OLD SCHOOL LIBERALS

Is his eloquent and inspiring address to the members of the Young South Australian Patriotic Association this week Mr. Symon said some true and unexceptionable things excellently well, and some controversial things with the persuasive skill of a practised rhetorician. The address was made to an association which, from its attitude towards certain parties in the State and radical political movements, is often regarded as conservative in character, but it might have been delivered with equal appropriateness before a body animated by avowedly liberal aims. Mr. Symon naturally had regard to the fact that his audience consisted largely of young men. When the association was formed we pointed out that if it ever became truly representative of the youth of this community there was little fear of its identification with the principles of a cold and hard conservatism. The reason is obvious. Youth is, by nature, the period of the greatest activity and enthusiasm, of the most abundant faith, of the highest and most generous aspirations, and of the least respect for institutions and traditions which are chiefly justified by authority and age. Mr. Symon has apparently no wish to misdirect into unsuitable channels the energies proper to the youthful period of life, or at any rate to urge their suspension or limitation. He assumes that the association will be a militant body. He wants it to be on the right side. He invites it to take arms and "to fight under the standard of a robust, high-spirited, and magnanimous democracy." Such words would ring like a trumpet-call in the ears of an assembly of acknowledged liberals. To conservatives, as the word is usually understood, they can have but little meaning, since it is of the nature of conservatism to quarrel with democracy and all its works, and to doubt the possibility of its possession of those estimable qualities which Mr. Symon would associate with its movements. The burden of the most pronounced anti-democratic utterances in this city of late has been that democracy is a hopeless failure. The fact seems to be that Mr. Symon belongs to the old school of Liberals of whom Mr. John Morley is at present perhaps the most prominent representative. The old liberalism, as Mr. Gladstone observed some time ago, was principally engaged in the task of emancipation. It took shackles off the individual, and then left him to his own devices. It had not embraced the social idea which is the mainspring of the newer liberalism, and in whose name—for the furtherance of social interests—more fundamental changes and even new restrictions are proposed. The older liberalism, built up on the economics of Mill and Spencer, has little sympathy with the militant new spirit. It views with impatience and apprehension that demand for constructive legislation which is the latest form that democratic activity has assumed. It is much less conscious of the inadequacy of existing social arrangements than it is fearful of the disastrous consequences of political experiments on novel lines. To a liberal of the old school a community regulated, or, as he would say, dragooned under the sanction of State-socialistic theories is no less unjustifiably oppressed than it would have been under the unauthorised despotisms which have been happily swept away. Such objectors take no account of the difference of the aim and method or the sounder foundation of the authority; or, if they do, they deny the right of a social ideal to fulfil itself at the cost of abridging the area of individual freedom, or of a majority to impose its will beyond the point necessary for security against aggression. The social contract is to them merely an agreement for mutual defence. Mr. Gladstone has admitted that the new liberalism will completely break through the barriers of laissez faire, but he feels that this is none of his work. The responsibility of constructive legislation in the future must rest on the new men. Mr. Symon is evidently untouched by the modern democratic spirit even in its most moderate forms, but he sees that it possesses vitality, and he holds it to be his duty to raise the danger signal. Judging from the tenor of his address Mr. Symon's liberalism is of the sort of which the most characteristic exemplars are to be seen in Tennyson and Carlyle. The lesson of Tennyson is reverence for law, tender respect for established institutions, and the peaceful anti-revolutionary ordering of progress from precedent to precedent. That, as he says, has been the happy English method, as distinguished from the "red fool fury of the Seine." The teaching of Carlyle, on the other hand, is a curious commingling of the elements of hero-worship and of the self-respecting development of individual character.
States cannot be great without great men, to whom obedience is the duty of the average man, but while the average man thus subordinates himself to superior and external authority existing by its own right he is to show by his own moral elevation that he does not exist for law at all. This philosophy alike justifies the political dictator and applauds personal liberty— two doctrines which are not easily reconciled in practice. Mr. Symon tells us that the safety of democracy lies in its virtue—in its respect for the magistracy and submission to well armed government and restraint. From this no true democrat will dissent—give him his conditions. The law to which he submits must have earned his respect by its derivation from the will of the people. The full-armed government must owe its powers to the same source. Restraints with the like authority, even if irksome, will be cheerfully accepted. Landor has truly said that the restraints which a free people lays upon itself are sacrifices made to liberty, and a nation never exerts a more beneficent or a greater power than in imposing them. But democracy requires as close an approximation to the conditions we have mentioned as may be humanly possible. The idea of tranquil submission to a well-armed government is admirable if it means that the government is armed with the power of the people for the good of the people, the people being the judges of their own needs. There is no public virtue in respect for institutions otherwise founded, or directed with other ends. Democracy seeks to abolish the notion that the government and the governed are two different things. A recent writer, Mr. Havelock Ellis, has referred to the old fallacy which frequently persists even under the forms of democratic rule, that there is an immutable distinction between a governing class and a governed. In a real democracy every man must be a member of the government, but such a democracy is unattainable without at least two processes—"on the one hand, a large and many-sided education; on the other, the reasonable organisation of life." That there is a Carlyle element in Mr. Symon's political philosophy is evident from his approving citation of Lowell's dictum that " the first duty of a nation is the production of great men." This sounds well, but it means little. The first duty of a nation is to make itself free and to establish conditions that will tend to its happiness and prosperity. Great men will choose their own time of coming—it is their way. They are among the inscrutable phenomena of social existence. There is no known method of producing them, and all artificial nurseries of greatness have signally failed. Great men are welcome when they do come ; but meantime we can hardly afford to neglect the mediocrity which composes the immensely preponderating mass of human nature. It is for the average man that all governments, all religions, all social and ethical systems are devised; and the principal aim as well as duty of democracy is to see that the conditions by which he is surrounded do him justice.

 The Advertiser 12 September 1893. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article25663990