But what are those people doing? They are merely reflecting in their own personal affairs an ideal which lies engrained in every State which puts self-interest above the interest of the whole human race. And that, in our present transitional stage, is the standpoint of every country to-day. In our heart of hearts we still hold Nationalism more important than Internationalism. And “my country right or wrong†is still for some people the last word in morality; rather than admit their country to be in the wrong they will let morality go.
In that matter, indeed, the world to-day seems to be divided into two schools. There is one school which so exalts the idea of the State as to say that the State can do no wrong: that if morality and State-interest conflict morality must go under, or rather that morals only exist to subserve State-interests,—and being a State-product, the State has the right to limit their application. We are fighting to-day against a race which is charged with having taken up that attitude; and the pronouncements of some of its most distinguished writers, as well as certain methods which it has employed in war, seem to bear out the charge. But when it comes to war, that particular school of State-ethics givesitself away by protesting that the other States which are in hostile alliance against it are behaving very wrongly indeed—though by its own doctrine (States being above morals) they are incapable of wrong. It cannot stick to its own thesis.
But what are we to say if that other school, which admits that the State can do wrong; but is not going to allow the State to be punished for doing wrong if that State happens to be its own? It is not that this school does not believe in punishment; it believes in it enthusiastically, rapturously, so long as it is directed against the wrong-doing of some other State. Punishment is good for other States, when they do wrong; without punishment the justice of God would not be satisfied. But for their own particular State punishment is bad, and is no longer to be advocated. And so you may say—looking back in history—that your country was quite wrong in waging such and such a war; but patriotism forbids the wish in that case that right should have prevailed and the justice of God been satisfied.
Now that school was very vocal in England during the Boer War; and I daresay during the Opium War with China; and I daresay, also, during the American War of Independence—very loud that we were in the wrong; but not at all admitting, for that reason, that it would be good for us to be beaten. But I think it should be one of our proudest boasts that, in the long run (not immediately—not perhapsfor a generation or two) the political and moral good sense of this country goes back upon the teaching of that school. I believe that on the whole we are glad that we were beaten in the war with America; and that we are glad we were beaten because we were in the wrong. And, perhaps, some day—not yet, for our fear of the Yellow Race is still greater than our fear of any white race you can name—but, perhaps, some day we may be sorry that we were not beaten to a standstill in our opium war with China. (I see, incidentally, that to-day we are addressing a sharp remonstrance to the Chinese Government, because it is now doing that very thing which we then compelled it to do at the point of the bayonet—permitting, namely, the opium trade to be revived. That remonstrance only came, however, after we had sold to China sufficient opium to last its medical needs for 140 years!)
Now those acts of our national past, which we now reprobate, were only bad prominent expressions of the fundamental idea on which the modern State runs its foreign policies—reflecting outwardly something which lives strongly engrained in our midst—the Will to Power. It is because that principle is more firmly established in the world of diplomacy than either the Will to Serve or the Will to Love, that our policies have been able to shape themselves. It was not because we wished to give the Heathen Chinee a good time that we forced our opium upon him; it was becausewe wanted to give our opium trade good returns. And that was merely a faithful reflection of what was going on at home. It was because we wanted—or because our ruling classes wanted—to give capital good returns, that the working classes were not allowed to combine, that child-labour, and sweated industries remained like institutions in our midst, that legislation in the interests of labour and of women and children fell hopelessly into arrears. Democracy, you may say, has done away with all that: well, with some of it. In proportion to the broadening of its power in the State, Democracy has looked after its own interests. But so long as the average human mind is bent upon securing advantage to the detriment of others, or upon securing for itself privileges not to be shared by others, that mind will inevitably be reflected in the way we work our State institutions, and the form we give to our foreign policies. And always, and in every instance, you will find, if you follow it out, that this inclination to secure advantage to the detriment of others always lands you in an ethical contradiction unless your ideal is entirely inhuman and non-social. It is inconsistent with that community of interest to which social order pretends. We set up laws for the good of the State; and we call them equal laws. And if they are good laws, and if we love our country, we must necessarily love the laws which are for the good of our country, and embrace them with equal fervour, whetherthey touch us or whether they touch our neighbours. But when a member of our own family commits a theft, or a forgery, we do everything we can to save him from the operation of that law which we think so good for others. And if we do; then our affection or respect for the law is entirely one-sided and impure. And the people who make laws and devise punishments upon those unequal premises are not at all likely to make their laws just, or their forms of punishment wise.
Our whole prison system is bad just because it is not really designed first and foremost to do the criminal good, and to develop him into a useful citizen; but only to repress him and make him a discouraging example to others.
Our prisons are impure because they are lacking in good-will; we have regarded power instead of love as the solution of the crime problem; and we have been contented to apply an impatient, unintelligent, and soul-destroying remedy to the crimes of others, which we would not wish to see applied in like case to those of our own family.
Of course, I know that our prisons have been greatly improved; because, as I said before, we are in a state of transition, and a new school of thought, whose basis is Love and Service, is fighting an old school of thought whose basis is Power, and gradually—only very gradually—getting the better of it.
It is the same with Education; the old idea of education was largely based on dominanceand power—the power of the teacher to punish. The new idea is largely based upon the power of the teacher to interest, and upon trust in youth’s natural instinct to acquire knowledge. It is a tremendous change; the old system was impure in its psychology, and corrupted alike the mind of the teacher and the taught. Nobody in the old days was so unteachable as a school-master; and yet his whole profession is really—to learn of youth. And the ethical impurity of the old system came at the point where there was a lack of goodwill—a lack of mutual confidence.
In trade again, how much co-operation has been over-ridden by competition—manœuvres of one against the other, designed to the other’s detriment. We have been told that competition is absolutely necessary to keep us efficient in business; it is precisely the same school of thought which says that war is necessary to keep us efficient as a nation.
But in a family you don’t need competition; where there is goodwill, co-operation and the give-and-take of new ideas for the common stock are enough.
To-day we are beginning to wake up to the possibility of co-operation taking the place of competition. It is the purer idea; and being the purer we shall probably in the end find it the more economical.
And what shall we say about politics? Does anyone pretend that our politics are pure; or that the system on which we runthem is anything but a vast system of adulteration?—which may perhaps be thus expressed:—Two great bodies of opinion trying to misunderstand each other and trying to make the general public share in their misunderstanding, in order that their own side may attain to power.
When you start on a discussion, what is the pure reason for that discussion? To try to arrive at a common understanding—mental co-operation. But is it for that purpose that we raise our party cries and run a general election?
We are being threatened with that great boon in the near future. And when it takes place a great wave of impurity will rise and will flood through the land; and men will be strenuously misrepresenting the words and thoughts and motives of their opponents—and very often men will be misrepresenting their own motives—because their end is really power—power over others instead of goodwill to others. And out of that process we shall draw together the Council of the Nation!
That process—which we see quite well is an impure process—is forced upon us because we are in a stage of transition; it is difficult as a matter of practical politics to suggest a better.
But ought not that obvious fact to make us very humble about our present stage of political development—and humble in general about the position to which we have attained in our moral evolution? Is it not a littlepremature to call ourselves a Free Nation? Is any Nation really free till it has found itself on peace and good-will to all?
Now I have put before you these sorry spectacles to show that where the true social ideal of brotherhood and goodwill breaks down, you arrive at some ethical absurdity of which you have to be ashamed—you find yourself driven into inconsistency, into impurity. And the only thing that is consistent and is pure (once you have started with the social idea) is that we are all one brotherhood—and that harm to one member of the community is harm to all. And when you have once got a nation that has really taken that idea to heart and made a practice of it, such a nation will never rest content till there is a Society of Nations of like mind extending over all the world.
I referred just now to the Sermon on the Mount. To most of the world its teachings sound impracticable. They are the extreme statement of an ideal; and it is hard in this world to live ideally. But that statement has about it this merit of commonsense—it is pure, it is consistent—it is a united whole; and it is based on something of which we have never yet really allowed ourselves the luxury—a trust in human nature. A belief that if you set yourself whole-heartedly to do good to others—to do good even to your enemies—human nature will respond.
We cannot all love our neighbours as ourself—that individual emotion is beyond us. Butif we can love our country enough to die for it, we can also love it enough to give to it laws and institutions and policies that shall prepare the way for the universal brotherhood of man.
(1912)
In every age some fetich of government has been set up designed to delude the governed, and to induce a blind rather than an intellectual acceptance of authority.
To set up in government some point over which you must not argue, is always very convenient to those who govern; and so you will note, throughout the world’s history, that the manipulators of government have always tried to impose some incontrovertible proposition as the basis on which their authority shall rest; and then, having done so, to get the strings of it into their own hands, and work it to their own convenience.
In the present day “majority rule†is the pretended fetich; a majority whose qualification is almost automatic, whose registration is all done for it by the party agents, and whose free and independent vote is brought up to the polling-booth very largely by the bribe of a free ride in a motor-car.
Scores of elections, that is to say, are turned by the indifferent voter, and on this sort of cookery recipe the moral products of majority rule are served up to us as “a dish fit for a king,†and as giving moral sanction to government. And whatever indigestion comes to us as the result of our swallowing it whole we areto sit down under. If the majority has decided, the matter (we are told) is beyond argument.
That is the fetich, the superstition on which, in theory, government rests to-day.
In other times there were other fetiches, quite as respectable. “The King can do no wrong,†was one of them. And we have had staged before our eyes, in due order, the divine right—or the divine sanction; it is all the same—of Kings, of Property, of Inheritance, of Slavery, and of War.
All these have been maintained as necessities of government—infallible doctrines, based on Scripture and the will of God.
Some of them present rather a battered front to-day. The fetich which has taken their place is the “Right of Majorities.â€
We do not exactly say “Majorities can do no wrong.†But we do incline to say (often for the sake of a quiet life, and for no better reason) “Majorities must be allowed to do as they please.†And that means in effect—those must be allowed to do as they please who can pull the wires by which majorities are manipulated.
I need hardly remind you that to-day the wire-pullers are the statesmen, the leaders of party, who have secured more and more the control of the party-machine, and with it the control of the education of the electorate.
Having secured this control, they let loose upon you the astonishing doctrine that, if youhave numbers, there you have your right cut and dried; that if you have not numbers your right (politically speaking) does not exist.
Now every student of history knows that in the past majorities, more especially manipulated majorities—or their counterpartforce majeure—have done great crimes.
But we do not to-day maintain that those majorities had a “right†to sack cities, to violate women, to massacre, to exterminate, and to bring others into subjection. The most we say is that these happenings are an extreme, and, under some circumstances, an inevitable expression of certain bad elements in human nature. Is it not, then, perfectly absurd to imagine that under internal and domestic conditions all such bad elements have departed from majorities; and that a consensus of vice, of self-indulgence, of unfairness, of a desire for domination, may not spread through very large sections of the community, even through whole peoples where the opportunity so to indulge is accorded—especially if it be accorded by law or embodied as a State doctrine?
Clearly, therefore, there must be some limitation or check imposed upon the so-called “rights†of majorities; and some of them may be limitations which those majorities would not choose for themselves, but will, all the same, submit to without revolt if they are properly rubbed home! One of the essential conditions for majority rule (if it is to carry with it any moral sanction at all) is that it mustbe ready to submit to the same conditions which it imposes upon others; and that it must not set up qualification, or prohibition from qualification, without any liability of that prohibition falling upon itself. It must make the liability fairly equal.
The specious excuse and justification for government by majority, as put forward by the materialists, is that, latent, within it, lies the physical force of the nation. (I may say, in passing, that the physical force of the nation lies latent in every form of government which secures the assent of the governed; and only ceases to be latent when some of it gets on to its hind-legs and insists on another form of government; and to be effective, that “some of it†need not always be a majority.)
But it is no use talking of physical force being the basis and the moral justification of majority rule—it is no use invoking the physical force argument—unless your majority is also prepared to go to the trouble of exercising it and paying the price for exercising it. And the main phenomenon of our present form of government by majority is that the majority won’t take any trouble at all; that, taken in the bulk, they care very little, and won’t put themselves to inconvenience—certainly won’t risk physical discomfort and pain—unless government has very seriously incommoded them by damaging or by neglecting their interests.
If the physical force basis is to be your fullsanction of government—if that is really your argument—then that basis, that sanction, is possessed equally by king or despot, so long as he has his organisation at his command. There are his numbers, obeying him just as, with us, M.P.’s, 700 strong, obey the party-whips, often against their principles, but from no physical compulsion whatever.
What the preachers of physical force seem to ignore in arguing about the basis of government, is the aim of government. What, in the minds and consciences of those who believe in government, is government aiming for? Is its aim only to keep order or to be just? Does it seek to repress humanity to the utmost extent, or to develop it? To wrap its talents in a napkin, or to make it spiritually a ruler of cities?
What is humanity out for? To what is it evolving? What has been its impulse, its motive force in pressing for, and in extracting from reluctant authorities Representative Government, with its accompanying symbol—the voice of the majority?
It has been seeking humane government—in the belief, surely, that the nearer you get to really humane government the more will unrest and revolt and crime cease; and, by the consequent reduction of the police and of the forces of repression now needed, repay the State a hundred-fold for the liberties it has established. And majority rule is merely a device to get nearer to humane government,to open up the mind of man to his own humane possibilities, and to develop his trust in others by reposing trust in him. The more you spread government as an organization of the people themselves, the more humane, upon that working basis, are likely to be its operations—on one condition: that such organisation of the people, whatever its numbers, submits to the operation of its own laws and shares equally in the conditions which it imposes—that, if it provides a qualification for citizenship, it provides also the means for all to qualify.
Now this brings us to the relative duties of those who govern and of those who are governed; and, whereas, fundamentally their duty is the same, in one important respect it differs. In each case, broadly and fundamentally, their duty is toward their neighbour—to do to him as they would he should do unto them. That axiom, rightly carried out, covers all the law and the prophets, being greater than either; nay, if it were rightly and universally carried out, the law and the prophets might safely be shelved. Law merely exists as an expedient, because men have not yet learned thoroughly to do, or even to wish to do, their duty toward their neighbour; and as law is an imperfect thing, only existing because of, and only applicable to, imperfect conditions, the law and its upholders are not, and never can be, a perfect expression of that duty which is mutually owed by all. Law isonly an expedient for averting greater evils which might, and probably would, take place without it in our present very imperfect stage of human development.
But there is one obvious difference between the governors and the governed. In the action of the former there is an assertion of authority—an underlying assumption of a power to improve matters by regulating them. In the governed there is no such assumption of moral superiority; the governed are there whether they like it or no; and the laws which condition their lives are laid upon them by a power beyond themselves, even when—under a representative system—they have secured some minute voice in regard to their shaping.
The governors, therefore, by their assumption of an ability to improve matters, are in a fiduciary position to the rest of the community—theonus probandiof their beneficence rests upon them and not upon the people. It is their duty to pacify the governed; it is not the duty of the governed to pacify them; and if they fail in the work of pacification, which is their mainraison d’être, they, and not the community, have to meet the charge of functional incompetence.
Government is a function; being governed is not a function. Humanity in all stages of civilization or of savagery has fallen subject to government without being asked to show any certificate of its fitness to be governed. It istherefore, the governors who have to prove themselves fit—not the governed; and if a penal code be found, or declared, necessary to enable the governors to secure peace and order, then (if your system be just and equal) the penal code should be applicable in at least equal severity to the governors who impose it, when instead of producing contentment, it produces unrest and disorder. Liability to impeachment and condemnation under laws of an equal stringency would be, I think, a very wholesome corrective to the legislative action of M.P.’s voting coercive measures which only result in failure. I fancy that under such conditions there would have been, for instance, a far smaller majority for the “Cat and Mouse Act,†the futility of which soon became so ridiculously apparent. Imprisonment with compulsory starvation, followed by release upon a medical certificate, and then by a fresh term of imprisonment would have been a most enlightening form of vacation for certain members of Parliament. And until we have secured in this country a much more equal adjustment of the relations between governors and governed, some such corrective for vindictive legislation is certainly needed.
It is not a sufficient equivalent, or safeguard to popular liberty, to be able merely to dismiss from office a Minister of the Crown who has by his administrative blunders brought citizens to death and property to destruction, or who has sedulously manufactured criminals out ofa class whose will is to be law-abiding. He, if anybody, deserves punishment; and Parliaments (backed by whatever majority) which, through maintaining political inequalities, produce such results, are under the same condemnation. Theonus probandiof their beneficence rests upon them; and if, commissioned to secure peace and order, they produce only unrest and disorder, then the proof is against them.
Listen to these remarkable words by so great a supporter of constitutional authority as Edmund Burke:
“Nations,†he says, “are not primarily ruled by laws, still less by violence. Whatever original energy may be supposed in force or regulation, the operation of both is, in truth, merely instrumental. Nations are governed by the same methods and on the same principles by which an individual without authority is often able to govern those who are his equals or his superiors—by a knowledge of their temper, and by a judicious management of it. I mean—when public affairs are steadily and quietly conducted: not when government is nothing but a continued scuffle between the magistrate and the multitude, in which sometimes one and sometimes the other is uppermost, in which they alternately yield and prevail in a series of contemptible victories and scandalous submissions. The temper of the people amongst whom he presides ought, therefore, to be the first study of the statesman.And the knowledge of this temper it is by no means impossible for him to attain, if he has not an interest in being ignorant of what it is his duty to learn.â€
And further on he says:
“In all disputes between them (the governed) and their rulers, the presumption is at least upon a par in favour of the people. Experience may perhaps justify me in going further. When popular discontents have been very prevalent, it may well be affirmed that there has been something found amiss in the constitution or in the conduct of government. The people have no interest in disorder. When they do wrong, it is their error and not their crime. But with the governing part of the State it is far otherwise. They certainly may act ill by design as well as by mistake.... And if this presumption in favour of the subject against the trustees of power be not the more probable, I am sure it is the more comfortable speculation; because it is more easy to change an administration than to reform a people.â€
There, then, is a great authority, Edmund Burke, maintaining that governments are more liable to wilful error than those whom they govern—and the main value of majority rule is that it tends to bring the presumption round to the side of government, by making the voice of government also the voice of the people. I do not think the claims of majority rule can be put on any higher footing than that—that ifthe government is really expressive of a governed majority (and not merely of a majority to whom the constitution has accorded licence and privilege above its fellows) then the favourable presumption in any conflict comes round to the side of government.
But if government claims its sanction from a majority, then we must enquire further into the composition and character of that majority; and yet further whether the mandate of that majority is the output of its conscience or merely of its self-interest; we must watch its workings, and see what really brings it to the poll—its moral sense, its pleasure in motor-cars, or its inclination (based on a national love of sport) to select and to back the winner.
At whose bidding to-day, and for what motive, are we really being governed? Our duty toward government can never be greater than toward that voice of sanction on which it rests. And short of a voice of the whole people conscientiously uttered, and so conditioned as to be really free and equal, I do not see whence an entire sanction of government is to come—though you may have (under such and such circumstances) a large increase of presumption in its favour.
But obviously there are degrees. We in England clearly recognise that. We have recognised it in our own history; we recognise it in looking abroad upon other countries. And we rather approve—most of us—ofrevolution against a Russian or a German government which has refused so to aim that the people shall be in some sort their own governors.
Similarly, in this country, the sanction may be imperfect—we may have secured the form but not the substance. If so—if the form is so manipulated as to be virtually of no effect—the moral sanction is by so much lessened. Universal franchise—on the unattainable qualification, let us say, of standing on one leg for a fortnight, would be a mockery deserving of instant revolt. And there is some mockery in setting up any qualification of which a willing and painstaking citizen cannot avail himself—or herself. Perhaps there is also some mockery—some cheapening of citizenship—in setting up a qualification which requires no willingness and no pains.
The moral sanction of government, therefore, is ever fluctuant and variable—conditioned always by the sincere relationship of theory to practice, of form to fact. No amount of form or theory, however just in appearance, or legal in fact, will condone unjust government. And as we would wish to be condemned and punished were we so to impose on others—so must we act towards any government which seeks to impose on us by substituting form for substance. If its moral sanction is imperfect it cannot claim perfect obedience.
Now if there is not a full and honest wish among those who govern to do as they wouldbe done by—claiming no advantage or privilege for themselves, and not attempting to keep in order one section of the community rather than another by framing laws which penalise this section rather than that—if there is not this honest wish, there will all the more be an attempt on the part of the governing section to give to its government in form that virtue which it lacks in practice,—to say to objectors: “See how safeguarded on all hands are your interests, how perfectly you are represented, how obviously you are the masters of the situation, and we only the servants.†And the nearer the governed are to an intellectual awakening and apprehension of their true condition, the more elaborate and plausible will be the pretence that the real ultimate power rests—not there in the hands of the governors, but here in the hands of the governed. And best of all—because most deceptive of all—will be the device which does actually put the means of reforming or of overthrowing government into the hands of the governed, while so nullifying the application of those means that the fair form, so fruitful in seeming, shall be in reality an empty husk.
Now, if it be true—as from history I have contended—that the moral sanction of government is variable, and depends on honest conditions and relations, obviously it is not the mere plausible form which shall decide whether this or that government be deserving of obedience or not. That form which isestablished by law must bring forth fruit to the satisfaction of the governed—producing, as proof of its claim, peaceful conditions and general content. If it fail to do this then it must be suspected, enquired into, and, if need be, disowned.
But it must breed something more than the acquiescence of a majority. The contentment, or at least the acquiescence of minorities is one of the signs of good government. For while it takes little to make minorities critical, it takes much to make them revolt—if for no other reason than that the chances are against them. And it is not in human nature to face so heavy odds except for some grave cause.
Consider first, then, in any given case, “Are those in the minority seeking to keep or filch liberty from you, or only to obtain such liberty as is already yours? Are they seeking to set up equality of condition or inequality? Are they pressing for privilege or only for common ground?â€
And if the answer to such questions be that they seek only a like liberty upon common ground and equality with yourselves—then, I care not how large the majority against them—you must open or make available to them that same standing which you claim as your due; and on whatever basis of public service or private worth you have obtained your right,—that means, that test, that qualification must be open also to them, else your majority rule is nothing more than brute force, a despotismextended from the embodiment of one or of a few to an embodiment of 10, 15, or 20,000,000. But if you sanction that and make it your base, then, to be logical, you must sanction also (at least as a test) the employment of force by a minority to make its position untenable. And remember, that if among a minority some ten per cent. are willing to die, as against only some one or two per cent. in a majority, that minority is likely to win, and all your numbers will be vain.
That fact puts no undue or dangerous power into the hands of minorities. Consent, on a just basis, can be obtained to government whose acts are little to the liking of individual minds or of minorities. But if, after long trial of expedient, persuasion, or coercion, consent cannot be obtained, then the weight of evidence (based on the unfailing document of human nature) has shifted against government; and it rests more with the government than with the rebel to prove that its claims are just.
When governments establish inequalities affecting the lives and liberties of any, however few, I see no sanction whatsoever in majorities. One runaway slave had not to wait upon a majority of his fellow-slaves in order to establish his right to escape from slavery—still less upon a majority of the nation which owned him. If he could find a path along which to escape, that was the highroad appointed for him by God from of old; and if he died in the attempt his grave wasstill a monument to Liberty. Not the will of a million could destroy the right of that one. And though I admit that a society which sanctions slavery must treat as a murderer the slave who kills in his effort to escape,—nevertheless, by posterity, and in a society which has repudiated slavery, that act will be very differently regarded; and so long as the man’s aim when he committed that legal offence was freedom, we, who have repudiated slavery, look upon him not as a murderer but as a fighter in a just cause.
We are in a society to-day which tolerates and even sanctions things which to-morrow will be regarded as slavery is regarded now. While society thus chooses to establish evil it is driven in self-defence to treat those who rebel as criminals. But posterity will not so think of them; and the greater the forces of the majority which stood against them when they struck—the more will it admire and reverence, and approve. Surely a startling commentary on the “rights†of majorities: approval of the minority in an inverse proportion to its size!
Now, you might have a State almost equally divided into what were, broadly speaking, opposed interests; under certain circumstances, for instance, (circumstances which have actually occurred in the past) manufacturing and agricultural interests might be opposed. If, then, you accepted majority rule as a blind dogma, those two interestswould have the right alternately to prey upon and to bleed each other, according to the fortunes of the polls—and they might do it by putting forward legislative programmes which would bribe the electoral wobblers first to this side and then to that. Where, on such a device does moral right come in? Was ever anything so ludicrous as a doctrine?
As a doctrine of right, majority rule has but doubtful ground to stand on. As an expedient, for practical use under sound conditions, there is much to be said for it. But when once you recognise it as a mere working expedient, then its workings must be watched, proved, and sometimes corrected and checked—by a minority.
Majority rule is only tolerable when it has the equal rights of man and woman firmly fixed as its goal; and it is as tending to the establishment of that doctrine that majority rule is acceptable (with some caution and reservations) to our progressive sense of citizenship.
In the great historic moments of upheaval which have brought it about, it has consciously or subconsciously been an attempt to get rid of the bad principle of dominance over others. It expresses the hope, or it embodies the probability, that a majority will be so broadly made up of all sorts and conditions—of the whole chemical composition of human society, that is to say—that in a government prompted and directed by a majority there will be nodominance of one section over another section: that they will, in the long run (or, if efficiently checked, in the short run) correct each other, strike a balance, and prevent the rigid and continuous existence in the body politic of any subjected section.
But if a majority could so sort its materials as to select for rigid and permanent subjection one section of the community, then the reason for its existence, and the grounds for its moral sanction would be gone.
If, then, two-thirds or three-quarters of the community can secure a greater apparent measure of comfort for themselves by forcing the remaining one-third, or one-quarter, to wait upon them and minister to their needs, the actual size of that dominant majority confers upon it no moral right whatever. There would, indeed, be more semblance of right, or at least more tenable ground, if a minority could so impose on a majority; because in that case the power of imposition would arise not from mere brute force so much as from superior ability; and a minority which can manipulate to its purpose the bulk material of a community has shown better ground for the rule of others (not very good ground, I admit) than the mere weight of numbers can supply. Weight of numbers as a ground for dominating others gives you no moral or efficient basis at all. Weight of capacity does give you an efficient basis, if not a moral one.
Now, if your two-thirds majority is extracting comfort on unequal and compulsory terms from the remaining one-third, you surely cannot deny the right of the remaining one-third so to diminish the comfort thus compulsorily extracted as to bring it to vanishing point, or to make it even a minus quantity. And the bigger the majority which is thus extracting sustenance from the minority, and exploiting it to its own ends, the more you will admire the minority if it rises in revolt, and makes the imposed and one-sided bargain unprofitable to the majority. And should the contention be carried to extremes (as it will be if both sides are sufficiently resolved) then the majority will have to exterminate the minority, and (if it wishes to continue government on the same lines) will have to extract for exploitation a new minority from its own body—give up one of its own ribs to servitude—and so become a diminished people in its perpetuation of a bad system.
Now, these considerations of moral right are irrespective of numbers. It may be the bounden duty of one man to resist the will of hundreds, or thousands, or millions. Indeed, every religious system admits, and history gives clear evidence, that that is so. A man must obey his conscience; that is his one ultimate guide. That statement expresses what one may call the atomic theory of human society. It suggests, at first sight, an impossible splitting to pieces of all systems of lawand order; but it is not so in reality, because—and this is the really wonderful thing and the spiritual root of the whole matter—conscience is the most infectious and convincing force in life. In a community there is really a far greater agreement of conscience than of desire or of opinion. A conscientious resister may, of course, be mistaken; but if he is prepared to go on resisting, making sacrifice, and enduring suffering for his scruples—that process is the least fallible as a test, and the most converting in its tendency of all the processes of propaganda that the human mind can conceive; and by recognizing the moral right of the individual to put himself to that test before the eyes of his fellow citizens, and so at the same time to test their consciences in the matter, you are not really encouraging a course which leads to disunion and anarchy, but a course which, on the whole, will best bring about a general consensus of opinion. A community which recognises the moral worth of such tests of its own and of the individual conscience, will be far less likely to arouse such demonstrations of revolt than one which altogether ignores and despises them; for the simple reason that such a community will be better based in its duty toward its neighbour; it will wish each man to do that which it would claim the right to do itself in a like case, if faced by a superior power backed by greater numbers than its own.
If I know that my conscientious resistancewill be respectfully considered (though not made easy or cheap to me), that my test of other consciences may be tried and may be adjudged to fail—I shall not be more inclined to enter into conflict with so considerate a majority, but less; for it is not open-minded justice but close-minded injustice which arouses opposition and rebellion.
But while human nature makes it safe, in the main, that men and women will not in any appreciable numbers submit themselves voluntarily to continuous discomfort, deprivation, loss of liberty and ease, except for a just cause or a high motive worth looking into, considering, and making allowances for: human nature does not make it safe that those in authority will not be overbearing and unjust, unless they too are liable to a like test.
And here again we come to consider the duty of the law and of law-makers to individuals.
The law should be prepared wherever its fallibility stands proved—where, for instance, it has done hurt and damage to innocency by its operations—at least to make full reparation. It is not an honourable position, for that which holds fiduciary together with compulsory powers, to say to one whom it has falsely imprisoned or unjustly charged—“You, on the whole, benefit by government, and, therefore, must yourself bear this hurt of government which has fallen upon you.†The State or the community which permitssuch individual hardship to result from its imposition of a fallible code is not just in its government or dutiful to its neighbour. And if it so acts, it undermines in the governed their sense of its moral sanction. The State cannot so do hurt to its citizens and retain an unimpaired claim on their allegiance; nor can it with any moral decency claim reparation from its enemies abroad, if it does not make full reparation for its own miscarriages of justice at home.
“One,†it is sometimes argued, “must suffer for the general good.†But the general good is not so served. In this connection general good only means “general cheapness.†The State, and not the citizen, must pay the price of its presumption—or it must look for an altered mind in every citizen whom it so afflicts from its position of immunity. Nay, it may be well that its supposed immunity should occasionally be disproved by a determined and self-sacrificing citizen, entirely for the general good, and the State forced to pay in extra upkeep for the bad condition of its laws.
The careless self-allowance of majorities in wrong done to minorities, or even to individuals, is not to the general good; and one could rather wish to a State that its minorities should be alert and pugnacious, than its majorities self-satisfied and indifferent on the score of mere numbers.
Numbers, uncorrected by conscience and uncontrolled by penalties, may be the cheapest,nastiest and most unscrupulous form of tyranny. The indifference or acquiescence of hundreds to conditions by which they themselves are not consciously affected cannot have the same moral weight as the discontent of one or of a few who are so affected. That is a consideration which must always qualify the “rights†of majorities. In such circumstances the sanction of mere numbers is not sufficient.
Are minorities, then, always to have their way? By no means. We know that they cannot.
Countless minorities in our political controversies have contended, have failed, and have acquiesced in their failure. Time has tested them, and has measured the depth of their grievance by the scale of human nature.
But other minorities, which have persistently refused to acquiesce have won. Time has tested them also; and human nature, not numbers, has in the long run proved their case.
Medical science tells us that there is in the human eye a blind spot, by the existence of which alone we are enabled to see. If that blind spot were absent the eye would be without focus.
In human nature (however much we hold by the principle of ordered government) there is a point of revolt which standardises the relations of the individual to government. It cannot be brought into play by mereartifice or calculation, except for brief spells; but when naturally aroused it lasts.
It is that point of revolt, latent at all times in a freedom-loving people, but only aroused by unjust conditions—it is the existence of that point of revolt in human nature which secures good government.
Minorities, if determined, can make unjust government an economic extravagance, and can indicate to majorities (with some trouble and cost to themselves) the limitation of their rights.
The sleeping partner of good government is the spirit of revolt.
To-day we have not good government; and that is why the sleeping partner is awake.
(1915)
Discreditable conduct, according to its right derivation, is conduct provocative of disbelief. It is that kind of conduct which makes us doubt the professions of its agents, because it is practically inconsistent with the things that they preach.
Many things are done in this world which are very reprehensible, vindictive, cruel, narrow-minded—I might go through a whole catalogue of the vices; but they are not therefore “discreditable.†A man who has gone about the world expressing his undying hatred for another man, and then ends by killing him, has done nothing discreditable from his own standard. He has not made you believe less in his professions, but more; for he actually did mean what he said, and has become by his act a creditable witness to the faith that was in him—the dark gospel of hatred. But if, while nourishing a personal hatred, he was at the same time laying it down as the duty of all men to love their enemies, then we have not to wait for the murder in order to look upon him as a tainted and a discredited witness. It is not so much the blood upon his hands as the hatred within his heart which has discredited him as a preacher to others.
Or, put the case otherwise; without pretending to such a counsel of perfection as that he can love his enemies, a man may yet assert that human life is sacred, and that he has no right to take the life of his fellow. Having done so he begins to set up exceptions: “Though I may not do it at my own,†he says, “I may do it at the bidding of others.†And this not by orders that he is compelled into on pain of death or torture (when he might plead a natural human infirmity as his excuse for wrongdoing) but by voluntary enlistment in an army, or by voluntary acceptance of the post of public hangman, or of a judgeship, or of service upon a jury in cases involving the death-penalty.
Now, it may be very commendable to take human life at the bidding of others; but it is not consistent with the unqualified statement that “all human life is sacred.†The one proposition—it is not my concern here to defend or attack either of them—becomes discredited by the other. The advocate of the judicial extinction of life under the institution of capital punishment, or of wholesale extinction under the institution of war—if he wishes to be heard as a credible witness, and to avoid the imputation of discreditable conduct when he gives a hand to it—must reshape his statement something after this manner: “Human life is so important a thing that one man must not take it on his own responsibility; but Society may.†And then he will have tomake up his mind what he means by Society, and why he thinks Society is more to be trusted than himself. And if he finds himself in a community which permits or even inculcates moral evils which he individually cannot tolerate, then he must puzzle out for himself why he will trust such a community with the power to kill, when he sees it make so vile and miserable a misuse of the power to keep alive—or to keep from life in any form that is worth having—so many millions of his fellow-creatures. And he will find presently that his assertion that human life is sacred must—if it is to mean anything—extend from the comparatively easy and simple problem of the death-penalty to those far greater problems, which lie all around him, of the cruel life-penalties tolerated or exacted by Society.
So before long what he will find himself up against is this—the necessity of being a creditable or a discreditable witness to the value of Society itself—of that thing to whose apron-strings he has tied his conscience. For you cannot assert that it is right for Society to unmake human life unless you also assert that Society is making human life in a form that is worth having, in a form, too, that would be imperilled were its power of judicial murder to be taken from it.
But the point of departure I have wished to bring you to is this: man did not begin to doubt his own moral right to kill other men until there entered into his being an idea ofsomething better able than himself to judge, to control, and to provide. And so long as he believed in that idea as protective of a morality superior to his own, and productive of the fruits of life in better quality, he could without discredit put into its hands powers which he dared not himself exercise.
But when, on the contrary, a man comes to the conclusion that the products of Society as constituted have in them more of evil than of good, he may quite creditably, in a strict sense of the word, start an attack upon Society, or upon great social institutions, and seek to bring them to dissolution. Such a course of action may be arrogant, or may have an insufficient basis of fact, but it is not discreditable. Rather does it prove the man’s faith in his professions. History gives record of many such characters, and posterity has approved of deeds which in their own day were regarded as violent, arrogant, and unjustifiable.
Martin Luther attacked a far greater social institution of his own day than was comprised under any single form of government. He attacked something much bigger than the English or the American Constitution. In deciding to attack it he was more arrogant (if single unorganised action against large and organised numbers be the proof of arrogance) than you or I could be if we attacked any institution to-day that you like to name, even the institution of war. Now, the result of that great attack was that it succeeded—notunconditionally, not universally, but (broadly speaking) racially and territorially. About one-third of Europe was conquered by it; and about two-thirds remain to this day—not indeed unaffected, but certainly not conquered by Lutheranism. If you are to judge of sacred causes by mere numbers, there are still more nominal Catholics than nominal Protestants in the world; and, therefore, by numbers, up to date Luther is condemned.
Luther’s real conquest—the thing that he really did bring about, and in which numbers are now on his side, would have horrified him. Luther was the root-cause why there are to-day more nominal Christians in the world who pick and choose doctrines to suit their own taste, than Christians who submissively take their doctrines wholesale from others whether from Luther or from Rome. It is due to Luther, as much as to anybody, that so many Roman Catholics who have no leanings to Lutheranism, are only nominal Catholics. Luther, that is to say, has brought into existence an enormous number of discreditable Christians who will not openly admit that they are free-thinkers.
You have clergy of the Church of England, for instance, who read themselves into their pulpits with the Thirty-nine Articles, and do not believe half of them.
The average young man who enters the ministry of the Church of England has been reasonably mothered by a university education; and when he takes the plunge it is not totalimmersion. His mother—his Alma Mater—still holds him by the heel. It is in consequence, with a sort of heel of Achilles that he enters upon divinity; and over this he draws a stocking with a large hole in it just where the wear of the heel comes hardest. That stocking (containing forty stripes save one) is the Thirty-nine Articles. It has been loosely knit, it is warranted to shrink the longer he wears it, and the hole in consequence gets larger.
There you have the weakness of the Church of England. Nobody to-day in his senses is prepared to die for the Thirty-nine Articles. Yet to hold ministry in the Church he has to swear by them, and thus at the very beginning of his ministerial career discreditable conduct is imposed on him.
It is no wonder that upon that basis the Church of England is permeated with unbelief in the things that it professes. A Church, a religion, may be full of credulity, bigotry, superstition—and with all those things it may yet have a true and a living faith: it may breed martyrs and inquisitors in equal numbers and with equal facility; but, in order to do so it must have at its back something definite and distinctive that its members are prepared to die for. And if it has not that, it is bound to become before long a discredited institution.
It is an interesting and a hopeful trait in human nature that it will only believe obstinately, continuously, and in spite of persecution, in those things which seem greatly to matter. When they no longer seem to matter, belief falls away from them. And, broadly speaking, we have come to see that things do not greatly matter unless they affect life and conduct.
“The Kingdom of Heaven†is within you; and if your doctrinal test does not produce good ethical results, you begin to doubt—not the Kingdom of Heaven—but the doctrine on which it was made to depend.
Similarly, if a doctrine obviously lays itself open to grave abuse, or presents strong temptation to the infirmities of human nature, you begin to doubt whether it is so heavenly in origin as it pretends to be.
The doctrine held by some cannibal African tribe that the bride’s mother shall provide the wedding-breakfast in her own person, is so clearly a truckling to the prejudice against mothers-in-law—which exists even in this country—that such a religious tenet immediately becomes suspect, and we guess that it emanates not from the gods but from their maker, man.
Notice, too, how the gradual displacement of miracle has been brought about. So long as miracles appealed to the human mind as a moral and not a licentious expedient for the Creator of the universe to indulge in, they remained acceptable to the human understanding and were easily believed. Their real dethronement began when it was seen that a belief in them gave the greatest possible assistance to the cruel, grasping, and criminalinstincts of the human race—that, from the social point of view, they opened a way for the terrorising of the weak, for fraud, for covetousness, for murder, for theft—in a word for priest-craft in all its worst forms.
The belief in miracle enabled Samuel, with his punitive threats of divine vengeance, to terrorise first Eli and then Saul, and bring Israel to such a pass under his priestly government that at no period of that people’s early history were they more in subjection to their enemies.
The belief in miracle enabled Elisha to cajole Elijah into the wilderness and there murder him, persuading subsequent inquirers that he had gone up to Heaven in a chariot of fire. Everybody believed him except the children; and when they mocked him and told him to go and do likewise, he threatened that bears would come and eat them. And Scripture, as a warning to us against like conduct, tells us that they did.
That is how miracle was played under the old dispensation; and (as long as it could possibly be maintained) under the new also. Then, as the bad social results of a belief in miracles became accumulatively apparent—when carried outside the canon of Scripture into contemporary life—then it began to dawn upon some people how bad also a belief in them was for the mind of man in relation to the Deity. It began to be seen that the institution of a law of nature (in conjunction with an arbitrary suspension thereof wheneverdivinely convenient) was not compatible with what men have now come to regard as “moral conduct.†It was literally “discreditableâ€; for it made men disbelieve the law of their own being. In nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand a man was to be guided by experience, by thought, reason, and conscience—by a belief in cause and effect. Then—in the off case—unreason and inexperience were to descend upon him like a thunderbolt, and either beat him to dust, or lift him, an ingenuously amazed Ganymede to the seats of bliss.
Now, we may admit—indeed we must—that there are many mysteries and secrets of nature which man has not yet fathomed; there may be many of which as yet he has no suspicion. A sudden exhibition of any of those powers and mysteries might even to-day seem “miraculous.†When in the past some fortuitous circumstance brought them about, “miracle†was the only explanation of them which human understanding was able to offer.
But now we are coming more and more to believe that if blind men have suddenly received their sight it has not been by miracle but by law; if faith has removed mountains literally, or caused the sun and the moon to stand still, it has done so by reliance on sources which lay hitherto untapped in the general order of things, and implicit ever since the creative scheme was established. For if any other explanation is to be offered, then the work of creation is discredited, and the meaningand the moral values of those processes which we sum up in the word “life†become cheapened, because we can no longer regard them as a law, but only as a sort of police-regulation, arbitrary, capricious, and provocative of misconduct, in that we are unable to depend upon them, or to have any guarantee that they will be impartially administered.
Miracle discredits the ordered scheme of creation; and quite as much does it do so if you believe creation to be the work of a personal Deity. Creation (science shows us more and more) was from its inception a process of absolutely related causes and effects—a whole system reared up through millions and millions of years upon a structure involving infinite millions of lives and deaths—and the whole a perfect sequence of causal happenings.
That is “life†as it is presented to man’s reason and understanding; and if his reason and understanding are not to faint utterly, he must in his search for a moral principle “find God (as the Psalmist puts it) in the land of the living,†or not at all. For as he estimates the moral value of things solely by that empyric sense which has been evolved in him through a faithful recognition of the inevitable laws of cause and effect, so must he become demoralised, if he is to be taught that what he has regarded as inevitable can be capriciously suspended by a power independent of those laws which life has taught him to reverence.
Do not think, for a moment, that I amquestioning the power of faith or the power of prayer. It is a tenable proposition that they are the most tremendous power in the world; and yet we may hold that they take effect through the natural law alone, and have come into existence through the courses of evolution—or, if you like to put it so—in a faithful following of the Will which, in the act of Creation, made a compact and kept it.
But if the compact of Creation was not kept, if that impact of spirit upon matter (which through such vast eras and through such innumerable phases of life worked by cause and effect) was ever tampered with so that cause and effect were suspended, then the whole process becomes discredited to our moral sense, and its presiding genius is discredited also.
Are we to suppose that through the earlier millions of years, when only the elementary forms of life were present upon this globe, cause and effect went on unsuspended and unhindered, and that these processes, having once been started (engendered, let us assume, by the Immanent Will), held absolute sway over the development of life for millions and millions of years, until a time came when humanity appeared, and the idea of religion and a Deity entered the world; and that this process then became subject to a dethronement? Are we to believe that then intervention in a new form, and upon a different basis (not of cause and effect) began to take place? If that is the proposition, then, it seems to me, we areasked (having accepted the idea of a Creator) to impute to Him discreditable conduct—to believe that a point came in these causal processes which He had instituted when He could no longer “play the game†without arbitrary interference with its rules, and that the appearance of man upon the globe was the signal for a fatal weakening to His character.
I have seen a clergyman cheat at croquet. He was the by-word of the neighbourhood for that curious little weakness; but I assure you that the spectacle of that reverend gentleman surreptitiously pushing his ball into better position with his foot instead of depending upon the legitimate use of his mallet, was no more ignoble a spectacle than that which I am asked to contemplate by believers in miracle when they present to my eyes a Deity who (upon their assertion) does similar things.
Test upon this basis of morality the most crucial of all events in Christian theology.
The idea of the Incarnation of God in human form as the final and logical fulfilment of the Creative purpose and process—the manifestation of the Creator in the created—has had for many great thinkers a very deep attraction. But if the process which brings Him into material being—the so-called Virgin-Birth—is not a process implicit in Nature itself and one that only depends for its realisation on man’s grasp of the higher law which shall make it natural and normal to the human race—if the Virgin-Birth is miracle instead of perfectlyconditioned law revealing itself, then, surely, such a device for bringing about the desired end is “discreditable conductâ€â€”because it discredits that vast system of evolution through cause and effect which we call “life.†From such an Incarnation I am repulsed as from something monstrous and against nature; and the doings and sayings of a being so brought into the world are discredited by the fact of a half-parentage not in conformity with creative law.
Now when one ventures to question the moral integrity of so fundamental a religious doctrine, and to give definite grounds as to why adverse judgment should be passed on it, there will not be lacking theologians ready to turn swiftly and rend one something after this manner: “Who are you, worm of a man, to question the operations of the Eternal mind, or dare to sit in judgment on what God your maker thinks good?â€
The answer is “I don’t. It is only your interpretation of those operations that I question.†But on that head there is this further to say: “By the Creative process God has given to man a reasoning mind; and it is only by the use of the reason so given him that man can worship his Maker.†To give man the gift of reason and then to take from him the right fully to exercise it, is discreditable conduct.
That tendency I attribute not to the Deity but to the theologian—more especially as I read in the Scriptures that where God had a special revelation to make to a certain prophetwho thought a prostrate attitude the right one to assume under such circumstances, divine correction came in these words, “Stand upon thy feet, and I will speak to thee.†Some people seem to think that the right attitude is to stand upon their heads.
It is told in some Early Victorian memoirs that a group of Oxford dons were discussing together the relations of mortal man to his God, and one postulated that the only possible attitude for man to assume in such a connection was that of “abject submission and surrender.†But even in that dark epoch such a doctrine was not allowed to go unquestioned. “No, no,†protested another, “deference, not abject submission.†And though it is a quaint example of the Oxford manner, surely one must agree with it. Reason being man’s birthright, “Stand upon thy feet and I will speak to thee,†is the necessary corollary. Even if there be such a thing as divine revelation—the revelation must be convincing to man’s reason, and not merely an attack upon his nerves, or an appeal to his physical fears.
Similarly any form of government or of society which does not allow reason to stand upon its feet and utter itself unashamed is a discreditable form of discipline to impose, if reason is to be man’s guide.
Now I do not know whether, by characterising the device of a “miraculous†birth as discreditable to its author, I am not incurring the penalty of imprisonment in a country whichsays that it permits free thought and free speech (at all events in peace-time). A few years ago a man was sent to prison—I think it was for three months—for saying similar things: a man who was a professed unbeliever in Divinity. And quite obviously the discreditable conduct in that case was not of the man who acted honestly up to his professions, but of this country which, professing one thing, does another. And the most discreditable figure in the case was the Home Secretary who, though entirely disapproving of this legal survival of religious persecution, and with full power to exercise the royal prerogative of mercy which has now become his perquisite, refused to move in the matter, and said he saw no reason for doing so. His discredit was, of course, shared by the Cabinet, by Parliament and by the Country—which (without protest except from a few distinguished men of letters and leaders of religious thought) allowed that savage sentence to stand on grounds so antiquated and so inconsistent with our present national professions.
Nationally we are guilty of a good deal of discreditable conduct on similar lines. We profess one thing, and we do another.
Our politicians tell us that they rely upon the voice of the people, yet often they employ the political machine which they control, for the express purpose of evading it. A few years ago a Liberal statesman was appointed to Cabinet-rank, and had in consequence to go tohis constituency for re-election. He belonged to the party which makes a particular boast of its trust in the popular verdict. But in order to make his election more safe—before his appointment became public property—he communicated to his party agent his ministerial knowledge of the coming event so that the date of the bye-election could be calculated. And the agent proceeded to book up all the public halls in the constituency over the period indicated. Then, in order that the scandal might not become too flagrant he generously released a proportion of his bookings to his Conservative opponent, but refused to release any at all to his Labour opponent; and on those nicely arranged conditions he fought his election—and got beaten.
Now that was surely discreditable conduct, for here was a statesman who, while ostensibly appealing to the voice of the people was doing his level best behind the scenes to deny to it a full and a free opportunity of expression. Yet the whole political world was in so discreditable a condition that there were actually people who thought then—and perhaps still think to-day—that that budding politician was unfairly and hardly treated when he was thereafter pursued from constituency to constituency by his cheated opponent, and successfully prevented from re-entering Parliament even to this day. Probably in other branches of life he was an upright and honourable man, but politics had affected him, as religion orsocial ambition has affected others, and made him a discreditable witness to the faith which he professed.
Now when you have great organisations and great institutions thus discrediting themselves by conniving at the double-dealings of those whom they would place or keep in authority—you cannot expect the honestly critical observer to continue to place their judgment above his own, or to believe (when some difficult moral problem presents itself) that there is safety for his own soul in relying upon their solution of it.
The sanction of the popular verdict in a community which is true to its professions is very great and should not lightly be set aside. But the sanction of a community or of an organisation which is false to its professions is nil. And it is in the face of such conditions (to which Society and religion always tend to revert so long as their claim is to hold power on any basis of inequality or privilege) that the individual conscience is bound to assert itself and become a resistant irrespective of the weight of numbers against it. And so, in any State where it can be said with truth that the average ethical standard for individual conduct is better than the legal standard, the duty of individual resistance to evil law begins to arise. “Bad laws,†said a wise magistrate, “have to be broken before they can be mended.†And to be broken with good effect they must be broken not by the criminal classes but by the martyrs and the reformers. It is not withoutsignificance that every great moral change in history has been brought about by lawbreakers and by resistance to authority.
When the English Nonconformists of two or three centuries ago were fighting governments and breaking laws, they were doing so in defence of a determination to hold doctrines often of a ridiculous kind and productive of a very narrow and bigoted form of religious teaching—a form which, had it obtained the upper hand and secured a general allegiance, might have done the State harm and not good. But, however egregious and even pernicious their doctrine, the justice (and even the value) of the principle for which they contended was not affected thereby. The life of the spirit must take its chance in contact with the life material, and Society must have faith that all true and vital principles will (given a free field and no favour) hold their own against whatever opponents. That is the true faith to which Society is called to-day—but which it certainly does not follow—especially not in war time.