Delphi complete works of.., p.737
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 737
Hence the great power exercised by such ideas in the days when American, and presently European governments, were being remade (1776-1800). Especially is this true of the idea of “equality” as a basis for society. This was, as far as anything can be, new. The church had long since recognized the equality of all men; but this equality was to be realized in Heaven. In a sense all Roman citizens were “equal,” but after the simpler republican days Rome did not organize the Empire on equal rights. Here and there was seen an equality such as that of Swiss peasants, all poor, or none rich enough to cast a shadow; or the equality of monastic societies or brotherhoods or sects, who received their equality, however, only as equals in poverty and renunciation.
There was, most conspicuous in all the world, the “equality” of America, of the happy homesteads where even the richest was poor and the poorest had in abundance; such equality as Longfellow wove around Evangeline and Acadia, or as the French soldiers of the War of Independence saw and admired among the farmsteads of Rhode Island. But this was mainly an equality of fact and happy circumstance, where land was free and nature bountiful, not yet an equality of design and contrivance. There was plenty of inequality, even apart from slavery, in colonial America. Few people were yet prepared to urge a universal suffrage and the more established people still cherished a dream of benevolent government by the best, meaning, as such dreams are apt to do, by themselves.
Hence not even in America and far less in Europe had people in general caught the idea of organizing a whole society, a state, an army, a church, and with them all, civic and commercial life, on the principle that all men are equal.
THE RIGHTS OF MAN AND OF THE CITIZEN
SUCH WAS THE new doctrine of liberty that formed the central thought of the French Revolution at its beginning in 1789. Patriots’ hearts everywhere welcomed the new doctrines. Poets, such as the young Southey, sang in the sunrise. Fox, the famous British statesman — bibulous, large-hearted and enthusiastic — saw in the fall of the Bastille the greatest event of the ages. Only a few people of longer vision, or of soberer or sourer thought, such as Edmund Burke, Fox’s fellow Whig, saw disaster ahead. To most of Burke’s enthusiastic fellow-citizens he sounded like a croaking raven on a bough. The world seemed full ahead for liberty.
It was this liberty which was written into the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man adopted by the new French National Constituent Assembly and presently made the opening section of the Constitution of 1791. Henceforth it became one of the world’s charter documents like the Magna Carta of 1215 and the Declaration of Independence of 1776. The doctrine was written into the Constitution in explicit terms, precise as French thought itself. British and American institutions and charters can tolerate hopeless ambiguities as long as we think we know what we mean. We can declare a union indissoluble with the provision that any member can get out of it at will, as in the American Articles of Confederation of 1777 and the British Commonwealth Statute of Westminster of 1931. German thought moves in such a thick fog of language that few outsiders can grasp it. But the French like to try to say what they mean.
Hence the French wrote into this document of 1791, the first of their many Constitutions, the principle of the equality of all men, of the social contract as the basis of organized society, and above all, the principle of individual liberty. “Men are born free and equal in rights,” says the first Article of the Constitution. “Liberty,” declares Article Three, “consists in being permitted to do anything which does not injure other people.” The same article adds that, “The exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which guarantee to the other members of society the enjoyment of the same rights.”
This theory of liberty, the Golden Rule of Liberty, as it was later called, has been affirmed and reaffirmed for a century and a half since thus firmly written. It carried in it the basis of the triumphant European liberalism of the nineteenth century. It laid down as a principle something which corresponded to the natural temperament of the British and the natural environment of the Americans. It shone as with the light of a star in the East, presaging a new gospel of hope for those still sitting in darkness under the tyranny of Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns and Romanoffs. It was for the sake of these principles that the French revolutionary movement assumed in its earliest stages an international aspect, a world appeal. “The National Convention,” so ran the famous Decree of November 19, 1792, “declares in the name of the French nation, that it would extend fraternity and help to all peoples who want to recover their liberty.” The French conquerors entered the cities of the Rhine garlanded with flowers and heralded with acclaim. Nor did these appeals fail till the Constitution of 1791 had been torn asunder and smeared with blood. In spite of all, something of it lingered till the very end of the epoch. Even now, for many of us, this doctrine of liberty still stands as clearly graven as ever.
Reflections on the French Revolution. 1790.
F. A. Hélie, Les Constitutions de la France. 1880.
A. Sorel, Europe and the French Revolution. Eight vols.
THE NEW LIGHT BURNS DIM
BUT THE DIFFICULTY, then and now, has always been with the application of this doctrine of liberty. What is the point at which I begin to interfere with my neighbour’s rights, or he with mine? Those rights can perhaps be fairly well distinguished in a simple society, each man living on his own as among hunters and fishermen, or even pioneer farmers. But with every stage of social advance life gets more complicated, more intertwined. More things have to be done by associated effort and each man’s rights against his fellow become more and more limited by the demands of the general welfare.
The further difficulty is added that everybody must act up to the rule or else nobody can. If all men are to be equal every man must know that the others will play their part towards him. There is a charming old fable, told or retold by the French poet La Fontaine, who lived in the days of Louis the Fourteenth. It tells how a fox came across a hen which had taken refuge in a tree. “Come down, dear friend,” said the fox, “have no fear. The animals have made a general peace.” “Very good,” said the hen, “and let us greet these two hounds that I see running this way.” “Ah!” said the fox, beginning to move off, “the hounds may not have heard of the peace.”
La Fontaine’s vision looked ahead to the difficulties of France a hundred years later. The new-born liberty and equality in France, in its first structure, went to pieces like a house of cards. The great mass of people, being without much property or education or political experience, were called “passive citizens” and had no vote. But what is “passive” seldom stays on. The new ideas fermenting in the mass brought violence, insurrection, the destruction of vested rights and clerical privilege, then foreign invasion and war (1792). For the time the new French Liberty went under, or joined hands with the new Terror, fighting for national existence.
Then followed (1799-1815) the autocratic government of the Napoleonic regime, in a period of mingled prosperity and misery, grandeur and despotism. The dark shadows of recurrent wars and unstable peace chased over Europe like the clouds across a harvest field. Only here and there the Great War, as we once called it, the war of 1792-1815, resembled the horrors that now make it seem reverting to the full ferocity of slaughter, unknown since the barbarian ravages, but returned again at the present hour. For vast numbers of people in all countries life was happier and more spacious in the Napoleonic days than for a generation after. For each locality war came and passed in thunder like a storm, fought mainly as between soldiers, with pity for the fallen, mercy for the conquered and honour to the brave. Marshal Ney erected at Corunna a monument to Sir John Moore buried beside its ramparts. The greatest tragedy of the epoch, the loss of the Grand Army in Russia in 1812, was at the hand of nature, not of man, a grim reminder of the power of elemental forces. It is poor history and fool philosophy to try to draw parallels between those days and now. There are none.
J. H. Rose, Revolutionary and Napoleonic Era.
W. F. P. Napier, The Peninsular War.
THE GREAT PEACE AND INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
BUT THE GREAT Peace that followed the victory of Waterloo (1815) soon showed an altered scene. In a financial crash at the close of the war, the false structure of war prosperity was carried away like a log-jam in a river, disastrous for the moment, but presently letting loose the steadier streams of lasting abundance. An era opened utterly unlike the past. The United States, indeed all North America, came into its own as the new home of the distressed, the land of hope, of bread and work for all, of “equality,” outspoken and even braggart and vulgar ... but still equality. With the peace the doctrine of liberty, national and individual, sprang again to life, the world over, as the seedlings rise among the stumps of the cleared forest.
It rose all the more rapidly because it now rested on a wider and more practical basis than ever before. Individual liberty in this rising world meant not mere political liberty, but economic liberty — the right to buy and sell, to manufacture, to trade, and to invest, to migrate or move, work or refuse to, according to the dictates of one’s own interest. Thus was the gist of the new political economy that rose in the world of factory industry and world commerce that followed the Napoleonic war. To its enthusiastic advocates this world of industrial liberty under free competition, with equal opportunity for all, seemed like the opening of a millennium of human happiness. Man’s chains were to be struck off by political liberty; his poverty to be abolished by economic opportunity; his idle armies to disband in universal brotherhood; and even crime grow weary of its needless trade. Such was the vision seen by Richard Cobden, the great English leader of the Free Trade Movement (1815-46), and of the apostles of liberty both in Europe and America. Was it sunrise, or only a mirage that showed a green oasis in the desert where all was dead sand? There are those who think that the vision can yet come true.
The Industrial Revolution, the age of invention and machinery, had begun, in the technical sense, well back in the eighteenth century. But its results were little felt for most of mankind till the Great Peace of the nineteenth century. They were obscured and impeded by the almost unbroken wars of the sixty years from the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War (1755) till Waterloo (1815). But the process of invention had begun, and invention in each industry called for similar progress and invention in others. The invention of improved spinning machinery by Richard Arkwright and others (1769) removed the industry from the home and put it into factories. Better spinning meant a demand for quicker weaving and brought the power loom (1786), one of the first things “invented to order.” All this meant a need for more power and brought on the use of steam, a thing that had wheezed its way down centuries of queer and useless experiments. It was now set to pump mines, then made to turn wheels of machinery, and then (later) to get up on its own platform, turn its own wheels and run away as a steamboat, like the Claremont on the Hudson in 1807, or faster still as a locomotive, such as Stephenson’s famous Rocket at Liverpool, 1830. All this needed iron, more than could be smelted in wood fires; hence arose the new giant industries of coal and iron, the grimy twins that held up England for half a century.
Bigger industry needed better transport. Ditches turned into canals, a network over England. Highways, “macadamized” by a Mr Macadam, recalled the forgotten glories of Rome. Steam took to the open sea. Most of all, America began that eager thrust towards invention which presently led the world. For the calls towards invention came across from Europe to America with the new need for more materials for the rising machine industry. Cotton, plucked clean by hand, was too slow in the getting. The cotton gin, another deliberate contrivance, was invented by Eli Whitney (1794) because it had to be.
In other words there came into this altering epoch, and chiefly in America, the process of self-conscious invention, a thing now stamped deep on the American mind. Labour in America was short. Every frontier farmer had to be a sort of Archimedes, contriving and whittling to get something that would let one man do the work of two, and presently of ten. This was really a novel phase of human life, this deliberate trying to invent. The Chinese long, long ago invented wonderful things — the use of wheels, the processes of weaving and dyeing and working metals, and a set of picture signs to tell about it all, stamping them on plates to make books. This done, they fell fast asleep over the picture signs and sacred books, and woke to the thunder of foreign conquest.
The Greeks cared nothing for invention nor for mechanical work. They preferred, as the University of Cambridge is still said to do, things that were “no good.” Among them such a man as Archimedes of Syracuse was an exception. Archimedes invented machines and screws and contrivances of fire and flame to defend his native city against the Romans. He once said that if he had a place to stand he could move the world, with a lever long enough. But the Greeks wouldn’t have given him one, even if they had had it. They cared nothing for such things.
The Romans invented little. They were administrators, not thinkers. Apart from the codification of law, they largely took their intellectual life from smarter people than themselves. The Arabs were better. But their speculations and their advance were largely intellectual and not mechanical.
The Dark and Middle Ages knew nothing of invention, worked by rule of thumb, and feared all mysterious knowledge and “black art” as the work of the devil. Roger Bacon of Oxford (1214-1292), who discussed much and suspected more, might have set the clock forward by centuries. To prevent it he was “concentrated” by the authorities.
It remained therefore for the age of liberty to be the age of progress. It seemed as if man’s increased knowledge of nature, his ability to make fire and water work for him, work instead of him, must place him beyond all reach of want. It still seems so. The shivering savage must go hungry when game fails, but not mankind, equipped with the power of the lightning and the waterfall. The paradox is still there, the inconsistency ever greater. Each new saving of labour seems to mean new wants. Each new mechanism of life turns to an added instrument of death. We are still seeking, collectively, our means of salvation. Unless our faith is vain, somewhere yet, in liberty and in justice, it will be found.
W. Cunningham. Growth of English Industry and Commerce, vol. iii.
E. W. Bryce, Progress of Invention in the Nineteenth Century.
Sir T. L. Heath, Archimedes. 1920.
Sedgwick and Tyler, Short History of Science. 1929.
ENTER POLITICAL ECONOMY
THE RISING THEORY of individual economic liberty found its first large expression in the famous Wealth of Nations published by Adam Smith in 1776. This treatise was partly intended to show how the American colonies could be permanently maintained, and it came out in the year when they were lost. But the main theme was that of enlightened self-interest, the proposition that each man, when left free to pursue his own advantage as he sees it, will be led “by an invisible hand” to promote the welfare of all. Hence absolutely free competition becomes the sole rule for social guidance. The government need not meddle or interfere with trade or industry by setting up tariffs or regulating wages. “The world runs by itself,” said one of Adam Smith’s contemporaries. The whole doctrine is so simple in its outline that it can be written out, as has been said, on half a sheet of paper.
But Adam Smith was a Scot, thorough and cautious. He made a job of it, took twelve years and a thousand pages, and when the book was done there was nothing more to say for a generation. The Wealth of Nations was a great literary success. Pitt, the prime minister, declared himself Smith’s pupil, and expressed his intention of carrying his doctrines into practice ... later on. So have others expressed the same intention ever since. The world, with modifications, still says it. But in Pitt’s day war forbade change. It remained for the generation after Pitt, both in England and America, during the free trade era to attempt to put it into practice. And it remained for John Stuart Mill to fortify and enlarge Smith’s industrial liberty by building into it the framework of individual freedom.
Wealth of Nations, book iv, chap. ii.
JOHN STUART MILL
THIS GIFTED MAN (1806-73) was one of the makers of the modern world. He was as clever as he was laborious, and as noble-minded as he was clear-headed. His working life was largely spent in the dull routine of the London office of the old East India Company. Later, when let free, he sat in Parliament, but pleased nobody because he was too honest for everybody. But his great writings, his Political Economy (1848) and his Liberty (1859), were overtime work, Mill’s real life achievement. Lesser people, who also must do the work they like best in hours stolen from those of rest, may take comfort in the fact that much of the world’s best work has been done in this way.
Mill’s Liberty became a sort of gospel. It is the best expression ever given to the reasoned idea of individual freedom, enjoyed in association with one’s fellows. Mill takes the ground of the Golden Rule, that a man may do anything that he wishes to if he does not therefore injure his fellowmen. The “government” has no right to interfere with him, not even for his own good, as long as he is not injuring other people. In Mill’s time people commonly preferred the plain word “government” to mean what is meant now by the mistier and more uncertain term “the state.” The one seems to mean a set of men, the other sounds like an abstraction. Everyone must judge for himself which is the better or the worse for his use. There is error and danger either way.
The primary function of government as seen by Mill and his school was the protection of people from force or fraud, that is, defence in war, safety in peace against violence, and security against cheating. But Mill admitted that the government may go much further than this. It may undertake public works of general usefulness, the making of roads and bridges, docks and harbours, the aid of navigation, the lighting of streets and the thousand and one things which are necessary to an associated, advanced society, but which must be done collectively or not done at all. Hence the government enters on a wide field of activity, reaping a wide harvest of taxes.
