MR. ASQUITH ON LIBERALISM.

 Mr. Asquith and Mr. Lloyd George, in speeches reported in our cable messages this morning, have addressed their followers in a vein of high confidence and spirit. The once great Liberal Party is at the very nadir of its fortunes, and needs all the encouragement it could find in such attempts as were made at the Reform Club meeting to assuage the bitterness of defeat. Mr. Asquith spoke, as he was well entitled to, of "the absurd caprices of the irrational electoral system" which resulted in the return of 40 members to the House of Commons. . . .

  Although the death of Liberalism is certified by Mr. Sidney Webb with the assurance a coroner might bring to his verdict, he is met by Mr. Asquith with a statement equally emphatic that liberalism is not only alive, but has every intention of remaining alive. A political view shared by 3,000,000 people cannot properly be described as non-existent. It may, of course, be a question whether the Liberal Party will continue for all time as a separate entity, or will be merged into a larger party, which, perhaps, under another name, will prove the compatibility of progress with law and order. Mr. Asquith himself has other expectations, and though the Liberal Party was never in a worse plight than it is to-day, he recalls the precedent of 1835 as a reason for believing in its future recovery. He claims for it that it is the only real alternative to Socialism, and holds that the advent of the Labor Party has rendered Liberalism more necessary than ever. Whatever may be said of the tactics of its expounders in the recent past, Liberalism has served the cause of humanity too well for any really thoughtful and unbiassed mind either to believe that there is no room left for its activities in the world, or to share the exultation with which Mr. Webb (prematurely) views its disappearance. Mill, the greatest of its British expositors, foresaw that it might have difficult times before it. "The next form of error," he once wrote, "will be that, of making all take care of each, instead of each man being stimulated and helped to take care of himself. This will mean a terrible trial, and a crisis, possibly with a speedy determination." Such sentences explain the aversion in which the creed expounded by Mill has always been held by the Sidney Webbs, for the freedom which he preached is the antithesis of Socialism. There is no doubt as to the origin of the term liberalism. In Great Britain the Whig party of the "great houses," the party of the Aristocrats, or the "Venetian party" as Disraeli named it, begat the liberal Party, much to its own dismay, just as the liberals, by widening the franchise, made possible Socialism as a political entity. Liberalism had a well-defined gospel, and so far from having outlived its day it is a gospel that was never more in need of inculcation than now. For it may be summarised as the most perfect liberty for each individual, consistent with the similar freedom of his neighbors. Matthew Arnold exhibited a true appreciation of the Liberal spirit when he said, "The instinct of expansion manifests itself conspicuously in the love of liberty, and everyone knows how signally this love is exhibited in England. Now the liberals are pre-eminently the party appealing to the love of liberty, and therefore to the instinct for expansion." The aim of all true liberals in the past has ever been to secure the freest play for the individuality of the citizen, and to banish as far as human limitations will allow, the cramping and blighting coercion of society over the individual unit. This was the main object of the sturdy adherents of the creed which hailed Bright as its apostle, Macaulay as its historian, and Mill as its philosopher. Perhaps the Liberals have not always been true to their faith. Having let go the cable which held them to the anchor of sound political principles, they have drifted about hither and thither, trimming their sails to any socialistic zephyr. They made a mistake in the last Parliament in not breaking at once with those whose principles were antithetical to their own, and the result of the recent election was the price they paid for their partial alliance with the Socialists. It may be expected that the lesson of their defeat will not be thrown away upon them. They are not likely again to dally with the principles of a Socialistic party. No doubt exponents of Liberalism at all times have been under the necessity of varying their formulas according to the nature of the obstacles that stood in their way. Locke had to counteract the doctrine of the divine right of the ruler; he opposed to it the debatable theory that society had arisen out of a compact between the ruler and the State. Rousseau had to meet the autocracy of the State and the raison d'etat, and he met them by evolving the State from the free consent of the citizens and by developing a theory of education which even to this day is the most powerful exposition ever penned of the sacredness of individual personality. Bentham had to destroy not so much a political theory as a system of political privilege, and he did so by putting forward the doctrine of the greatest good for the greatest number, in which are to be found the essentials of democracy and the germ of constructive effort. The older expounders of the Liberal faith lapsed into the "falsehood of extremes" when they sought in laissez faire the solution of the economic riddle. The problem of organising society in the interests of personality is very complicated, but that is no reason for abandoning it as hopeless. It is a reason for enlisting the best brains in the community in the task, and not leaving the solution of the difficulty to wild and hare-brained extremists. The example of Russia is a standing illustration of the danger of such a course, for there we find Trotsky, in the true spirit of Communism, dividing mankind into two categories—the supermen and the cattle, the former represented in Russia by the Bolsheviks, and the latter by the unconverted, who, though many millions strong, are deemed unfitted for that voice in the government of their country which it would be the first business of liberalism to give them.

Advertiser (Adelaide, SA : 1889 - 1931), Wednesday 12 November 1924, page 8