Arthur George Villiers Peel

“ It was at this epoch in Peel's career that his political views underwent a subtle change. Although still as strongly opposed as his fellow tories to such measures as catholic emancipation or reform of the House of Commons, and although he still fully recognised the exigencies of party warfare, he began to perceive that it was the duty of politicians to study the condition of all classes of the people, and to bring parliamentary policy to some extent into harmony with the wishes and needs of the constituencies, even at the risk of ignoring many preconceived opinions. ”

“ The land above all of introspection and spirituality is India. Hence have started the founders of religion, and here again must start the wave which will spiritualise the material civilisation of the world. Political greatness or military power is never the mission of the Hindus. But there has been the other mission given to us: to accumulate, as it were, into a dynamo all the spiritual energy of the race, and to pour forth that concentrated energy on the world. India's gift to the world is the light spiritual. ”

“ As individualism, it seems, ignores the individual, and socialism swamps him, we are to forget these shibboleths, and are to stow these nineteenth-century antiquities in the lumberroom. Thus in future we are to employ the energies of the State in creating what for want of a better term may be called the Minimum Man. Each swimmer in the maelstrom of life is to be buoyed up partly. The milk of human kindness is to be on tap at every door. ”

“ It was at the opening of the seventeenth century that the House of Hapsburg at Vienna seemed to have grown really powerful, and prepared itself for the discharge of its historical mission, the union of Germany under itself. Now that so many other peoples had formed themselves into strong organisations, it was high time for Germany to do the same. Yet from that moment the House of Hapsburg committed a series of blunders so enormous as to begin by ruining Germany in the Thirty Years' War, and to end, in 1870, by enabling the once obscure state of Prussia to seize the headship of the whole. ”

“ Greece, when overwhelmed in 1897 by Turkey, was rescued by Europe. Viewed broadly, then, the property of the Sultan has devolved as much to sustain the weak as to enlarge the strong, so that even in Europe, and even in the southeastern part of it, force has not ruled absolutely, and weakness can live and flourish. How is it that the rays, shorn from the horns of the waning Crescent, have made an aureole for such humble brows? Who, if not democracy, has cried halt to the "Drang nach Osten" of Austria and Russia? ”

“ Therefore, European statesmen see a new world rising rapidly yonder, alienated from themselves, in touch with us, destined to be the rival of Europe, and growing the faster as they indulge in their time-honoured Kriegspiel. Meanwhile, their best and bravest, their invaluable citizens, will take wing across the ocean to better continents, while the weakling and the pauper will stay behind. Thus an ever-ascending scale of impositions will fall upon peoples ever less disposed to bear them. ”

“ Rising to the highest issues of public policy, we may be certain that if India hitherto, with eyes turned introspectively upon herself, and debilitated by the anaemia of her own metaphysics, and embittered by her unparalleled disasters, has not only nourished too much hatred against the stranger within her gates, but has sanctioned too much mutual animosity among her own offspring; if she has, in her despondency, too often regarded life as useless, a mere fitful fever with a recurring attack; if she, who was great when we were barbarous, has become weak when we are strong ”

“ The European had come, with his precise machinery and his less precise ideas; and the Arab had come also, with a prayer-mat and a koran, bearing across the hot desert the hotter formulæ of Islam. These melt some of the chains round the limbs of the benighted African. For, to apply the words of Gibbon, "the subject or the slave, the captive or the criminal, arises in a moment the free and equal companion of the victorious Moslem." Thus, the most energetic peoples in west and east are combining to inspire three thousand miles of Fuzzy-wuzzy warriors with novel hopes and powers. ”

“ Nevertheless, it is certain that all this that looks impossible will be accomplished, that this barrier purporting to bar our progress is but a mist, that we are as yet on the mere verge and fringe of our industrial resources, and that the future will multiply infinitely our commercial strength. Science says so. For science views our boasted progress in production as the mere gropings of a standstill empiricism, and pours contempt on the archaism of our primitive inventions, on the crude wastefulness of our processes, and on the ignorance of any despair. ”

“ For if, as already shown, our interests are increasingly concerned and involved in Europe; if, further, our pessimism of the nineteenth century in regard to the continent may give way to a hope, however modest, that the tangled skein of continental policy is not a mere noose to hang any intruder; if, therefore, we may enter where our interests call us so imperatively, without sheer foolhardiness or wanton folly—then forward, in the name of prudence itself, and in abandonment of the splendid isolation of old days. We must be Europeans. ”

“ Germany had not come on; and France filled the scene, enjoying for a time the combined authority which Rome exercised over Greece by her power, and which Greece exercised over Rome by her mind.
In this epoch she produced a literature so close to life that life and literature seemed one. Following on Montaigne, on Descartes, and on Malherbe, there arose a band of men who, numbering Corneille, Bossuet, La Fontaine, Boileau, Molière, and Racine among them, made France the school of Europe, and humanised humanity itself. ”

“ The State is the name for every one else under an alias. Rather than vest their industries in the State, our artisans will prefer to vest their industries in themselves as shareholders.
Then would be, then will be, liberated a commercial energy calculated to confound our rivals and to amaze the world. Then those who have hitherto wasted their strength in the civil wars of business will join ranks to score triumphs such as we have never known. The army of industry will march not as conscripts, but as volunteers. ”

“ Liberty is that spirit which, in politics, repudiates absolutism, respects the minority, and weighs the protest of a single conscience with care; which, in jurisprudence, favours the common, limits the canon, and rejects the civil, law, suspecting those iron maxims to be the weapons of imperial wrong; that spirit which, in the judgment seat, assumes innocency and gives the benefit of the doubt; which, in social life, sides with weakness against strength, with the outcast against the oppressor; and which, in all conflicts of authority against reason, inclines to follow the inner guide. ”

“ But this third proposition that genius in arms has founded and maintains our fortune, though it too must have some element of truth in it, is not more satisfactory than the others, and cannot stand the test of a cursory glance. For it must be immediately plain to the most casual student of our history that militarism is not our characteristic. The ruler who did his best to instil the genuine martial spirit into the nation was Cromwell, and his failure was so complete that reaction against his system has left a mark scarcely yet effaced upon our policy and character. ”

“ In a word, the future of India is to co-operate with the future of England.
Therefore, when we are justly told, by those who know, that India is not, and never will be, a nation, and that she consists of many nations at eternal variance with one another and parted by the profound abysses of race, creed, language, and history, we can assent. But that assent must not be taken to imply that, ruled by many governments co-ordinated into one common focus, she cannot pursue a definite policy and stand as a clear unity in the future before mankind. ”

“ And so we trace in London, as in all other of our cities, an infinity of retail shops, of personal businesses, of minnows living in the whirlpool as best they can, of small parties foraging against poverty, of vedettes feeling the way for the Napoleonic hosts of commerce, until we climb to the room of the solitary worker, who has no master but the morrow for which he has not provided, and no subordinate but the yesterday which he has won from death. ”

“ The Asiatic knew, or thought he knew, the Englishman to have made this freedom his divinity. For it appeared that, for the sake of freedom, he was ever losing the world that he had conquered, and was seemingly content to lose it. If India adopted that divinity, she might prosper mightily on the one hand, and, on the other, would be rid of the Englishman in due course. True, freedom is not in her pantheon, but in that countless company of godheads one more or less would not count. ”

“ In the breasts of a minority infinitesimally small, it must excite a determination to escape from such dire bondage, and to embrace the outstretched hands of western civilisation and freedom. But upon the huge overwhelming mass it must work conversely, weakening the fibre of the mind and the sinews of the will, so that they welcome their trammels, and stand at cross purposes with their own enlightenment. ”

“ That is one aspect of the industrial future as it is opening before our eyes. But the other aspect of this future is disappointingly different. In spite of the mercy of nature, of all our triumphant organisation, and of all these human energies at full stretch, the hard and stern fact remains that the result is not what we might expect. Even our best industries are not specially satisfactory, measured by the only true test, the wealth drawn therefrom by the mass of those engaged in them. ”

“ Between the civil revolution, whereby England led the modern world to political liberty, and the industrial revolution whereby she initiated our emancipation, more completely than ever before, from the dominion of nature, there is an intimate, and even necessary, connection. For to live free was little, if life had no strength. Therefore, to grapple with nature, nay more, to renew and reconstitute it, now became her purpose. ”

“ A very little thought will demonstrate that neither our entry into the balance of Europe, nor our settlements with individual powers, nor our reorganisation of our navy and an expeditionary force, nor our support of the Concert of Europe, nor our cultivation of international arbitraments, are more than highly laudable and very important palliatives against the seizures and paroxysms to which Europe has been subject for fifteen centuries. Enough surely to remember that, though all these expedients of ours are in operation at this moment, our western barbarism, though modified, is still itself. ”

“ It was from these multitudes of men, thus circumstanced, that there have been issuing those forces which have caused trade unionism to give way to socialism, socialism to syndicalism, and the latter to disorder and anarchy before our eyes. To comprehend how this has happened, let us get, as General Gordon recommended, into the skin of the labourers of this class.
The casual labourer had no regard for the older trade unions, for they were the aristocracy of labour, the men on the upward way. And this was why the socialists so easily dominated the trade union movement. ”

“ Thus it is that England, surveying her own work in India, in that third phase of her policy which would make men prosperous, has to apply to herself the words of Napoleon, "I am the Revolution." We shall discover, too, that the more eagerly we push that revolutionary programme of utilitarianism, and the more hastily India puts on the West, to the detriment of her old order, the more she will resent our disruption of the "reason of her existence and the repose of it." ”

“ Nevertheless, if we consider the origin and history and meaning of the Empire, we must suppose that one of the results of its existence must be, in the purely business sphere, to strengthen demand. After all, that is really why we created it. On the loss of the United States we felt it vital, in face of the general animus of Europe, to build another Empire in the place of the one which we had forfeited. ”

“ Britons began to descant on the parliament of man, on war drums beating no longer, and on the federation of the world. Our universal exhibition was organised to usher in the brotherhood of peoples, and good men gushed over the inauguration of universal peace.
From that moment, however, wars raged in almost all quarters of the globe. In Europe alone, Italy fought Austria; Austria fought Germany; Germany fought France; France fought Russia; Russia fought England; Germany fought Denmark; Russia fought Turkey; and so on with the catalogue. Triumphant democracy! ”

“ No one more than the oriental has made life bow to religion: no one more than he has made religion bow to life. In the height of his spiritual fervour, in the depth of his materialism, in the satisfaction of his soul by mysticism, in the gratification of his body by luxury, he has surpassed the world. But India never had a citizen. ”

“ We have all listened so long to eulogies of co-operation and profit-sharing as not to believe much in them, though, as a matter of fact, the sliding scale of wages in use in some important trades is itself profit-sharing in a certain sense. But the only final cure for the war of labour and capital is that labour should own some actual share in its own industries. A Lancashire authority, writing in 1887, foretold the day when the operatives in the cotton industry would possess a great portion of their mills, and already the better paid of them have large sums so invested. ”

“ Thus was it that an inventive genius which owed scarcely anything to science or education, produced, by an otherwise inexplicable marvel, those wonders that have so largely reshaped human life—the power-loom, the steam engine, the carding frame, the spinning frame, the furnace, the crucible, the open hearth, the steam hammer, the rolling mill, the hydraulic press, and the others of the long catalogue. ”

“ Yet, even so, in this interminable exhaustless East, into the mazes of which we have somehow stumbled, we have to turn another corner still. After all, the Moslem, in spite of his fatalism, can cry out when he is hurt like other people. The Hindu himself is growing as fond of money as the denizens of Park Lane or Capel Court, can agitate, as well as the best of us, for the good things of this life, and is utterly material in his baser rites. ”

“ At any rate, whatever the explanation, the history of our education up to the closing decades of the nineteenth century is not merely a record of stagnation but even of lamentable and painful decline. That statement is not speculative or hypothetical. It can be proved to the hilt by a perusal of the conclusions of the Commissions which sate in the 1860's, and reported respectively on our elementary and secondary education. Altogether, these documents stand to the pedagogic world as the report of 1843 stands to the industrial. They revealed a deplorable condition of ignorance, chaos, and decay. ”

“ But demand tends to fluctuate not only thus in detail, but, what is far more important, as a whole and bodily. Ever since the closing years of the eighteenth century, economists have noticed that our trade regularly oscillates in periodic cycles of good and bad times, these being usually reckoned at ten or eleven years. The tide of activity, then, pulses by a general ebb and flow, which dominates the whole economic life of the nation, and enables the history of its collective business to be mapped out into eras of progress and stagnation. ”