Joseph Clayton

“ Just as easy is it to regard the Peasant Revolt of the fourteenth century and Jack Cade's rebellion in the fifteenth century as the tumults of a riotous mob. The great point is to see clearly in all these contests, successful and unsuccessful, the movement for liberty, for greater security and expansion of life in England, and to note that only by a stern endurance and a willingness not to bear an irksome oppression have our liberties been won. In the winning of these liberties we have proved our fitness for democracy, for a government that will allow the fullest measure of self-development. ”

“ Chartist preacher, put the case as he, a typical agitator of the day, saw it in 1839: "The principle of the People's Charter is the right of every man to have his home, his hearth, and his happiness. The question of universal suffrage is, after all, a knife-and-fork question. It means that every workman has a right to have a good hat and coat, a good roof, a good dinner, no more work than will keep him in health, and as much wages as will keep him in plenty." ”

“ The king that tries without advice to seek his people’s weal
Must often fail, he cannot know the wants and woes they feel.
The Parliament must tell the king how he may serve them best,
And he must see their wants fulfilled and injuries redressed.
A king should seek his people’s good and not his own sweet will,
Nor think himself a slave because men hold him back from ill. ”

“ There was no room for the egotism that loves power, the vaulting ambition that o’erleaps itself, or even the self-deception that persuades a man holding to high position at sacrifice of principle that his motive is disinterested, in St. Thomas of Canterbury. More than once England was to see in later years men who strove vainly to serve with equal respect the Christian religion and the royal will—the service always ended in the triumph of the latter. ”

“ There was not even a conception that slaves might or should take part in politics, and the slaves vastly outnumbered the citizens. Modern democracy does not tolerate slavery, it will not admit the permanent exclusion of any body of people from enfranchisement; though it finds it hard to ignore differences of race and colour, it is always enlarging the borders of citizenship. So that already in the Australian Commonwealth, in New Zealand, in certain of the American States, in Norway, and in Finland, we have the complete enfranchisement of all men and women who are of age to vote. ”

“ In the choice of its representatives, a democracy will do well to elect those who know the life of the working people, and who share its toils; just as it will do well to shun the mere talker, and to seek out for itself candidates for election rather than have candidates thrust upon its attention by some caucus in London. But the main thing is that it should first discern men and women of ability and of character and then elect them for its representatives, rejecting those, it may be of more dazzling qualities, who are unstable in mind and consumed with vanity. ”

“ James,” cried the earl, “they come on skilfully, for they have turned my lessons against me. God have mercy on our souls, for our bodies are theirs! Though if Simon were to come up we might hope yet.” He turned to his eldest son, and pointing to the banner of Gloucester said, “See, Henry, what your pride has done.”
In vain Henry urged his father to fly while escape was possible. “I had as lief die here in a good cause as in the Holy Land,” said the earl, and the barons and knights standing round were equally resolute to fight to the end—though they had but two men to every seven of the enemy. ”

“ And just because legislation is, at the prompting of a social conscience, invading our homes and workshops, penetrating into prisons, workhouses, and hospitals, touching the lives of all of us from the cradle to the grave, the more imperative is it that our legislators should be chosen freely by the widest electorate of men and women. We fall back on the old maxim: "That which touches all shall be approved by all," and can perceive no other way of obtaining that general approbation for the laws than by the popular election of our representatives. ”

“ THE GREAT CHARTER 1207–1228 When Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury—the old Justiciar of Richard I.—ended his long life of public service on July 12th, A.D. 1205, King John exclaimed, with frank satisfaction, “Now for the first time I am King of England!” As long as Hubert was alive there was one man strong enough to restrain the king, and the primate and William the Marshall together had done something to guard England against the foulest and most ruthless tyranny of all its kings. ”

“ And when all is said and done—what does this democracy, this government by popular representatives, mean, but government by the consent of the governed—the only form of government tolerable to civilised mankind in the twentieth century?
Given a fairly good standard of common honesty in the ordinary dealings of life, and the honesty of our public life, whether in Parliament or in the Civil Service, in executive or administration, will serve. If the private and commercial life is corroded with dishonesty, then democracy will be bitten by knaves and rascals. ”

“ How mankind had passed from primitive freedom to civilised slavery neither Locke nor Rousseau inquired. "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains," cries Rousseau, in sublime disregard of facts. For man was not born free in the ancient republics of Greece and Rome that Rousseau revered; children were not born free in his day any more than they are in ours; and any assembly or community of people necessarily involves mutual consideration and forbearance which are at once restrictive. ”

“ Supremacy of King, or supremacy of Commons,—seed time and harvest remain, and the labourer and the artizan must needs do their day’s work.
Not till the deposing of the Stuarts—forty-five years after John Hampden’s death—is the supremacy of parliament over the crown arrived at by general consent, to become a recognized and settled thing in British politics. By the middle of the nineteenth century the House of Commons is unmistakably the ruling power in the constitution, and the labours of Eliot, Hampden and Pym are vindicated. ”

“ All the great men—heroic and faulty—who withstood the tyranny of their day, not only wrested charters from kings, they left a tradition of resistance; and this tradition has been of incalculable service to a nation seeking self-government. It is easy to dismiss the work of Anselm and Becket as mere disputes between monarch and Churchman, to treat lightly the battle for the Great Charter as a strife between king and barons. ”

“ He spared not his own brother, called Odo, who was the chief man next to the king, but set him in prison. So just was he that the good peace he made in this land cannot be forgotten. For he made it so that a man might fare alone over his realm with his bosom full of gold, unhurt; and no man durst slay another man whatsoever the evil he hath done him; and if any man harmed a woman he was punished accordingly. He ruled over England, and surveyed the land with such skill that there was not one hide but that he knew who held it, and what it was worth, and these things he set in a written book. ”

“ And all the old attempts at revolution by popular insurrection are again retold, not only because of the witness they bear to the impossibility in England of achieving democracy by the violent overthrow of government, but because they also bear witness to the heroic resolution of the English people to take up arms and plunge into a sea of troubles rather than bear patiently ills that were unseemly for men to endure in silence. ”

“ It is impossible to gaze without reverence on the earliest monument of English freedom which we can see with our own eyes and touch with our own hands, the Great Charter to which from age to age patriots have looked back as the basis of English liberty. ”

“ Once it is manifest that Parliament is the instrument of authority, that the Prime Minister and his colleagues rule only by the permission and with the approval of the House of Commons, and that the House of Commons itself is chosen by a certain number of electors to represent the nation, then it is plain that the real sovereignty is in the electors who choose the House of Commons. ”

“ But though Thomas, canonised by the pope on the prayers of the people of England, could be struck out of the calendar of the Church of England by the arbitrary will of King Henry VIII., as an enemy of princes, and his shrine destroyed, it is beyond the power of a king to reverse the sentence of history or to blast for ever the fame of a great and courageous champion of the poor of this land. Time makes little of the insults of Henry VIII. Thomas of Canterbury died for the religion that in his day protected the people against the despotism of the crown. ”

“ Now is the opportunity given to Englishmen, if they do but choose to take it, of casting off the yoke they have borne so long, of winning the freedom they have always desired. Wherefore, let us take good courage and behave like the wise husbandman of scripture, who gathered the wheat into his barn, but uprooted and burned the tares that had half-choked the good grain. The tares of England are her oppressive rulers, and the time of harvest has come. ”

“ It was when he was archbishop, and was riding one day from Windsor to Hayes that a hare chased by the dogs of some of his company took refuge under the feet of his horse. Anselm at once pulled up and forebade the hare to be molested, and when his escort laughed gleefully at the capture, the archbishop said: “You may laugh, but it is no laughing matter for this poor unhappy creature, which is like the soul of a departing man pursued by evil spirits. Mortal enemies attack it, and it flies to us for its life: and while it turns to us for safety we laugh.” ”

“ Hardie has been the ever-ready supporter of all democratic causes and the faithful advocate of social reforms; but the great idea, the political pearl of great price, for which, if necessary, all else must be sacrificed. Only by this independence can democracy be achieved, and a more equal state of society be accomplished—so Mr. Hardie has preached to the working people for the last twenty-five years at public meetings and trade union congresses, travelling the length and breadth of Great Britain in his mission. ”

“ Wat Tyler emerges from the obscurity of history to become a strong democratic leader. For eight days he commands a vast army of men; he confronts the king as an equal; orders the execution of the chief ministers of the crown; and wrests from the king promises of fundamental social importance. Then, in the very hour of victory, an unexpected blow from an enemy strikes him down, and death follows. ”

“ To sketch the rise of democracy in England is to trace the steady resistance to kings who would govern without the advice of counsellors, and to note the growing determination that these counsellors must be elected representatives. Only when the absolutism of the Crown is ended and a Parliament of elected members has become the real centre of government, is it possible, without a revolution, for democracy to be established. ”

“ But forty years of repression did their work, and a generation arose which only knew Catholicism as the faith of a proscribed and unpatriotic sect, who denied the absolute sovereignty of the crown and had another sovereign at Rome—the religion of Spain—popery, in short: a faith worse than Mahomedanism or heathenism—the scarlet woman of the Apocalypse—according to the fierce Puritan expounders of the Bible, and not to be counted as Christianity. ”

“ The elected representatives may sit and pass laws, but the bureaucracy which administers them will be the real authority.
It may be an entirely honest and efficient bureaucracy, as free from political partisanship as our British Civil Service and police-court magistracy are, but if it is admitted to be outside the jurisdiction of the House of Commons, and to be under no obedience to local councils, and if its powers involve a close inquisition into the lives of the people, and include the right to interfere daily with these lives, then bureaucracy and not democracy is the actual government. ”

“ Only when we have dropped all Locke's theories of primitive man's happiness, and the social-contract fiction, does the real value of his democratic teaching become clear, and the lasting influence of his work become visible.
Mankind is compelled to adopt some form of government if it is to sleep at nights without fear of being murdered in its bed, or if it wishes to have its letters delivered by the postman in the morning. ”