the Liberals, meant cheap food, you are merely doing as you and cheap food meant low wages, and than low wages was there anything in a world of Liberalism more ardently to be wished? So the Liberals flourished and grew rich, and believed that the cakes and ale should all be theirs unto the end of time. Meanwhile, they added to their practical policy a general love of the vague thing which they called "liberty." As they interpreted it, liberty was the right which belonged to everybody of doing as he liked. Whatever form and shape this "right" assumed, it must not be thwarted. And, indeed, it took many shapes when it was touched by the hand of the ingenious Liberal. The liberty of marrying a deceased wife's sister, for instance. For many a year this seemed of the highest importance. And after the right to marry a deceased wife's sister, the right most highly esteemed was the right to rebel. Why should a man who was, according to the gospel of Rousseau, born free and equal, remain patiently in the chains of the law ! Away with authority, said the Liberal, and obey none but the dictates of your own hearts. If it suit you to follow Mr Beales into revolt, pull down the palings of the nearest park, trample upon its pleasant paths, and make it clear that, if you choose to destroy it, it shall not be a place of amiable resort to any one. After all, in breaking down the palings set up by authority, like; and if you do that the whole weight of Liberalism, you may be sure, will be thrown in upon your side. Moreover, the Liberals saw from the very beginning the importance of solid cash. They were rich, and so long as free imports helped them to low wages, they had a chance of growing richer. It was well enough, too, if you were a stout Nonconformist, to claim burial in a country churchyard. After all the Church, the very embodiment of law and order, was a proper thing to be encroached upon. There were commandments in its service, and it was no part of the Liberal's duty to obey commandments. If he liked to dishonour his father, why shouldn't he, without seeing his days cut short? Besides, there was one useful quality which the Church shared with few other institutions. It might be disestablished. And so it was in Ireland and in Wales, and if the Liberals, having laid hands upon the funds of the Welsh Church, could find no useful purpose to which to devote them, that did not matter. The mere disestablishing of the Church gratified at once their envy and their sense of justice. But the attacks upon the Church were but interludes. It was the chief business of the Liberals to see that the middle class grew rich quickly and was left untaxed, while the miserable upper classes, who did not vote straight at the polls, bore the burden of expense. Liberalism, in truth, reached its zenith when Sir William Harcourt at one scoop not only made the dead pay for the living, but broke up the great estates which had always been centres of reaction. These are but a few of the successes achieved by earnest Liberals. There were others. There were foolish Education Acts to be thrust upon the country. There was the native idleness of the English workingman to be encouraged, in order that he might eat the food of Liberalism, even if he resolutely refused to work. There was Ireland, which might be stirred up out of its pathetic placidity, and made a scene of strife and murder, in order that Mr Gladstone might overwhelm it (and us) with eloquent sentimentalities. And beyond England lay the Empire, a fertile soil in which might be sown the seeds of a disquieting Liberalism. The Liberals did not love the Empire. It checked their determination to make all men do as they liked. If the inhabitants of our dominions were minded to kill English soldiers, why should their generous impulses be thwarted? And the Liberals embroidered upon their banners, proudly and in gold letters, the names of Majuba Hill and Khartoum. inevitable as early as 1912. And they made no preparation for war. Had they made preparations, there would have been a stampede of resigning Ministers, and the Liberal Cabinet would have been broken in pieces. This was a calamity which no Liberal Prime Minister would face, and the Party stumbled into war, which it had always hated, from negligence and timidity. "This, then," as Al. Carthill says in his essay on Liberalism,1 which we commend to all our readers, "was the result of the application of reason and sentiment to human affairs. The party which had promised peace had brought a war, and, moreover, a war which, dreadful as it was, seemed likely to be a mere ante chamber to the real torture-house. The party which had promised economy had laden the world with an incredible and fantastic debt. The party which had promised progress had arranged for the speedy killing off, in the flower of their age, of the young males of three continents. Surely there must have been something wrong somewhere ? Is there any wonder that the people has lost faith in the doctrines of Liberalism, and that the saint is dead, and the disciple is damned? Yet Liberalism has striven In 1914 the Liberals behaved very hard to survive. Mr themselves after their wont. Asquith, that he might find They boasted afterwards that an easier passage for his policy they knew that the war was of disruption, did not hesitate 1 The Legacy of Liberalism.' By Al. Carthill. (P. Allan.) after. ، to destroy the Constitution. earth, deserves no rest hereHis colleagues, in their eager ness to grasp the power which they knew not how to wield, raised deceiving "cries," which were as false as they were attractive. From "Bulgarian Atrocities" to "Chinese Labour" the cries of Liberalism still echo furtively in the corridors of time. As Professor Saintsbury most wittily says, it was “An infant crying for the light [of Downing Street], And with no language but a cry." The infant will cry no more. For Liberalism is dead-dead of its own weakness and incompetence. Even if it could have survived its own black record, if it could have recovered from the pitiful figure which it cut in the war, it would have perished by the hand of Socialism, for which it prepared the way. It is the old story of the man who rolls a stone downhill, and thinks that he can stop it with a movement of his hand. The false and selfish doctrine which the Liberals taught for the best part of a century, has been carried to its logical conclusion by Mr MacDonald and his Communists. And there is no longer a corner of the earth upon which Liberalism can support its ebbing life. In a year or two the last Liberal will be duly buried, the last survival of a dismal age, and no friendly hand shall be found to cut R.I.P. on the headstone of one who, as he gave us no rest on Professor Saintsbury's Last Scrap Book' (London: Macmillan & Co.), from which we have already quoted, happily resembles its predecessors. It is the same mixture of anecdote, politics, and literary criticism which Professor Saintsbury has taught us to expect. But why Last Scrap Book' The comments and reminiscences of Professor Saintsbury are inexhaustible, and it will be difficult to find a title for his next volume, unless the author condescends to the slang of the theatre and calls it 'Positively the Last.' In the meantime we may take what we are given in thankfulness of heart. None knows better than Professor Saintsbury how to treat serious subjects gaily, and his memory is so actively alert that one scrap easily suggests another. Open it at random, and you may find a scrap, entitled C'est fini de rire, which prompts Professor Saintsbury to deplore the decay of laughter. The Oxford election petition fills him with despair. There was a time when election petitions were an occasion of hilarity; at Oxford the judges could not get up a single joke. And even the sins committed by the corrupt candidates have nowadays lost their glamour. Corrupt practices," says the Professor, "used to mean gold and beautiful, if not burial, christening things, liquor and kisses, and I don't know what other luxuries. They appear of, Political Beauty. Socialism to consist now in walking about laden with picture - postcards and extra copies of local newspapers. It sounds like purgatory inflicted for the practices rather than like the practices themselves." Is not the age of picture-postcards more dismal than the age of lead? Professor Saintsbury is a sound Conservative in taste as the in politics. He prefers the ancient ways; he is loyal to the tradition of our blood and state. Even though he does not like the term "Conservative," he reveres and admires all that it means. He says, quite rightly, that the simple doctrine of Conservatism is Je maintiendrai, and a better doctrine could not be found for a Party which believes in "protection from the violence of others towards life, limb, and property, in the enjoyment of property, inherited or legally obtained, and the power of transmitting it to others, in freedom of individual action in so far as it consists with others' freedom, in the preservation of unharmful privileges, legally and by long prescription enjoyed, briefly in the triumph of habit and custom over the foolish thing which Radicals call reason. And thus he concludes his "scraps " upon Conservatism : "The sum of the three divisions is that Conservatism is the only form of politics which contains Political Justice, Political (that is to say, Historical) Practicability, and a third thing, less often spoken is rooted in injustice, has invariably failed, and must invariably fail, in practice, and if it could succeed, would be hopelessly ugly." For "the third form of political faith or unfaith" he has nothing to say. "The Liberals," he says, "have always destroyed; there is not really a constructive measure to their credit on the Statute Book. Statute Book. And now that a more vigorous destructive agency, young, ready, strong, quite unscrupulous, presents itself, why should anybody employ these poor old Liberals? Why, indeed? And, again, we may congratulate ourselves that once more we are living in a country which disdains (for the moment) neither Political Justice nor Political Beauty. In matters of literature, also, Professor Saintsbury is resolute against change. What he has said he has said. When he reiterates his heresies against Virgil, he says with Quintilian, in pravum induresco. We would not have him otherwise. Even when he defends himself against his detractors, and adds to his account no new argument, we would not demur. For, after all, he recognises—as what critic would not ?-the beauties and the virtues of Virgil. He points out, willingly, how highly Virgil was esteemed by his contemporaries, how the rhetoricians of the Decadence held him up as a model and treasury of examples not merely in poetry, but for all literature; how, when the Dark Ages had made him a magician, Dante " gave phrase or a noble harmony him such a testimonial as no with the best of them. And other poet-not even Shake- he wrote 'Don Juan.' For ever received." this indeed Professor Saintsbury gives him full credit. "Satire will improve with practice," says he, "and Byron, whose gift of satire was undoubtedly great, arrived in 'Don Juan' at something like perfection in a particular kind of meaning, with a metre to suit it which is almost matchless." This is high praise for any man, and Professor Saintsbury does not, and never will, range himself on the side of those who look askance at the nineteenth century. speare has Upon Byron he is harder than And if you are tired of literature and politics, ask Professor Saintsbury what he thinks of fish and wine, of old editors, of booksellers of the past; and of all these and many other subjects he will tell you his opinion freely and frankly, without subterfuge or equivocation. Thus you may pursue your talk, in happy solitude, with a full man and a learned man, with a man to whom nothing human ever came amiss. |