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IV Rulership and Responsibility In the previous chapter it was suggested — (1) That Liberalism is but a means of relieving a temporary and morbid political situation; and, (2) That far from mankind's having any natural propensity to tamper with self-government, men much prefer to be free from such responsibilities, and favour the alternative of trustworthy leaders who can take charge of public affairs. As its name suggests, Liberalism is a doctrine advocating liberty and the sort of polity that makes liberty possible. In the light of history it is a systematic protest against the oppression, injustice and constraints of bad government. It is therefore generally a more or less late reaction to a condition felt to be onerous and tyrannical and, unlike chieftainship, monarchy, aristocracy, or even primitive communism, it is not a spontaneous and instinctive product of healthy social life. It implies a negation, a counter measure. That is why it may fairly be described as a medicine. As an exasperated response to provocation more or less prolonged, it bears on its face the ugly birthmarks of a delivery from thraldom. Indeed, although its principles were a long time hatching, the very term "Liberal" as applied to a political party professing the doctrines we associate with the name, only came into use in English politics after 1815, owing to Whig sympathy with the Liberales of Spain who were fighting for their freedom. The first astonishing feature the historian notices in Liberalism is its late arrival on the scene. Without examining too minutely its remote beginnings, even if we place its first conception as a deliberate policy no earlier than the Reformation, there is still justification for the claim that as a protest against bad government, it was extraordinarily long delayed; and we are left marvelling at the long-suffering patience of the European masses for waiting so long before their endurance was ex-
Only when goaded beyond endurance does another mood supervene, and the trouble is that when once this mood is experienced it is not easily given up. It is true that a tradition of sound rulership maintained by a succession of able rulers, has hardly ever been known in Europe. Our Continent has witnessed the government of monarchs, dictators, aristocrats and even priests; yet only exceptionally has it enjoyed wise and beneficent rulership. Indeed, in speaking of England alone it is no exaggeration to say that for a period of 1100 years — from St. Boniface to Asquith and the Parliament Act of 1911, which was a rude congé hurled at the heads of England's worthless aristocracy — we know of no Age in which the English ruling class, as a body subordinate to the sovereign, displayed even that minimum of wisdom and prudence which would have ensured their retention of the national leadership. St. Boniface himself, William of Malmesbury and the later historians of the Middle Ages, all concur in condemning the Nobility of the Anglo-Saxon period. The rulers who followed, although perhaps less reprehensible, because they were not natives but Feudal barons of foreign extraction, were no less "Manslayers of the poor"; and in the record of their successors right up to the end of Victoria's reign, there is no instance of even a few decades during which the class enjoying privilege and power may truthfully be said to have fulfilled the obligations their rights entailed and to have justified the advantages of their exalted rank. The dignitaries of the Church and even the Sovereigns themselves were often, throughout English history, partners with the aristocracy in the crimes that finally shattered the common people's faith in all power not subject to
The Highland clearances of the years 1807 to 1850 are alone sufficient evidence of the kind of high-handed tyranny practised more or less as a matter of course by men of power in Great Britain, for the barbarity shown towards the wretched victims of these forcible clearances beggars description. In his History of the Highland Clearances, Chap. XVI, Alexander Mackenzie says, "It is altogether a tale of barbarous action unequalled in the annals of agrarian crime." And he adds, "Atrocities were perpetrated which I cannot trust myself to describe in my own words." One "nobleman", the Earl of Selkirk . . . "allured many of the evicted to emigrate to his estate on the Red River in British North America. . . . After a long and otherwise disastrous passage they found themselves deceived and deserted by the Earl; left to their unhappy fate in an inclement wilderness, without any protection from the hordes of Red Indian savages . . . who plundered them of all on their arrival and finally massacred them, save a small remnant." And so on, for page after page of harrowing details which make the reader's blood run cold. Nor does Mackenzie conceal the fact that the clergy, to their shame, constantly sided with the "oppressing lairds." But I have jumped several centuries. If, however, we turn our glance backwards and try to discover the condition of the humblest among the ruled say, from the days of Edward I onward, we constantly have before our eyes a spectacle of more or less ruthless exploitation and injustice. Measures had to be taken repeatedly to prevent the oppression of the masses by landowners. The unfair assessments levied on the poor and the undue burdens imposed on the unenfranchised classes were a perpetual source of discontent and revolt in the towns. On the land in the rural districts of England, conditions were no better, and no later than 1360, John Ball, driven to lead an open revolt among the peasants as the result of the cruel hardships they had to endure, was inspired less by ideas imbibed from
The major Peasant's Revolt occurred in 1581, and Garnier states that the rustics had been starved into rebellion. (Annals of the British Peasantry, 1908, Chap. VI). Nor was their revolt confined to one quarter. Everywhere, from Kent to Yorkshire there was seething discontent. Norwich was sacked, insurgents marched from parts as distant as Devonshire and Lancashire, and three leaders, Tyler, Hales and Grindecobbe, conducted armies of peasants towards London. And this was not the only incident of the kind. Sixty-nine years later, in 1450, another major peasants' revolt occurred under Jack Cade, and yet another in 1549 under Kett. And we are told that, without exception, the fundamental cause of these outbursts of rustic passion was "agrarian oppression". We have but to read an old poem like Langland's The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman, in order to appreciate that as early as the fourteenth century and onwards, there were in the nation all the signs of a hard, greedy possessing class exploiting the weak and defenceless when and wherever they could. In the poems known as "King Edward and the Shepherd" and "God Speed the Plough" passages occur which illustrate vividly the asperities of the peasant's lot and reveal much the same conditions as Langland depicts. In the unspeakable horrors of the era covering the Industrial Revolution, we again encounter the ruthless abuse of power and indifference to lower-class suffering which have characterised the attitude of the ruling classes throughout the 1100 years of English history, beginning with the times of St. Boniface. And all too seldom in all those years can attention be called to an aristocrat as truly noble and conscious of his duty and lofty function as the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, or to a commoner of influence and power as truly and constructively charitable as Michael Thomas Sadler. But the record elsewhere in Europe is no less shocking. In France the degeneration of the nobility and their ultimate degradation under Louis XIV and XV is now common knowledge; whilst in Russia and Germany it suffices to state that it was by no means uncommon for some "aristocrats" to amuse themselves by taking pot-shots at their serfs or otherwise ill-treating them. Many of the German nobility did not even shrink
Thus, in George II's reign, English gold brought misery to thousands of German homes; for, in the war with America alone, the King managed to buy 17,742 recruits from the Duke of Brunswick, the Landgrave and Hereditary Prince of Hesse Cassel and the Prince of Waldeck. Needless to say, very few of these unhappy youngsters ever saw their native land again. When Voltaire blamed Frederick the Great for tolerating the scandalous trade in human beings, the King replied on June 18th 1776 denying that he countenanced it and added: "If the Landgrave had come from my school he would never have sold his subjects to the English like cattle in order to drive them to the slaughter house". (Schlachtbank). According to a contract concluded in those days, infantrymen cost 90 and cavalrymen 288 florins, and this price included the cost of recruiting them. A few protests were certainly raised in England against this white-slave trade and, on March 5th 1776 Lord Camden, in the House of Lords, said. "The whole business is a mercenary bargain for the price of troops on one side and the sale of human blood on the other, and the devoted wretches thus purchased for slaughter are mercenaries in the worst sense of the word." (Der Soldatenhandel Deutscher Fuersten Nach Amerika, by F. Kapp, 1874). Truth to tell, however, the protests raised in England were chiefly against the ruinous cost of the traffic. These are but isolated facts culled at random from the past history of our own and European aristocracy, and no one familiar with the social and political records of the last millennium would maintain that they are cither exceptionally black or present an unfair picture of the class enjoying privilege and power. When, therefore, in 1887, Lord Acton pronounced his famous dictum that "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely" (Letter to Bishop Creighton), we can
His shallow generalisation was however not seen as such by any one. Most Western people had long had it in mind, and the fact that his words were the tocsin calling on all men of sound understanding at long last to have done with Power and Privilege and for ever to eschew aristocracy, brands Acton as perhaps the greatest figure in the Sieges Allee (or Triumphal Avenue) of Liberal sophistry. |
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