his private affairs; there was about him something of the absent-minded scholar (he had once hoped to become a professor). 

Only once during his 33-year exile in England did Marx grow desperate enough to try to get a regular job: then a railway company turned him down because of poor hand writing.

 Always Marx plodded ahead on his masterpiece, "Capital," reading enormously in many languages and piling up mountains of notes. He worked mostly in the British Museum, daily from ten to seven, and then at home far into the night.

 When Marx in 1867 published the book "to which I have sacrificed my health, my happiness, and my family," he firmly but quite wrongly hoped that he would soon be a "made man."

 In London, the Marx family's situation shortly grew so desperate that Engels felt compelled to go back to "filthy trade" in his father's Manchester mill in order to support them all. But the sums he was able to send from time to time were not enough to do more than keep the Marxes alive.

 After eviction from their first London home, the Marxes (with a German maid who stayed with them to the end) moved to a two-room tenement in the slums of Soho.

Sometimes Marx lacked money for writing paper or for postage. Sometimes, beset by dunning or distrustful tradesmen, the family lived for days on bread and potatoes. 

The evidence is surprisingly unanimous that under these circumstances Marx remained as devoted to his family as he was truculent in his relations with the bourgeoisie and rival revolutionists. A police agent, for example, regarded him as "the gentlest and mildest of men" in the home circle.

 Marx was plagued by ill-health during most of the last half of his life. He was tortured by chronic insomnia, inflammation of the eyes, racking headaches, rheumatism.

 THE great riddle of Karl Marx's personality will probably always be in dispute: how much was he driven to his extraordinary life and work by love of humanity, how much by hatred of capitalist society and of its more fortunate members?

 Certainly he kept himself personally remote from the proletariat he championed. 

The vivid accounts of English working-class miseries in the mid-19th century that help make "Capital" so heart-searing a document were drawn, not from personal observation, but in the main from Engels' "Condition of the English Working Class," and from reports of parliamentary investigations Marx read in the British Museum. 

"Working for the world" was one of Marx's favorite sayings, and occasionally he mentioned the service or the sufferings of humanity in his writings. But for every word of such explicit humanitarianism there are a thousand of hatred and appeals to hatred.

 He spoke the word "bourgeois" as though spitting out something evil-tasting.

 He asserted that the power of love had failed to better social conditions in the 1800 years since Christ, and that the "iron necessity" that drives the proletariat to destroy capitalism and capitalists "will open the way to socialist reforms by transformation of existing economic relations sooner than all the love that glows in all the feeling hearts of the world."

 He argued that what the proletariat needed was not Christian "self-abasement, resignation, submission and humility," but "courage, confidence, pride, and independence even more than it needs daily bread."

 Marxism is not to be found neatly packaged in "Capital" — and especially not in the first volume alone, which is all that most people read.

 His theories of history, politics, and revolution are scattered through the writings of 40 years.

 Some of the reasoning is difficult to follow, especially for those not steeped in the grandiose and mystical speculations of German philosophy.

 Sometimes the reasoning in one work contradicts in part, that in another. But Marxs' main conclusions, his fundamental principles, are reasonably clear.

 Marx called his theory "historical materialism." It was the application to history of what Engels called "dialectical materialism."

 From Hegel the team borrowed the notion that everything in the world is in constant flux; something new is always developing, something old is dying away. And sooner or later all this change is for the better.

 Progress is achieved by what Hegel called the dialectic: one force (thesis) is opposed by a second (antithesis), which has split from it, and from their conflict emerges a synthesis containing the best elements of both. 

When the unification is completed, then it gradually becomes old and the process is repeated. 

Hegel, a patriotic State-worshipper, believed that human progress had reached its apex in the Prussian State of Friedrich Wilhelm III.

 Marx held out for one more step.

 "Modern bourgeois society, rising from the ruins of feudal society," proclaimed the "Manifesto," "did not make an end of class antagonisms. It merely set up new classes in place of the old; new conditions of oppression, new embodiments of struggle. Our own age, the bourgeois age, is distinguished by this; that it has simplified class antagonisms. More and more society is splitting into two great hostile camps, into two great and directly contraposed classes: Bourgeois and Proletariat."

In "Capital," Marx set out to show how capitalism (thesis) must inevitably, by its own inner laws, become so increasingly intolerable to the proletariat as to produce revolt against the bourgeoisie (antithesis) and a classless society (synthesis).

 Marx, who scorned other socialists' neat blueprinted Utopias, said little about what the classless society would be like.

 He did not even find it necessary to assume that the revolution would wash away all human vice.

 For him it was enough that:

 ⬤ Most of the world's troubles have sprung from the exploitation of class by class. ⬤ The ascendancy of the working class would abolish classes by making every man a producer.

 ⬤ Abolition of private property in the means of production would mean that no one would have anything to exploit anyone with.

 To be sure, he predicted that after the revolution, while Communism was emerging from the womb of capitalism in a "long and painful travail," there would be a "political transition period" requiring a "revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat" and considerable inequality of living conditions.

 But after sufficient education and organisation, the no-longer-needed State would "wither away," and everyone would live in peace and plenty in a society devoted to "the full and free development of every individual," under the slogan, "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!"

 This vision, the end result of the continuous progress assured by the dialectic, is to almost all Marxists not a hope but a "certainty," for to them, as to Marx, dialectic materialism is not a philosophy but a science, a science of society comparable in exactness with the science of biology.

 Indeed, Marx fancied himself as the Darwin of the social sciences.

 In explaining why capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction, Marx begins with the theory, inconclusively advanced by Adam Smith and developed by David Ricardo that labor is the source of all value.

 He went on to develop his theory of surplus value, the keystone of his economic philosophy. According to this view, each worker spent only a fraction of his working hours earning his wages. The rest of the day he works for nothing.

 From this unpaid labor come all profits, providing those needed to pay interest and rent.

 Thus Marx arrived at his picture of society; a host of useless capitalists and landlords robbing the workers of the fruits of their labor.

 Every capitalist, he argued, necessarily likes to wring from his workers as much surplus value as he can; even if he is humane, his competitors force him to exploit. At first he may simply make his employees work longer hours. When the law forbids that, or the capitalist finds that it lessens efficiency, he may shorten the hours, but introduce the speed-up and stretch-out to make his workers work faster and harder. 

What do these things mean for the worker?

 Marx's summation: "They mutilate the laborer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labor process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his lifetime into working time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital."

 Machinery produces technological unemployment. The capitalist accumulates more and more of the profits of his unpaid labor, he buys more and more machinery, machines do more and more of the work, fewer and fewer human hands are needed to tend them.

 Besides, capitalism needs a large unemployed "industrial reserve army" for the times when it suddenly wants to hurl large amounts of its overflowing wealth into new industries, or into old ones whose markets have suddenly expanded.

 Finally comes the worst of capitalism's evils, the periodic recurrence of ruinous depressions.

Marx, although asserting that capitalism tends to give the working class less and less money to buy its products, flatly rejected the belief of labor leaders and other reformers that everything would be all right if employers would only pay their workers high enough wages to maintain a balance between production and consumption.

 Marx held that the prime cause of depression is overproduction, resulting from expanding capital's insatiable urge to find a profit and the compulsion upon invested capital to keep producing, regardless of demand, in a desperate effort to maintain itself.

 Marx predicted capitalism's trend toward concentration and monopoly. "One capitalist," he observed, "always kills many."

 He predicted the virtual disappearance of the middle class, as one ruined capitalist after another dropped into the proletariat.

 He believed that the end would come when a handful of great capitalists at last con-fronted a proletarian multitude, disciplined and united by enforced association in great industries, driven to despair by prolonged depression.

 By that time, too, capitalism would have reached its highest development, as Marx believed it must; its centralisation and productivity would be at a peak of ripeness for handy plucking by the proletariat.

 To Marx it made no difference whether Capitalists are good or bad: they are driven by forces they neither control nor understand.

 No matter how much the worker's lot may be improved, there can be no final compromise; the class war must be fought to the end. The end must be "a revolutionary change in the whole structure of society," or else "the common ruin of the contending classes." 

Marx taught his followers to harness for their ends the energy of class hatred wherever it existed.

 But he was aware that the conditions for revolution had not arrived. The only hope of a proletarian victory, as he saw it, was through a temporary alliance with the bourgeois democrats then revolting against monarchy and aristocracy.

 In 1850, Marx gave the Communist League significant strategic instructions in handling the bourgeoisie: "In the event of a struggle against a common foe . . the interests of both parties coincide for the moment . . .

 "During the struggle and after the struggle . . the workers must at every opportunity put forth their own demands alongside those of the bourgeois democrats. They must demand guarantees for the workers the moment the democratic citizens set about taking over the government . . . 

"From the first moment of victory our distrust must no longer be directed against the vanquished reactionary party, but against our previous allies, against the party which seeks to exploit the common victory for itself alone " 

The "Manifesto" laid out the goal: "The Communists . . . openly declare that their purpose can be achieved only by the forcible overthrow of the whole existing social order . . . Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Proletarians of all lands, unite!"

 What Marx meant by some of his strategic and tactical statements has been a subject of bitter dispute among his disciples.

 Interestingly enough, Marx did not mention a party in his 1850 address. In the "Manifesto" he wrote that "Communists do not form a separate party conflicting with other working class parties."

 He never spoke of a dictatorship of the party. Of course, just as he believed in the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat as instruments of struggle toward his goal of the classless and stateless society, he believed in a party as an educational agency. 

But he had never seen nor could he have envisioned the kind of monolithic and omnipotent party that rules Russia today. 

As for the "dictatorship" idea, there has long been controversy as to the meaning he attached to this concept.

 But this much is clear: Marx defined freedom as a condition in which the state is subordinate to society, and Engels equated the dictatorship of the proletariat with "the democratic republic."

 What was meant by this seeming semantic outrage?

 Some followers have believed that it meant a political democracy in which the proletariat, grown to immense proportions, could by ballot dictate economic measures, furthering its interests against those of the capitalists. Then the task of the party would be not to rule, but to educate and lead the proletariat.

 Perhaps this sounds like nothing more than New Dealism, rather than violent revolution.

 THE fact is that Marx observed the failure of his frequent prophecies of early revolution and he shifted from the hot intransigency of youth to the involved economic and metaphysical abstractions that make "Capital" such hard going in spots.

 Without ceasing to be a revolutionist, he became more reconciled to waiting and even eschewed the dogma of the universal indispensability of violence, declaring that socialism had a good chance of a peaceful birth where indigenous democratic traditions were as tenaciously rooted as in the Netherlands, England, and the U.S. 

Eventually, struggles inside the First International put before Marx and Engels the unpleasant alternatives of concentrating on its affairs to the neglect of study and writing or of letting dominance pass to the Russian anarchist, Bakunin, an advocate of direct and violent action without reference to political conditions.

 Thereupon Marx and Engels sent the International to the U.S. to die, which it did.

 In 1889, with Engels' blessing and under the leadership of some of Marx's disciples, the Second International was founded. 

The Second International placed its faith in slow accretions of power by the proletariat, which would build a new socialist society inside the shell of the old. 

The socialist task, therefore, was to teach and preach the inevitable coming of a classless society by almost automatic evolution.

 World War I laid the Second International low.

 Another interpretation of Marx was made by V. I. Lenin for use in the country Marx had regarded as the least hopeful prospect for socialist revolution.

 By its use Lenin organised the Bolshevik Party, captured power, and founded the Soviet state, which he called the dictatorship of the proletariat, and, when he was being more accurate, the dictatorship of the Communist Party.

There is no record that he ever disputed a statement of Marx's. But to square all of Lenin with all of Marx is extremely difficult.

 Lenin regarded the party as an elite of hardened professional revolutionaries capable of knowing the relatively backward workers' interests better than the workers themselves. It must therefore be justified in using and means to make its will prevail. 

In contrast to Marx's contempt for concealment was Lenin's advice to members of the Communist Party that to capture strategic posts of power "it is necessary . . . to go the whole length of any sacrifice, if needed, to resort to strategy and adroitness, illegal proceedings, reticence, and subterfuge — to anything in order to penetrate ... at any cost, to carry on Communistic work. ..."

 When the saving revolutions that Lenin looked for in Germany and the industrially advanced west failed to develop, even with the sparkling of the Third International set-up in Moscow, he did not drop the power he got under such special conditions. He decided to dig in, build industry, await new tumults. 

War, he felt, must come — "the existence of the Soviet Republic side by side with the imperialist states for any length of time is inconceivable."

 Lenin was succeeded, after a struggle between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, by the latter, whose removal from the party secretaryship had been the outstanding point in Lenin's political testament.

 After a series of purges, political trials, and executions of most of their surviving old comrades, Stalin and a small group around him consolidated their dictatorship of the Communist Party and through it of the Soviet state.

 From proclaiming the goal of building "socialism in one country"— a revision of Lenin as well as of Marx — the Bolsheviks went on to a nationalism so strong that they claimed, with much justice, the mantles of ancient Russian national heroes, such as Peter the Great and even Ivan the Terrible.

 Thus was Marx reinterpreted again.

 During the last years of Lenin's life, Russian writers began referring to their gospel as "Marxism-Leninism" rather than simply as Marxism.

 After Lenin's death, Trotsky, in his attacks on Stalin, began referring invidiously to the current gospel as "Stalinism."

 For a time the use of this word was regarded by the regime as a sign of opposition and disloyalty. Then Soviet writers began referring to official doctrine as "Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism," and later as simply "Stalinism."

 This is now an official Soviet term.

 Leninism has been called "the Marxism of the imperialist epoch"; Stalinism may be called the Leninism of the epoch of the party dictatorship.

 Last February, Stalin made a speech about capitalism's doom and socialist revolution.

 Until then he had not talked like a Marxist in any important public speech since 1939, when he said that Russians can expect to achieve a stateless society only when socialism is victorious in all or most countries and "there is no more danger of attack."

 Then Marxism went into a wartime eclipse. Neither during the pact with Nazi Germany nor during the "great patriotic war" did Marx make a happy Soviet symbol. 

No longer were huge posters showing Marx's head a dominant feature of Moscow parades and meetings. Throughout the war his name was taboo in the chief Army publication, Red Star.

 True, Marx's writings continue to be analysed, worked over, dissected, and classified by Soviet authorities.

 But basic Soviet policy is largely independent of Marx.

 For example, he declared that "we Communists do not deign to conceal our aims." But Moscow-controlled Communist parties conceal and disguise themselves, e.g., in Cuba where the Communists call themselves Popular Socialists.

 On the other hand, whereas Marx opposed all reformers, the Communist Party cannot be counted on to do so, as Australian Labor leaders learned when it so embarrassingly endorsed them at the last election.

 Such subterfuges and compromises are mightily modified forms of Marxism. 

Nevertheless, to Russians, Marxism, as interpreted by their leaders, has given some-thing important in addition to the wide variety of propaganda masks suitable for all eventualities of the changing world scene.

 It has given them reason, as the world's sole great "proletarian nation," to be suspicious of nations that are not only foreign, but capitalistic, and has given certainty that they are full sail in the main stream of history, while capitalistic outlanders stupidly row against the current.

 Has Marxism bound Russia to turn on her late allies and organise, agitate, and, if necessary, fight until the revolution has triumphed in all or at least some of the dominant countries of the world?

 Although Russian spokesmen may quote Marx on this point now and then, to try to find the answer to the question in Marx is futile. For Soviet policy is neither world revolution nor simple nationalism; the two aspects exist simultaneously.

 To Russia's revolutionary policy, the nationalist aspect lends a dynamism derived from propaganda about a holy socialist fatherland flowing with liberty and security; to the nationalist policy the revolutionary aspect brings the services of disciples in every foreign land, organised to do Moscow's bidding.

 None of this is simple Marxism.

 All of it ignores Marx's warning that the outcome of human struggle may be progress under socialism, but that it may also be — a striking phrase today— "the common ruin of the contending classes."

 Karl Marx has had an influence so great as to be difficult to explain in terms of his own theory of history.

 Somehow his personality and intellectual achievement seem to loom larger than they should according to his theory, with its stress on broad social forces.

 Few careers pose the problem of the relation of the individual personality to history so sharply as does that of this son of the bourgeoisie who sacrificed comfort and family to the intellectual goal of building a classless society.

 Marx's money worries lasted until 1869, when Engels sold out his interest in Ermen and Engels, moved to London, and gave his friend a settled income.

 Jenny died in 1881, Marx in 1883 at his dusty scholar's desk, Engels in 1895, after publishing the second and third volumes of "Capital."

 Marx's daughter Eleanor committed suicide in 1898 at the age of 43 because of a disappointment in love.

 Another daughter, Laura, and her husband, Dr. Paul Lafargue, committed suicide at the age of 70, feeling that their useful years were over and not wishing to be a burden in old age and illness.

 The third daughter, Jenny Longuet, alone left progeny; her son Jean was a leading French Socialist; her grandson, Robert-Jean Longuet, is a French Socialist writer.

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article248500951

LEGISLATIVE INDEPENDENCE.

 Previously we took occasion to demonstrate, on the basis of documents collected by Mr. Bancroft, in his History of the United States, that modern British colonists have been deprived of their just rights, and that the present system of Colonial Government and legislation is essentially unconstitutional.

At this crisis it may be useful to recapitulate the principal facts and results of our former demonstration. The precedents and principles established in the older British colonies apply now in full force to the free colonies of Australia. A knowledge of them may save much unprofitable argument, and may lead to a more speedy settlement of the great questions now under discussion.

The grand principle established by Bancroft is, that the subjects of the British Crown who planted America carried with them the whole rights and liberties to which they were entitled by the English constitution, as fully and unreservedly as if they had remained in England; and they were consequently entitled to a representative assembly, self-government, and independent legislation.

The first colony of Great Britain was that of Virginia, established in 1606, under a charter by James I. The body of adventurers on whom the charter was conferred was composed of every rank and class in the community. They comprehended twenty-one peers, ninety-eight knights, and a multitude of esquires, gentlemen, merchants, and citizens. It was declared in the charter that all persons voyaging to and settling in the colony, and the children born within its precincts, should have and enjoy all liberties, franchises, and immunities, to all intents and purposes, as if they had been abiding and born within the realm of England. Twelve years after its settlement, when the colony possessed only six hundred inhabitants, it acquired a constitution which became the model for the subsequent settlements in North America.

Its terms (says Bancroft) are few and simple. A governor, to be appointed by the company; a permanent council, likewise to be appointed by the company ; a general assembly, to be convened yearly, and to consist of the members of the council, and of two burgesses to be chosen from each of the several plantations by their respective inhabitants. The assembly might exercise full legislative authority, a negative voice being reserved to the governor, but no law or ordinance would be valid unless ratified by the company in England. With singular Justice, and a liberality without example, it was further ordered that after the government of the colony shall have been framed, no orders of the court in London shall bind the colony, unless they be in like manner ratified by the General Assembly.

Henceforward might the historian well say, "the supreme power was held to reside in the hands of the Colonial Parliament, and of the King, as King of Virginia.''

Precisely the same system was adopted in Maryland in the year 1638. The third Assembly of that colony published a declaration of rights, which was therefore established to the following effect :—

Acknowledging the duty of allegiance to the English Monarch, and securing to Lord Baltimore his prerogatives, it likewise confirmed to the inhabitants of Maryland all the liberties which an Englishman can enjoy at home, established a system of representative government, and asserted for the general assemblies in the province all such powers as may be exercised by the Commons of England.

It should be observed that these early constitutions were recognised by James I. and Charles I., the most arbitrary of English monarchs. The latter even went so far as to recognise the Virginian Legislature as an independent body, by applying to it for a monopoly of tobacco, the staple produce of the colony.

By these monarchs, and by Charles II., similar and even greater privileges were granted to the New England States, which latter, under Charles II. and the wise Lord Clarendon, became more like friendly in-dependent states than subject provinces. The charter of Connecticut, framed in 1662 by Lord Clarendon,

Conferred on the colonists unqualified power to govern themselves. They were allowed to elect all their own officers, to enact their own laws, to administer justice without appeals to England, to inflict punishments, to confer pardons, and in a word to exercise every power deliberative and active. The King, far from reserving a negative on the acts of the colony, did not even require that the laws should be transmitted for his inspection, and no provision was made for the interference of the English government in any event whatever. Connecticut was independent except in name.

To Rhode Island even greater liberality was displayed.

The supreme power was committed—the rule continues to-day—to a governor, deputy - governor, ten assistants, now called senators, and deputies from the town. It marks a singular moderation that the scruples of the inhabitants were so respected that no oath of allegiance was required of them. The laws were to be agreeable to those of England, yet with kind reference to the constitution of the place and the nature of the people."

No wonder that the thanks of the colony were voted to, "King Charles of England for his high and inestimable, yea, incomparable favor," and to Clarendon the historian, the statesman, the prime minister, who had shewn " to the colony exceeding great care and love ;" and no wonder that the Rhode Islanders continued the most loyal and the best ordered community in the British dominions.

The last proof we shall adduce of the rights of British colonists is from " A state of the Case " proposed by James Otis, of Boston, in 1764, about a hundred years after the date of the Rhode Island Charter, at a time when the British Government and Parliament are commencing usurpations which are only now in course of partial abandonment.

By the laws of nature and of nations, the voice of universal reason and of God, by statute law, and the common law, this memorial claimed for the colonists the absolute rights of Englishmen personal security, and liberty, the rights of property, the power of local legislation, subject only to the king's negative, as in Ireland, and the sole power of taxing themselves. "The authority of the Parliament of Great Britain," such were the words of this paper, "is circumscribed by bounds, which, if exceeded, their acts becomes mere power without right, and consequently void. Acts of Parliament against natural equity are void. Acts against the fundamental principles of the British institutions are void." "The wild wastes of America have been turned into pleasant habitations ; little villages in Great Britain into manufacturing towns and opulent cities ; and London itself bids fair to become the metropolis of the world. These are the fruits or commerce and liberty. The British Empire, to be perpetuated, must be built on the principles of justice." Such were the views of Otis, sent by Massachusetts to its agent in London " to be improved as he might judge proper."

The series of precedents thus laid before our readers are at the present juncture of the deepest importance. It was mainly during the period from 1606 to 1764 that all the great principles of the British Constitution were agitated, debated, and settled. The rights and liberties of the people, the privileges of parliament, and the extent of the prerogative, were all in turns discussed and contested in the cabinet, in the houses of legislation, and on the battlefield. Yet in all these struggles there was no debate as to the claims of the colonists. Even the most despotic of monarchs recognised their right to self-government and independent legislation, and refrained from exercising an obnoxious and unconstitutional prerogative. It was not till one hundred and fifty years after the establishment of British colonies that the British Parliament and Government put forward a claim of despotic authority; and the enforcement of that illegal and unconstitutional claim cost the country the loss of an empire.

It is painful to think that in regard to all the weaker colonies that remained in possession of Britain, the new usurpation was continued. In North America, in South America, in the West Indies, at the Cape of Good Hope, in Australia, the incubus of Downing-street despotism was retained. For a long time it is true Britain kept her colonies under this yoke, by tempting monopolies. Discriminating duties in favor of timber, corn, sugar, wine, &c, were the bribes that kept the colonies quiet; but no sooner had the system of free trade put an end to these sugarplums than the colonies discovered that they lived under a virtual tyranny. Those that were sufficiently powerful immediately asserted and vindicated their rights. The Canadian and the Cape provinces already possess constitutions framed by themselves; the British Ministry have extended a similar privilege to the Australian colonists and our Constitution Bill is now before Parliament.

In our present circumstances it is of the greatest importance that our rights and our position should be precisely ascertained. Last year, in consequence of the liberal declarations of the British Ministry, we suspended the elaborate demonstration of these rights ; but the postponement of the Constitution Bill, and the arbitrary conduct of the Government in now enforcing unjust measures with the strong hand, compel us to enter again upon the controversy. The importance of the demonstration will be appreciated, when it is remembered that if the privileges for which we contend are birthrights never forfeited, and not favors to be conferred by a British Parliament, then the circumstance that the Constitution Bill is postponed can have no effect in justifying the arbitrary proceedings of the British Government.

We hold that our Legislature, imperfect as it is, occupies in this colony, and so far as the colonial interests are concerned, the position of the British Parliament with reference to Her Majesty. In this view it is entitled to act as the restrainer of the prerogative. The writer whom we quoted lately on this subject states that " when the King claims rights as falling within the scope of any part of his prerogative which are opposed to the common good, there are remedial powers which bring things right, and it is one of the most important functions of the two Houses of Parliament."

The conclusion, we trust, is now plain to the meanest capacity. Unless the people of this colony have forfeited their birthright, they are entitled to free and independent legislation, and their Legislature is entitled to restrain the exercise of the Queen's prerogative, when it is opposed to the common good. How much more are they entitled and bound so to act, when the exercise of that prerogative stultifies their own acts, sets at nought the decisions of our courts, tends to bring law and justice into contempt, increases the insecurity of life and property, and is destructive of the best interests of the community at large.

Argus (Melbourne, Vic.), 17 October 1854 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article4799072

THE TURMOIL OF INDIAN POLITICS

 The problem of India has been for the last five or six years second only in importance to that of Ireland in the eyes of British statesmen. It was believed that, as Mr. Montagu was regarded as a Zionist of liberal political tendencies, he would favourably impress the Indians, and would be able to withdraw them from the path of non-co-operation by reconciling their aspirations with the amount of freedom England would be prepared to grant. The appointment of such a man ten years or fifteen years ago might have worked wonderfully towards the continuance of British rule in India ; as it was, Mr. Montagu took office too late, and had a heartbreaking task in view of the extension of the non-co-operative movement led and directed by Ghandi. He was instructed, or rather permitted, to introduce reforms along certain lines at a time when the Indians had decided that they wanted change along a totally different line. It is somewhat similar to the position in Ireland in 1919, when the British Government (after fighting and suppressing Home Rule since O'Connell's days) tried to thrust it on the Irish when they themselves had conceived a different and a nobler ideal, and were bent on its attainment. The fatal words, "Too late," to quote Lloyd George, seem to sum up the external politics of England under all administrations since Gladstone's time.

 Montagu, the Jew, was dismissed on some pretext, so slight and so palpably "framed up" as to be quite frivolous. His forced resignation took effect just as the Prince left India, and there followed closely the sentencing of India's national hero and leader. The cumulation of so many mistakes in tactics suggests a complete reversal of policy at Downing street, and a return to the old plan of ignoring the inhabitants, or, at the best, hectoring them. '"There is nothing," says Belloc, "so unfortunate as to be born a native;" and this has always been the superior and not even kindly attitude of the India office. Our interpretation of Mr. Montagu's retirement is that he refused to agree to the prosecution of Ghandi, and expressed himself as opposed to the infliction of any penalty on the Nationalist leader. What happened in the Cabinet was either that the conservative method of treating India triumphed, or that some past administrator, such as Lord Curzon, accomplished the fall of Montagu out of personal jealousy and pique. The usual long story about the publication of a dispatch has been given to the public; the real story is well beyond our reach. One of the most annoying features of the Indian question is the manifest censorship which is being exercised over the news sent to the outside world from Delhi. If we are returning to the compulsory silences and suppressions of the ghastly lustrum, 1914 to 1918, it is clear that war, openly or tacitly, is being declared on the mass of Indians who have accepted the propaganda of non-co-operation and the lead of Ghandi. . . . Mr. Montagu's vision may have been, from the point of view of the Indians, somewhat limited, but, at any rate, he had progressive ideas as regards self-government for India, and he was not hampered by the ordinary English prejudices against the East. British rule will not prosper by his fall.

 Freedom depends not so much on the material possessions or economic potentialities of a people, as on their mental state. Keep the mind free and independent, self-reliant, and even defiant, and you are not far from the achievement of liberty. Once let the mind accept bondage and remain compliant under it, there are no depths to which a people may not sink; and any return to a state of freedom becomes infinitely difficult and painful. There is no doubt that for a long time Indian inferiority was accepted by the natives. The "slave mind," to use a phrase of Arthur Griffith, became a commonplace, and on it was built the theory of the ability of far-off England to govern those countless millions. The caste system keeps great sections of the people from having any dealings with one another, and that; naturally, was used to their disadvantage.

 For a long time no word of revolt was heard from India. But it could clearly be seen by men of historical knowledge that the Indians, with their immemorial culture and their scholarship of at least two thousand years, would never definitely accept the sway of a power that had no new thing to teach in literature, or philosophy, or, art. . . . . The old centres of learning, twice as old as Oxford and Cambridge, would never accept any theory of the intellectual inferiority of India. Then came the troops of Indian students to the Universities of England and to her Inns of Court: they not only competed with the English students, but easily vanquished them at their studies. It would be impossible for these men to go back to their people and peacefully accept the domination of the men with whom they had successfully crossed swords in the examination halls. We must observe, moreover, that there was no inducement for them to stop in England or any of her oversea possessions, since in those places they were looked on as social inferiors on account of their colour. The intellectuals are the élite of the army of peaceful revolutionaries, who aim at securing control of their country by their campaign of non-co-operation.

 We have remarked in these columns before that the only chance which the British Empire has of lasting for a further span of time is to grant to all its component parts the measure of freedom which they desire, or at least a great part of that measure. Any measure short of independence would thus be granted to a country in rebellion or agitation. These tactics have been followed in Ireland and in Egypt. We foretold that they would be seen in England's dealings with India, and then suddenly comes the news of Mr. Montagu's dismissal, and, much more unfortunate, the tidings of Ghandi's imprisonment. The patriot's work and life will doubtless continue as a source of example and inspiration to millions of his countrymen, who will cherish and safeguard the ideals for which he is suffering.

Advocate (Melbourne, Vic.), 23 March 1922 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article171062768

AN INDIAN TOLSTOY.

 A representative of the "Daily News" had a conversation on January with Mr. Kellermacher, well-known architect of Johannesburg, who is in very close touch with M. K. Ghandi, the leader of the British Indians, in the Transvaal against the pass law. 

Mr. Ghandi, who so unselfishly suffered violence and imprisonment in the passive resistance movement in behalf of the rights of British Indians, has also given up his little fortune of six or seven thousand pounds for social causes like that for which Tolstoy laboured. The hundred acre farm of Phoenix, near Durban, was some time ago handed over by him to tho trustees of the colony, and this son and grandson of Indian Prime Ministers, and eloquent and successful practitioner at the Indian bar is at present penniless. 

"He is," said Mr. Kellermacher, "an extremely modest man, as you know, a man of the highest courage, and he is the happiest man I have seen. He lives on a farm of eleven hundred acres near Johannesburg, which by coincidence belongs to me. Only about fifty acres are at present cultivated, the rest is virgin soil, and we have proved a good supply of water through three bore-holes. General Smuts has promised to visit us, and in the next Parliament the law in resistance to which 2500 people have fol lowed Mr, Ghandi to prison will be abolished." 

"And what is Mr. Ghandi doing on the farm?"

 "He teaches a school of fifteen Indians, and he is a shoemaker. He insists upon doing the hardest and the meanest work upon the land, and he does the work of 10 men, sitting up all night with some one sick, and beginning manual work as early in the morning as anyone. There is no one in the world, I imagine, who carries out so vigorously the principles of Tolstoy, and you must remember that the Hindoo temperament and belief do not tend so much in the direction of work as ours do.

 "Mr. Ghandi believes that politics and religion are not activities apart from life, but must be put into active effect in every phase and detail of life. He teaches not by words, but by deeds. Words can be misunderstood, but not deeds. Men who come in contact with Mr. Ghandi gain a new idea of the value of life and of human relationship. He is the one man who fought the cause of his countrymen in South Africa, He did it by throwing away all rights and privileges, and insisting upon sharing the hardest blows that were going. He is doing just the same in the work of the farm." 

"Tolstyism," ventured our representative, "must be far more difficult in Africa, where the colour prejudice is so strong," 

"Colour prejudice," said Mr. Kellermacher, "is all rot. There is only misunderstanding with the blacks when you are seeking to get everything out of them that you can. As soon as you take up the attitude that you must not exploit them the colour prejudice vanishes."

Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners' Advocate (NSW ), 14 February 1912

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article133960536

THE UNDESIRABLE ASIATIC

 A NATAL PEN PICTURE

(BY W A. SQUIRE.)

Natal, the garden colony, since the latter sixties, has encouraged and aided the importation of some of the lowest specimens of humanity from the teeming bazaars of India. Outcasts in all senses of the word without a habitation, and with no country to call his own, he is now knocking with grimy barbarian fingers at the door of civilisation demanding equal rights with British South Africans.

 The master men in the garden blest,

 Loved the white man well but the black man best.

 The colony of Natal is nearly half populated by Indians of the lowest type, controlled by savage instincts and subject to the most infamous of criminal impulses. The statisticians have lost count of the number the colony holds, and cannot find means to-morrow to trace or identify those it has publicly examined to-day. Criminals are at large, and uncontrolled disease is being spread to a degree that has at length caused the authorities to hasten to the aid of the Chief Health Officer of the colony.

 The arrest of seven Indians in Pretoria and Mr. Ghandi and five of his wealthy followers in Johannesburg marks a break in the continuity of the policy of drift into which the Asiatic problem has been allowed to drift in the past. The Transvaal has been brought face to face with the fact that the lip loyalty of the Indian coolie is a dangerous matter to accept, and that, beneath the oily subservience and cringing exhibition of Baboo-English jingoism that impelled Mr. Ghandi to seek a bubble reputation by organising a useless corps of Indian stretcher-bearers for General Buller's army corps, lie the ill-expressed aspirations to equal rights with civilised British subjects. It is like linking the barbaric Dravidian priest who sat his midnight vigil in the heights of the Himalayas to the frock-coated legislator in his seat beneath the clock at Westminster. Oil and water do not mix, and no country has yet been successful that let a majority of individuals rule a maximum of brains.

 The Transvaal calls upon all Indians in their boundaries, some 12,000, to register their names, and for purposes of identification leave their fingerprints with the Indian Immigration office. The Chinese mine coolies do not come into question, the system of identification so far as they are concerned is completed before they leave China. To fully appreciate the position, it must be thoroughly understood that the system of census taking throughout South Africa has been a very incomplete and thoroughly ineffectual one. Indian coolies of the lowest criminal castes, or of no caste at all, after terminating their articles of indenture in the tea or sugar plantations or coal mines of Natal, have crossed the border at Charlestown, and settled in the Transvaal towns, without the slightest possibility of the authorities discovering  their whereabouts should they or their friends, for any reason, of crime, wish to conceal them. The Indian merchant has control of the whole of the native trade. The Kafir prefers the Banyian storekeeper, who is of his colour, and but little above himself as to habits, to the European, some of whom he has, unfortunately, learned to distrust. These Indians have accumulated large landed possessions, and much wealth, and have been admitted far too much liberty in Natal. The Transvaal does not wish to repeat evils that to-day convert Natal into a questionable white colony. The seeds of sedition sown by natives in the stores of the Indian must, so far as the Transvaal Government is concerned, fall on barren soil, and the Botha Government has faced the question none too soon. How far the colony can demand fellow British subjects to submit to conditions of colonisation that amount to class legislation is a matter, that will in all probability be faced by the Colonial Office and the British Cabinet. The arrest of the ringleader, Mr. Ghandi, has brought about the climax. In any event, however, it will be found that with such horror does the Transvaal view the encroachment of the Asiatic, and the overrunning of its cities, towns, and villages with the scum of India, that measures of the greatest importance will be adopted and carried into force in face of any Anglo-Indian opposition that may be organised. The Asiatic sore now festering on the face of Natal can never be healed, but the infection may be prevented from spreading across the Drakenberg along the high veldt of the Transvaal.

 Mr. Ghandi, a Parsee barrister-at-law, is the leader of the South African Indian progressive movement. His ideas of black and white equality, and the brotherhood and fellowship of all British subjects, are founded upon effete and decayed notions, promulgated by Max Muller, and long ago discarded by scientists. The Indian coolie, in South Africa, whose battle is being fought by Mr. Ghandi, is a descendant of the Drairdian, who, with a spoonful of brains, hid in terror from the cave bear and tiger in the rock slopes of the Himalayas, what time the earth was young, and Israel had not evolved a prophet. Mr. Ghandi wishes to take him from his fetid slime, enlarge his pigmy brain by Act of Legislature and place him proudly upon a pedestal in equal footing with "the heir of all the ages," a dual monument of his own cupidity and oily jingo flag-wagging. "Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay." Yes, better even the native we know and can regulate as a savage and hold dominion over as an inferior than a horde of barbarian, evil, disease-spreading Asiatics, who claim the protection of the British flag as a means for the pollution of other colonies, and defy authority in scorn of consequences from a misapplied idea of martyrdom to the cause of Empire. Mr. Ghandi, from his self-elected position of South African dictator of laws, has disregarded the mandate that the developed brains of Europeans must of necessity dominate over the barbaric and semi-civilised intelligence of the undesirable Asiatic.

Australian Star (Sydney, NSW ), 18 January 1908 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article229926483

THE FETTERS ON INTERNATIONAL TRADE

 ————

Hot Bricks at Geneva

BY HARTLEY WITHERS,

 THE DISTINGUISHED ECONOMIST.

An article on International Finance by one of Britain's Greatest Experts on financial and commercial matters, published by special arrangement.

It is now some years since the late Dr. Walter Leaf expressed the opinion that Europe was heading for economic suicide owing to the tariff policy which has been prevalent there since the War. As a scholar and a banker Dr. Leaf was one accustomed to weigh his words carefully, and he made this statement in his capacity as Chairman of the International Chamber of Commerce in order to call the attention of public opinion to what he believed to be the probable consequences of the policies which the Governments of the various countries of Europe were pursuing.

 Not long after there appeared the famous "Bankers' manifesto" which was unhappily so described since it was signed by a large number of distinguished gentlemen who were not bankers, but were prominent in industry and commerce. It stated that there can be "no recovery in Europe until politicians in all territories old and new realise that trade is not war, but a process of exchange, that in time of peace our neighbours are our customers, and that their prosperity is a condition of our own well being. If we check their dealings, their power to pay their debts diminishes and their power to purchase our goods is reduced. Restricted imports involve restricted exports and no nation can afford to lose its export trade. Dependent as we all are upon imports and exports, and upon the processes of international exchange, we cannot view without grave concern a policy which means the impoverishment of Europe."

 Since then, as we all remember, there was a great economic conference at Geneva which talked very eloquently round the subject of the hindrances to trade which are imposed in greater or lesser degree by all the leading Governments of the civilised world, in a mistaken endeavour to increase the prosperity of their countries by restricting their commercial activities. At the same time, the Council of the League of Nations set up a consultative Committee of the International Economic Organisation of the League to follow the application of the Economic Conference recommendations, and it held its first meeting in the week beginning on the 14th May. The chief purpose of this first session was to examine the work which had already been accomplished in carrying out the recommendations of the Economic Conference. Its counsels were assisted by a memorandum in the form of a "Green Book" drawn up for its guidance by the Economic Organisation of the League summarising the actions which had already been taken to put into practical effect the measures recommended by the Conference. As quoted by 'The Times" of 14th May, it began its summing up of the general situation by saying: "The tariffs actually in force at the present date appear to be on the whole higher than those in force when the Economic Conference met in May 1927." 

 At first sight it would, therefore, appear that the practical effect of Dr. Leaf's warning, the Bankers' manifesto, and the Economic Conference of last year, has been rather less than nothing, and this is, in fact, the conclusion that most people will be inclined to draw from the facts so bluntly stated in the Green Book. It goes on, however, to comfort us by saying that in May 1927 a number of new tariffs were under consideration by various Governments and Parliaments, which were much higher than the tariffs hitherto in force, and that the tariffs actually adopted are, on the whole, considerably lower than those then proposed.

 It thus appears that such is the craving of human nature to restrict its own trade activities by keeping out foreign goods, that the tariffs which were heading Europe for economic suicide, and have, in spite of the Economic Conference been made rather more efficient since it sat, would, if it had not been for the impression produced by the Conference, have been higher still. If this is all the comfort that can be administered to those who want to see the prosperity of Europe, which is so important to the prosperity of all the world, not only restored to its former level but carried up to the much more elevated heights it is capable of reaching, the outlook for European recovery does not appear to be particularly promising; and the discussions at the meeting of the Economic Committee, in so far as they were summarised by the inevitably abbreviated telegrams sent from Geneva, give rather the impression not of a determined effort to face a serious problem, but of the delicate hesitation of a number of tenderfooted cats trying to walk over a floor of hot bricks.

 It is satisfactory to note that the English representatives distinguished themselves by plain and serious speaking. Sir Arthur Balfour, while admitting that the results of attempts to remove trade barriers were rather disappointing and that a good number of increases in tariffs had taken place since May 1927, thought that the suggestion of a tariff holiday was not enough. It was not, in his opinion, sufficient merely to stabilise the present level of tariffs. The fact that, in order to produce greater prosperity it is essential to lower tariffs, does not seem to be sufficient argument for refusing to entertain the suggestion that at least their further raising should be stopped for the time being but Sir Arthur, in his desire to avoid too general and ambitious methods, suggested that it might be possible, instead of dealing with tariffs as a whole, to sub-divide them into their constituent industries and to try to reduce tariffs industry by industry. This ingenious suggestion appeared to meet with general approval, Mr. Pugh another English representative, was more outspoken in expressing his disappointment at the way in which the various Governments had treated the various resolutions of the Economic Conference, saying they had only paid lip service to it, and Mr.. Walter Layton, the Editor of the "Economist", proposed a series of resolutions, one of which embodied a request that the upward movement of tariffs should cease so as to give a favourable atmosphere for the discussion of reduction. This apparently was asking for too much. M. Serruys, who throughout had adopted an attitude of great caution, stated that Mr, Layton's proposal attempted to go too fast and too far, maintaining that the Economic Committee of the League could not order Governments not to touch their tariffs pending their deliberations.

M. Loucheur, who has held high political office in France, went so far as to contend that the only effect of reducing tariff barriers would be to transfer unemployment from one country to another, thus apparently questioning the whole purpose for which the Economic Conference had been appointed. His line of argument is one, however, which is commonly followed by less distinguished exponents of international trade problems. It leaves out of consideration the important fact that goods cannot be imported into any country unless some equivalent in value is exported in order to pay for them. If we imagine the example of a country which we will call Ruritania, which has built up a textile industry behind a high tariff wall with the result that all its inhabitants pay much higher prices for a bad article, and that the export trade of Ruritania is restricted because the textiles which used to come in from abroad are now manufactured at home—if Ruritania then reduces its tariff on textiles, manufacturers of the countries which can make them cheaper and better, will come in, all the Ruritania consumers of textiles will get better articles more cheaply, and the Ruritania exporters of commodities which Ruritania is especially well qualified to produce, will find a freer market for their products. So far from transferring unemployment from one country to another, the reduction of tariffs would at the same time give the consumer a reasonable chance of getting good articles such as he used to enjoy before the War. But as long as false patriotism blinds us with the delusion that it is wrong to buy foreign goods there is little hope for real prosperity in international trade.

Papuan Courier (Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea), 3 August 1928

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article251065157

EUROPEAN LIBERALISM

 AN ESSAY IN INTERPRETATION BY PROFESSOR LASKI

"The Rise of European Liberalism," by Harold J. Laski. Published by George Allen and Unwin, London.

LIBERTY OF THE INDIVIDUAL

IN the nineteenth century the dominating idea in the political and social thought of the period was the doctrine of the liberty of the individual. Political freedom was sought to be attained by democratic institutions, economic liberty by the restriction of State interference in industry. In general it was considered that not merely was the general welfare best attained by allowing a maximum of freedom of action to individuals, but that individual liberty of action and thought was a value in itself, something to be sought for its own sake. In medieval times no such doctrine prevailed. Authority was the keynote of the period. Freedom of thought and action was strictly controlled by the dogmas of revealed religion and the moral code of Christianity. In modern times the pursuit of economic gain is regarded as an allowable and even praiseworthy end in itself, but in medieval times the economic interest of the individual was subordinated to consideration of the general welfare. Men lived within an economic order in which the effective social institutions, whether church or state or guild, judged economic activity by criteria derived from outside itself. Material utility was not accepted as a valid justification of economic behaviour. Heaven was man's destination, and his activities in this world were controlled accordingly. Hence competition was controlled, commerce was forbidden on religious grounds prices and the rate of interest were fixed, wages and hours were regulated, and speculation was, within wide limits, prohibited. But in the sixteenth century these medieval ideas began to give way to the habit of thought and system of ideas that are known as liberalism, and the question is, why did they do so?

 PENETRATING ANALYSIS.

 IN his essay, Professor Laski seeks to supply an answer to this question. To his task he brings qualifications which are possessed by few if any other writers of the present day. Not only is he an accomplished historian, but he is also a political philosopher with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the political writings of the period under consideration: indeed he almost irritates at times by the copiousness of his familiar allusions to writers of whom most people have never heard. The result is a profound and penetrating analysis of the fundamental ideas of liberalism, and of their relation to the historical evolution of the last four centuries. Professor Laski sees in liberalism an ideology invented to justify the methods and the predominance of the commercial class which gradually came to power in the period following the Renaissance and Reformation. Seeing the opportunities which lay before them to take advantage of the new geographical and technological discoveries, merchants and manufacturers rejected the traditional ideas which would have hampered them in their pursuit of gain, and asserted the right of the individual to free enterprise in the acquisition of wealth. They challenged the right of absolute monarchy to rule independently of their consent, thus evolving the doctrines of political liberty, and they next denied the right of the State, however controlled, to interfere with the economic freedom of the individual in the pursuit of gain, thus laying down the doctrine of laissez faire. In place of a society resting on status they substituted one the basis of which was freedom of contract between individuals. They persuaded themselves further that the freedom of the individual to pursue his own personal gain would promote the general welfare of society.

 THE DOCTRINE OF LIBERALISM.

 THUS Professor Laski sees liberalism as fundamentally a doctrine intended to secure to the middle classes their right to property and their right to pursue individual gain. Its more idealistic exponents did not of course limit its benefits to the middle classes, but Professor Laski lays stress on the fact that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the founders of liberalism refused to extend their theories to cover the working classes in cases where middle class interests might be affected. Thus they energetically rejected the claim of the working classes to participation in the government of the State, and they denied them the right of combination against employers (which alone could give them equality of bargaining power) as being an infringement of the liberty of contract between employer and employee. In the end they were prepared to grant political rights to the working classes, but only on the understanding that rights of property were not to be interfered with — it probably never occurred to them that such rights would be questioned. Now that they are being questioned, Professor Laski notes a disposition on the part of the middle classes to throw overboard their liberal doctrines in favour of Fascism and similar anti-liberal theories. This supports the thesis that liberalism was intended to maintain middle-class interests. 

THE LONELY FURROW OF THE IDEALIST.

 HOWEVER, the thesis is one from which many people will violently dissent. They can point out that John Hampden was not a business man, and that many of the aristocracy fought against Charles I. They can point out that Quesnay, who founded the French school of Physiocrats, who propounded the doctrine of freedom of trade, was not a trader but a court physician. There is no doubt that John Stuart Mill when he wrote of liberty had much more in mind than to make the world safe for capitalists. And so on. But ideas have a habit of being carried further than their origin necessitated, and their extensions are accepted so long as they do not conflict too strongly with their essential basis. The notion of individual liberty is one which may well arouse the enthusiasm of a John Stuart Mill, and economic liberalism had practical advantages and triumphs which might easily persuade a man of its value even though he was not engaged in commerce himself. But theories do not gain general acceptance unless they meet the needs of a large and important class, and the idealist will plough a lonely furrow unless his ideas are such that the practical man of affairs can use them to further his own self-interest. An example was given above of how the doctrine of liberalism could be applied to maintain the position of the middle classes against other classes. On the whole Professor Laski's view would seem to be incontrovertible, and his essay constitutes a masterly analysis of the basis of the dominating political thought of the last four centuries.

W.N.H.

Telegraph (Brisbane, Qld.), 29 July 1936 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article181911415