BRITISH LIBERALISM.

Another severe blow to the prestige of the Liberal Party in Great Britain is reported to-day in the defection of Lieutenant Commander J. M. Kenworthy, for many years one of its most active members. He has joined the Labor Party, because he finds the body with which he had been associated since he began his political career rent from top to bottom, and no longer as he believes capable of usefulness. It has lost its leader in the Earl of Oxford, and is apparently yet unable to agree on a successor, and what, in Lieutenant- Commander Kenworthy's eyes, is a graver disaster, it is encumbered by Moderates, or Whigs, who are alarmed by what they deem the ultra-radical character of Mr. Lloyd Georges land and other proposals. Unlike Lord Oxford, the member for Hull is plainly of opinion that for the historic party he has quitted there is no future, that it is so water logged by the deadweight of unprogressiveness it has to carry as scarcely to be able to float, and that it is a waste of energy and time to remain longer with it. Therefore, he has decided to shift himself and his luggage to another vessel, his only hope being that the old craft will be abandoned by other active minded members of the crew, including Mr. Lloyd George, before it sinks. Lieutenant-Commander Kenworthy is not the first to conceive and act upon this view, nor is he likely to be the last. The disappearance of the Liberal Party and its replacement by the Labor Party has been a favorite prediction with the spokesmen of the latter ever since Labor became a distinct factor in British politics, and it figured very prominently in the utterances of Mr. Sidney Webb and others at the last general election. They spoke of it in a tone of exultation as the removal of one great barrier to the triumph of Socialism, and perhaps it was participation in this belief which prompted in Sir W. Joynson-Hicks an expression of regret at the apparent doom of a great party, and of misgiving as to the probable effect on political life of the disappearance of the "traditional organ of the middle classes."
All this might have happened in days when there was no third party to complicate the voting and profit by the split between the two wings of the Liberal Party, practically defeating both at the polls. It would really seem as though the time were coming when Liberalism can no longer maintain an independent existence, and that its only hope lies in coloring more or less the two parties into which it seems destined to be absorbed. Its doctrine therefore has not ceased to be worthy of attention. It has been its boast to base itself on some fixed principle which, in starting a recent correspondence in the "Times" on "True Liberalism," Sir Ernest Benn correctly interpreted as "the promotion of a condition of things in which the individual can function to the best advantage." This is in keeping with Mr. Harold Cox's definition of Liberalism as a belief in individual Liberty as opposed to State Socialism. It is part of the gospel of "True Liberalism" that the wealth of the community "cannot be increased by the suppression of the individual and the substitution for him of the State." Give every man by education, and in other ways, the fullest possible chance to rise by his exertion, and then leave him alone, expresses in a sentence the doctrine of Liberalism. This is not a doctrine of laissez faire. Laissez faire, pure and simple, would leave the citizen to create his own chance as well as profit by it, but it is in the provision of a chance that "True Liberalism" finds the proper function of the State. The application of the doctrine is not always easy. "One of the first problems in legislation," said Burke, "is to determine what the State ought to take upon itself to direct by the public wisdom, and what it ought to leave, with as little interference as possible, to individual exertion." In the great coal difficulty the proper distinction was made by the Commission of Enquiry, and it is the crowning disaster of the greatest industrial crisis in British history that the suggested solution was not accepted by the parties to the dispute or the Government. Had it been adopted all concerned would have had to content themselves with a reorganisation of the industry effected with the help of the State, which, while leaving it unnationalised, would have placed it on a sounder basis than it has ever yet occupied. The gospel of liberalism, as expounded by its leading stalwarts, is not to leave things to settle themselves. When Mr. J. M. Keyne, as an exponent of Collectivist thought, writes a book on "The End of Laissez Faire," Mr. Harold Cox, as a Liberal, replies—'"Like all other principles of human action, laissez faire has its limitations; but there is nothing to justify the idea that laissez faire is yet dead, or that the world has anything to gain by substituting universal State control for liberty of private action.'' Perhaps lieutenant-Commander Kenworthy's objection to liberalism is that, unlike Socialism, which starts with the doctrine of the public ownership of the "means of production," it has no well-defined programme, but contents itself with applying to every case as it arises its general principle of so ordering the environment that the individual can "function to the best advantage." But, as we are reminded by Professor J. H. Morgan in his life of John Morley, it is only in comparatively recent years that "social reform" has entered the sphere of British politics. During the greater part of Gladstone's career Liberalism concerned itself with the spiritual emancipation of man—with education, suffrage, and like questions—and his economic welfare was not specially studied. "From 1832 to 1867 the Government of England was exclusively in the hands, not only of the well-led but of the well-to-do." and these classes are very apt to overlook the claims of the hungry. No party has yet done its full duty towards those who were formerly what Carlyle designated the "dumb millions," but Liberalism has had at least one claim on their gratitude. It has through a progressive widening of the franchise, given them a political voice.

  The Advertiser  OCTOBER 26,  1920.