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 PRICE OF FREEDOM.

 Vigilance and Faith in Democracy

Professor Laski's Warning

"The essential duty of British Socialists at the present time is to work for the conquest of a Parliamentary majority in a straightforward, constitutional way," says Professor Harold Laski, in a special article in the London "Daily Herald."

THE collapse of democratic systems in the post-war world has naturally tended to weaken the faith of all students of politics in both their validity and staying power.

Certainly nothing is gained from concealing from ourselves that they confront a crisis of the gravest magnitude, and that no realistic observer can doubt the profundity of the challenge they encounter.

But it is one thing to admit this; and it is quite a different thing to assume that the case for parliamentary democracy should be allowed to go by default.

Socialists, of all people, have the obligation to recognise the solid advantages it represents over most of its alternatives, and the justification they have for defending it as, so far in our experience, the surest path available to the conquest of political power.

A country which abandons Parliamentarism does so under conditions that involve a revolution either of the Left or of the Right.

In the former circumstance both the approach to and the maintenance of the revolutionary government depend upon conditions unlikely of realisation save in the aftermath of unsuccessful war.

European Examples.

This has been the experience both of Russia and Germany, and the strength of organised government in the Allied countries stands in striking contrast.

It would be folly to throw away the solid prospects we confront for an alternative that might well destroy the prospects of democracy in the next generation.

This, of course, applies not less to the idea of force used on behalf of reaction. The use of it is possible and in that event, no doubt, we should be ruled, in our special English fashion, by a Fascist dictatorship.

But only economic prosperity would justify this adventure to the masses ; and in the ill-will it would encounter we are entitled to doubt whether that prospect is even thinkable.

Major Disasters.

Were it to occur, every Socialist ought to realise from Continental experience that, compared with the habits of a Parliamentary system, this would be a major disaster. It would end trade-union freedom; it would destroy liberty of the press; it would destroy the prospect of any Socialist propaganda save in an obscure and underground form.

Almost certainly the masses would pay the price of its establishment by the loss of all social legislation passed in the last generation.

The whole effort of such a regime, as in Italy and Germany, would be to consolidate the powers of the propertied classes at the expense of the workers.

Experience Teaches.

The experience of Italy and Germany makes it clear:

(i) That this consolidation can, in terms of modern administrative technique, be very rapidly effected, and

(ii) That it can postpone the prospect of successful assault upon itself for a considerable period.

Duty of Socialists.

I believe, therefore, that the essential duty of Socialists at the present time is to work for the conquest of a Parliamentary majority in a straight-forward, constitutional way. Once that majority is obtained, it is their duty to use it for fully Socialist purposes, and if challenged to protect its right to such a use by all the means at its disposal.

It seems to me clear that such an attitude is far more likely to secure the purposes of Socialism than any alternative strategy.

It throws the onus of conflict, if there be a desire for it, on our opponents at a period when they are least likely to be successful in its promotion.

It rallies to the side of a Socialist Government that great body of middle opinion which is habituated to a belief in law and order. It splits, therefore, the ranks of the enemies of Socialism by compelling them, in circumstances where legal authority is hostile to them, to stake their cause upon a gambler's throw.

These, I think, are the circumstances, in which a reaction of violence from the Right has the least chance of obtaining its objectives.

Appeal To Reason.

My argument, up to this point, has been one built essentially upon strategic considerations. But there are other reasons of importance which make the defence of the Democratic system an urgent matter for Socialists.

There is an unfortunate tendency abroad, both on the extreme Right and on the extreme Left, to belittle the importance of reason and persuasion in the settlement of human affairs.

We speak of war as inevitable; the Right to do so on the ground of some alleged need of human nature, the Left as a necessary consequence of a capitalist society. We speak of dictatorship as inevitable; the Right do so because they see no other way of arresting the progress of Socialism, the Communists because they insist that only force can break the will of the opponents of Communism.

False Assumption.

The underlying assumption of this attitude is the futility of any method save that of force in the settlement of human differences.

I do not myself deny that there are occasions in the history of the world when these differences are so final that there is, in fact, no alternative but force to their settlement.

But I do not believe that the use of force is likely to be successful unless its employment is related to a previously widespread conviction of its necessity; and it is then at least a matter for discussion as to whether it will be necessary to employ it.

The enforcement of the Peace of Versailles by the victorious allies is an instance of the use of force to settle a dispute: I do not think it can be called a striking success.

The Case of Hitler.

The regime of Hitler is an example of the forcible imposition of a philosophy upon a population 13 millions of whom at least dissent vehemently from its implications; and it is, I suggest, obvious to most thinking persons that it will provoke its own violent overthrow sooner or later.

Because the use of reason is the high-road to the consolidation of power it seems to me urgent to rely upon it until it has been demonstrated that no attention to, or respect for, its conclusions is likely to be displayed by our opponents.

No Blind Faith.

This does not, in my judgment, imply that the task of the Labor Movement must be founded upon a blind faith in the hypotheses of democracy.

The old maxim that perpetual vigilance is the price of freedom was never so obviously true as in our day.

But it does mean that Socialists, with the example of Italy and Germany before them, have the duty to take freedom seriously, and to recognise that the secret of its persistence is courage in those whose business is its defence.

Democracy the Goal.

The way to lose freedom is to be careless of its importance, to spurn its opportunities, to belittle its significance. There has been a good deal of that temper in the Labor Movement; above all, as in the case of India and the unemployed, an inertia before attacks upon its foundations which has encouraged the reactionaries to go on with their work of destruction.

It is useless to deny that the next years are likely to be a period of momentous challenge to Socialists. They may well have to prove their faith on the battlefield. At least let them remember that the goal at which they aim is a democratic society; they cannot abandon their struggle to secure it while the power remains to keep the flame of reason alight.

Daily Standard (Brisbane, Qld.), 13 July 1933 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article183074262

A PESSIMISTIC OUTLOOK

 "Democracy in Crisis," by Harold J. Laski London: Allen and Unwin Ltd) 11/3

The critical position of democratic government is Professor Laski's theme. In the United States, he points out, banking, power, oil, transport, coal—all the essential services upon which the public welfare depends,—are vested interests in private hands; in Poland, Hungary, Rumania, and Jugoslavia the pretence of Parliamentary democracy has been abandoned; in Japan a military oligarchy is in charge; Spain has revived a Parliamentary regime, "but who can call it stable?" The South American republics continue their unenviable record of casual revolution; China is the prey of bandits; and Turkey and Persia have changed from dictatorships on the Eastern to dictatorships on the Western model. Only the British Dominions, Holland, Belgium, and the Scandinavian countries remain, with Switzerland, at all firmly wedded to a Parliamentary system; but the economic position of Australia makes the persistence of parliamentarainism a matter upon which doubt is permissible. In explanation of his contention about Australia, Professor Laski says :—" A country mortgaged to absentee creditors cannot easily maintain a high standard of life for the masses and continue to pay the interest on its debt abroad. If it defaults upon the debt its international position becomes dubious; if it meets its obligations a high standard of life becomes inaccessible to all save a small wealthy class. Is it likely that universal suffrage will produce the conditions upon which the security of capitalism depends?" For all the evils that are afflicting the world Professor Laski blames Capitalist democracy and the disturbing effect of the war. Certainty has been replaced by pessimism. The Western way of life is in the melting pot. The ancient East, so long content with a passive aquiescence in the ascendancy of the West, has issued a challenge to those who seek to preserve the conditions of tutelage. Professor Laski makes this ominous addition to this gloomy summary :— 

"The search by the intelligentsia for new canons of behaviour is like nothing so much as the last period of the ancient French regime." Obsessed by his own conception of what is happening, Professor Laski looks for the remedies. The first that he finds is the realisation that the central fact of the age is economic international independence. We should, he advises, try to discover the formulæ of an international society. The sovereign national state should be abrogated and there should be international control of currency, tariffs, migration, foreign investment and conditions of labour. "We are dominated," he declares "by a communal psychology, which thinks essentially in terms of the national state; can we rapidly transfer our thinking to the new plane that an international society implies?" Speaking of Great Britain in particular, he discusses the wisdom of transferring "a capitalist into an egalitarian democracy," and he predicts that the attempt will be made when the Labour party obtains an electoral majority in Parliament with consequences that he himself does not contemplate with equanimity.

Argus (Melbourne, Vic.), 8 July 1933 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article4747508

SOCIALISM LOOKS AT UNIVERSITY

 SUBVERSION BY SUBSIDISED PEDANTRY

— PROFESSORS AND PLANNED ECONOMY

(By SOLOMON BRIGG.)

 (No, 24.)

IN previous articles we have been examining the technique of Capitalism facing this the major crisis of its existence. In turn we have analysed the Fascist experiment, the position of the Press, certain phases of financial control, and the insidious attempt to undermine responsible working-class organisation by suborning responsible working-class executives.

 One of the most recent phases of declining capitalism has been its growing consciousness that an enlightened democracy represents the most serious challenge to the continuance of its exploitation of the masses. In America, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos have brought to literature a recognition of the social necessities of the times, and ripped away the conventional hypocrisy cloaking the vices of a materialistic age.

 In England, Bernard Shaw with his mordant pen has in the "Apple Cart" and similar works, shown the true significance of the social struggle, Harold Laski has remorselessly analysed the political concepts from London University; G. H. D. Cole has advocated Fabianism from the shelter of Oxford; whilst in literature J. Middleton Murry, the late D. H. Lawrence and more recently Aldous Huxley have shown that the intellectuals of the period all realise its deficiencies due to the failure of capitalism to assess true social values.

 Aldous Huxley in "Brave New Worlds" is seen by John Strachey as sending the "long, delicate, probing fingers of his analysis into every corner of capitalist society. Go where you like, 'do what you will,' you will never escape from the smell of ordure and decay." 

That the Australian Government censored this volume from the gifted pen of England's most brilliant young literary giant is thus seen in its true perspective. His Utopia is a repugnant one, machine conceived and machine built, and its automata may well be accepted as the most devastating destructive criticism of the machine age yet essayed in literature. But authority is even more restive under satire than the philippics of its avowed opponents.

 Effective Contribution

 In England the London University has been long a meeting place for intellectuals and social theorists, free to promulgate their views, however dangerous from the point of view of the established order. Such freedom of thought was rightly regarded as the most effective contribution to intellectual democracy achieved in any part of the world. Laski in his recent work, "Democracy in Crisis," felt himself free to pursue his analysis even as far as a consideration of the possible reactions of the Crown itself, and Middleton Murry in the "Adelphi" is free to consider the application of revolutionary Communism to Britain without calling down the wrath of the authorities.

 Professor Albert Einstein, the world's greatest physicist, found sanctuary from the excesses of Nazi-ism in a Chair at Oxford University, and no one questioned his political views prior to his appointment, although everyone recognised that they were not in harmony with present-day Capitalism. Nevertheless, when he appeared in the gallery of the Lords during a debate on the Semitic question, members of that House, models of Conservative propriety, broke the traditions of ages by rising in their places to applaud his appearance.

 Professor Soddy, Professor of Physics at Oxford, feels himself free to advocate radical monetary theories, and even officials of the British Treasury itself, like Mr. R. G. Hawtrey and Dr. Wm. Shaw, are free to enter the field of monetary controversy, expounding heterodox views on occasions in direct opposition  to those of their own department.

 Mr. J. M. Keynes, in his "Essays in Persuasion," finds that "the Economic Problem,  as one may call it for short, the problem of want and poverty, and the economic struggle between classes and nations, is nothing but a frightful muddle, a transitory and unnecessary muddle," but if he held the views of Marx he would still be free to practise his profession at Cambridge without restraint. So Marx himself, after conflicts in Prussia and expulsion from Paris, found sanctuary in London, and "Das Kapital'" represents the fruits of his research in the British Museum and London libraries.

 This led, no doubt, to his observation that Britain was the only country in which he had been that could achieve the emancipation of the working classes without recourse to violence but could, in fact, achieve it by utilising the constitutional processes at hand.

 All of which leads up to an examination of the position of the intellectuals in Australia, and the attitude adopted by the University administrators to freedom of thought and discussion. The noble conception of the University presented by Cardinal Newman has lost much of its lustre during recent years. As the economic struggle has intensified, Capitalism has realised the necessity of regimenting every agency to assist it in its fight.

 Politically-minded

 So the University as Australia knows it has become politically-minded in the very narrow sense of the term, and we have witnessed of late developments which show that it no longer can be regarded as an institution of scholarship and research, but rather as a very pliant instrument for the cultivation of a ''correct attitude." It is, indeed, significant that professors of history, and economics in particular, who have shown a disposition to examine facts from a detached intellectual standpoint and convey their judgement judicially and honestly to their students, have invariably been frozen out. In the realm of history, obviously, the man who essays a true economic interpretation of the principal phases of historic development and the motives actuating the leading figures engaged, may be regarded as a "social menace" by those desirous of maintaining the present system.

 If he exposes the cant teachings of the schools regarding the many "fights for freedom" and shows how Imperialism meant the exploitation of helpless colored races, how unscrupulous employers were protected by an equally unscrupulous State when exploiting the workers, particularly the women and children, he is immediately out of court— and incidentally out of a job. Obviously the results of such teaching will be quickly apparent in a new attitude in the schools, and instead of the vicious sentimentalism and gross misrepresentations of facts now posturing in the guise of history, the children who are not destined to reach the higher stages of the educational regime will be informed of the truth regarding the mistakes of the past.

 How many are conversant with the terrible story of the transportation of the early industrialists, who had the temerity to advocate some relief from the sufferings of their fellows? The history professor who deals with even the objective data of the Five Years' Plan is regarded as a dangerous influence, although in every other country in the world this experiment is being studied in order to ascertain the benefits of a planned economy, and already its principles have been adopted in a modified form in the tottering citadels of Capitalism itself.

 Banks' Briefs.

 But when we turn to Economics, the position is even more desperate. Indeed, in many of our public institutions we find occupants of teaching positions who are at the same time obviously in receipt of briefs from private banks and large trusts. How they reconcile their dual positions it is impossible to say, as in a crisis like the present they are called upon to interpret the functions of the institutions they are sponsoring, and analyse for their students the effects of the policy being pursued by the financial institutions.

 If they consent to become paid propagandists in a quasi-private capacity, how may they avoid becoming partisans in the lecture hall? But their position becomes altogether intolerable when called upon in their public capacity to act in the advisory capacity as monetary technicians to the State in defining relief measures. As the private banking institutions occupy the keystone of the present monetary arch their views are impossible of acceptance as the unbiassed judgment of independent experts.

 The Chicago economic professor, charged with being the presiding genius behind one of the most lucrative "rackets" in that exotic centre of the modern technique of speedy expropriation, is, if guilty, merely pursuing the present liberal tendencies of his profession to their logical conclusion. The threadbare plaint of the University pedant that he is removed from the worldly taints of commercialism is every day proving a mockery and sham.

 So the lecture hall has become the forum for the political and commercial aspirations of its dons. If it is intellectually and politically dangerous for a University teacher to examine in a controversial manner the teachings and practices of Communism it must be equally intellectually and politically dangerous for another professor to openly espouse the revolutionary philosophy of Fascism, or advocate the destruction of the existing Parliamentary instrument.

 Labor believes that it should be the function of the University teacher to examine untrammelled every modern political, social and economic phenomenon as it arises, without the interference of any group of muddling administrative penguins. The first duty of every teacher must be that he thoroughly examines all the data available, forms his independent judgment, and is then free to indicate his views. Otherwise he must submit all the objective facts in a dispassionate manner pro. and con., and leave his students to formulate their own opinions. Either method properly handled gives to posterity a chance, but there must be no suppression of material facts, as so often happens at present for the sole reason that such do not happen to coincide with the views of the teacher.

Labor however, must be determined that the channels of true education shall not be polluted by capitalistic subversion, by making the various University faculties merely a convenient method of subsidising propaganda to be disseminated there-from through every aspect of public life. Hitler in his expulsion of the University professors because of their refusal to embrace Nazi-ism or because of their religious beliefs, Jewish or Roman Catholic, has revealed the ultimate results of such a policy. 

Repugnant

 Similarly in Russia the historic pronouncement that the intellectuals of the old regime would provide a satisfactory "manure" is repugnant to our ideals of intellectual freedom. The Universities must remain sanctuaries for free and independent research and erudition, and, with the growing reliance upon technicians for guidance in a planned economy, it is more urgently necessary than ever before that they should remain such.

 Unfortunately Labor administrators in the past have often failed to appreciate the necessity of policing these important avenues by failing to secure adequate representation of working class thought on the administrative executives of these institutions. In the future development of our country this must be regarded as one of the most urgent tasks, and no excuse accepted for failing to carry out the declared will of the Movement in this connection. 

 The true conception of the position of the University teacher should be that he is equal in status with our present conception of the position of a Supreme Court Judge. His remuneration must be sufficient to enable him to devote his time entirely to his duties; and, being thus economically independent, a condition of his employment must be that he cannot accept retainers from outside institutions. He is indeed a servant of society and he should be at all times prepared to give his services to solving the problems confronting the State.

 Apart from these conditions, he must be free to advance any views which his studies inform him to be intellectually and socially correct. By adopting these principles, the University might be restored to its former position of honor in the community.

Labor Daily (Sydney, NSW), August 1933 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article236575880

CHARLES DICKENS.

 "The Novelist of Democracy."

IN the sixty-odd years that have passed since Dickens died, nothing has occurred to shake his position as the most popular of English novelists (says Professor Harold Laski, Professor of Political Science in the University of London, in an article in "The Hindu").

 Other men may have seen life more profoundly. There may be justice in the criticism that he was better as observer than as philosopher, and that he succeeds in humour while he largely fails in tragedy. But he created living people who haunt us once we meet them; and nothing less than genius of the first order could have established him as the acknowledged friend of half the world. . . .

 No doubt he rather felt truths than saw them; his insights are supreme flashes of intuitive perception rather than the symmetrical product of ordered analysis. There is rarely a logical pattern, a unified philosophy in his work. He is the man in the street raised to the power of genius. But he is the man in the street with that special and ultimate wisdom which, as Voltaire said, is so much greater than the technical wisdom of all the specialists in knowledge.

 Dickens's characters may lack that reticence in the expression of emotion which characterises the governing class of Great Britain. But it was not a class in which his own interest was profound. He was, in the full sense of the word, democratic. The people he loved, those, too, in whose delineation he was most successful, were the common people; and it is not the least example of his marvellous power accurately to observe character that he grasped at once the essential truth that, with ordinary men and women, language serves for the expression of emotion and not its concealment.

 A Great Social Reformer.

 THERE was a great social reformer in Dickens. The famous claim of Shelley that poets are the legislators of the world is one in which the novelist, also, has a right to share. He saw with clarity and indignation some of the great evils of his day; and the emphasis with which he depicted them had no small share in compelling Governments to give attention to their relief.

 Imprisonment for debt, the indefensible delays of Chancery, the follies of the old Civil Service, the sheer cruelty of the Poor Law system, what the factories really meant in the first generation of the industrial revolution —these he made so clear that men were shamed into dealing with them.

 It is, I think, especially significant that right down to our own time no other novelist has held so long or so firmly the enthusiastic attention of the working class. He knew their inner life as only a man of genius could know it; and he could write of it so that the struggle and effort was transferred from the particular to the universal plane. How great a feat that is no one can realise who does not remember how rarely it has been accomplished. Thackeray, George Eliot, Kingsley, Trollope—not one of them succeeded in dealing with normal working men and women in their ordinary lives with the immediate truth which Dickens achieved.

 His Comic Genius. 

WE speak of his comic genius. But that was not merely the power to evoke the sudden gust of laughter. It was the insight into the essential comedy of life, the delineation of its substance upon a scale so magistral that one is overwhelmed by the power displayed.

 Does fiction show a comic figure more immense and awe-inspiring from Cervantes to our own time, than Mrs. Nickleby? Has the heart of London ever been set out more uniquely or more completely than in Sam Weller? Have the tragic limitations of the practical man ever been so remorsely exposed as in Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby? Or the futility of the official who loves to strut in his little pompous authority than in the Barnacle Family? Has British self complacency ever been so remarkably incarnate as in Mr. Pecksniff?

 All of them, no doubt, are comic figures; but they are comic only in that ultimate sense which makes it akin to the tragedy of the world.

 He accepts the great miracle of life, the phenomenon or sudden conversion; Scrooge is for him the proof that the wicked may be transformed overnight. He is traditional, too, in his optimism, his love of the happy ending, his difficulty in rejecting the view that faith, if it be intense enough, can move mountains. 

The Christmas Spirit.

 IF one had asked Dickens what chief reform he wanted, I think he would have replied that he wished for nothing so much as the prolongation of the Christmas spirit into the other days of the year.

 At bottom, his teaching is the old teaching that the truest sources of happiness are within ourselves. The meek, the generous, the simple-minded, with him are always destined to inherit the earth. It is, alas! untrue; and it is not a gospel for the sophisticated critic, but it explains well enough why Dickens gave such infinite happiness to his readers. For, in the last analysis, all his novels are magnificent fairy tales, in which the heroes and the heroines are not princes and princesses, but ordinary men and women who win their reward.

 Little Dorrit, Mr. Pickwick, Kate Nickleby, Tom Traddles, Mr. Micawber, are the men and women we know. They have to struggle; they meet difficulties; they conquer them. And in their joy over conquest we find our own Utopia. To combine realism with the dream, as he combined them, is one of the rarest imaginative feats in literature.

Queenslander Illustrated Weekly (Brisbane, Qld.), March 1933, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article23267006

Influence of Patriotism on Modern Philosophy in Italy

 Prof. F. C. Bentivoglio B.A., Member of our Institution, on the invitation by the "Literary Club" of the Sydney University, delivered a lecture on the above subject.

 We are pleased to give hereunder the text of the lecture, as published by the "Corriere."

 Italy is often called the land of sunshine, of music, of art. It could be called also, and quite truthfully, the land of philosophers.

 Two centuries ago, in those few decades preceding the French Revolution, we see in Naples two of the world colossi writing epoch-making books on philosophy: Vico and Filangieri; in Milan, Beccaria. But ere long came the Napoleonic storm. What was thought inviolable, sacred and immortal, proved not to be so. In vain the Holy Alliance in 1815 tried to put back the clock of time, to ignore the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The Encyclopaedists had flooded the world with their books. A new ferment had permeated all Universities, all intellectual centres.

 In Italy the movement for unification had had a powerful impetus from the Napoleonic wars. Sicilians, Neopolitans, Venetians, Lombards, etc., all shed their blood for the greatness of the French Empire. Why not fight for Italy, for one united and independent Italy?

 Italy only a geographical expression. What nonsense, says Vincenzo Gioberti, and he wrote "Il primato degli Italiani," proving the historical and spiritual right of Italy to be at last united.

 Romagnosi, Cattaneo, Ferrari — to quote only the most important philosophers — published book after book on this all-absorbing question.

 Mazzini, the prophet of Italy, had already preached for nearly thirty years in his "La Giovine Italia," a secret organisation whose members were all pledged to work, to fight, and to die, if needed, for the unification of Italy. Excitement was at fever heat in the year 1846, when a former gallant officer, the Count Giovanni Mastai Ferretti, was elected Pope Pius IX., who in a moment of enthusiasm exclaimed: "Great God, bless Italy." The Pope made an alliance with Sardinia and the King of the two Sicilies to fight Austria. But two months later he recalled his army. In fact, Sardinia remained on the field to fight single-handed.

 Patriotic citizens boycotted churches; some even embraced Protestantism. Thousands of priests resigned their office, enlisted, fought and died as brave sons of Italy. Those who survived entered the teaching profession, and through them the passion of patriotism became the daily bread served out to youth, thus permeating all families.

 Garibaldi had collected a battalion of gallant priests in Calabria in his memorable expedition of "The Thousand," and nicknamed the holy battalion.

 Is there any wonder if we see the most intellectual amongst those patriotic priests endeavour to justify their action, not only on historical and national grounds, but by assailing their opponents in their tenets and philosophy? The Church maintained that any national strife was but an incident in its fabric, which she claimed to be immortal. However, the patriots realised that an attack on religion was necessary to obtain the support of the mass. Religion represents the Absolute. The mass can only be stirred into action by the Absolute. Was not the same thing repeated during the Great War?

 Fight, fight on, brave boys; this is the last war. You are not killing your fellow-man; you are killing war. 

Hence an avalanche of books was published trying to prove that Christ never existed. Renan's, Strauss's "Life of Jesus" were in all homes. Biographies of Arnaldo da Brescia, Campanella, Pamponazzi, Giordano Bruno, all killed or burnt at the stake, were presented as prizes to young students. Beautiful monuments to those martyrs were erected in the piazzas.

 * * *

 Carducci, the famous poet, from his chair of Italian Literature at Bologna, inveighed for fifty years against the pious romanticism of Manzoni. Greek and Latin classicisms must be the rock foundation upon which should be built a united Italy.

 Could philosophers refrain from this battle? Here we have Gaetano Trezza, from Verona, a priest, a learned and good man. He attacked St. Thomas, writing most fiercely. He wrote on all topics bearing on the main subject. Also a magnificent Essay on Goethe, just because Faust represents a new conception of life, altogether contrasting with Christian ideals. At the end of an eventful life, the woman he loved died, leaving him alone, absolutely alone. He could not stand the blow. He recanted. The Church re-admitted him into its bosom, and he died Padre Bonvicino, in a cloister. Those mysterious threads which weave the spiritual cloak of our youth seem to weave also our shroud.

 R. Ardigo was born in a peasant home near Cremona in the year 1832. Boy of striking intelligence, he found only one road open to him: Holy Orders. He entered a Seminary in Mantua, and soon was a Doctor in Theology. He saw the hanging of nine Italians in 1851, whose only crime was their love for their country. He witnessed the furious fight between the Church and the patriots, and when forty years of age he declared in a very moving letter to his bishop (a holy man) that he no longer believed. While in the Seminary he was a zealous student of scholastic philosophy and modern science, firmly convinced that the "modern errors," as he called them, were to be refuted. Slowly an entirely new fabric of thought grew up in him, and finally it dawned upon him that he no longer espoused the dualistic teaching of the Church, but believed in a great continuity of things.

 The Minister of Public Education nominated him to the Chair of Philosophy at Padua. Undoubtedly the patriotic environment in which he lived had a great influence on his mental evolution. He was all his life a staunch patriot, and in 1918, when the war seemed lost, still a professor at the University, in a moment of despair he attempted suicide. He lingered on for another two years. He was the foremost writer on positive philosophy, and with his fifty years of teaching he had an overwhelming influence on the philosophical mind of his contemporaries.

 * * * 

G. Negri, a Milanese whose proud intellect would not mix with the populace, for whom he had the greatest contempt, maintained that Italy had made an historical and tragic mistake by wresting Rome from the Pope. He wrote the life of the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate, extolling this great man in his vain endeavour to resuscitate the gods and annihilate the Christian religion.

 Yet he, an atheist, shares the view of Livy and Macchiavelli, that religion is essential to a nation. Religious ties for the lower class are like spiritual and intellectual ties for the upper class.

 * * * 

Who does not know Giovanni Papini? A furious internationalist, communist, futurist, at the vanguard of every thought that sounded new, bizarre, impossible. He contributed thousands of writings to newspapers, attacking everything that was or seemed orthodox. He roamed all over the world in search of a new Gospel. Abroad he became enamoured of his own country. His health broke down, he returned to his native Tuscany, he shut himself in a hut, learned Greek and Hebrew, and wrote a "Vita di Cristo" that staggered the world. It is very little critical; it is almost a paraphrase of the four Gospels, and yet it is an extraordinary book. If its literary and philosophical value could be gauged by its sale we should say it is immense. Let it suffice to say that in the first year of its publication three and a half million copies were sold in the U.S.A. alone.

 * * * 

B. Croce, the eminent philosopher, is living on the heights of Naples amongst his books, almost in a monastic retirement. Some of his friends say he gives the cold shoulder to the present regime because Mussolini ignored him.

 "Croce himself," says Gentile, a well-known philosopher, "is a Fascist in spite of himself, who, notwithstanding his Hegelian foundations, he, more than any other single scholar, has revivified the Italian tradition and contributed by his historical researches to the development of Italian Stoicism: that is Fascism. He led a revolt against French and German philosophical systems which had permeated the intellectual lives of all Italian Schools and Universities.

 * * * 

G. Gentile, instead, directly Fascism went into power, was nominated Minister of Public Education. He was the first to tackle the great problem of teaching and making such sweeping changes in all departments as no other person in Italy or anywhere else has dared to make. "To teach well is not to pile up the baggage of bits of information on to the pupil and to impose upon him the result already given and completed by the thought of another, but, above all, to promote the activities of the pupil in the conquest of the scientific truths which are valuable only in so far as they are the results of his own work and represent his own conquest. Hence a syntheist in the person being educated is realised spontaneously every time he really educates himself, that is every time he feels the value of his own person in acquiring a new idea, undergoing a new experience, overcoming a limitation, widening the orbit of the life of his imagination. Our mind has a value not for what it knows materially, but for his capacity to win ever new knowledge. Hence the value of the school consists essentially in its enhancement of the ability to learn." 

* * *

 In the year 1909 died near Forli the philosopher Alfredo Oriani. If we had to judge him by his success in life it would not be worth our while to mention him at all. He wrote books, novels, short stories, poetry, dramas, all dismal failures. He wrote also on sociology. His startling prohecies make us pause and ponder over that singular intellect never understood. In his last book, "la Rivolta Ideale," 1906, he has exalted certain traditional spiritual values, judged Socialism not as creation, but mere criticism. He saw in the ascent of the proletariat not a new revolution approaching, but the birth of a new middle class, and expressed contempt for the cowardly theory which flattered the people by telling them that their inferiority was only due to the injustice of the law. He despised these pseudo philosophers — political opportunists who could explain everything they saw, standing as it were at the window, but it never occurred to them to go in the street and take a hand in anything. The systems they propounded were an end in themselves. They led nowhere and could not serve as practical programmes. By them, everything could be explained, but nothing predicted. In the fifty years preceding the Fascist regime materialism and positivism reigned supreme in lecture rooms, press and books. The Italian spirit was in a state of torpor. Oriani in his last writings set forth with unmatchable passion all problems, anxieties, ideals, hopes of our times, exalting the potential Italian energies. He revolted against the deadening levelling tendency of democracy, socialism and the orthodox Church. Above all, he preached the dawn of a greater Italy.

 I must go into further details about Oriani, as he has been acclaimed the philosopher, the prophet, the saviour of Fascism.

 Nietzche divides humanity in two classes, aristocracy and the commons, denying almost every right to the latter, which should simply remain a tool for the elevation of the former. Oriani instead maintains that aristocracy and genius are pushing along "the mass," giving it value and bringing out its best men to join the "leaders," shape its course, and give a name to it.

 The mass is moved into action by instinct, the Aristocracy of Intelligence represents its conscience, while genius is its personification. Everything is elaborated in that immense cauldron, but is completed and shaped in its dynamic force by the intelligentsia.

 And if for Nietzche aristocracy meant something apart, altogether detached and differentiated, for Oriani it meant the highest exponent of society, the symbol of its purest ideals, "leader of the mass and its servant." Hence it must be a throng of heroes who realises its duties not only toward one part of humanity, but to-ward everybody. Heroes ready for all emergencies, ready for all sacrifices.

 The liberty of which democracy speaks is purely a lie. Only "authority" can bring justice. Contrasting interests, supported by ever-changing political parties, prevent justice from being meted out with even measure. Oriani wept at the ineptitude of Italy in colonial warfare. "Italy," he cries, "slave of an idle and ignorant democracy. Revolt, my beloved country, against everything and everybody. Light all your beacons because a revolution has begun. It has set out in the darkest of nights, but the dawn is near. The flush of dawn may look like blood, but fear not, march on, democracy is doomed." And with an astonishing prophetical afflatus Oriani in 1897 foresaw the world war, the fall of the great empires, the disruption and turmoil of the Slavonic world, and the overbearing plutocracy of the U.S.A. Also the progress and set-back of Socialism, the rousing of sane minorities destined to become the new aristocracy, different from those of blood and wealth.

 He hated Socialism not only for its ideologic substratum which could be a poetical mistake, but because it was a school of makeshift, of corruption and moral mediocrity. He maintained Socialism to be but a small tyranny, inefficient and timid, set up by a bogus aristocracy, the offspring of industrial labour, and by means of universal suffrage. Unscrupulous demagogues, weaklings, biologically, by pandering to the mass, became the rulers of nations.

 Could Oriani rise from his grave to-day and see the work of his formidable pupil, Mussolini. A new Italy, his beloved Italy, a great nation at last, setting to a bewildered world an example of a new national organisation in which the rights of labour and capitalism, the principle of authority and the principle of private initiative, the exigency of tradition, and needs of a new era are harmonised in a united effort to create and produce the moral and material wealth of the nation.

 MUSSOLINI.

 Mussolini is supposed to have taken his main ideas from G. Sorel and his philosophy from Oriani in building his Co-operative State. Two months ago Mussolini was asked by the compilers of the Enciclopedia Italiana to give in brief the essence of Fascism for publishing purposes. It was a very difficult task to translate it and reduce it to the essentials. However, here it is: "There cannot be a conception of the State which is not fundamentally a conception of life. Philosophy and intuition; system of ideas developing in logical sequence, united in vision and faith, but, virtually, an organic conception of the world.

 So Fascism is not to be understood in its many practical aspects as the organisation of a method, as a system of education, as discipline, but in its general working as conception of life. It works spiritually. The world, for Fascism, is not the material superficial world, where each is an individual, apart from his fellows, standing alone, governed by a natural law which induces him instinctively to lead a life of selfish and temporal pleasure. Each Fascist is a unit of the nation, obeying a moral law which binds individuals and races together in a tradition and in a mission which suppresses the instinct to live only for a brief round of pleasure; teaching, instead, the obligation of a higher life, self-denial by sacrifice of his own interests, even of his own life. Spiritual conception, therefore, arising from the general reaction of the age against the feeble and material positivism of the 19th century. Not sceptic, nor agnostic, nor pessimistic, nor positively optimistic like most of the theories (all negative) which would give the centre of life a place apart from man, who, with his free will can and should create his world for him-self. Fascism desires to rouse man to devote the whole of his power to action, bravely to recognise such difficulties as exist and to be ready to meet them.

 Fascism conceives life as a struggle where it is the part of each to gain for himself that which is really worthy of him, creating first of all in himself the instrument (physical, moral or intellectual) to achieve it, and as for the individual, so for the nation, so for humanity. Hence the great value of culture in all its forms, art, religion, science, and the superlative importance of education. Hence also the essential value of labor, by which man conquers Nature and creates the world, economic, political, moral and intellectual. This positive conception of life is manifestly an ethical conception. Every action must conform to moral judgment; nothing in the world can dispense with the value of striving towards moral ends. Life must be serious, austere, religious. Fascism scorns a "comfortable" life. It is a historical conception, in which man has only his being in the function of the spiritual process with which he co-operates, in the domestic and social groups, in the nation and in history, in which all nations co-operate. Hence the great value of tradition in memories, in language, in custom, in rules of social life.

 Without history man is nothing. 

Therefore, Fascism is contrary to all individual abstraction, with material foundation of the type of the 18th century, and is contrary also to Utopian and Jacobin innovations. It does not believe in the possibility of happiness on earth, as was the desire of the economist literature of 1700, and therefore rejects all the theological conceptions of a definite systematising of the human race at a certain period of history. That means going beyond history and life, which is continuous, flowing and developing. Fascism desires to be, politically, a realistic doctrine. Practically, it aims at solving only the problems which (history shows) have always presented themselves, and which automatically find or suggest their own solution. To operate amongst men, as in Nature, it is necessary to understand intrinsic processes and to master the powers in action.

 The Fascist conception is against individualism and for the State. It is for the individual in so far as the universal conscience and will of man in his historic existence agrees with the State. It is against classic liberalism, which arose from the need of reacting from absolutism and whose historic function passed when the State became the conscience and will of the people themselves. Liberalism denies the State in the interest of the private individual, Fascism declares the State to be the true personality of the individual. And if liberty should be the attribute of the real man and not of the puppet abstraction conceived by individualistic liberalism, then Fascism is for liberty and for the sole liberty which can be a serious matter, liberty of the State and of the individual included in the State.

 The Fascist State is synthesis and unity of every value. It interprets, develops and strengthens the whole life of the people. Therefore Fascism is contrary to Socialism, which cramps the historic movement in the class struggle and ignores the State unity which fuses classes into one economic and moral whole. Similarly, it is opposed to class syndicalism. Fascism recognises those exigencies in the orbit of the State from which syndicalism and the socialist movement derive their origin, and would consider them in the system of corporate interests conciliated in the unity of the State. It is not the nation which generates the State according to the obsolete conception which formed the base of the democratic States of the 19th century. On the contrary, the nation is created by the State, which conscious of its own moral unity gives to the people will power and thence effective existence. The right of a nation to independence comes not from a literary and idealistic consciousness of its own being, far less from a situation more or less unconscious or inert, but from an alert conscience from a will ready to act and prepared to declare its own right. In fact, the State, as Universal Ethical will, is the creation of the right.

 The nation, like the State, is an ethical fact which exists and lives while it develops. Stagnation means death. Therefore the State is not only authority which governs and gives laws and values of spiritual life to the individual wills, but it is also power which makes its will recognised and respected abroad, thus demonstrating its universality in all directions necessary to its development. The Fascist State is power, but spiritual power which includes all forms of moral and intellectual human life. It cannot therefore be limited to the simple function of order and protection, as liberalism would do. It is not a mere mechanism which defines the sphere of presumed individual liberty. Fascism, finally, is not only law-giver and founder of spiritual life. It would not remake the rules of human life, but its content : man, his character, his faith.

 And to this end it would have discipline and authority to penetrate deeply in the mind, and there to rule unchallenged.

 Therefore, its standard is the lictoral fasces, Symbol of Unity, Power and Justice."

 * * *

 Students of the University! You are on the threshold of life. Fortunate are you. A new world is coming into being. You only can shape it. What it is going to be no one knows. But the duel has started already: Intelligence versus the Mass; quality versus quantity; in short, democracy as it is commonly understood is on its trial. Allow me to urge you to take, as soon as you can, a hand in the affairs of our beloved country, Australia. Discard that shameful pandering to the lowest instinct of the populace, do not put the crowd on a pedestal and worship it. Tell everybody that you are the torch-bearers, that you must be the rulers. The mass must follow. The mass in its millennial evolution has remained a minor; it must be assisted, protected, stimulated, but never allowed to govern.

 There is to-day a greater gulf in vision of life and mental outlook between you and the man in the street than between Charlemagne and his swine-herd. And, do foster a healthy intercourse amongst spiritual leaders of all nations. Ideas, new ideas, we need, or we go under. A country aiming to be self-supporting, self-contained, is doomed. There are no water-tight compartments in the world, either moral, intellectual or economic.

 Here I have a vision: Who is that weary giant stumbling along with the sphere on his shoulder? He is Atlas, carrying the world. "Whither goest thou, Father Atlas? What is wrong with thee?" "This world is out of joint, and unless I find a remedy it may slip from my shoulders into chaos."

 Here a horde of tailors cobblers, mechanics of all sorts, cry to him: "Let us assist thee, Comrade Atlas; we have the panacea for all ailments." "Begone ye all, begone," he answered. "There in the dim distance I see the beacon light, the salvation of this unbalanced world. There it stands! A group of stately buildings; it is the University. Only Science, graced by love, which is understanding, can save the world. I will go there." 

Ladies and gentlemen, don't you hear Atlas knocking at the portals?

Italian Bulletin of Commerce (Sydney) 1 October 1932, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article259097537

Popular Sovereignty a Successful Reality

 By ALBERT RITCHIE. Governor of Maryland.

The political problem of the ages has always been how to reconcile the powers of government with the liberties of the individual. If we trace this effort historically, we find that through the centuries government has overwhelmed liberty, in that the freedom of the individual against despotic power has generally depended upon the benevolence of government itself. By and large there has been no sovereign power back of and independent of government, guaranteeing the individual immunity as of right against the excess of governmental authority, and protecting him in that immunity. As a result, governmental benevolence in the old world has recurrently developed into governmental despotism, intolerance and tyranny. In this country we sought to solve the problem by recognising behind government a sovereign power superior to government. This power was in the people, and we devised a governmental system whereby the liberties of the people no longer depended upon the grace or favour of governmental authority, but whereby governmental authority itself was granted and defined, circumscribed and limited by the sovereign people themselves. Now comes a contemporary European viewpoint which is both confusing and paradoxical. With an obvious upsurging of social democracy there comes also a declining faith in its political virtue. Socially and politically, democracy seems to mean one thing here, and something quite different there.

 Monarchical Absolutism.

 Mussolini, who personifies this viewpoint, may share our own democratic condemnation of monarchical absolutism, but he has a monarchical concept of popular sovereignty. He is perhaps the first dictator in history to formulate a philosophy of democratic autocracy, if such a thing can be conceived of. The masses, he is sure, cannot govern themselves intelligently, because they will follow foolish leaders or be exploited by corrupt ones; and representative government is doomed to failure, because it exhausts itself in building a village and so is incapable of building a nation. Like the Kaiser, he believes that the strong State can best be achieved by a sort of self-perpetuating governing class, which will function as guardian or trustee for the people in the selection of their law-making body, and in decreeing the customs and practices to which they must conform. "Liberty," Mussolini says, "never existed," and in place of a government with its powers defined and limited by a popular sovereignty which creates and controls it, he sets up a government which "governs for all, over the heads of all, and if necessary, against all."

 Adequacy of Political System.

 I pass the very obvious point that if this view of government had prevailed in pre-Revolutionary Colonial days, and our American forefathers had submitted to it, then there would have been no War of Independence, and no United States of America to-day. Perhaps even Mussolini and the Kaiser would not insist that the British Government knew better than we did what destiny was good for us, and that we had no right to demand and win freedom to govern ourselves. So merely to state what would have been the result of their governmental theories over here may be sufficient to refute them so far as their applicability to this country is concerned. "However this may be, I am convinced that nothing could so chill our national spirit, or check our prosperity and the progressive solution of our political problems, as to have our leaders or our people, or the growing youth of our land, lose faith in the workings of popular government, or in the adequacy of our political system, or fail to realise that the revolutionary ideas now prevalent abroad are wholly foreign to the genius of our people.

 Definition of Democracy.

 We need not concern ourselves with any analysis of the nature of sovereignty, nor with any abstract definition of democracy. Suffice it to say that democracy, in its broadest aspect, is not a form of government, but a social and political ideal, which contemplates a society of equals in the sense that each person contributes an integral something which goes to make up the common life ; a society in which no one can avoid his share of responsibility for the interest and welfare of all, and in which every one shall have an equal opportunity for self-development according his capacity. Democracy distinctly does not contemplate a society after the Fascist or Communist idea, in which the individual members, instead of having the free opportunity to develop themselves according to their free choice, are told from above what they are to do, and have their parts in life assigned to them in a way that submerges personality. Now, it need not be urged that a government of the Mussolini type, with the people subservient to it instead of it subservient to the people, must necessarily be malign. It may indeed be admitted that given a high order of wisdom, integrity and good luck, you may sometimes, for the moment at least, get a stronger government that way than you can by popular ballot. But it by no means follows that you can get a better government, because even a bad government that is free may be better than a good government that is self-perpetuating and breeds within itself the germs of despotism and tyranny.

 Trend to Dictatorships in Europe.

 In Europe the very word "government" means to the average man something different from what it means to us. There they have always had a governing class, and political power as well as political opinion have usually been the power and opinion of that class. Then there is another European condition which, while possibly transitory, is too vital now to be overlooked. Ten years after a war fought to end wars and make the world safe for democracy, we see not only the new-born Governments of the Old World, but to a considerable extent the older Governments too, turning from parliamentary forms of democratic expression back to the rule of dictators. With kingdoms and dynasties and principalities gone, with Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs and Romanovs either dead or in exile, the realities of popular government have not taken their places. We may as well admit that this result is an amazing one, but it would be a superficial view indeed that accepted it as a permanent stage in the progress or evolution of government. 

Huge Public Debts.

 I have no thought to dwell in any detail upon the war-worn condition of Europe when peace finally came, or upon the giant task of restoring order out of chaos. The story is familiar enough, and the difficulties of reconstruction too recent or contemporaneous to need accounting. The hang-over of war waste and extravagant expenditure, huge public debts, undetermined international obligations, an inflated currency, unbalanced budgets, upset markets, industry diverted into abnormal channel, widespread unemployment, industrial unrest, an economic structure entirely out of joint— such were the conditions which the countries of Europe had to face and remedy before they could take their place again in the normal progress of history. 

Economic Order Restored.

 Perhaps the task may have been one, in some countries may still be one, for the autocrat or dictator, just as the task of winning the war was undoubtedly one for the autocrat or dictator. Wars are won by the sweep of driving leadership, and driving leadership may be necessary, too, for the scarcely less herculean task of restoring economic order. The philosopher Hegel said that nothing can be considered as settled historically until it repeats itself. If so, then certainly the chronicles of history show that after every great war there has been a recoil to much the same kind of dictatorship that the world is witnessing to-day in some of the countries of Europe. After the Persian wars— Pericles. After the Peloponnesian wars — Philip of Macedon. After the Punic wars— Caesar. After the collapse of Rome — Charlemagne. After the Wars of the Roses — the Tudor dynasty. After the English Civil War — Cromwell. After the French Revolution—Napoleon. My point here is that in the sweep of history this may be but a temporary and passing condition in Europe, which may be only an interruption of progress towards ultimate popular sovereignty.

 Insurmountable Difficulties.

 Turn now to our own country, where of course the war caused no economic upset or disarrangement even faintly comparable to that in Europe. Here, the story is an altogether different one. Here, popular sovereignty is not a dream or a distant hope, but a political reality which finds expression every day and whose organisation and growth can be clearly traced. With us democracy is no new doctrine evolved by political science or by legerdemain, but an actuality achieved through evolutionary processes. We did not secure it by the grace of kings. Nobody conferred it on us. Our Constitution itself did not create it, but we had it "ab initio," and it created our Constitution. Let me go back for a moment, because this is important. Sir Edwin Sandys, the leading spirit of the London (or Virginia) Company, and his associates who crossed the Atlantic, may have regarded it all as a great adventure, as some believe, but the form their adventure took was to establish in the New World those principles of representative democracy which they could not establish in the Old World so long as James I, with his ideas of divine right, ruled there. Gradually and in the face of difficulties almost insurmountable, the great experiment proved its worth, and long years before the founding fathers of the Republic came, men who craved freedom and liberty thronged to our coast— the Plymouth fathers to Massachusetts, the Calverts to Maryland, Roger Williams to Rhode Island, Oglethorpe to Georgia, William Penn to Pennsylvania— and here on virgin soil their new-born spirit took root and flourished.

 Colonial Democracy.

 Thus the Constitution became a living institution and the expression of our political life and mind. Its strength was the strength of the American spirit. It did not spring from the brains of the extraordinary men who gave it form and body, but from the heart and experience and ideals of the long years of a colonial democracy striving to become a nation. So in passing judgment on governmental systems at home and abroad it is important to remember the evolutionary character of our own system. This represents, it is true, many compromises and adjustments needed to meet conflicting requirements and ideals, it even reflects some of the fears and dangers of democracy itself, and all this has helped to make it workable and effective. But its vitality does not spring from these facts alone. Its abiding strength lies in the fact that it was born of the people, blood of their blood and flesh of their flesh, and gave expression to the traditions, ideals and free spirit that animated them in their century old efforts for self-government. Pessimists and critics, to be sure, can find defects enough in our system of government, and indeed we need not venerate it unduly or hold it sacrosanct, for after all it has successfully met the tests and crises of our national existence for nearly a century and a half, and this alone should silence callow criticism and foolish fears as to its future. It has changed and been changed with changing times, and not always for the best, but the cardinal fact is that it works, and has worked from  the very beginning. Let us see if this is not so.

 State against State.

 After the Revolutionary War there almost instantly arose in this country a condition akin to what followed the World War in some of the countries of Europe and threatened in others. The thirteen original States, sovereign and independent at last, fell apart. State was allied against State, class against class, interest against interest. So desperate was the situation that, as Madison wrote Edward Pendleton, some leading minds were advocating a monarchy, while the bulk of the people probably preferred a partition of the Union into three more practicable and energetic governments. Then, none too soon, the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia, and out of the travail of that convention our system of government emerged, and it united the thirteen discordant States into a Federal Republic, and has held them indivisible ever since.

Triumph of Liberty in New World.

 Can one ask more practical demonstration of the effectiveness of our form of government than this? If so, another one, equally obvious, is at hand, for soon our hard won popular sovereignty was subjected to as determined a test as was ever conceived by a group of autocratic rulers believing in the divine right of kings. The Russian Czar, the Prussian King, the Austrian Emperor and the French King combined with the purpose of stamping our popular liberty in the western world. They called themselves the Holy Alliance. The spirit of liberty which had established itself in America was rising to the surface elsewhere, too. It was rising in Poland, in Austria, in Italy and in Spain, and these monarchs sought to crush by the might of their enslaved peoples. In South America, Spain had lost her colonies and these had set up their own forms of Government. The Russian Czar, the Prussian King and the Austrian Emperor were to send their combined forces across the seas in order to restore these republics to the Spanish King.

 Armed Conflict.

 Then democratised England proposed to the United States— both just emerged from their second armed conflict in less than half a century — an alliance to preserve the independence of the republics of South America, and thus, as Jefferson wrote, "make our hemisphere one of freedom" and "emancipate at one stroke a whole continent." This was not effected, because the despotic purpose of the Holy Alliance was dashed to earth by the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine with the approval and support of Great Britain, and thus it was that the power of autocracy was checked and overthrown by the spirit of liberty and popular sovereignty which two peoples had established as their governmental creed. Thus the American form of popular government began in effectiveness and success, and thus from the adoption of the first twelve amendments, which may properly regarded as part of it, it continued for more than a century with no single change save the three political amendments which reflected the results of the battle-fields of the Civil War.

 Greatest Country on Earth.

 Under it we have emerged from small beginnings into what we believe is the greatest country on earth. During this long period the sail-boat became the ocean liner, the stage coach became the trans-continental railway. Morse gave us the telegraph. Bell the telephone, and the Wrights conquered the air. Steam ushered in the marvellous era of machine production, followed now by an era of mass production on an undreamed of scale, and electricity and power have wrung new wealth from the treasure house of nature and hold the possibilities of a world remade. And all of this under a government dependent not only upon the theory but upon the actuality of popular sovereignty! So much for what democracy in America has achieved. Now for a few other considerations. One may well ask, what autocrat or dictator at his best ever did more than bring order out of chaos for a while? Did any of them ever work for the interests of all in the long run? And however benevolent and wise, have they not almost always yielded to the urge of personal ambition, or become the source of oppression and injustice, from which there lay no appeal, or burdened some classes for the benefit of others, and thus stifled the free play of individual enterprise?

 No Guarantee.

 And when Mussolini, or any other dictator like him, leaves the scene, what then? I will not debate the question whether Italy has needed this strong hand temporarily. Even if it has, there is no guarantee, there is indeed no probability, that another man of equal force and ability will arise to carry on the constructive part of his work. If he carries it on for his own life time, he may still be followed by a group which will take a purely selfish view of their enormous powers, and exploit the very people he would protect from the like danger under a democracy. Or he may be followed by men so weak that the pendulum will swing back again toward disintegration. Pericles destroyed the great court of Areopagus, which vetoed legislation that violated the liberty of the Athenian people, and then came his personal rule of Athens for a third of a century. He exercised his despotic power with wisdom and moderation, but he had no successor. His death ended the brilliant period in Greek history, and soon the political centre of the world moved westward and the empire of Rome began. Likewise there was no successor to govern the world Alexander the Great had conquered, and when Napoleon reached the zenith of his power, the question that troubled him most was how to fortify and make permanent the political structure he had erected. History shows how utterly futile his efforts were.

 Self-Imposed Tyranny.

 Thus the work of any dictator, no matter what its value, may be undone at any time by his death. Is it not better to cling to a system of popular participation, in which the swings of the pendulum from left to right, from liberalism to conservatism and back again, are not violent and accompanied by Fascist tyranny on the one hand, or by the French and Russian reigns of terror on the other hand? It is true that in democracy, as in autocracy, individual liberty may be abridged in many ways, sometimes necessarily, sometimes unnecessarily, or even foolishly and unjustifiably. But when this happens in a democracy we do not bend the suppliant knee to any ruler. Here is the essence of popular sovereignty. If there be tyranny, it is at least the self-imposed tyranny of a free acting or of an acquiescing majority. I believe it was Lord Bryce who said that democracy furnishes a political master key that can unlock every door, and John Stuart Mill long ago said that if the rights and interests of individuals in a democracy are disregarded, it is because they are not disposed to stand up for them. That representative government should sometimes fail to express adequately the will of the people is not so important as it is that the popular will, within sound constitutional limitations, should be free to act and that it should have the machinery to put its action into effect.

The Power of Public Sentiment.

 Popular sovereignty functions not only through our machinery of government, but equally through the effective force and play of public opinion upon government. And just here we meet another criticism from our despotic friends. They talk much about mob psychology, the inefficiency and incapability of the herd, and the wrong standards of mass instinct. They have been talking that way ever since man first strove for freedom, and the truth is they do not see the woods for the trees. The instinct of the masses may be sounder than the instinct of the politically self-anointed. In fact there is usually an element of sound sense and true instinct in every mass movement. Lincoln's apothegms about the wisdom of the people and about fooling them are political truisms. I believe he was right when he said, "Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed."

 Governmental Corruption.

 Because public sentiment so often seems non-existent, or quiescent, or sterile, or foolish, or difficult to understand, we both underrate it and overrate it. It may be passive and apparently impotent to-day, and be all-powerful to-morrow. Let an ambitious State Department, for instance, imagine that our manifest destiny points to the need of an imperial navy, and we see public opinion rise overnight and assert the effective sovereignty of the people. Let governmental corruption reveal that it is not confined to isolated miscreants and public opinion, as I believe we are about to see, will quickly operate as a political force. There may for a time be acquiescence in the evils of excessive officialdom or bureaucratic control, but let the advocates of these things go too far, let them approach legislative or executive autocracy, and public opinion will become an effective check. Yet public opinion seems to be precisely the factor that your Kaiser or your autocrat never understands, although history reveals that every great reform or political step forward has always sprung from the people — from the lower and humbler classes. Men like Jefferson may have formulated principles, but it has been the masses that gave them the impulse of life.

 Deadening Influence upon Character.

 Nor must we overlook the deadening influence of a dictatorship upon character. One man or one group of men manages the entire affairs of a people grown or coerced into political and mental passiveness. The individual has no voice or potentiality in his own destiny. Everything is decided for him by a superior will he is required to obey. Jefferson said, "the freedom and happiness of man are the sole objects of all legitimate government.” Man's happiness requires that his worth and dignity and character be accentuated and developed. If this be the high end of human institutions, then certainly it can best be attained by cultivating in man the qualities of self-reliance, self-respect, self-control and self-discipline, and by giving him a consciousness of that equality with all other men that can come only from regarding himself as a determining factor and force in his political and civic life. It can never be attained by hampering and dwarfing man's healthy growth through the palsying effect of a paternalism ruling and directing him from above.

 Wise Leadership.

 It is said with truth that wise leadership is essential to wise government, that particularly is this so in the case of a representative government, but that such governments are not always productive of the most capable political leadership. Lord Bryce commented on this at length in his "American Commonwealth." No one will contend that our democracy has not produced great leaders, and if, as James M. Beck says in his recent book on the Constitution, contemporary history shows a decay in this regard, at least it can be affirmed that our leaders are selected under a system which gives all classes in the community the opportunity of choosing them, and the opportunity of turning them out if popular dissatisfaction is great enough. If it be said that under a democracy the people are liable to be exploited, I answer that under an autocracy they are likewise liable to be exploited, with the additional evil that the exploitation would be legalised through the dictator's legalised control. But in a democracy the issue can always be placed before the electorate at the next election, and the people can turn the Ins out and put the Outs in.

 Democracy a Force for Peace.

 There is at least one other asset of popular sovereignty, and it is very vital. If the record of democratic nations does not show an altogether clean slate in the matter of aggression, still it cannot be denied that autocracy and dictatorship tend to war rather than to peace. The people lack the agencies of democratic government for the expression and dictation of their own will, and must respond to the will of their rulers. All history shows this, and the danger of it to the peace of the world. Were not the military autocracies of Germany and Russia peculiarly menacing to world peace before 1914? Does not Mussolini personify the chief anxiety for the peace of Europe now? Indeed our own war of Independence was forced upon us not so much because the English people wanted it, as because the English King and ministry decreed it. Men like Burke and Pitt and Fox reflected the views of a great part of the English population, but their voice was politically inarticulate and unheeded. When English rule was overthrown, it fell not alone before the onslaught of American troops, but also before the opposition of the people at home which finally made itself effective. And this popular opposition and the war's reaction, by the way, did much to secure self-government in England's colonial empire.

 Struggle for Armament.

 On the other side of the picture, consider the continuous peace for more than a century between the United States and our neighbour Canada. The struggle for armament between these two countries was stopped by mutual agreement after the Treaty of Ghent in 1814, and ever since the border line between them has been no more a line of division than a line of friendship. There are no forts on either frontier, no warships on the Great Lakes. May not the reason be that in neither country do the people respond to the power of a dictatorial government superimposing upon them its will and ambitions, but that in both countries the Government, functioning through popular sovereignty, though in different forms, responds to the will of the people, whose ideals and wishes are for friendship and for peace? To-day problems galore crowd upon us, those growing out of industrialism and urbanism, the increase of wealth, the inequality of its distribution, the assimilation of immigrants, agrarian questions, the concentration of power, the abridgement of individual liberty, and what not. Many of these may show anti-democratic tendencies, but neither the problems themselves nor the difficulties they involve are due to defects in our governmental system or to the inability of popular sovereignty to function. The way out is not to be found in autocratic government. Indeed, I venture the assertion that at least some of the major ills in American politics have arisen from the failure to observe some of the principles of our governmental system, such, for instance, as the balance between State and National powers and the basic doctrine of local self-government.

 Solution of Problems.

 After all, it is actual experience that counts most, and whatever its defects the great American experiment is popular sovereignty has had amazing success. It is the oldest written form of government in the world to-day. It has resolved the problems of our past, even those which threatened national disintegration, and its mechanism can resolve the problems of our present and of our future. This is not a static world, and what is needed is not cynicism, but a just faith born of the accomplishments of the past. If the path of progress through democracy and liberalism is slow, if it must be tested out by the experience of trial and error, at least the path thus offered is the only one that is safe. If gradual processes are inevitable for democratic ideals, at least these processes are onward and upward. We have shown in this country that political liberty can be made a political reality ; that freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, of self-determination, of self-government are more than abstract ideas. All this is proof that popular sovereignty is not a myth, that expression is better than suppression. Here the people have shown that they can govern themselves, and that they can produce leaders who will love justice and do justice, and who will serve their nation both faithfully and wisely even though they be only servants and not rulers.

Catholic Advocate (Brisbane, Qld. : 1928,http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article258733303