PAP AND FETTERS.

By Ivan.

During the last couple of years a slow duel has been going on—away yonder in the centre of opinion and criticism, which is somewhere in London, presumably— between the champion of the now unfashionable individualist, or self help, school, and the new radicals. These latter advocate state socialism with more or less consistency, and against state socialism—"the new Toryism" he calls it—Mr. Herbert Spencer has shot certain arrows into the air, muttering the while that he did not care where they hit or who picked them up. Of his four articles, contributed to the Contemporary Review, and republished under the title of The State versus The Man, he has said that he expected few people to read them, and no one to pay much attention to them.

Nevertheless, this forlorn tract of Mr. Spencer's has acted as an excuse and encouragement for much grumbling against certain proposed legislation—witty grumbling such as Lord Bramwell's and Mr. Auberon Herbert's, and puzzle-headed indignation, such as the English Conservative press now deals in. It has in a quite unexpected fashion stuck in the throat of public opinion (which, having a voice, must own a throat also) like a fishbone. To answer Mr. Herbert Spencer became advisable, not so much because an exposure of the folly and injustice of state socialism was an injunction to restrain socialistic legislation in the British Parliament, but because some handy and portable replica to the grumblers were sadly needed. M. Emile de Laveleye volunteered to answer Mr. Herbert Spencer. M. de Láveleye is a famous writer and thinker, and as he has written in opposition to some "socialistic" proposals, he seemed to be a proper arbitrator in a debate of this kind. To the Contemporary Review for April he contributes a long "reply" to The State versus The Man, which is not a "reply" at all. It is rather an appeal to Mr. Spencer, somewhat in this fashion—"Why, sir, if certain things which you say are true, certain other dreadful things are also true. Do you really mean them?" M. de Laveleye's reply is, however, a very interesting dissertation on sundry questions raised by The State versus the Man, and is especially noteworthy us showing the difficulties that a thoughtful man falls into the moment he faces a certain position and a certain set of facts which bear on social and political questions, and behind which Mr. Spencer is supposed to stand. It indicates also the line which a triumphant democracy would be likely to take in England, illustrates the divergence in respect to social and economic legislation between the old liberals and the new, and shows why this divergence was really inevitable.

As the greater part of M. de Laveleye's paper deals with views not held by Mr. Spencer. Much of it is, therefore, irrelevant, but it is, on the whole, well worth reading. For one thing, because the new school of English Radicals, under whose official guidance democracy hopes to carry all before it in England, seem to have no intention of trying to prove their case. Unlike the old Liberals, who supported every proposal by endless argument, copious treatises, essays, speeches, and so forth—the new Radicals do not mean to waste time in those exercises, but instead, as soon as they get their majorities, to set about legislating at once—deciphering for the people their "natural rights" to a fair income, setting the owners of property to "ransom," &.c., &.c. Except, therefore, from M. de Láveleye—who makes himself its apologist in that high court where reason is supposed to hold sway—we shall probably get little justification of the new radicalism—or socialism-and-water—which is coming.

It is interesting to all friends of and believers in democracy to observe under what auspices English democracy now enters into its inheritance. The arena has been assiduously levelled and rolled and swept for its coming, and now we can perceive, waiting for it

". . . . A company with heated eyes
Expecting where a fountain should arise. "

The kingly power (so we shall all have to learn when Mr Gillies issues his standard history books, and, like Queen Elizabeth, looses " my good subjects " Hume, Macaulay, Froude, and that company who have been in prison), has long ceased to act as a check on " progress." That "governing class," which in England, according to Lecky's estimate, has hitherto been "entrusted under the restrictions of really popular government, with the chief share of active administration, whose interests are most permanently and seriously bound up with those of the nation, which has most leisure and most means of instruction, most to lose and least to gain by dishonesty, and upon which has been thrown the chief political leadership of the people"—seems to have completely worn out its mandate. To-day, greatly given to cigarette smoking, pigeon shooting, dry champagne, and new ways indescribable, that class no longer believes in itself ; if it still possesses the genius of command, it has more than once shown itself wanting in the loyalty to follow a capable leader, and courage to assert its constitutional position. Apart from all that, it is quite open to any one to assert that the need for a special governing class ceased when the population acquired education, intelligence, and a general smattering of political knowledge. Thus toward the installation of democracy a coalition of national forces has been long working. It was the hope of not a few that England would offer the spectacle of a democracy of the same robust, free, manly, and law abiding type which Britons beyond sea have adopted, but it now seems as if the latter day chieftains of English democracy were not going that way at all. Modern liberalism—or rather the new radicalism which has laid its eggs in the liberal nest for the motherly, cackling Whigs to hatch—has doubled back on its tracks in a remarkable way, it soon wearied of freedom, although freedom used to be the watch word of Liberals everywhere. To-day democracy in England hobbles on to the arena propped on the one side by its wetnurse, and on the other by its jailer. Pap and fetters constitute the equipment of the "new" radicalism.

That radicalism is really a very raw and novel creed—and that neither Pap nor Fetters were originally part of liberalism —becomes clear when we glance at the views of such a brilliant champion of advanced liberalism as the late H. T. Buckle. Benjamin Disraeli described the late Sir Archibald Alison as " Mr. Wordy, who wrote a book in 20 volumes to prove that Providence was on the side of the Tories." Had Buckle lived to complete his History he would have devoted many volumes to prove that the "party of progress " had finally "bailed up" Providence and the Tories united. It has been estimated that over five hundred and seventy three thousand leading articles in liberal journals have been inspired by passages in Buckle's History of Civilisation in England. Although criticised from certain points of view by liberals themselves, it is a text book of liberalism of the good old high and dry pattern, and it indicates throughout a simple theory of the social and political history of the human race, which is as follows: —Man in his struggles to be perfect has had three principal foes — religion, aristocracy, and war. The sacerdotal, the governing, and the military classes formed, as it were, three warts on humanity's nose, and the main idea running through Buckle's work is that if they could be cut off humanity would be both good looking and happy.

Buckle stuffed his mind with vast stores of erudition, as a portmanteau is crammed with shirts and coats. But the portmanteau never assimilates any of its contents, and the dry and narrow instincts of his school prevented Buckle from seeing that when scepticism has said its last word, there is still an abiding human need, and craving for some communion with a world, locked to science, but of which the church has some tidings to tell. Where the "governing classes " were concerned, again, he overlooked the varying but yet most symmetrical process by which they had at each epoch been selected to govern, and unconsciously taking for granted that England had always been stocked with people about as intelligent as the £10 householder of his own day, he did not see that unless the governing class had first governed, the "making of England" would have been impossible. Buckle always does what he convicts the early protectionists of doing, with respect to England's commercial rivals; having no idea of utilising social institutions for the general good, he coldly inculcates that the impoverishing and degrading of one class is absolutely necessary for the prosperity of another. As for war, Buckle wrote about 30 years ago, at the time of the Crimean war (which event gave his theories something of a twinge) and he never became acquainted with the " intellectual progress" made in recent years by the general staff of the German army —to say nothing of our own Lord Wolseley in his pyjamas and jack boots. Buckle concluded that, owing to the "advance of civilisation," war was dying out everywhere. All through his book however, he preaches that it is "the activity of the human intellect" which was finally to bruise the head of the priest, the aristocrat, the warrior, and to save humanity. We shall see that the modern radical disagrees totally with Buckle's worship of mere intellectual progress, and also why he is driven to do so.

The seventh chapter of the first volume of the History of Civilisation in England describes the services which "the great principle of scepticism" has rendered to mankind in ridding them of their priestly foes. Chapter IV. of the same volume shows how a state of society "in which military glory is most esteemed, and military men are most respected, is one of frightful debasement," and points out that "as the intellectual acquisitions of the people increase, and the pacific classes begin to arise, their love of war will diminish." The modern radical has to ruefully confess that this is not particularly true, and we begin to see more of the line of cleavage between his notions and Buckle's. Like ashes in the mouth again are those opinions of Buckle's about the softening and beneficent effect of political economy, which he actually ventures to call " a noble study." "Even those," he says, "by whom it is understood, seem to have paid little attention to the way in which, by its influence the interests of peace, and therefore of civilisation have been directly promoted." It is as though a man came preaching some of the old second-century heresies, to hear a "liberal" speak thus of a "science" which, as we all know, treats of "freedom of contract," "competition rents," the "rights of property," and other dreadful conservative things.

Buckle's views on the functions of government were quite unlike the new radical creed. In his fifth chapter he says:—" To maintain order, to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak, and to adopt certain precautions respecting the public health, are the only services which any government can render to the interests of civilisation." And further on—" It is absurd—it would be a mockery of all sound reasoning—to abscribe to legislation any share in progress, or to expect any benefit from future legislators, except that sort of legislation which consists in undoing the work of their predecessors." Because the leaders of thought in England had worked on these lines, and wrung from the kings, priests, nobles, and soldiers a series of reforms or great political achievements which "took power from particular sections of society to confer it on the people at large," Buckle and his school looked forward confidently and enthusiastically to the future of humanity. He distrusted moral progress, because the church claimed a share of that. He died in the faith that intellectual progress would save the nation, and his great scheme for an exhaustive History, we know, remained unfinished.

One can hardly help wondering what attitude Buckle would have assumed— had he lived—toward the modern instructors of democracy in England. He and, indeed, we might with some reservation couple with him Mill, Cairnes, Cliffe-Leslie, Bagehot, Newmarch, and Fawcett, would find at once that modern radicals hope nothing from "intellectual progress;" indeed, they distrust it greatly, and it is no wonder, for their new Socialism does not thrive in the atmosphere of criticism, and gives plenty of scope for ridicule. The attempt of the Radical party to disfranchise the universities recently proves their conviction that men of intellect will not be their friends in the future ; indeed, they mean to look in quite another direction for support. We find Mr. John Morley denouncing newspapers, the newspapers published in London chiefly, because there men lose that moral inspiration which is strewn about the provinces. A liberal who came to earth from the place liberals go to would also find that free speech was not now liked, and in the House of Commons had been greatly curtailed by new rules. Then what would our returned liberal think of such a book as the Limits of Individual Liberty— the work of Mr. Francis Montague, an Oxford fellow, highly recommended as a class book for the new democracy? It says— "Unqualified freedom necessarily implies unlimited competition,. . . and the state of affairs growing out of unlimited freedom and unlimited competition did not merely offend the taste or the morality of a few—it made the many suffer until they doubted whether it must endure for ever. Our modern socialism expresses the practical revolt against the doctrine of negative" (he means positive) "freedom." Socialism and freedom as understood in England rest, he says, on "irreconcilable postulates." Even freedom of discussion, Mr. Montague says, may be forbidden by the state, for the publishing of an opinion is an act not essentially differing from other acts. It is no wonder that Mr. Herbert Spencer has called this "the new Toryism "

After reading so far, our liberal of the old school, who had ascended to earth to see how the "new democracy" shaped, would probably want to go back. For no place set apart for the detention of sceptics could possibly be more uncomfortable than an England under the new "coercive system," fathered by Mr. Montague and his friends. They preach, indeed, the doctrine of Pap and Fetters. The stepfather "State," conceived by them, is to provide nearly everything that a man (or a woman) wants, and the which they would, if left alone, struggle with their neighbours to procure. Already a Royal commission inquires into the housing of the poor, by and by it shall extend its inquiries to the clothing of the poor also, and the "bitter cry of shoeless London" be set to political music. As for the girls, they will be entitled to state husbands when old enough. Mr. Joseph Chamberlain snarls out his blessing on such schemes. His new House of Commons is to give away many things, hitherto procurable by individual effort, and to prevent many acts, the doing of or abstaining from which has hitherto been decided on by each individual conscience. This leaves no one either free—or able to fight for his own hand. And so it is to continue until the people of England consist of an enormous population of tame and decrepid slaves bossed by a brotherhood of deformed and half witted philanthropists.

By what process have the new Radicals come to commit themselves to proposals which must end in the bringing about of such a millennium as that? Why have they such a quarrel with the old liberal doctrines of freedom and self help? Mr. Montague in his Limits of Individual Liberty, partly tells us, and M. de Laveleye's grand remonstrance with Herbert Spencer in the Contemporary Review completes the tale.

What has happened seems to be this. In the interval between Buckle's day and our day, the views associated with the name of Darwin have become familiar. There has arisen a school of sociologists, who look upon political and social phenomena as the result of the same process of evolution which is at work all through the realm of nature. Haeckel holds some such views, and Mr. Herbert Spencer is supposed to hold them, indeed, M. de Laveleye accuses him of having preached "Darwinism " in one of his books, written in 1851, although Darwin's Origin of Species was not published till 1859. There is no doubt that at first liberals of all degrees of advancement heartily welcomed Darwin's discoveries. It was considered that the theory of evolution furnished another cartridge to fire into the body of the priest, already grievously wounded. Gradually, however, there stood out certain awkward consequences of the theory that all states and conditions of "life" on this globe of ours imply a fierce and unceasing "struggle" between the weak and the strong, between the fit and the unfit. Liberals came to reflect that if this "progress of civilisation," for which they had been working so arduously, meant the production of millions of people, emancipated from kings, priests, nobles and warriors, and yet bound by on inexorable law to struggle incessantly for "life," until the fittest was selected and the unfittest got rid of, a complete " right about face" was absolutely in dispensable. It is not too much to say that the whole views and opinions of latter day radicals in Great Britain have been forced into a new direction, owing to Darwin's discoveries. They have refused to face the consequences of liberal principles plus evolution, and when we consider that "natural selection" tends year by year to produce a milder, softer, and more humane type of Briton, we can understand their repugnance.

Of course, it was open to those radicals who shrink from the grim deductions of "sociology," to deny that human history and conditions can be really moulded by evolution. Mr Montague makes an attempt to do this. He says evolution is all very well for animals and plants, they are subject to physical laws, but human society is not a mere physical organism. "Tommy," said the Pharisaical parent, in the story, "leave off whipping your top on the verandah, don't you know it's Sunday. If you want to whip your top, go into the back yard." "Mamma," said Tommy, "aint it Sunday in the back yard." No doubt it was Sunday there also, and evolution is at work everywhere. The "struggle for life," the "survival of the fittest," the selection of certain types of men and women, and the disappearance of others, go on wherever life is lived by any creatures. Liberals, however, do not like to accept such conclusions. Why should they? M. de Laveleye, in the Contemporary Review, does not, like Mr Montague, boldly attempt to exclude man from the operations of nature's law ; yet he also helps to show how wide is the gulf between Buckle's liberalism and the new liberalism. After a little parenthesis to show that Mr. Chamberlains talk about "natural rights" is "really not sense," his main contention is that the notion of the Darwinian law of evolution governing human affairs is so frightful, that we Christians must reject it. The law of the survival of the fittest among men is "not in the true interest of humanity." "The spirit of Christianity " abhors it, and he quotes an author who says that if sociology be right, then "Jesus acted in vain." Here we see a strange thing. Advanced liberals have been bellowing out for nearly a century that there was no Christ at all, and now they appeal to Him to "smash-up" Darwin. M. de Laveleye crawls under the altar to escape the impact of the dread forces which his scientific friends have revealed. Buckle disestablished "moral forces" in favour of "intellectual progress," but the modern radical is particularly strong on moral sentiments, and takes all sorts of improper liberties with Holy Writ. M. de Láveleye's article in the Contemporary Review is as full of texts as the walls of a Sunday school at Christmas, and such are the plastic charms of the French language that few French authors can resist, even when writing in English, bringing in the name of le Christ, when least expected. M. de Láveleye holds that the law of the survival of the fittest "will never be applied to human societies, until the sentiments of charity and justice which Christianity engraves on our hearts are completely eradicated." One tries to realise Christianity engraving anything on the heart of the new House of Commons!

I notice that M. de Laveleye constantly assumes that the sociologists propose to "apply" the Darwinian law to existing society. This seems a misconception, as though one should talk of "applying" the laws of gravity to clock weights , the sociologists merely say that the Darwinian law must and will apply itself, whether we like it or not. Mr. Herbert Spencer fears that is true, and in the meantime he says that all the new legislative scorn of the laws of gravity and all such proposals as M. de Láveleye's "to make use of the power of the state for the establishment of greater equality among men in proportion to their personal merits," merely means doing "new injustices for the purpose of mitigating the mischief produced by old injustices." The extreme inexpediency of "applying" the Darwinian law is another of M. de Láveleye's arguments. And as to its being a "law" at all, he says that the laws which govern human societies emanate from man's will. He does not tell us what man's will emanates from, while the sociologists say that "man's will" at any particular epoch is the result of the survival of certain people with certain ideas, and the destruction of those who hold opposite views.

With much justice M. de Laveleye observes that before the Darwinian "struggle for life" obtained full sway, we should have to abolish the present laws against theft and murder. He forgets, however, that he and his friends are already doing much towards the requisite abolition. At the end of his work on Primitive Property, he himself proposes a scheme of wholesale robbery, which, if carried out, would be a great abolition of the law against theft.

It is clear enough that the new English democracy will not be on cordial terms with science, and we can see whence their distrust of "intellectual progress" arises. It is a bad look out for English democracy that, in the first place, so many thinking men call the pap it offers poison, and, in the next place, that the fetters it wants to put on everybody's limbs are so utterly unsuited to the English climate.

The Argus 13 June 1885,