THE GENERATION OF 1789.

 UNDER this title an article appears in the February number of the Revue des Deux Mondes, from the pen of M Guizot. It is a portion of an introductory essay which is soon to appear prefixed to a collection of M. Guizot's speeches, and has been permitted to appear in advance in the pages of the only French periodical in which the old and better days of French thought are still reflected. The theme on which M. Guizot mainly dwells is the confidence he feels in the restoration of public liberty in France. He owns that most of the ancient friends of freedom are weary, disheartened, and despondent, and that its new friends are few in number, and not ostensibly backed by public support. But his own faith in the triumph of political liberty is unshaken, because his faith in France and in French progress and civilisation is unshaken. Political liberty is the natural and necessary sequel, in his eyes, of the whole of French history and we must no more be made hopeless by the revival of the Napoleonic Empire than Englishmen who loved liberty ought to have despaired when the Stuarts seemed to be going to have everything their own way. France is in the main, and at times in her own despite, tending towards political liberty, and therefore her destiny, which is to be free, must be accomplished. We confess that these deductions from the philosophy of history do not give us quite so much comfort as they seem to give M. Guizot. If a man sets out with the theory that political liberty is the destiny of France, it is easy to prove that all things since the age of St. Louis have been moving in that one most desirable direction ; but if he sets out without any theory, he may not see things quite so favourably as M. Guizot sees them. The value of the whole method of looking at the past as a great vestibule through which man has marched to the inner shrine of modern civilisation, has yet to be decided. The speculator who hereafter attempts to determine it will have the advantage of finding this view amply represented and fully explained in the numerous works of M. Guizot. Whatever can be made of the theory has been made of it there, and he will readily acknowledge that, whether wholly, or partially, or in no degree true, it has at least given a charm and weight to the writings of its apostle. M. Guizot's tendency to sum up the results of his reflections on history in the language of a sensible and eloquent philosophy not rarely betrays him into platitudes which he loves because they are his own. But at the same time his anxiety to look at the past and present as a whole, and to seize on the binding tie which links together the centuries of modern Europe, imparts to his writings a character of elevation and largeness which justifies the reputation he has acquired. We are more moved to hope for the restoration of liberty in France by observing that French thought, though stifled, is not extinct, and that the Emperor is continually forced to treat the present system as temporary, than by reading what, in the eyes of a philosophical optimist, are the lessons of French history. But M. Guizot knows Fiance far too well, and has thought over the past history of France far too deeply to permit us to view with indifference any remarks he may have to offer on a subject so full of importance and interest as the " Generation of 1789."

M. Guizot goes unavoidably over old ground in most of what he says, he deplores the separation of the old nobility from the Revolution ; he does justice to the services which Napoleon rendered to the country ; he praises him for having seen that religion must be restored, and that a Court must be formed to satisfy the national taste for elegance and luxury and he repeats what has so often been said, that the Revolution was on the whole a great gain to France, and that those who most decry it would be very sorry to go back to the state of things which preceded it. He gives us something rather more new when he puts in a clear and intelligible form the leading political theories on which, as he says, the Revolution was based. There were, he thinks, three formulas which were running in the heads of men at the time, and by which they were overpowered and guided. The first of these formulas is this :— " No man is bound to obey laws to which he has not consented." The second is, " that power properly resides in the numerical majority." The third is, that "all men are equal." It is very convenient to have the leading ideas of the Revolution put in this concise form, although, as M. Guizot says, the wonder is that any men can ever seriously have entertained them. They are so wholly at variance with the facts of life, that we may be surprised how the facts did not put out the theories at once. But facts do not put out theories for a long time, when the theories are part of a whole mode of regarding life itself. We in England, who live in a country where there are visionaries so wedded to their interpretation of apocalyptic dates as to hold that the millennium has already begun, ought to be prepared for any tenacity of belief in theories that we find on the Continent. And those ideas which were working in the minds of the generation of 1789 were not isolated propositions to which, without preparation, they were invited to assent. They were the results of a whole way of thinking which had been gradually impressed on the mind of France by a series of writers of whom Rousseau was the latest, while at the same time he was the most influential, partly because he was the latest, and still more because he appealed more powerfully than any other to that side of the French intellect which unites sensibility with logic. M. Guizot only makes very slight reference to this; for to have really sketched the generation of 1789 would have required a volume, and not a few pages in a review ; but on the other hand, he calls our attention to two erroneous moral assumptions, which he thinks lay at the bottom of most of the intellectual and social errors of the Revolution. It is this part of his essay that strikes us as both new and valuable. No one acquainted with the French history and the French literature of recent times, can doubt that these moral errors, if we are to call them errors, have largely penetrated the French mind, that they appear at every turn and in every shape, and that no legacy which the generation of 1789 left to its successors has been more fruitful of consequences both for good and evil.

The first of these assumptions in the sphere of morality is that man is naturally good, and that it is society that sets him wrong. This was a doctrine that the men of the Revolution laid to heart. They were fired with a hope and sustained by a conviction that all Frenchmen were like imaginary Roman citizens presented to them in the fictions of popular history— ardent, noble, self-denying, grand ; and that it was only rogues of aristocrats, and priests, and English who made the modern world so much lower and feebler than the ancient. They, too, were Romans, they exclaimed, as they heard of Brutus, and Cincinnatus, and Cicero. They were all that was or ever had been of great and good. Living in a time of excitement, unused to think, and devoid of experience in great changes, they felt as young enthusiasts feel at the end of a novel, whom fancy persuades that they are as lovely and constant as the heroine, and as noble, and graceful, and fortunate as the hero. But the same mode of regarding man and society appears in the newest works of French literature. The whole burthen of Les Misérables is that all men and women, even down to convicts and their companions, are very good and very great, but that society corrupts and crushes them. This, as M. Guizot remarks, presents a rather startling contrast to the teaching of the Bible, that we are all, conceived in sin and have all gone astray. We may be sure that, as there is so startling a contrast, the theory of the men of the Revolution was in some sense wholly wrong. But, in another sense, it may be, in a large degree, true. If we look to the individual man as he appears to himself in the presence of God, there is no truth but the one truth, that he is desperately wicked. This is the sentence which every heart capable of comprehending the idea of holiness passes on itself. To the end of the world, in our age as much as in another, this will remain true. But man has a different feeling when he thinks of himself in relation to other men, and to the place which he occupies on this earth. He then becomes conscious of a nature which is not wholly bad, but is in a great part good—which is capable of ridding itself, in fancy and for a moment, of the presence of evil—and which might issue in far nobler fruits than it does if it were allowed, if men lived together to make each other better, if intellectual light were permitted to beam on their darkness, and if a place for repentance were given to the erring. This seems to us as true as the doctrine of inborn sin does when applied, as the Bible applies it, not to man in society, but to the individual in the presence of his Maker. But Catholicism had attempted to bind society within the rules, and to judge it by the doctrines, which the Bible applies to individuals. And nothing could be more natural, nor, perhaps, at one time more salutary. Modern society derives much of its elevation from the action of Catholicism on the individual. But the time came when the error of judging the world, and its social life and its governments, by the standard of an individual in his devotional moments, grew oppressive. Man required a new fountain of belief in himself, and in the possibility of what he might and could do in this life, in order to dispel the torpidity and despair which had taken possession of society when the doctrine of the worthlessness of man in the sight of God had passed, as in the Europe of the eighteenth century, into the doctrine of the worthlessness of the mass of mankind in comparison with the claims of the few who are born to govern.

The second of these moral errors was that man is all-powerful. It seemed to the generation of 1789, when on the eve of the Revolution, as if everything might be done, and happiness secured, and the beauty of humanity displayed on earth, if only man rose in his power, and hurled into dust his oppressors, and the enemies of his advancement. This feeling, too, is little in harmony with the teaching of the Book which says that man is weak and frail and that he must bear his burthen meekly, and walk humbly and as a pilgrim in the world. But for society, such as society under a monstrous compromise between Catholicism and the State had got to be in France a hundred years ago, the idea of the power of man—the belief that he could make things indefinitely better if he pleased—was an idea involving far more of good than evil. That society can be so remodelled as to make the individual what he ought to be, and that the real remedy for human misery is to reconstitute society, are positions which have been strained far beyond the limits of truth in the writings of such men as Victor Hugo. But it was perfectly true that society had wrapped itself up in a cloak of old, complicated, fine-spun errors, and that a vigorous effort was necessary to tear this cloak away and it was most salutary for France that the men of the Revolution did, in a large measure, tear it away. That an attention to man's happiness and comfort and intellectual advancement in this life is, at this period of the world's history, essential for the promotion of his religious life, has been among the greatest of the truths which a slow and often unwelcome experience has brought home to the minds of the present generation; and it was the men of revolutionary France who, more than any others, first set the idea of this afloat. It is quite true that society is badly constituted, and was far worse constituted seventy or eighty years ago ; and it is also true that the improvement of society is, in many cases, the only door to the improvement of the individual. French writers have pushed these truths beyond the limits of absurdity, and have worked themselves into a belief that Society alone is in fault when the individuals errs ; but in itself, the notion of looking to society principally, and to the circumstances in which he may be placed, as determining whether man generally is to become better or worse in Europe, is one the truth of which is attested not only by reflection on current history, but by the efforts now made on every side to improve the condition of those on whom society presses severely, as the indispensable preliminary to improving the sufferers themselves.

No view of the French Revolution, and of that general revolution throughout the civilised world which appeared most signally in France, appears to us more true than to regard it as a revolt against the double process of applying the truths revealed in the individual sinner and saint to the body of human society, and of at the same time acquiescing in the substitution of military tyranny and oligarchical caste when this application proved practically impossible. It was a great thing that, when this process had been carried on triumphantly for some time, men should at last have dared to say that they felt much better and more noble than they were supposed to be, and that they were determined to give themselves a chance of showing what they could be. No wonder that in spite of all its horrors, in spite of all its mischievous errors about equality and the rights of the majority, and in spite of all the palpable sophistries it had borrowed from Rousseau—the generation of 1789, which dared to say this, is still held in honour by France. We in England have embraced the main truths on which this generation seized, and have embraced them much more gradually, quietly, and sensibly, because our preparation had been long going on, and because Protestantism is so much more elastic than Catholicism in recognising the claims of the world beside those of the Church. It is with the greatest ease that, in England, we make our Protestantism square with the social facts around us, and the social theories that prevail. English Protestantism so readily incorporates secular views of man and his duties below that it incorporates them insensibly. That which, for the sake of our national pride and our peculiar scheme of society, we wish to be true, our religion easily permits us to think true. But Catholicism resisted far more strenuously the inroads of a set of opinions which it thought adverse to Christianity; and this gave rise to a struggle in France which is still going on, and the issue of which still divides the French mind.— Saturday Review.

Sydney Morning Herald (NSW ), Friday 12 June 1863, page 6

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/13079913

BARBARISM AS AN IDEAL

 An Examination of a Tendency in World Affairs

By S. M. Melamed, in the “Reflex”

The age old barbardom, which for centuries lay fettered and hidden beneath the rigorous forms of an old culture, is now awakening again, at a time when the cultural process has been completed and that of civilisation begun—that bellicose, virile joy of one’s own strength which only holds in contempt the rationalistic thinking of the epoch which is satiated with literature—that unbroken instinct of the race which wishes to live differently than under the pressure of studied books and theoretical ideals.—Oswald Spengler, “Hours of Decision,” p. 12.

No other generation in the western world has witnessed as many transvaluations as our own. They are of world historic significance not because they jeopardise economic, political and social systems or theological concepts, but because they affect man’s very soul. The startling political events of our time are but the accompanying phenomena of deep spiritual transformations. Many of our most ingrained convictions and deep-rooted beliefs, which grew out of a long and slow evolutionary process, are being destroyed before our very eyes. The speed with which these startling developments have taken place has so anesthetised the Occidental that but few people understand their historical significance. Neither the rise of Christianity, the destruction of the Roman Empire, nor the French Revolution can be compared in significance with the startling drama now being enacted here before our eyes.

The change in the form of government of a great nation is not necessarily a world historic event. Even a new spiritual allegiance of a people need not change the rhythm of the world historic process. But when the conception of man as a spiritual being and as the central figure of life is ruthlessly attacked and he is reduced to a purely economic atom, as in Marxist Russia, or to a purely zoological creature, as in Racial Germany, humanity is faced with the startling drama now being enacted here before our eyes.

For thousands of years the foremost representative of Occidental culture ought to impress upon man that he is the meaning and goal of all life. Religion pictured him as the crown of creation and as the highest peak in the cosmic process. In the making of man, so the religious myth of the Bible goes, God almost exhausted His creativeness. Although fashioned out of dust, man is not a part of nature only but partakes of the divine spirit. In the figure of the Redeemer, the idea of man’s close relationship to God finds its most powerful expression.

While religion placed man above brute nature by emphasising his relationship to God, philosophy stressed his spirituality. In foregoing his desire, in modifying his urge and in overcoming his instincts, in order to help his fellow man, man rises above nature and attains true humaneness. This doctrine of man was most impressively pronounced by Socrates and Plato. Forgotten during the Middle Ages, it was given new life by the Renaissance and Reformation and held sway until the World War.

In the plastic arts, too, the appreciation of man’s position in life found its expression in the glorification and idealisation of his figure. The great artists of classical antiquity and of the Renaissance were captivated and inspired not by the phenomena of brute nature but by suffering, aspiring and thinking man. This tendency only reflected the spirit of these respective periods.

It was this concept of man as the central figure of life, and as the crown of creation, which made modern culture possible. He created science in order to free himself from nature; he formulated jurisprudence in order to free himself from the natural instincts and urges of his fellow man; he invented ethics in order to free himself from evil; he conceived politics in order to safeguard his liberty and happiness, and he developed economic and social forms in order to free himself from want. In all his efforts, endeavours, and struggles, he was primarily animated by one desire—to preserve his spiritual individuality. Whether believer or heretic, he was inspired by the thought that he was the crown of creation.

II

“Man is a beast. I will repeat it again and again. All the moralists and social ethicists who seek to escape . . . are only beasts with broken teeth.” Such is the ethical doctrine of Oswald Spengler, the greatest German intellectual figure since the days of Nietzsche, as formulated in his latest book. “Hours of Decision” (p. 14). This conception of the beast-man is an extension of Schopenhauer’s will-man and Nietzsche’s blonde beast. That man is not a creature made in the Image of God but only a part of brute nature has become the basic conviction of Marxist Russia, Caesaric Italy, and Racial Germany.

Birth, marriage, and death, the most solemn moments in man’s career, have become of trivial significance in Soviet Russia. Burial is a profane and prosaic act as unsentimental as the disposal of any other worn out mechanism. Marriage is a matter of mere registration and birth a purely animal process. In Fascist Italy, the Government seeks to increase the population so that the cannon fodder of the country be increased. The quantity producing rabbit and the quality developing horse are the symbols and sources of inspiration of this policy. The Italian is taught to think in purely zoological terms upon the most important phenomenon of life. In Nazi Germany the new formula for the birth of a child is “Das Weib Gebirt das Tier" (“The woman gives birth to the animal”). Marriage and birth have not been profaned and secularised in Italy and Germany for reasons of political expediency, but the general tendency is no different than that of Russia.

It is no mere coincidence that in these three countries in which man has been deposed from his pedestal and reduced either to an economic atom or to a zoological creature that the sciences of man, with jurisprudence as their focal point, have been practically abolished and eliminated. The old systems of jurisprudence have been done away with and the new “systems” are merely expressions of the changing moods of arbitrary despots. Not basic laws and juridic principles, but arbitrary decrees prompted by expediency, caprice or ambition or malice are the corpus juris from which justice is drawn. The reintroduction of the torture chambers in Italy, Germany and Russia, as well as the summary executions of mere suspects of political opposition or resentment, testify best to the complete abrogation of the rights of man in these countries. Animals and mechanisms have no right. Since in these countries man is only considered to be beast or machine he cannot be the subject of rights, but like all other things he can only be an object of law.

III.

The most striking feature of the neo-barbaric world concept is its vehement rejection of reason and intellect. The social, political and economical degradation of the scholar and savant in Russia, Italy and Germany is only an expression of a powerful anti-intellectual tendency which originates in emotional mysticism. Even in Russia, with its artificial rationalisation of life and its adoration of applied science, only the Marxist scientist is tolerated. In all three countries the freedom of the mind and its accompanying attributes, such as intellectual honesty, sincerity, and idealism, are considered to be the contemptible legacies of decadent liberalistic and rationalistic regimes which must be uprooted. The position of men of the spirit, such as poets, artists, scientists, religionists, philosophers and scholars, is almost comparable to that of the lower castes of India. Not intellect, but will, not mind, but physical energy, not spiritual, but robust virility, is the standard of cultural life.

In Russia all professional men with the exception of engineers are most exploited by and receive less consideration from the State than any other group. It is almost unknown for working men not to be paid on time, whereas physicians, teachers, and laboratory workers often must wait months for their meagre wages. And when they do receive their wages they cannot buy nearly as much with them as can other groups. But worst of all they are regarded as potential political heretics and are treated accordingly. In Italy, the hotbed of intellectual individualism since the days of the Renaissance, every teacher from the grade school to the university is expected to teach a minimum and preach a maximum. He must constantly bring the message of Mussolini the Redeemer to his pupils. In Germany the granting of academic diplomas is predicated upon at least six months service in a labour camp. When Max Planck, the dean of German science, came to Hitler to plead for his colleagues who were deprived of their positions, he was told that ‘‘scientists being fools should not interfere in matters of the State but should mind their own affairs." As late as May 1934, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Enlightenment, in an article in his paper, "Der Angriff,” said:—

“. . . the intellectuals are an idle and generally worthless lot and in our age which demands real men they are merely in the way,”

And further he says:-—

"The intellectuals are failures and have fallen down at all decisive moments. And now when a simple labourer, an ordinary front soldier, has succeeded in making himself the leader of Germany, they are simply dying of envy and wounded self-conceit.”

It was therefore entirely consistent when some two weeks later Herr Zander, director of schools in the Berlin-Brandenburg province, proposed that the time devoted to the three R's in grammar school be reduced one-third, and that the time thus saved be devoted to physical training.

This contempt for intellectuality and its representatives finds its justification and explanation in the denial of man and in the deification of the State. Only the State has reason and it is omniscient. Consequently the mind of the individual must be subservient to that of the State, and its refusal to do so may forfeit the individual’s right to exist. Such was also the guiding principle of the Inquisition—believe or be killed!

IV.

The profound contempt for human reason so characteristic of the neo-despotism is the cultural legacy of the German Romantic School of Philosophy. Oswald Spengler is the latest powerful tremor of this tendency in German cultural life. His major opus, “The Decline of the West,” is not so much a new philosophy of history as a panegyric to the irrational, emotional, and mystic side of human life. Rationalism to him is akin to original sin. It is the source of all human aberration, the embodiment of all decadence, the clearest symptom of cultural degeneration and the agent which spells ruin to the virility of life. Rationalism to Spengler includes every manifestation of the Western mind of the past 300 years—Puritanism, Idealism, Materialism, and Romanticism. He rejects Rousseau as well as Kant, Voltaire as well as Holbach, Owen as well as Marx. They are all guilty of the crime of attempting to introduce a definite order into life and seeking to divert world history into a definite channel. All the great mottoes of modern times, such as freedom, equality, historical progress, the happiness of the greatest number, and the like, are sheer demagoguery, for human history is only war history. Hence the doctrine of and the will to international peace is an attempt to violate the . . historical process.

The unadulterated historical process manifests itself with elemental force and sweeps aside the artificialities created by the various rationalistic schools. The highest spiritual reality is not knowledge, but the religious myth. The ancient motto, “I believe because it is absurd," testifies to realistic understanding of the world. The highest political reality is the power of the great conqueror who heralds the coming of a new culture. Hence liberalism and democracy are signs of degeneration. Whenever the masses raise their heads culture is doomed, for only the great individual, privileged with unrestricted freedom, is the source of all culture. The highest social reality is the lord of the manor, the nobleman. It is he who gives life its form and colour. The domination of the myth, conqueror and nobleman form the higher order, and that of reason, masses and peace form the lower order. At present, the lower order prevails, and its continuance spells the inevitable destruction of our present culture and civilisation, says Spengler.

This deep-seated attraction to the mythical and repulsion from the rational expressed itself in Spengler's construction of the philosophy of history. All cultures are distinguished from one another by definite border lines which cannot be crossed. The ancient Babylonian culture had nothing in common with the Hindu or Chinese and the Arab had nothing in common with the Germanic. All these cultures arise within a certain landscape upon which they flourish, decay, and die like living organisms. Occidental culture, having been weakened and undermined by rationalistic rust, is about to collapse. The only culture visible on the horizon, capable of replacing the dying culture of the West, is the Russian. That the latter is overwhelmed with Marxistic rationalism which he elsewhere pronounces to be the embodiment of decadence, does not deter him from visualising a glorious coming Russian culture. For not that he hates rationalism less, but that he loves the mailed fist more. The complete suppression of democratic rule in Russia, the permanent degradation of reason, the absolute domination of the subjugator, and the idealisation and worship of might, appeal powerfully to Spengler’s romantic senses.

There is something sadistic in Spengler's conception of political history just as there is something fatalistic and arbitrary in his conception of the philosophy of history. When the masses are chained, oppressed, maltreated, tortured, and whipped by the rod of the despot, it is the normal order of things, but when they are free and happy and masters of their own destiny, history is moving with seven league boots towards catastrophe. When reason prevails, science flourishes, and life moves along an even keel, decadence is already to be seen on the horizon. But when the mind is enveloped in myth, and culture is only the privilege of the few, life attains its highest peak. If this Spenglerian doctrine is valid, Occidental history of the past three centuries is only an uninterrupted, typographical error of destiny.

There is nothing universal in man’s culture, says Spengler. All the great cultures have their own truths, logic, science, art, etc., which have no meaning or value to any other culture. A great culture is a spiritual individuality which absolutely excludes and denies any other personality. Modern man would be no worse off if the civilsations of classical and Oriental antiquity had never existed, for the languages and symbols of each culture can be understood only by its own period and people.

This cultural determinism bordering on fatalism is no less theology than is the economic determinism of Marxism. The great cultures of history, far from being encased in Chinese walls, actually empty into one another. Thus modern man derived his geometry from ancient Egypt, his foundations of algebra from the Arabs, his philosophy and art from ancient Greece, his jurisprudence from ancient Rome, his religious world picture from ancient Palestine, etc.

This theory of isolated cultures has many implications. Its presumptions are first a denial of one humanity, second, a division of the human race into aristocratic and non-aristocratic peoples, and third the supremacy of blood over mind. These presumptions have no foundation in fact. As a matter of fact all men are governed by the same laws of the mind. The history of science, philosophy and religion are replete with instances of simultaneous but independent discoveries by men of different cultures. Thus the atomic theory was discovered contemporaneously in ancient India and in ancient Greece. The conception of one God was also evolved simultaneously in ancient Egypt, Judea, and China. Gunpowder and glass were developed in China and in Europe independently of one another. Nothing, however, testifies more powerfully to the oneness of the human consciousness than the history of numerals which were developed independently of one another in all the ancient centres of civilisation.

Nor is the second presumption of aristocratic and plebeian peoples and cultures to be accepted without qualifications. Spengler’s own countryman, Felix von Luseban, one of the greatest anthropologists of modern times, completely denies the existence of superior and inferior peoples. So do those savants such as Montesquieu, Taine, Buckle, Darwin, and Lamarck, who maintain that the environment primarily gives a people its character and creativeness. Thus far, Spengler as a scientist has not discovered any concrete facts which may make the theories of his adversaries obsolete.

The same may be said of Spengler’s third presumption of the supremacy of blood over mind. Here again another great countryman of Spengler, Goethe, who was also a great scientist in his own right, maintained that the human mind cannot lay bare the innermost secrets of nature. Whether and how blood influences mind ethnically man has no means of discovering. All that man can detect is that the environment influences the mind, especially in art, religion, and science.

 The cultural clannishness with its absolute lines of demarcation of Spengler is only a glorified form of barbarism. Every barbarian considers the members of every other tribe to be the enemy which must be annihilated. The barbarian delights in the gleaming sword and the mailed fist and worships the conqueror. He surrenders to his instincts and is guided by his emotions, and when in quest of food, shelter, etc., his conduct is indistinguishable from that of the beast. But it is in these very manifestations of man's urges, instinct and emotions that Spengler sees the height of life and the source of all creativeness. His entire philosophy thus becomes a pæan to barbarism.

V.

The history of Western Europe coincides and is interlinked with the history of Christianity. Since the destruction of the Roman Empire, the great spiritual and artistic movement of Europe, whether mystical or rationalistic in form, was deeply anchored in the Christian world picture. It is only since the middle of the 18th century that the representatives of the natural and social sciences began to disregard Christian thought, although many of them continued their adherence to the church. By the beginning of the 20th century the representatives of the science were sharply divided into two camps —religious and anti-religious. This is especially true of Germany, where the Monistic Society represented the anti-Religious and the Kepler Society the religious groups. This division, although it stirred the educated groups, did not affect the masses. Not the onslaughts of science upon religion but those of Marxism estranged a great part of the city populace from the church, which now became not anti-religious but simply non-religious. Even in the Marxist camps defenders of religion were not lacking.

It was only with the rise of Nazidom that an anti-Christian wave swept the country. As early as 1921 the life of the priests in the villages of Catholic Bavaria began to become uncomfortable. In the large cities the representatives of Christianity became objects of attack and derision. Even the figure of Christ was subjected to scorn and humiliation. Hundreds of thousands of vociferous Nazis, jingoists, extreme nationalists, racialists, and neo-pagans suddenly discovered that Christianity is a foreign plant which has been sown upon German soil, and that Jesus was only a son of a foreign people which can never fathom the German mind. This anti-Christian movement won such adherents as General von Ludendorff, who served to legitimate this tendency in the eyes of the populace. It gained in strength in proportion to the success of National Socialism. When the latter finally triumphed, a bold attempt was made not only to dechristianise the church, but to introduce in its stead Germanic paganism of old. The figure of Jesus, symbolising meekness, piety, charity, and goodness was considered to be suitable only for slaves. A powerful and dominating people like the Germans require the inspiration of Wotan, who radiates might, energy, bellicosity, and severity.

This anti-Christian, pagan movement which assumed such ugly forms was fathered by Friedrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler. Nietzsche was the first to teach the Germans that Christianity is slave morality, which was born out of a rebellion of slaves against lords. His ideals of the blonde beast and of the superman were incompatible with the basic concepts of Christianity. “The Christian God Concept,” he says in his “Anti-Christ,” “God as the God of the sick, God as a spider, God as spirit, is one of the most corrupt God concepts that has ever come upon this earth.” In thus declaring war against Christianity, Nietzsche called into being those latent heretic forces which began to spread with the industrialisation of Germany.

But Oswald Spengler, even more than Nietzsche, has contributed to the development of the anti-Christian movement in Germany. In describing Christianity as a phenomenon of the so-called Magian or Arabic culture, which died with the rise of the German culture, Spengler impressed upon his country men that Christianity is not only a strange plant upon German soil, but actually belongs to a lost and petrified world. Preferring the world of action to the world of the spirit, Spengler sides with Pilatus and not with Jesus. World history is a realm of action and not of dreams, of facts and not of sentiments. "Since Christianity represents the second it must be rejected.

Spengler’s “Decline of the West” was read and accepted by millions of his countrymen in the Fatherland. Coincident with the spread of Spenglerism, such anti-Christian publicists of previous generations as Ludwig Feuerbach and Max Stirner, experienced great revivals. So charged was the German air with anti-religious sentiments that Fritz Mauthner’s monumental “Atheism and its History in the West,” in four large volumes totalling 2,200 pages, ran through five editions in five years. So was the ground prepared in German literature, philosophy, theology, and historiography for the growth of pagan tendencies culminating in Nazi religious profaneness and barbarism.

In the cities of the English speaking world one very seldom finds such streets as Hume Street, Beacon Street, Milton or Shakespeare Avenue. But in Germany every city and town has its Goethe Strasse, Schiller Strasse, Kant Strasse, Hegel Strasse, Fichte Strasse and Schopenhauer Strasse. The memory of almost every German poet, scientist, philosopher and artist of note is perpetuated for the populace by streets named after him. No other country in the West has as many statues in bronze and marble erected to its great representatives of the spirit. The people considered the men of the spirit to be the true heroes of the nation, holding them in greater esteem than conquerors, warriors and statesmen. Every German took pride in his being associated with the "people of poets and thinkers." The respect for intellectual achievement or even for mere intellectual occupation is traceable to the influence of Immanuel Kant, Germany's greatest philosopher, who made reason the source of all reality. His philosophical theories created social values in Germany by making the intellectual the centre of social life. Just as no popular meeting in England can be successful unless graced by the presence of a prince of the blood, so could no popular meeting in Germany be of importance unless addressed by an outstanding intellectual. For over a hundred year the intellectual was the axis of social life in Germany, until the Nazis rose to power and decreed that the intellectual was a superfluous being who contributed nothing to German strength and might. From the present hostile attitude towards the intellectual in Germany, one can readily appreciate the great position he must have held in former days. The startling anti-intellectual movement culminating in the worship of ignorance and vulgarity is the product of a slow historical process which has but recently come to a head. One need only page the major works of German poetry and philosophy of the last generation to appreciate that the German attitude towards life was undergoing a radical change. Since Nietzsche's battle cry of the transvaluation of values, even his adversaries began to adopt a critical attitude towards the old order and old concepts. In the first decade of the 20th century, there was already visible in German thought a growing enmity towards the values of the nineteenth century, viz., intellectualism, mechanism, historicism, and all those life concepts which spring from a rationalistic understanding of the world. By 1930 German poetry and German philosophy reflected an ever growing irrationalism and mysticism. In the 19th century the motto of cultured Germany was reason—in the 20th century it was life. Not concepts but instincts, not ideas but urges, not definitions but sentiments are now considered to be the sources of truth. In modern German philosophy figures like Wilhelm Dilthey, Nicolai Hartmann, Friedrich Grave, Mueller Freienfels, and Oswald Spengler give powerful expression to this tendency. This forte chord in German contemporary spiritual life became fortissimo at the end of the war, when the Germans realised that great world historic decisions are made not by superior thought but by superior deeds. The cult of reason was transformed into the cult of instinct.

This anti-intellectual tendency was not confined to Germany alone. In Russia, where intellectual life was less developed than it was in Germany, but where, nevertheless, the representatives of the spirit were held in high esteem, a new attitude towards the old values became noticeable at the conclusion of the abortive revolution of 1905-06. This revolution was engineered in large measures by the intellectuals and academic youth. Some of them, like Gorki, Audrieff and Trotsky were notable figures in Russian letters. The entire Socialist Revolutionary party deduced its programme of action from purely intellectual theories. The failure of their revolution compromised the faith of the Russian youth in intellectualism. Almost overnight a swing from intellectualism to mysticism, and from rationalism to sensualism took place. The hitherto esteemed Russian classics of Dostoievsky and Tolstoy were relegated to the background, and Artzibaskeff, the author of the highly pornographic novel “Sanine,” became the literary hero of the day. Not spiritual depth or intellectual truth but urges and instincts became the ideal.

From 1906-14 one of the main tasks of the Russian Minister of Education was to suppress sexual orgies in the secondary schools of the country. Within a very short time the idealistic clan of the Russian youth vanished and paganism became the order of the day. Might became the greatest object of adoration, and the great man was identified with the powerful man.

This demoralisation of Russian life, culminating in the figure of Rasputin, enabled a determined group of Bolshevists to ride into power and to maintain it ever since. So did the manifestation of purely psychological forces pave the way for paganism and barbarism in important European centres.

That this neo-paganism in central and eastern Europe which has degenerated into economic and political barbarism is not a mere caprice of history can best be seen from the reception which Spengler’s “Decline of the West” has received in these countries. In Germany alone over 300.000 copies of this work were sold during the first six years after publication. In Austria it received the greatest popular reception since Weininger's “Sex and Character” appeared in 1906. It was read with equally great gusto in Hungary, Russia and Italy. Only in France, England and America did it fail to impress the reading public, and was politely rejected in all these countries.

Oswald Spengler, the apostle of the new Caesarism, has impressed himself upon peoples who were vanquished either politically or psychologically. Their defeat developed in them a veritable hunger for might. In power they saw their only salvation. To attain it, it was necessary to transvaluate life from reason to will, from intellect to instinct, from idea to urge. Guided by these forces, the order of the jungle settled upon the major part of the European continent. Barbarism became the ideal.

Australian Jewish Herald (Melbourne, Vic.), Thursday 17 December 1936, page 5

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/260975975/29158516#

EUROPEAN LIBERALISM

 AN ESSAY IN INTERPRETATION BY PROFESSOR LASKI

"The Rise of European Liberalism," by Harold J. Laski. Published by George Allen and Unwin, London.

LIBERTY OF THE INDIVIDUAL

IN the nineteenth century the dominating idea in the political and social thought of the period was the doctrine of the liberty of the individual. Political freedom was sought to be attained by democratic institutions, economic liberty by the restriction of State interference in industry. In general it was considered that not merely was the general welfare best attained by allowing a maximum of freedom of action to individuals, but that individual liberty of action and thought was a value in itself, something to be sought for its own sake. In medieval times no such doctrine prevailed. Authority was the keynote of the period. Freedom of thought and action was strictly controlled by the dogmas of revealed religion and the moral code of Christianity. In modern times the pursuit of economic gain is regarded as an allowable and even praiseworthy end in itself, but in medieval times the economic interest of the individual was subordinated to consideration of the general welfare. Men lived within an economic order in which the effective social institutions, whether church or state or guild, judged economic activity by criteria derived from outside itself. Material utility was not accepted as a valid justification of economic behaviour. Heaven was man's destination, and his activities in this world were controlled accordingly. Hence competition was controlled, commerce was forbidden on religious grounds prices and the rate of interest were fixed, wages and hours were regulated, and speculation was, within wide limits, prohibited. But in the sixteenth century these medieval ideas began to give way to the habit of thought and system of ideas that are known as liberalism, and the question is, why did they do so?

 PENETRATING ANALYSIS.

 IN his essay, Professor Laski seeks to supply an answer to this question. To his task he brings qualifications which are possessed by few if any other writers of the present day. Not only is he an accomplished historian, but he is also a political philosopher with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the political writings of the period under consideration: indeed he almost irritates at times by the copiousness of his familiar allusions to writers of whom most people have never heard. The result is a profound and penetrating analysis of the fundamental ideas of liberalism, and of their relation to the historical evolution of the last four centuries. Professor Laski sees in liberalism an ideology invented to justify the methods and the predominance of the commercial class which gradually came to power in the period following the Renaissance and Reformation. Seeing the opportunities which lay before them to take advantage of the new geographical and technological discoveries, merchants and manufacturers rejected the traditional ideas which would have hampered them in their pursuit of gain, and asserted the right of the individual to free enterprise in the acquisition of wealth. They challenged the right of absolute monarchy to rule independently of their consent, thus evolving the doctrines of political liberty, and they next denied the right of the State, however controlled, to interfere with the economic freedom of the individual in the pursuit of gain, thus laying down the doctrine of laissez faire. In place of a society resting on status they substituted one the basis of which was freedom of contract between individuals. They persuaded themselves further that the freedom of the individual to pursue his own personal gain would promote the general welfare of society.

 THE DOCTRINE OF LIBERALISM.

 THUS Professor Laski sees liberalism as fundamentally a doctrine intended to secure to the middle classes their right to property and their right to pursue individual gain. Its more idealistic exponents did not of course limit its benefits to the middle classes, but Professor Laski lays stress on the fact that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the founders of liberalism refused to extend their theories to cover the working classes in cases where middle class interests might be affected. Thus they energetically rejected the claim of the working classes to participation in the government of the State, and they denied them the right of combination against employers (which alone could give them equality of bargaining power) as being an infringement of the liberty of contract between employer and employee. In the end they were prepared to grant political rights to the working classes, but only on the understanding that rights of property were not to be interfered with — it probably never occurred to them that such rights would be questioned. Now that they are being questioned, Professor Laski notes a disposition on the part of the middle classes to throw overboard their liberal doctrines in favour of Fascism and similar anti-liberal theories. This supports the thesis that liberalism was intended to maintain middle-class interests. 

THE LONELY FURROW OF THE IDEALIST.

 HOWEVER, the thesis is one from which many people will violently dissent. They can point out that John Hampden was not a business man, and that many of the aristocracy fought against Charles I. They can point out that Quesnay, who founded the French school of Physiocrats, who propounded the doctrine of freedom of trade, was not a trader but a court physician. There is no doubt that John Stuart Mill when he wrote of liberty had much more in mind than to make the world safe for capitalists. And so on. But ideas have a habit of being carried further than their origin necessitated, and their extensions are accepted so long as they do not conflict too strongly with their essential basis. The notion of individual liberty is one which may well arouse the enthusiasm of a John Stuart Mill, and economic liberalism had practical advantages and triumphs which might easily persuade a man of its value even though he was not engaged in commerce himself. But theories do not gain general acceptance unless they meet the needs of a large and important class, and the idealist will plough a lonely furrow unless his ideas are such that the practical man of affairs can use them to further his own self-interest. An example was given above of how the doctrine of liberalism could be applied to maintain the position of the middle classes against other classes. On the whole Professor Laski's view would seem to be incontrovertible, and his essay constitutes a masterly analysis of the basis of the dominating political thought of the last four centuries.

W.N.H.

Telegraph (Brisbane, Qld.), 29 July 1936 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article181911415

"NO CLEAR DIRECTION."

 Professor Laski Discusses Roosevelt.

CONTEMPORARY America is a bewildering spectacle; I returned to England after five weeks with a sense that here, in comparison, were stability of purpose and direction of effort! It is true that the new American Government is the best since the end of the war.

It has courage, it has initiative, and, in an important degrees, it has good will. But one cannot avoid the sense, as one watches it at work, that it is overwhelmed by the complexity of its task; that it has no clear direction in which it is seeking to move; and, not least important, that the stage of evolution the American economic system has reached is unlikely to permit it the luxury of the wholesale economic reconstruction America so patently requires (says Professor Laski in the London "Herald").

What is being decided in America? Essentially, I think, the present phase is the end of the struggle between the little man and the great combination for the control of the sources of productive power. As yet, in a European sense, there is no Labor movement in America; the trade unions, with, but one notable exception, lack any serious political sense of the technique required for the defence of the wage-earning classes.

Political Issues.

The major political issues are, therefore, what they were in Great Britain when Liberals and Conservatives dominated the scene. The policies pursued by the Democrats do not think of issues in terms of the nation's mastery of its life.

They conceive of the achievement of an equilibrium in which the independence of the small owner-merchant, farmer, manufacturer, or what not, is secured.

But this is a futile attempt to arrest a technological evolution in which the small producer is bound to go to the wall. Mr. Roosevelt is seeking to protect him by a policy of regulating capitalism.

At the moment, he has a free hand simply because the Republicans are so discredited. But his effort depends upon a rapid recovery of prosperity. If that does not come, he will lose his hold of Congress at the next election, and, with it, his initiative in legislation.

In that event his last year of office will be barren; and he will hand over to the Republicans—who stand essentially for big business—a highly centralised political machine more apt to the development of industrial feudalism than the world has seen in modern times.

Workers' Outlook.

The American working man will, under those circumstances, be proletarianised under conditions which will make the task of organisation more arduous and more bitter than it has been anywhere since the industrial revolution.

What I felt in America was that the whirlwind of depression had come so quickly that no Government could bridge the gap between the historic psychology of its electorate and the measure required for reconstruction. That is why, I think, the Presidential policy will be regulation, where the facts require socialisation.

Roosevelt Doomed.

That is why I believe that, despite his profound desire to help "the forgotten man," President Roosevelt is doomed to defeat; he is trying to do with the American economic order things its environment does not make possible.

And this is why I come back to England with a profound sense that our outlook is a more hopeful one. For though the experimental temper of Washington is incomparably better than the reactionary do-nothingism of our own Government, here, at least, the lines of division in policy are clear.

The British people have given their Government as wide a mandate for private enterprise as it has ever received; it is terribly and convincingly clear that it has no notion how to make use of it.

The alternative in this country is not, as in the United States, a policy of limited control. The alternative is a clear policy of wide, and rapid socialisation for which the  psychology of the people is being increasingly prepared.

If there is no European catastrophe, if, further, we can count upon respect for constitutional principles, the next years in England ought to give the Labor Party the most creative opportunity in its history.

Compare that situation with the American position. There are 15 million unemployed who with their dependents probably constitute a population greater in number than the whole of our people.

Great schemes must develop, like unemployment insurance, of social welfare, for which the necessary Civil Service will have to be improvised. Control of banking, hours of labor, property-rights, will have to be invented; and these experiments will have to run the gamut of a Supreme Court which is nothing so much as the final defender of economic privilege. That is not all.

States And Federation

The relation of the States to the Federal Government is largely archaic; yet it will be astonishingly difficult to secure its radical amendment. The temper of the people is ardent for change, but it is still set in an overwhelmingly individualist environment. Labor is badly organised and politically unconscious.

 There is no well-developed co-operative movement. The whole social life of America, in a word, is still planned upon the assumption that it is the fabled land of opportunity. And only the actual vision of America can make the observer realise the volume of reconstruction, psychological and institutional, which the new environment requires.

I did not feel that the American Government has either the power or the institutions essential to the task it confronts. It is still, as a Government, largely thinking in terms that the conditions have made obsolete.

It is a "Liberal" Government at a time when the recipe of Liberalism has no applicability to the issues before us.

Inflation?

It may do something by inflation to relieve the terrible pressure of mortgages and debt-interests. It may ease the tariff-barriers which have so woefully handicapped international trade.

It may establish a sounder banking system and offer a greater security to the investor. It may promote schemes of social welfare on the lines of the legislation fostered by the Liberal Government of 1906. But even supposing that it achieves all these things, it will still have left the effective economic power of the community in the hands of the few.

It will still not have been able to plan an America in which there is even an approximation to an equal claim on the common good.

It is no doubt true that the motives of Mr. Roosevelt and his colleagues reveal a far more liberal and creative temper than those of the "National" Government. 

No Organised Workers

But what is lacking in America is a seriously organised and self-conscious working class which sees the problems of power and is prepared to think in those terms. Until that epoch arrives in the United States I find it hard to see how any progressive movement can have behind it the driving force which brings success.

There may be sporadic improvement. There may be well-meant effort to anticipate and stem working-class discontent before it assumes unmanageable proportions. But there will be no decisive attack on the central citadel of power.

In Great Britain it is toward that decisive attack that we are marching. There is no need, Heaven knows, to anticipate that the task will be other than a very difficult one; the British Labor Movement is learning slowly, but, I think, steadily the lessons of 1931.

But at least the character of the alternatives is with us one that is increasingly obvious. To retain the present social order means to retain the present drift and misery and inability to plan in a wholesale way.

A government of the Left in these next years means experiment with the vital foundations of the national life. We have reached a stage in our evolution where that experiment is the alternative to disaster. And it is because a government of the Left may still be the choice of the British people that I find here a prospect of hope not yet discernible on the American horizon.

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article185468576

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

MR. HENRY TAYLOR AT HINDMARSH.

 ————<>————

Mr. Henry Taylor, the Honorary Commissioner of Emigration, gave an address on " The Farm Labourers' Revolt in England." The chair was occupied by Mr. James Weeks. A small book, entitled "Songs for Singing at Labourers' Meetings and Homes," was put into the hand of each person upon entering the Hall, and the proceedings were initiated by all present joining in a song selected from this book. Its opening verses, sung to the tune of "The Fine Old English Gentleman," were as follow : —https://www.youtube.com › watch?v=P7pFP2iQnVU

 “Come, lads, and listen to my song, a song of

honest toil,

 'Tis of the English labourer, the tiller of the

soil;

 I'll tell you how he used to fare, and all the ills

he bore,

 Till he stood up in his manhood, resolved to

bear no more.

 This fine old English labourer, one of the

present time.

 " He used to take whatever wage the farmer

chose to pay.

 And work as hard as any horse for eighteen

pence a day ;

 Or if he grumbled at the nine, and dared to ask

for ten,

 The angry farmer cursed and swore, and sacked

him there and then.

 This fine old English labourer, &c.”

 He used to tramp off to his work while town

folks were in bed.

 With nothing in his belly but a crust or two of

bread ;

 He dined upon potatoes, and he never dreamed

of meat,

 Except a lump of bacon fat sometimes by way

of treat.

 This fine old English labourer, &c.'.

 Mr. Taylor, upon rising, was received with loud and prolonged cheers. He said :— I don't apprehend at all any difficulty with you this evening. For the life of me I cannot see what we have to quarrel about, because what I have to say to you is simply a matter of fact — a matter of history, consequently it is not a matter for debate at all. I think I may say that the most important event in the social history of England, and one by no means unimportant to the political life of the mother-country during the present century, is the revolt of the farm labourer ; and when you through your Secretary invited me amongst you I thought it would not be uninteresting to you to hear something of the " old folks at home," feeling quite sure that none more than yourselves would rejoice to know of the elevation of the poorest and most dejected of our fellow-countrymen, of the liberation of the slave, and of the breaking asunder of the bonds of the British serf. It was in the month of February, 1872, that the warcry of the labourers was raised, and before proceeding to speak further of the movement we will briefly glance at the condition of the labourers immediately prior to that time, and look at the causes which led up to and made the movement a possibility. The condition of the rural population was that of almost complete subjection—of serfdom—to the village magnates—the lord, the squire, the parson, and the farmer. Badly housed, miserably clad, and working for starvation wages, their case seemed to be getting worse and worse, for in the olden times there used to be some show of a supplementary wage in the systematic bestowal of perquisites and parochial relief ; but these were failing, the farmer ceasing to recognise any responsibility beyond the payment of the nominal wage, be it ever so meagre or insufficient; and the poor law was becoming such a huge and expensive machinery, the screw being put on forcibly to throw the people upon their own resources ; and thus it was that in the "darkest part of the night" the daybreak of unionism dawned upon them, giving them hope and courage sufficient to successfully break the chain and demand the "liberty of the subject." The wages of farm labourers in the beginning of 1872, prior to the revolt, were as nearly as possible as I will state ; and I will take care not to exaggerate anything, for in very truth there is no need to do so. In Warwickshire—the county which the movement centres, and in which it took its rise—the men were receiving from 9s to 12s. per week, the difference, as in most other cases, being largely in proportion to the proximity of the village to towns and manufacturing centres; in Oxfordshire, from 8s. to 10s. ; Worcester, Dorset, Hereford, Wilts, Somerset, Devon, Essex, Beds, Cambridge, Herts, from 7s. to 10s. ; Surrey and Sussex, 1s. or 2s. higher ; and these sums you must understand to represent the wages independent of "tucker"— on the contrary, house rent, tucker, clothing, and other necessaries had to be miracled out of these wages into providing not only for the man who received it but often for a wife and family. I will not waste your time in any attempt to divide up these amounts and explain how they were made to meet domestic requirements, for hitherto I have failed, and it will be better as an exercise that you should go into the matter for yourselves. The social condition was very low ; the ignorance of the people was deplorable, and superstition abounded beyond belief. With little or no society beyond his intercourse with one or two others in the field, who were often kept at considerable distance apart to prevent conversation, he had no exercise for his mental faculties beyond the mechanical plodding about the farm or in the field, or if he once thought of his relation to society he would discern that he was a nonentity — no one noticing him or caring for him so long as he worked hard, kept off the rates, and refrained from “picking and stealing.” The farm labourer knew comparatively little of the world outside his own village, either as to the geographical relationship of our own country with others — anything beyond the boundary of England being to them " foreign parts,” whether it be America, Canada, the Cape, or the Australias — nor knew he anything of the condition of the labour market to enable him to make the best of his labour; nor could he well avail himself of any opportunity which might present itself at a distance, being continually in debt to the baker, who, as a matter of course could no longer supply the wife and family when the breadwinner had left, fearing lest he should lose what he had already advanced, for the beggardly condition of the labourer was such as to induce him to fraud and dishonesty — for who amongst us is prepared to hunger in a land of plenty ? In parish matters he was never consulted, nor his rights and privileges either known or recognised by himself or his " betters," who are frequently found fighting him now that he realizes and asserts them in the vestries and other parochial assemblies. Politically, of course, he was nowhere: having no vote, he was never consulted upon any matters whatever, however closely his interests were connected. There were a few exceptions, in the case of agricultural boroughs such as that of Woodstock, the seat of the Duke of Marlborough, and created for the special benefit of noble lords and used accordingly, and where at one time either farmer or labourer would as soon dare to dispute the right of His Lordship to exist as to oppose him politically. Legally, he received plenty of attention: but lures and rabbits were protected to a much greater extent — the farmer who ran a dungfork into the behind parts of a labourer being fined five shillings for assault, whilst the snarer of a coney would receive two months' imprisonment as a felon. Cases arising from differences between master and servant, being in all cases decided by the employer class, were much the same as when the wolf caters for the lamb; for the labourers were mostly too poor to procure the defence which a lawyer would afford them, and the cases not being reported, or being reported by a ”local” entirely under the thumb of the magnates, there was no public opinion to operate as it is found to do so wholesomely in large communities where the Press is free; so that the law was frequently twisted and strained to pay off the grudges of bumptious J.P.'s whose dignities may have been assailed by the assertion of the liberties and independence of an exceptionally intelligent labourer who might feel the yoke too oppressive for his advanced stage of manhood. Such has been the conduct of the “great unpaid,'' and so infamously have they betrayed their trusts and privileges that they have become a byword and a reproach in the country districts that law in many cases is not so much respected as the invasion of it, and a Magistrate with a white necktie is regarded as about synonymous with a tyrant. And, verily, the revelations which have been brought to light through the operations of the National Agricultural Labourers' Union are such as to justify the people in their contempt towards such an institution, which has been such an engine of tyranny as to call forth denunciations from all communities, not excepting the Lord Chancellor himself, who, in the most severe language, rebuked a certain landlord, magistrate, barrister, and esquire named Wilberforce — a name he disgraced for summarily flogging two boys until the blood flowed in streams from them for having been in the field pursuing rabbits. We have taken care, since the labourers' movements have given us facilities, to expose and denounce many of the most flagrant injustices of these lordly tyrants ; but we have not been able to cope with one half of them. What was done in times previous when there was no one to keep a look out God only knows, but it was something terrible. The law in the hands of the rural J.P.'s was as the rod in the hand of the schoolmaster of the olden times, and was used as recklessly. The following song, composed by the Editor of the English Labourer, is a fair representation of the regard in which the labouring classes view the J.P. portion of their betters : —

 My name it is Squire Puddinghead,

 A Justice of the Peace, Sir,

 And if you don't know what that means,

 Just ask the rural p'lice, Sir.

 When culprits nabbed for petty crimes

 Within my Courts assemble,

 If I am sitting on the bench

 Oh ! don't I make them tremble

 At the great unpaid,

 Ask anything but justice

 Of the great unpaid.

 The cases that I have to try

 Are mostly small transgressions.

 So small, the Court in which I sit

 Is called the Petty Sessions ;

 A sort, of legal smalltooth comb,

 The offences are so tiny,

 You'd laugh at them, but you'd not laugh

 When I commence to fine ye.

 Oh ! the great unpaid, &c.

 If Polly Brown but takes a stick

 From Farmer Giles's fences,

 I fine her twopence as its worth,

 And fourteen bob expenses ;

 And if a tramp sleeps in a field,

 Such is my lordly bounty,

 I find him lodgings for a week —

 Provided by the county.

 The Union leaders I would hang

 'Twould be a task delightful.

 But since I can't, I am content

 To do the mean and spiteful ;

 And if my colleague, Captain Fair,

 Would be the poor's protector.

 The vilest things I dare to do

 Are backed up by the Rector.

 Oh ! the great unpaid !

 Ask anything but justice

 Of the great unpaid.

 This condition of things has given rise to a great agitation in favour of a better administration of justice, and for a Stipendiary Magistracy. The religious condition of the rurals was such generally as to afford little anxiety to the national shepherds, the clergy of the Established Church, who appeared to be “asleep in Zion.” They imagined that their flocks were well fenced in, and all that was necessary was an occasional walk round : their dogs, keepers, police, J.Ps., &c., were entrusted with the rest. For the most part the villages possessed the cardinal virtues ; they were “ poor, humble, and meek,” and rarely raised themselves beyond those boundaries. I noticed lately a paragraph in the English Labourer, giving as the Rev. G. Congrene's ideal of a Christian life an example in the Life of a Cornish farmers lad, who was so advanced in spiritual perfection that at last he gave six hours a day to devotion. This young man found the spiritual life in "fasting and early rising, six hours' daily prayer the mortification of the flesh, living on plain food, dressing in the cheapest clothes, dwelling among the poor, giving up all his means, and maintaining himself by daily labour on his father's farm, and constantly in spiritual anatomization." I need hardly tell you that there are no priests or clergy of any denomination who have faith enough in this kind of thing to live it themselves, and I must confess that I am quite as sceptical ; and yet there are hundreds of men getting good livings by preaching this and similar impracticable rot and falsehood to the poor of my country. The clergy of the Established Church are not alone responsible for thus teaching poverty, and submission to what was libellously called Divine Providence; it was preached week by week by dissenters, itinerant and local preachers, who seemed quite sincere ; and the tongues of those who held clearer views of the Divine will were silenced, because there seemed to be no way of escape. Now and then we heard a voice crying in the wilderness, a few solitary prophets denouncing the social wrongs, and doing what they could to improve the condition of the people; such was that venerable and godly man Canon Girdlestone, who for years stood out on the side of the oppressed, enduring the calumny and reproach of his neighbours. He assisted as many as he could to emigrate and migrate to better fields of labour, and so has earned the right to live in our memories, revered and respected; but, good man as he was, Canon Girdlestone could never understand what we meant by freedom for the labourer; and although he worked, and was prepared to co-operate with others to assist and benefit the poor, yet he could never realize the independence of the people and the possibility of their doing for themselves what he had recognised as the duty of other classes to do for them. And let me not be misunderstood to underestimate the kind feeling and benevolence of many who in their own way and through pity, did much to alleviate the sorrows of the poor, when I say that many of these their apparently greatest friends were the greatest opponents of the labourer's efforts at self-help and independence—threatening those who dared to assert such a position with all kinds of penalties involved in the withdrawal of their patronage. Whilst all these things were so there was a gradual and continual work going on— unnoticed but none the less sure— which must ultimately produce its fruits. Through the dames' schools and the parish schools, inefficient as they were, and with all the stumbling-blocks and barriers raised by a bigoted directorate mostly centred in the parish clergyman, there was and had long been a leaven of education which had done some thing amongst the naturally shrewd peasantry. That bugbear dissent had made sad havoc against the law and doctrine of "constituted authority;" and with all the strange doctrines preached by an oftimes illiterate local preacher in the "conventicle," there was the seed of revolt against a condition of things which seemed wrongs in the light of a growing intelligence. We shall not be likely to attach too much importance to the work of dissenters in the villages, to whom we are indebted very largely for the life and energy which were remaining to the labourers prior to 1872. Where dissent was most rife, there was found the most spirit and courage in the people ; and where only the Established Church predominated, there was most servility and cowardice, unless in some very exceptional cases where the clergyman was a better man, and not a worse, for holding such a position. Another force was at work. The railways were being carried in every direction through the rural districts, making it possible for men in the towns and cities to come more in contact with each other. The penny Press soon found a growing circulation in the villages; and thus Reynolds, Lloyd, and others commenced to talk strange things to enquiring disciples, which gradually made them very uneasy. It occasionally told them of cruel injustices which were practised, and how the perpetrators had been punished and held up to reprobation; and in comparing the reported case with their own circumstances they often found their own case the worse of the two, which made them restless and anxious for redress. They read of Trades Unions and strikes, and their hearts burned within them when they read of the triumph of the worker, and sank when the men were defeated. Now, men in the villages — the most plucky of them — had commenced working for railway contractors for a better wage ; some had gone to cities and towns — had dared to tear themselves away from their old associations: the village church and steeple, with its chiming bells on the Sabbath, was no small thing to sacrifice: and as each man wrote home, and forwarded to his wife and family the means of maintenance, or re-visited his village, the spirit of revolt was sown. All these things could be clearly seen by those who watched the signs of the times and who study cause and effect. Professor Beesley, in a pamphlet written five years prior to the starting of the movement, predicted that in that space of time in all probability there would be a rising of the farm labourers : and so it happened. Subsequent events proved how effectually the above causes had been in operation, for at the blast of the first trumpet men came forth from all parts of the oppressed rural districts, possessing such a power of natural eloquence and intelligence, though with a scanty education, which surprised everybody. It is a disputed question as to where the first sound was heard, nor does it signify much ; the field was ripe for the harvest, and whilst Joseph Arch was holding forth as much to the surprise of himself as of his neighbours, Teddy Haynes in Warwickshire, George Ball in Lincolnshire, and numbers of others in other directions were busily engaged in calling upon the poor to revolt against their miserable condition and demand a livelihood more compatible with our civilization. I cannot refrain from mentioning the name of J. E. Matthew Vincent, who at the risk — and no small one as that time — of the withdrawal of patronage, hurried to the assistance of Joseph Arch in making his voice heard in the country, and who, together with William Gibson Ward, a fierce and powerful writer, started the first paper which espoused the cause of the labourer in such a way as to command the attention of all classes. I do not mention these individuals and their work with less pleasure than I feel regret that they have not shown themselves more stanch to the principles which they at first professed to advocate. These have now no part in the matter, the English labourer having superseded the first. The labourers of Warwickshire had no sooner conceived the notion of uniting than the farmers, clergy, and squires, with Sir C. Mordaunt at their head, met in solemn conclave to consider this shocking ingratitude of the men, spoke of their kindness to the men in charities and perquisites, declared that they must " nip it in the bud," the Rev. Canon Holbeach declaring that it was "seditious and wicked," and resolutions condemnatory were passed by this "union of the powers" to stamp out the union of laborers, and they decided to give a week's notice to all who belonged to the movement to leave their employ. This they carried out, and at the end of the first week some 300 men were without means of subsistence, and many of them under notice to quit their homes. In the meantime I had been solicited, by some labourers in a village near Leamington, to address them on Unionism, and help them to start. Why they came to me I know not : I had never been in public, nor was I in the least a speaker, but a quiet homely man. Nevertheless I could not refrain, and with my shopmates we went over after our day's work was over, and, meeting a vast audience of labourers and their wives and daughters, we started a branch of the Union. I had the honour that week — the week the men were under notice to leave — to write the first appeal to the Trades Unionists and the country for help, which was liberally responded to, and which saved the men from submission, or perhaps a more violent rebellion. The Daily Telegraph and the London Daily News at first, and then other influential newspapers, espoused the cause of the labourer, and from almost all classes expressions of sympathy, as well as practical help, was forthcoming. Politicians of the advanced school imagined that they could see a power arising which might be of service to the party of progress. Social reformers rejoiced at the ''shaking of the dry bones,'' and conceived a grand change in society as a result of the movement : and thousands who have no sympathy whatever with workmen's combinations came forward to assist the labourer to a bigger loaf and his social and political rights. But there was another party, of immense strength, who, whilst they did not deny the labourers' right to sufficient food, were not prepared to concede any social or political position, knowing full well that in proportion as the labourer's influence and power was increased, theirs must diminish. This cut them to the core, and it was not to be wondered at if they resisted what they considered an encroachment on their “divine right” to govern. The farmers, upon whom the demand for a better wage was made, resisted upon two pleas — it affected their profits, and to them it presented itself as an interference with his right to decide for himself what he should pay his men — as though the seller should abide by the price fixed by the buyer for his commodity ; but, however absurd the arguments and notions of these employers may appear to us who can look without prejudice upon the question, there is no doubt of the sincerity of those who held them, who were quite satisfied that they were rendering a service to the poor men themselves if they could only destroy this most seditious Union and protect them from the seductive influences of the agitators. Who were the agitators ? Mostly labouring men from the field— men of power in speech who were pained with the smarts of the oppression which in common with those to whom then appealed they had been subjected in the past; and men who, if their knowledge of political economy was not of a sound order, were yet decided in their faith that their condition was not such as industrious men were entitled to. These expressions were uttered with tongues of fire, and they appealed effectively to tens of thousands of awakening souls, who aforetime were cast down and hopeless. These agitators were, as a rule, morally, the best men of their class, of good repute, chosen by the people themselves as their philosophers and guides, and far away from them I am happy in testifying to their industry and integrity; for I believe there were never so many men so hurriedly called forth to so important a work who acted more faithfully in their calling. Great and good men allied themselves to the movement in its early stages ; some of them are still stanch and tried friends. Mr. J. S. Wright, Alfred Arnold, and Jessie Collings, of Birmingham ; Rev:. F. S. Attenborough, of Leamington ; J. C. Cox, Mr. S. Morley and others in London are amongst the number who have rendered us valuable assistance, and to whom the labourers of England will be always indebted. In March, 1872, the first district was formed in Warwickshire, and in June the movement, had so far spread as to justify a union of the various districts in the country, which took place on the 29th, when a National Union was formed, with Joseph Arch as President, with an Executive Committee of 12 labourers, and a Consulting Committee of gentlemen who were known to be favourable to the movement, and myself as the General Secretary; There were also elected a number of men known as delegates, whose duty it was to go into the villages and invite those who were ready for union, and stir up those who were not. Now the war was raging. The farmers declared that they would not be interfered with by outsiders, but would manage their business in their own way; they averred also that their men were stirred up by designing politicians, socialists, and men of disrepute. All kinds of tyranny were practised ; whole families turned headlong out of their homes irrespective of legal process, thousands discharged from employment, poor relief cut off from the sick and infirm relatives of Unionists, parish doles were cut off, damnatory sermons preached at them, all kinds of threats were used, and the conspiracies of the farmers who amalgamated to crush the Union made the thing quite lively. Union poets arose who wrote songs reminding the men of bondage and inspiring them to patriotism. These were sung at thousands of meetings by tens of thousands of poor men and women who were looking to the Union as their only hope and refuge, and the greater the persecutions the greater were the bonds of sympathy and cause for united effort. There were numerous stand-up fights, and what with the courage of the new-born enthusiasts and the financial assistance of the members and friends of the Union, backed by public sympathy, the men almost invariably won ; and notwithstanding reverses and defeats, which were often as beneficial as victories, the Union soon succeeded in making some 50,000 members, with an average rise in the wages of agricultural labourers of 3s. per week all round. In 1874 there was a dead stand made against the Union in Suffolk, where at one time there were some 6,000 men thrown on the funds. The farmers combined ostensibly for the purpose of resisting certain rules of the Union and a rise in wages— the rate then being paid was 13s. — but the disguise was soon removed, and it was soon seen that it was against the Union itself they were fighting; and they declared that until the labourers gave up their newspaper and the voices of Arch, Ball, and Taylor were silenced, they would come to no terms with the men. The contest lasted for some months, costing us many thousands of pounds, which was raised from members' contributions and public subscriptions, which flowed in from all sources. Through want of energy in the men, which I can well excuse, and the season being favourable to the farmer, we could not claim a decisive victory, although we maintained our Union, and are stronger in that country to-day than ever; but it cost the fanners to such an extent that it is doubtful if they lightly undertake such another job. Moreover, whilst this battle was going on the farmers in other parts of the country were awaiting the results, whilst the men were strengthening their Union. Doubtless, if the farmers in the eastern counties had had an easy triumph there would soon have been attacks all round the lines. It was during this conflict that I conceived and carried out the idea of marching some 70 farmers' labourers from Newmarket to the North, finishing at Halifax, where the Trades Unionists organized a demonstration with 15 brass bands, and a procession of the whole of the Unionists — many thousands. To the credit of the Trades Unionists of England in each town we came to they met us right nobly, and so besides sending to the funds a net of nearly £800 Relief Committees were formed from which we received weekly contributions of money. There are continually little squabbles occurring in different parts of the country which waste a good deal of money, but which resists the tyrannical powers of the farmers, who have many of them yet to learn that there must be two to a bargain in lieu of one, as in former times. A great deal of money has been expended in law in resisting legal oppression, and the “ powers that be”  have been quite surprised to know ; the law, having been in the habit of dealing with questions according to their own notions or feelings. Large sums of money have also been expended in the removal of its members from badly-paid districts to places where labour is in demand. Large numbers have also been assisted to emigrate, and I am glad to say that our emigration policy has been very satisfactory, simply because, as a rule, the members are such as an agricultural or new colony requires. We have been gratified to receive so many testimonies from those who have emigrated to the effect that their position and prospects have been improved. I have received one during the past week from a couple from our Society, which is very pleasing. Our agricultural labourers at home are, in my opinion, far too numerous for their own good, and it will be well when they have the world for their market. The National Agricultural Labourers' Union has been a great success: it has been and is still a great educational power, and although the labourers have much to learn which has been gained by others through experience, and which can be secured through no other channel, I know of no means so likely to educate them economically, socially, or politically as the Society afforded them in their organization. They will blunder as all others do; but their aims are good, and under the direction of men in the future as good as those who have hitherto assisted them there need be no fears entertained as to the future. You will be glad to know that a work much greater than could possibly have been done by private benevolence for the poor has been performed by the poor for themselves by the application of the principle of self-help. The Union is now in healthy condition, having in its funds upwards of £8,000 accumulated out of the contributions of its members, who pay 2d. per week; it has given to the labourer a place in society which was hitherto denied to him: it has freed their labour and made the markets of the world accessible to them: its eye is vigilant upon those who would otherwise disregard the just claim of its members, and through its instrumentality the enfranchisement of the rate payer in the village as in the city is only a thing of the immediate future. Lord Suffield some time since, speaking of the Union, remarked, " Let us pinch them with hunger — that will bring them to their senses." And so it is, although not in the sense in which that bloated aristocrat meant it. It was the pinching which caused the revolt, and now that they have realized the power of combination they will never be content with anything short of what their growing intelligences teach them is right; and thus they will only share with all other classes of society the laudable desire and ambition to advance with the times.

South Australian Register (Adelaide, SA : 1839 - 1900), Wednesday 10 January 1877, page 7