Confessions of an Economic Heretic/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
CONTACTS WITH POLITICAL AND ETHICAL MOVEMENTS
Though I had never become a full-blooded rationalist in the sense of holding that reasoning was the sole method of attaining truth and of assessing values, my mind hdd long been set in that direction, and when I came to London I soon found myself consorting with persons who had shed theology and who sought to apply rationalism in the fields of ethics and politics. One of my earliest and most intimate associates was Bradlaugh’s chief intellectual lieutenant, J. M. Robertson, who was assistant editor of the National Reformer, which took for its leading tenets Atheism, Republicanism, and Birth Control. Equipped with unrivalled powers of controversy, immense industry in the acquisition of knowledge in history, science, and philosophy, and a wonderfully accurate and ready memory, he devoted the greater part of his life to the history and the current practice of free-thought. Though later on in the early twentieth century he was drawn into active participation in the Free Trade controversy, was elected into Parliament and even held office as Under-Secretary in the Board of Trade, his heart never lay in politics. He could never become a sound party man, for, though certain early excesses of the rising Labour movement repelled him and drove him into the Liberal camp, he was never quite at ease there and was, I think, glad to return to his books and his controversial theories. When I knew him best, in the nineties, the virtues and at least one curious defect were exceedingly impressive upon one in general sympathy with his rationalism in all fields of its application, The defect was an excessive combativeness which was apt to pursue every detected falsehood or fallacy to its remotest origins and a related failure to assign the proper scale of importance to the several errors of his “enemies.” I remember on one occasion venturing to protest against the ferocity of some indictment, and he answered: “You forget that I am only four generations from a painted Pict.” It would be wrong, however, to neglect in any estimate of Robertson, the intense “humanism” which underlay his “spirit of revolt” against the popular creeds of his day and of the past. In personal intercourse he showed a most kindly disposition in all the ordinary affairs of life. It was only when our conversation brought up some controversial topic of the day that the fighting temper was aroused. How far my association with this remarkable man influenced my mind and lines of thought I cannot judge. It certainly strengthened my anti-religious bent and clarified the doctrine of “determinism” which at that time threatened to dominate my outlook in all fields of activity. But though we first met in the adoption of a common economic heresy, “Over-saving,” as my economic studies led me along the Labour and Socialist paths, Robertson stood upon the whole by laisser-faire Liberalism, and a gradual breach came into our politics and economics.
It may seem at first sight rather difficult to link up the Scot J. M. Robertson with another Scot, Ramsay MacDonald, with whom I had a close personal contact during the same period. Both were men of fine presence and of imposing personality. MacDonald came into my life a year or two later than Robertson, as I remember from a remark made by a German governess, who spoke of MacDonald as “die zweite Schönheit.” A Labour Party was not then in being, the I.L.P. had not yet entered Parliament, and MacDonald’s earliest standing was that of an independent radical with Socialist sympathies. My relations with him took on a more impersonal form when we became associated in the production of a magazine entitled the Progressive Review, which ran a brief precarious life from 1896 to 1898. The title chosen for this magazine, taken in conjunction with the names of its chief supporters, editors, and writers, is an indication of the new alignment in the field of politics due to the intrusion of important economic issues which had long been waiting in the political background. William Clarke, then a writer for the Daily Chronicle and a member of the Fabian Executive, was the active editor, to whom I rendered such assistance as I could, while Ramsay MacDonald was secretary, and Herbert Samuel an active worker and supporter, with Charles Trevelyan and Richard Stapley aiding and abetting in the enterprise. Samuel I first came into contact with when, as a candidate for one of the Oxfordshire Divisions, he was giving his attention to projects of land reform, and generally preparing himself for the active political career of after years. His close friend, Trevelyan, was then not a Labour man or a Socialist in any declared sense. The Progressive Review was definitely opposed to such a general Socialist policy as Keir Hardie was allowed to advocate in one of its early numbers. The term ”New Liberalism” was adopted by Samuel and others as rightly descriptive of its aims. That “New” Liberalism differed from the old in that it envisaged more clearly the need for important economic reforms, aiming to give a positive significance to the “equality” which figured in the democratic triad of liberty, equality, fraternity. “A many-sided policy of thorough economic reform” was the task confronting Parliament as Samuel saw it in 1896. Or, if we turn from “equality” to “liberty,” we may take as its aim the passage quoted by Haldane from T. H. Green in the second number of the Review. “When we measure the progress of a society by its growth in freedom, we measure it by the increasing development and exercise on the whole of those powers of contributing to social good with which we believe the members of the society to be endowed; in short, by the greater power of the citizens as a body to make the most and best of themselves.”[1]
But though “the citizens as a body” must utilize the State as their main political instrument for the promotion of this “social good,” the editorial policy of the Review was keenly alive to the dangers of a powerful State, taken as an instrument of absolute control and adducing “Reasons of State” as an overruling principle of policy. One of the last articles in the Review was a strong endorsement of a protest by John Morley against the reincarnation of Machiavellism, especially in Germany. The writer, moreover, points out that Imperialism, as practised on the Congo, in Matabeleland, and elsewhere, works along the same evil assumption that “Human claims, universal morality, mercy, justice, pity, all count for nothing in the minds of those who mainly administer affairs, when weighed in the balance against State interests.”
The growing “Imperialism” and the growing “Socialism” exhibit the same danger of an absolute State control. “In the light of this idea, that the State exists for the individual, not the individual for the State, all existing institutions must be tried, and they will stand or fall according as they can bear the searching test.”[2]
Taken by itself, this statement may seem to resolve all “social good” into the good of the individuals who compose society. This was not, however, the intention of the writer, for he adduces “the general will” as a spiritual reality, organic in character, and operative through the State, as through other organs of co-operation. We had here in the Review a first serious attempt to draw the attention, not of a few intellectuals but of a wider thinking minority of citizens, to the difficulties besetting the intrusion of the State, whether autocratic or democratic, into new economic spheres of activity. Another article, “Is Democracy a Failure?” directly confronts those difficulties which now, forty years later, figure in the forefront of political history.
But it was distinctive of the Progressive Review that, though primarily political-economic in its outlook, it realized that “progress” was “cultural” in the widest human sense. Not a few of its articles were written by leaders of free-thought in the fields of art and literature. Havelock Ellis. Edward Carpenter, William Archer, James Oliphant, Karl Blind, are among the names recorded. The early collapse of this Review was, I think, a great misfortune. Had it lived, it might have had a most useful influence in moulding the thought, policy, and structure of the new Labour-Socialist Party which was just beginning to emerge from the clouded counsels and mixed interests of diverse “progressive” movements. It was, however, the usual race between a slow-growing circulation and limited finance which has brought to an end so many promising literary projects — one aspect of an economic determinism sharpened by a secret recognition that our sense of “progress” involved peril to the purse, power, and prestige of the ruling classes in business, politics, society.
For myself, I think the many contacts which my work on the Review brought with more mature minds than my own, and in particular the experience of the intricate interactions in the worlds of thought and action, were of immense value in widening and deepening my outlook. It became impossible for me to devote myself to an arid economic science which boasted its growing exactitude and took “the measuring rod of money” as its final criterion of value.
Other associations belonging to this period of the nineties ministered to the same tendency, the close relations between economics and politics and the search after a social ethics which should harmonize the two and bring them both under a broader concept of the art of human welfare.
Here it behoves me to say something about the Ethical Movement which began its enlarged activities in the nineties. Soon after I came to London in the late eighties I found that my work in University Extension brought me into touch with the London Ethical Society, of which J. H. Muirhead and Bernard Bosanquet were active leaders. In substance it was an attempt of a few Oxford philosophers, not content with the seclusion of an academic life, to furnish thought and leadership to movements “for the amelioration of the condition of the working classes.” The men I have named, with a few others, had been associated with the Charity Organisation Society, a creation of the late seventies, which vested its reforms in the improvement of the character of the workers. But it became evident that any wider reforms of working-class character demanded a prior process of moral instruction for the upper and middle classes who had hitherto taken their social creed and charitable policy from the Orthodox Churches. Our ethical leaders rightly emphasized the need of a reasonable social and personal ethics, based not on any theology but upon a rational conception of moral welfare and applied to working out the conditions of “the good life.” My experience of this Ethical Society led me to regard it as excellent in its assertion of free discussion, but as committed so strongly to the stress on individual moral character, as the basis of social progress, as to make it the enemy of that political-economic democracy which I was coming to regard as the chief instrument of social progress and justice. This moral individualism was not, however, equally developed in the other ethical societies which were coming into existence at the close of the century. Nor was it applicable to the earliest Ethical Society, that of South Place, which from the time of Charles James Fox, the Corn Law reformer, had been a centre of free-thought and free speech on all the controversial issues of the age. Unitarian in its origin, it retained the name of a “religious” society after Moncure Conway, its American re-founder, became its minister. The term “ethical” was introduced when Dr. Coit took charge in 1888. Though problems of economic reform did not take concrete shape under Conway, the ethics of social responsibility figured largely in his teaching. My own personal association with South Place dated from 1897, and two years later I became one of its regular lecturers, figuring as a sort of middle-man between J. M. Robertson and Herbert Burrows, a committed Socialist. The wide divergence of our views on many matters made no difficulty before an audience that prided itself upon an “open mind.” A test of this liberty of speech was afforded me when the South African War occupied the national mind at the close of the century. Though the sympathies of prominent members of South Place were sharply divided on the merits of the war, no attempt was made to “boycott” the strong pro-Boer utterances made from the platform by the lecturers, who were in agreement in their condemnation of this brutal piece of Imperialism.
My close connection with this liberal platform, lasting continuously for thirty-six years, was of great help to me in clarifying my thought and enlarging my range of interests in matters of social conduct. Addressing audiences consisting for the most part of men and women of the business and professional classes, with a scattering of educated clerks and manual workers, I found myself driven to put ethical significance into a variety of current topics and events, many of which belonged to the fields of politics and economics. But I had first to make up my own mind, before communicating the result to others. Though such a fragmentary process had its defects, it served on the whole to bring together what at first sight seemed widely sundered pieces of thought and valuation, and so to give an increasing measure of cohesion to the deeper process of intellectual order needed to carry out the humanization of economic thinking which I had taken as my primary intellectual task.