A DEFENCE OF LIBERTY A PROLOGUE OF MODERN REFLECTIONS THE I HE statue of Liberty in New York Harbour is a somewhat trite object of contemplation. Both the cynic and the idealist have used that gigantic image to fill the gaps of many a moral tale and idle platitude. Its magnificent position, its ironic proximity to the marvellous metropolis of modern commerce, its embodiment of the ideas of Jefferson and Rousseau are so compelling a combination that I do not see how that dominating figure can fail to stir the pulses or quicken the imagination. Great is Diana of the Ephesians. It pleases men to solidify their ideals. The world is strewn with the frozen memorials of this desire, the desire for definite and unchangeable standards, the desire to record once and for all that this and no other is what we believe, and shall always believe. And, as in the case of Ozymandias, "nothing beside remains." It is a sad reflection that this passage of an ideal from the heart into the hands of men is a process of decay, and that what we see about us, familiar and accustomed, we forget to feel, just as men forget to love their wives. France was the birthplace of this the youngest of human hopes, and her public buildings are blazoned with the message of liberty, equality, and fraternity. It can, I think, be said that during the hundred and fifty years in which human endeavour has worked for these ideals, France has obtained a high standard of equality, but very little liberty or fraternity, England a high standard of liberty and very little equality or fraternity, America a high standard of fraternity, and very little liberty or equality. Perhaps the stony soil of modern industrialism has been unkind to the delicate plant of liberty. But modern industrialism is only a new name for a very old disease. The power of gold is no new phenomenon ; the obscure writers of the Nibelungen legend knew all about it, and it was an easy task for Mr. Bernard Shaw to link up Alberich with Rockefeller across the centuries. The thinkers may think and the dreamers may dream, but the sure instincts of men know well enough that, except in rare cases of intellectual detachment, it is impossible to be free unless you possess a measure of wealth. The Greek and Roman Republics built like palaces on wooden piles of slave labour; the troubadours and knights of feudalism, the flower of chivalry with its roots in serfdom; the landed aristocracy based on the toil of Hodge; the commercial plutocracy based on the poverty of the wage-earners; Pericles, Maecenas, Richard Cœur de Lion, Horace Walpole, Andrew Carnegie emerge from the common herd into the light of history and owe their personalities and freedom to their independent income. Philosophy and ethics will dispute it, but the hard facts and experience of life prove that "the pursuit of happiness which Jefferson so proudly claimed as the right of all men in the new-born American Republic means little else but the "pursuit of wealth." From Plato to Maeterlinck the intellectuals have discussed the plumage of the blue bird of happiness, but common men have always known that happiness for them means just the health that comes from good food and clean surroundings, a modicum of leisure, and the power to buy things, to lay up a little store of personal possessions. Put in the term of these desires the pursuit of wealth is neither sordid nor unnatural; and it ceases to be cynical to say that wealth is the main ingredient of freedom. We must not be hypnotized by words. Out of the confusion of modern political and social thought two or three salient facts emerge. If we divide up the present wealth of the world -and that is the natural effort of the poorwe shall not all be rich and happy; we shall all be poor and unhappy. If we destroy wealth we destroy what we ourselves desire, and should possess. The dirty work of the world has got to be done by some one. As I lie lazily in my deck-chair and look out over the blue Atlantic shimmering in the May sunlight, I know that some one sweltering beneath my feet has got to stoke the Aquitania, and that no social theory has yet evolved a method of avoiding such abominable toil. No doubt solutions to these problems will be found. Science will some day take the place of our slaves, and production so increase that there is enough wealth for all. In the meantime the students of sociology are busy redistributing the miserable pittance that is called the wealth of the world, and the masses are bitterly arguing about the size of their share of that pittance. Indeed a pathetic spectacle. II The Child is father of the Man, and perhaps the only thing that makes us interesting is the subconscious memory of the transitional stages that have marked our personalities from youth to age. The imprint of what we were is never completely erased by what we are, |