English Independents

“ Under the influence of this Liberal temper the self-governing Empire has grown to its present proportions. A queer freak of political fortune has made Tories of the present generation the self-styled champions of communities which, if Tory doctrines had been applied to their government half a century ago, would have been long since driven into revolt and independence. ”

“ So now we say, that the right measures of England are the men it bred; that it has yielded more able men in five hundred years than any other nation; and, though we must not play Providence, and balance the chances of producing ten great men against the comfort of ten thousand mean men, yet retrospectively we may strike the balance, and prefer one Alfred, one Shakspeare, one Milton, one Sidney, one Raleigh, one Wellington, to a million foolish democrats. ”

“ The older men, who had not forgotten how they had wrested their independence out of the unwilling hands of England, were being steadily overtaken by men of wider views, who saw clearly enough that independence could not be maintained for ever on the basis of racial distinctions. ”

“ But in order to affirm and manifest this sentiment the English have no need to group themselves, to form themselves into a society. An Englishman is to himself England alone; he carries his nation in him, with him, on him ”

“ With all their class sentiments, they are Englishmen, trained to walk in the paths of English policy and justice. But that their feelings should be against you is not strange. You are fighting, not for the restoration of the Union, not for the emancipation of the negro, but for Democracy against Aristocracy; and this fact is thoroughly understood by both parties throughout the Old World. ”

“ We have not the political liberty of the English, and they have not our social equality. An Englishman could not live with laws like those which, in France, regulate the right of speaking, the right of writing, the right of petitioning, the right of assembling, the right of going and coming; but a Frenchman would be stifled amidst those thousand conventional bonds which form English society. The influence of convention in England is such that it equals and even surpasses the tyranny of the political and administrative laws of the Continent. ”

“ In despair at beholding a nation whose condition was so utterly at variance with all their dogmas of the necessity of democratic representation to temper the frame of government, they have recourse to the salutary influence of English ascendency, and ascribe all this improvement to the beneficial influence of English freedom. ”

“ Left to themselves, and unbiased by any of those selfish motives that go to make up the sum of politics, we have not the slightest doubt that the English people, in the proportion of ten to one, would decide in behalf of the supporters of freedom in this country ”

“ We must remember that if we claim the right not only to accept, when they come spontaneously and by no act of ours, but to create and catch at, opportunities for spreading in other countries the opinions of our own meridian, we must allow to every other nation a similar license both of judgment and of action. What is to be the result? That if in every country the name of England is to be the symbol and the nucleus of a party, the name of France and Russia, or of Austria, may and will be the same. ”

“ Their traditional faith in compromise, their traditional dread of ideas, their traditional habit of acting first and reasoning afterwards, has made the English system a hopelessly confused bundle of semi-efficiency and semi-inefficiency—just as it has made the best English social type a gentleman, but a gentleman absolutely conditioned, tempered, and supplemented by a flunky.
While the process of becoming more of a democracy may very well injure—at any rate for a while—English national consistency, England's future as a nation is compromised by her fear of democracy. ”

“ At first sight, the theory of government in England appears to be most simple; two great political parties, each having its leader, whose authority is uncontested, and who takes office amid the acclamations of half the nation. Is the country threatened with danger, party spirit vanishes, Liberals and Conservatives disappear; the Englishman is supreme.
All this appears as simple as admirable. I will show farther on, however, that if there is fixity in the form of the government, there cannot be any consistency in the politics of the country. ”

“ In the realm of those ideas, which constitute the western world by their connexion and shake it by their strife, the Independents exhibit views in relation to both religious and political government which, if not entirely new, yet acquired general influence first through them. ”

“ A hundred years ago there were pulpits that led the popular movement; while outside of religion and of what called itself literature, industry and a jealous sense of personal freedom obeyed, in their rapid growth, the law of their natures. English common sense and those municipal institutions born of the common law, and which had saved and sheltered it, grew inevitably too large for the eggshell of English dependence, and allowed it to drop off as naturally as the chick does when she is ready. ”

“ The English nation ever recurs to its ancient institutions—the institutions that have alike secured freedom and order; and after all their ebullitions, we find them, when the sky is clear, again at work, and toiling on at their eternal task of accumulation. ”

“ The author, who is a true friend to English liberty, determines in the negative, and answers all the arguments of the opposite party with great acuteness: that as the government of England has a mixture of democratical in it, so the right of inventing and spreading political lies is partly in the people ”

“ We must be united not only as a United Kingdom but as a British Empire. Old England by herself may not have the strength to face the enormous forces now being arrayed against her. In the same way the Dominions by themselves have not the strength to maintain their freedom against possible attacks. ”

“ English liberties, imperfect as they may be,—and as an English Liberal of course thinks they are,—are the source from which your liberties have flowed, though the river may be more abundant than the spring. Being in America, I am in England,—not only because American hospitality makes me feel that I am still in my own country, but because our institutions are fundamentally the same. ”

“ But sweeping measures have never found favour in England. There has ever been in English legislation, even when most reforming, that temperate spirit of equity which has refused to visit the sins of centuries upon a single generation. ”

“ Shall men be less liberal—less forgiving? Why should we then reject the proffered and sincere friendship of our own kindred? Is it only among nations, and such nations, that "no place is left for repentance, none for pardon"?
England to-day, in respect to the individuals who compose it, is not the England of yesterday. She recognises the independence of the United States as the work of her own offspring; that which she once sought to prevent she now hails as a blessing. The past is buried; a new era is ushered in; new light illumines our purposes, motives, and acts. ”

“ But the people concerned were such as made certain their maintenance of a noble principle, even from bad motives. The stocks from which they sprang were among the most vigorous of the English race. The lives which most of them lived made them hard and self-reliant. ”

“ Now every one acknowledges that such an institution is not only in opposition to the principle of political science, but to the universal experience of Anglo-Saxon communities in every part of the globe.... An Englishman, when he emigrates to the United States, carries with him in reality all the laws, rights, and liberties of an Englishman; but if he emigrates to our Colonies, on touching colonial soil he loses some of the most precious of his liberties, and becomes the subject of an ignorant and irresponsible despot at the Antipodes. ”

“ But he never doubted that the nation would own its calling as zealously as his soldiers did. He had no wish to change the outer form of its political or its social life; he would maintain social distinctions as he would maintain Parliaments. But the old institutions must be penetrated with a new spirit. Conscience and worship must be free. Holiness must be the law of England's life. Its rulers must be found among "godly men," and their rule must be widened beyond the common sphere of temporal government. The old distinctions of the secular and the spiritual world must be done away. ”

“ What more trying position for England than the necessity of championing quarrels not of her own making, where both of the contending parties have claims upon her forbearance, and in a sphere where her powers and resources would have to be employed to the full, and then only wasted? ”

“ That is the very question that I propose to answer, and in the statement that the English heart is on our side. The nobility is against us; the government is divided and a part is against us. I think I may say that while the brains that represent progress in Great Britain are in our favor, yet the conservative intelligence of Great Britain is against us, and that all there is on the surface of society, representing its dignities, its power and intelligence, is anti-American. ”

“ The English have not moved towards democracy with any conscious desire for that particular form of government, and no vision of a perfect State or an ideal commonwealth has sustained them on the march. ”

“ These men of course, are against you, because their employers are. But the sense of the country is not against you, the people of England are not against you—they feel warmly for you—in some respects they feel with you. The sense of the English and of their Governors is opposite—there must be an end of this, the goodness of a Government consists in the happiness of the Governed, if the Governed are wretched and dissatisfied, the Government has failed in its end. ”

“ What with us is lacking is the whole class which in England carries on politics, the class of gentlemen who are well-to-do and therefore Conservative, who are independent of material interests and whose whole education is directed towards making them English statesmen, and the object of whose life is to take part in the Commonwealth of England. ”

“ Yet it is said by some persons, because of the revolution of 1776, that this phenomenal offspring of England, whose similarity of speech, laws, literature, customs, complexion, manners, in fine, of everything vital, is so striking, should shrink from a closer union with her maternal ancestor; that overtures to push farther their onward march towards civilisation and peace should be treated either with indifference or positive scorn and contempt! ”

“ The contests which follow are not contests that tell, like those that preceded them, on the actual fabric of our institutions; they are simply stages in the rough discipline by which England has learned and is still learning how best to use and how wisely to develope the latent powers of its national life, how to adjust the balance of its social and political forces, how to adapt its constitutional forms to the varying conditions of the time. ”

“ The cries for a parliamentary reform which reached them across the Channel became in their ears cries of a people as powerless and oppressed as the people of France had been. They still clung to the hope of England's aid in the emancipation of Europe from despotism and superstition, but they came now to believe that England must itself be emancipated before such an aid could be given. Their first work therefore they held to be the bringing about a revolution in England which might free the people from the aristocracy and the aristocratic government which held it down. ”

“ I hope to render great services to England,—for we English politicians, whatever the mob and the Press say of us, are not selfish place-hunters. I refused office, as high as I look for now, ten years ago. We believe in our opinions, and we hail the power that may carry them into effect. ”

“ Therefore these authors of our school textbooks felt that they needed to bolster our cause up for the benefit of the young. Accordingly our boys’ and girls’ sense of independence and patriotism must be nourished by making England out a far greater oppressor than ever she really had been. These historians dwelt as heavily as they could upon George III and his un-English autocracy, and as lightly as they could upon the English Pitt and upon all the English sympathy we had. ”

“ To speak seriously, I really see very little either in the so-called Liberal or Conservative principles that can cause an Englishman to be anything more than the partisan of a certain group of men.
Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that English politics should, above all things, consist in doing in Office what has been valiantly fought in Opposition ”

“ The first indeed of our disqualifications, our conceit of ourselves, is certainly diminishing. Our governing classes are now quite accustomed to be told that the institutions which they thought must suit all mankind since they suited us, require far greater alteration than they dream of to be fit even for ourselves. When they were told this, they have long been in the habit of answering, that whatever defects these institutions may have in theory, they are suited to the opinions, the feelings, and the historical antecedents of the English people. ”

“ The chief fruit which I carried away from the society I saw, was a strong and permanent interest in Continental Liberalism, of which I ever afterwards kept myself au courant, as much as of English politics: a thing not at all usual in those days with Englishmen, and which had a very salutary influence on my development, keeping me free from the error always prevalent in England—and from which even my father, with all his superiority to prejudice, was not exempt—of judging universal questions by a merely English standard. ”