Richard Roberts

“ It is a sad commentary upon the civilisation we had produced, that it left us with a hunger which we endeavoured to appease by an elaboration of the fringes of life. We had gradually accumulated a range of comforts and conveniences, and not a few superfluities, which had come to be regarded as indispensable. But the war has taught us how few things are after all needful. We have all the materials of joyful life when we have food to eat, a home to live in, freedom and congenial work, comradeship and love. ”

“ We should agree to make it cease to be worth anyone’s while to exploit the public, by fixing rigid bounds to the accumulation of private wealth; and this we may do with a good conscience. For all wealth is socially produced; and the society which produces it has the first claim upon it. This is a position which can be challenged only by those who still hold that the possession of property confers upon its possessors a “divine right” to take the lion’s share of the wealth produced by the industry of the whole community. ”

“ For the thing that is stirring in the mind and heart of organised labour to-day is something much deeper than a desire for a more satisfactory physical life or for economic independence. Labour is indeed unable to make articulate more than the margin of the new desire of which it is aware; but the phenomenon which we have called “labour unrest” properly understood, is the result of a craving, imperious and not to be denied, for a larger life. Of this larger life the worker instinctively feels that economic security and independence are the indispensable pre-requisites. ”

“ An egalitarian democracy may indeed become the tomb of liberty. “Democracy,” says the same learned authority, “no less than monarchy or aristocracy sacrifices everything to maintain itself, and strives with an energy and a plausibility that kings and nobles cannot attain to override representation, to annul all the forces of resistance and deviation, and to secure by plebiscite, referendum, or caucus, free play for the will of the majority. The true democratic principle that none shall have power over the people is taken to mean that none shall be able to restrain or to evade its power ”

“ Between a proletarian bureaucracy and an industrial plutocracy there is little to choose; and the tyranny of the expert may become as galling as that of a despot. “In the socialistic presentment,” says Professor Hobhouse, “the expert sometimes looks strangely like the powers that be—in education for instance, a clergyman under a new title, in business that very captain of industry who at the outset was the socialist’s chief enemy. Be that as it may, as the expert comes to the front and efficiency becomes the watchword of administration, all that was human in socialism vanishes out of it. ”

“ In other words, democracy requires a specific type of personal relationship between men; and perhaps, its troubles are chiefly due to the fact that while it preached liberty and equality with no uncertain sound, it neglected to lay a corresponding emphasis upon fraternity. In truth, democracy is beset more perilously and more persistently by the inward enemy than the foe without—the inner enemy that lurks in men’s souls. For though there be a democrat in every man, there is also a potential aristocrat. The ultimate battle-ground of the democratic ideal is in men’s hearts. ”

“ Economic change will not deliver us from the mechanistic obsession; and we shall only be saved from the inherent dangers of economic change under present conditions by a fresh recognition of the central principle of democracy. That every soul has equal worth carries with it the corollary that personality must be conceived as an end in itself and not merely as a means. It is our quarrel with the Junker classes wherever we find them, that they deliberately relegate large masses of their fellowmen into a sub-human category. Democracy is the direct denial of this posture. ”

“ And, indeed, the main root of indifference is ignorance; for we are vitally interested in nothing of which we do not know something. It is to education that we must look for our main remedy. Some gleams of light have indeed already begun to pierce our darkness. We have commenced to educate school children in the rudiments of civic obligation; and there is no reason why history and geography should not be taught, not as at present to stimulate national pride or commercial efficiency, but to generate a sympathetic and comprehensive outlook upon human relationships. ”

“ But so long as we talk about “vindicating” the law more than reclaiming the offender—as the legal mind is apt to do—so long will men tend to regard the law not as a stepping-stone to higher things, but as an irksome restraint; and while we indulge in tall talk about the majesty of the law, we make law-abidingness “the law and the prophets,” and jeopardise our chance of effecting that increasing enfranchisement of the social sense in which alone is the hope of the democratic ideal. ”

“ Liberty is surely the assurance that a man may have full opportunity to live out his own life and to grow to the full stature of his manhood, to be true to himself through everything. This requires the recognition of real personal independence and a definite minimum of obligatory uniformity. In another connection, Acton insists that “liberty is not a means to a higher political end; it is itself the highest political end. It is not for the sake of a good public administration that it is required, but for security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society and of private life.” ”

“ That economic dependence cuts the nerve of all freedom needs no proof; the history of landownership is full of instances—even in recent times—of the coercion of dependants in matters of opinion and religious observance. So long as one man’s subsistence depends upon the will of another, it is foolish to suppose that he can in any real sense be free; and it is to be counted for righteousness to the Trade Unions that by binding the workers together, they have been able to resist encroachments on the part of the vested interests upon liberty of thought and conscience. ”

“ Freedom and fulness of discussion is the very breath of life to popular institutions, and wheresoever any problem or range of problems is withdrawn from public discussion, there is a virtual denial of the democratic principle. When, for instance, and in particular, foreign policy is conducted behind closed doors, a control over the destinies of the people is vested in individuals or in a class of individuals which is as real and as monstrous as that of an autocrat; and democracy is denied in its most sensitive and critical part. ”

“ Finally, in its broadest and deepest, most comprehensive and most interesting sense, democracy is the name for a certain general condition of society, having historic origins, springing from circumstances and the nature of things, not only involving the political doctrine of popular sovereignty but representing a cognate group of corresponding tendencies over the whole field of moral, social and even spiritual life within the democratic community.”—Lord Morley. ”

“ It is so frequently assumed that the function of government is the establishment and preservation of order that it is well to remember that it is a comparatively easy thing to secure some kind of order. The real difficulty is to establish and to secure liberty. We are far too ready to assume that liberty is capable of looking after itself and that the fragile plant which needs our solicitude is social order. But liberty stands in jeopardy every hour, not less in a democracy than in an autocracy. ”

“ What we must insist upon is that marriage shall be a partnership, deliberately entered into by two equal persons, economically independent of each other, attracted to each other by that physical and temperamental affinity which we call love; and that we shall import into the relationship no extraneous notions of state-service or of race-preservation which may interfere with the freedom and spontaneity of the relation thus established. The bearing of children may be a service to the nation; but no child is well-born who is not born simply of the joyful mutual selfgiving of man and woman. ”

“ Beneath the outward calm of empire there was a seething mass of unrest; and once the crust of empire was cracked, this lava of human passion rushed through. The worker has come to believe that the origins of the war are to be traced to economic causes, direct products of the capitalist system of industry, which is also the source of his disabilities in times of peace; and whether in peace or in war, the worker has at last to pay the bill. It is not to the point here to discuss whether the premises from which the worker argues or the conclusions he has reached are valid or not. ”

“ That is the inwardness of the present stirrings of organised labour. The worker knows that while he is compelled to hire himself out at a price in order to provide himself and his children with bread, under conditions which make a sufficiency of bread permanently uncertain, and which virtually deny him the opportunity of being anything more—from his first working day to his last—than the tool of interests from which he is powerless to detach himself, he can never become the man he might be or experience the joy of life which his intuitions declare to be his rightful inheritance. ”

“ If democracy is to survive at all, it must make up its mind speedily that the principle of its inner life shall not be denied in its outer. But if democracy is to have a mind at all, it must learn to use the mind it has; and the chief stimulus to this end would be the multiplication of centres of discussion. This would be materially helped if government departments were required to produce not only ponderous blue-books which only bewilder the common man, and official documents intelligible only to the expert, but popular accounts, published regularly, of their proceedings. ”

“ We believe, therefore, in the Holy Alliance of the Peoples as the vastest formula of association possible in our epoch;—in the liberty and equality of the peoples without which no true association can exist; in nationality, which is the conscience of the peoples, and which, by assigning to them their part in the work of association, their function in humanity, constitutes their mission upon earth, that is to say, their individuality, without which neither liberty nor equality is possible ”

“ But though the problem is not of our making, we cannot absolve ourselves from the moral responsibility which it lays upon us; and it is only by means of an inveterate good-will that we shall discharge this responsibility. Such a good-will must rest upon the truth—however unpalatable to our prejudices it may be—that the black man whether in New York or in Cape Town is equally with ourselves endowed with the human differentia of personality, and that he is morally entitled to all the rights of life and light and liberty that we claim for personality. ”

“ Our complete emancipation from the economic motive requires not only a new status for the worker but a new doctrine of work. Industry must no more be conceived as a means of national wealth than of individual wealth.
The true doctrine of work is present in germ in the British Labour Party’s formula of “workers whether by hand or by brain.” The inclusion in one category of the industrial and professional classes should exert a very profound influence upon the popular attitude to manual labour. ”

“ It has discovered that “society, like the individual, does not live by bread alone,—does not exist only for perpetual wealth production.” If it makes bread and produces wealth, it is only that men may live, and living may together strive to achieve the glorious liberty of the sons of God.
It is a fair conjecture concerning the results of this general movement, that it will ultimately assign to the economic interests of life their own proper secondary place. With the gradual disappearance of private profit and wages will pass the present ascendancy of the economic motive over the whole of life. ”

“ There is a sense in which the struggle for liberty may be regarded as being essentially a struggle to broaden the basis of human fellowship; and it is undoubtedly true that forms of privilege are the most prolific causes of social schism. No community possesses the conditions of real fellowship while it is (as modern communities are) divided into topdogs and underdogs, whether the topdogs be aristocrats or plutocrats, and the underdogs be serfs or wage-slaves. For the poison of privilege is apt to permeate the whole body ”

“ Not less than by the loss or the absence of moral impulse, is democracy endangered by ignorance or forgetfulness of what it exists for. Two words are usually taken to describe the characteristics of democracy, liberty and equality; and the atmosphere of a particular democracy depends upon whether it lays the larger emphasis on one or on the other of these. In England, for instance, the type is libertarian. The Briton has cared less for political equality than for what he calls freedom, the right of self-determination, the opportunity to live out his own life in his own way. ”

“ For a hundred great services beyond its ministry to the elementary human needs of food and clothing, we are debtors to commerce and to those merchant venturers in many ages who laid its broad modern foundations. Yet just because we acknowledge a manifest debt even to profiteering commercial enterprise, it is the more necessary that we should assail its modern ascendency over life, and its own perversion to individual aims, and point out the havoc which its more modern developments have wrought. ”

“ Freedom of thought and conscience is a vain thing except a man be able to translate thought into act and to obey the injunctions of his conscience; and so long as a system, industrial or other, imposes restrictions upon a man’s control of his own person, he does not possess that mobility with which his own personal growth and his ultimate social efficiency are organically bound up. To complete our heritage of freedom, it is essential that the worker should receive a guarantee of economic security. ”

“ Men became dithyrambic about laissez-faire, and though they perforce admitted that the growth of the commercial system had caused certain glaring evils, yet they maintained that these were no more than the inevitable accidents of a process of readjustment. Let the system only work out its inherent logic to the end, and there will be a golden age for everybody. The system has had a fair trial; and so far from achieving the results confidently predicted by its advocates, it has failed hopelessly to provide even a tolerably secure and sufficient subsistence for the great mass of men. ”

“ It is the permanent danger of democracy when it is not sustained and inspired by a generous moral impulse to be prostituted to undemocratic ends. “It is at best” (to quote Mr. Hobhouse again) “an instrument with which men who hold by the ideal of social justice and human progress can work; but when these ideals grow cold, it may, like other instruments, be turned to base uses.” ”

“ Its tenderness for the losers in the race, its protests against class-tyranny, its revolt against commercial materialism, all the sources of inspiration under which socialist leaders have faced poverty and prison, are gone like a dream and instead of them we have a conception of society as a perfect piece of machinery, pulled by wires radiating from a single centre, and all men are either experts or puppets. Humanity, Liberty, Justice are expunged from the banner and the single word efficiency replaces them. ”

“ Capital buys in the cheapest and sells in the dearest market; and labour having been brought up in the same school does the same thing. If capital tries to extort as much as it can out of labour, it is not to be wondered at that labour should take a hand in the game.
We have to recognise that the best workmanship requires two conditions; first—that the worker shall have a direct interest in the thing he produces, second, that he shall enjoy the freedom which comes from a sense of guaranteed security. ”