The Virtual Stoa

Ptolemy is supplementing his diet with a piece of bread pinched from the table.

Ivor the Engine, 1958, first series, sixth episode.

A couple of weeks ago I thought people might be interested in discussing Noel Skelton’s “Constructive Conservatism”.

I was wrong.

(4) But to pass to the Referendum—crown and apex of a constructive Conservatism in the new era. Accepted by Conservatives in the Constitutional crisis of 1910-1911, its value and necessity are infinitely more obvious now. It was called for then to save the House of Lords; it is needed now to protect democracy. For if democracy, faced in the new era by Socialism as its scarcely disguised enemy, is, from a constitutional point of view, to be made stable and safe, if its property and liberty are to be preserved, the people, in the last resort, must directly and for themselves decide their own fate. And for this duty they are ripe. Meantime, it needs only a blunder or two on the part of a Cabinet, a General Election dominated by passion or prejudice, and the flank of the Constitution is turned. The task of Conservatism in the new era would be only half done if the British democracy were to be denied a means of protection the value of which has been amply proved elsewhere.

And, in conclusion, whatever means be taken to stabilise democracy, this much is clear—that the Conservative Party cannot leave it a matter of guesswork what its outlook is. “Democracy,” Lord Balfour once said, “is government by explanation.” The mass of the people are profoundly perplexed by the paradox that Conservatism, in which they have so deep an instinctive belief, is apparently content to leave its view of life unexplained, its principles unstated, while Socialism, which they distrust exceedingly, is fearless and untiring in setting out its aims and ideals. Liberalism is dying because its principles are dead. It will fare ill with Conservatism unless it breaks its silence and makes clear to the nation that it, too, has a vision of the future—of a property-owning democracy, master of its own life, made four-square and secure, and able therefore to withstand the shrill and angry gales which, in the new era’s uneasy dawn, sweep across the world of men.

(2) Of small ownership in land, only a word can be said. In principle, generally recognised to be a most powerful factor in the stability of the State and in the development of a rural democracy of character and intelligence, the policy of small holdings has greatly suffered in Great Britain from the methods which have been adopted. Extravagant expenditure on equipment and administration by Government departments or County Councils has been combined with demands for payments from the holder, based upon the principle of making him pay rent for the land, and in addition interest on the full cost of erecting the buildings. No private landowner gets an annual return if he lets his land, or a purchase price if he sells it, calculated in this way. The result has been that our State-constituted holdings have imposed on their cultivators burdens which no other agriculturists in Britain have to bear. The resettlement of the land of England and Scotland, the development of intensive cultivation, the reconstitution of rural community, are matters so vital that every effort to devise sounder methods of instituting small holdings than those presently in operation must be made by Conservatism. And this is pre-eminnently a problem which Conservative knowledge and resource can solve. Let it not be forgotten that the Wyndham Land Act was the last and greatest constructive work which Unionism did for Ireland.

(3) And agricultural co-operation. The foundation of modern agriculture throughout the world, the way to prosperity for the small cultivator and large farmer alike, it is inextricably bound up with the Conservative view of life, because it is essentially the means whereby in the cultivation of the soil the individual can be helped to help himself. On this there can safely be neither silence nor indifference. All that the State can do, all that the politician can say, should be said and done to spread a knowledge and assist the development of agricultural co-operation, if in the new era Conservatism is prepared to give of its best to the nation.

And if it be here objected that apparently all parties in the State are alive to the importance of agricultural co-operation, it must be said, in rejoinder, that so preponderating is the influence of Conservative thought on at least two out of the three great agricultural classes, that without active and ardent Conservative support and exposition, confidence in co-operative principles in agriculture would advance only at a snail’s pace, since distrust of Liberalism is complete in rural England, and is rapidly increasing in rural Scotland, while the country populations of both nations agree in their contempt for the town-bred fallacies of Socialism.

(1) First, then, as to industrial co-partnery. It rests on a firm basis of principle. Capital and Labour by it are to the full recognised as partners in the work of the production of wealth, for each shares in the true profits of that production, arrived at after each, the one by way of a fair rate of interest, the other by way of a fair wage, has been paid the price for its services in the common work. And further, the wage-earner’s proportion of the profits is paid to him partly in cash, partly invested for him in the concern, while, as the workers become capitalists, “seats on the Board,” either for the domestic internal government of the concern, or for its general direction, very naturally follow.

Thus status and property-owning grow together; the wage-earner, as industrialist, from a machine becomes a man. Nor is this all. To the wage-earner, co-partnery brings a new incentive and a new kind of interest in his work, arising out of his new relation to it; a wider industrial outlook, since, as his savings in the business increase, so does his interest in its general prosperity, for that prosperity affects him directly as a shareholder.

To the community it brings all the results that flow form a real identification of interest between Capital and Labour—reduction of the number of strikes, with their waste of the national wealth and dislocation of the national life; the elimination of such crazy doctrines as that of “ca’ canny”’; improvement in the standard of both management and work, since the wage-earner will not readily submit to his own good work being neutralized by the slackness of his neighbour, or the incompetence of his manager.

Moreover, co-partnery is clearly on the broad highway of economic evolution, for it is the next available incentive to increased productivity. Increase of wages and reduction of the hours of labour have both contributed largely in he last hundred years to this result. But it is more than doubtful whether both of these factors have not exhausted their impetus, and from a purely economic point of view are not now “squeezed oranges”.

And finally, the development of co-partnery and profit-sharing is the natural and obvious concomitant of any system of protecting British industry. For it has told against Tariff Reform that it has seemed to many to be the sole constructive suggestion which Conservatism had to make, and it has, perhaps in consequence, acquired almost the character of a substitute for, instead of a part of, a general policy of improving the status of the wage-earner. Certainly many opponents have made haste to point out to the working classes that, in the existing industrial system, the lion’s share of any advantage would, in their opinion, fall to Capital rather than Labour.

Such a criticism would be of no avail under a system in which employer and employee clearly shared alike in the increased prosperity.

Yet there are objections. It is said, “Some industries are not suited to the system.” Possibly not. But has there yet been any determined effort to work out in practice the modifications necessary to make it suit the special circumstances of particular trades? The overcoming of practical difficulties is a matter for resource and will-power, once the value of the underlying principle is realised. Conservatism in the new era must refute Anatole France’s mocking remark that moderate men and women are those who have only a moderate belief in moderate opinions.

And again, “The Trade Unions are against it.” Perhaps their Socialist leaders are, but battle has to be joined with them in any case. That the great mass of the wage-earners is hostile can hardly be maintained, since the fact is that no political party has yet seriously addressed itself to the exposition of co-partnery in all its bearings. In any case, co-partnery is the ideal ground on which to fight Socialism, for it emphasizes the distinction, fundamental but neglected, between a property-owning democracy and the Socialist ideal, and if the Trade Union leaders hide away from their followers the more excellent way, so much the worse, when the truth is discovered, for them and for their leadership.

If, therefore, the master-problem in our highly industrialised country be how to bring the economic status of the wage-earner abreast of his political and educational, the master-key to that problem is clearly industrial co-partnery.

IV — Democracy Stabilised

In the preceding pages, an attempt has been made to sketch the main features of the new era, and to indicate the opportunity which opens to a constructive Conservatism to solve the problem it presents. It remains to state as clearly as may be some of the means which lie ready to develop a property-owning democracy, to bring the industrial and economic status of the wage-earner abreast of his political and educational, to make democracy stable and four-square.

These (to mention only subjects of the widest importance) are, it is submitted, four: (1) for the wage-earner, whether in factory or in field, industrial co-partnery, or its halfway house, profit-sharing; (2) for the agriculturist, who seeks to become completely his own master, small ownership; (3) for the rural world as a whole, agricultural co-operation; (4) for the community, to secure it against sudden assault, the Referendum.

One common principle underlies these proposals, making them a practical and accurate expression of the Conservative “view of life,” for each, in its own way and in its own sphere, at once develops the character of the individual, and the stability of the social structure. It may be objected that, of these, co-partnery and profit-sharing cannot successfully be brought into operation by Act of Parliament, but must grow as the nation’s understanding of them grows. So be it—though the extent to which the State can induce the adoption of profit-sharing by legislation has never been zealously or exhaustively explored. All the more natural and essential it is that Conservatism should make this great topic its own: for it offers a means of economic, social and national progress which the State cannot dole out with a spoon. And if Conservatism fails to show the nation an alternative line of advance, it would have to bear the blame should the people come to the conclusion that the only way forward lay along the Socialist path, however desperate and perilous that might be.

Here are Ptolemy, Andromache, and an unnamed griffin:

Here’s Ptolemy, on the same sofa, later on the same evening:

These two leading ideas, moreover, are what give to the permanent relations existing between the British people and Conservatism their specially intimate quality; for the stability of the State and the value of character are not only the fundamental beliefs of Conservatism: they are the fundamental beliefs of the race. And these fundamental principles of Conservatism. Which form the basis of its whole view of life, lead inevitably to the development of the political, the educated democracy into a property-owning democracy.

The beneficent effect upon human character both of the effort to acquire private property and of the opportunity, after it has been acquired, for its wise or foolish use, can hardly be over-estimated. For what is the effect of property, its proverbial “magic”? In the getting, the exercise of thrift, of control, of all the qualities which “the rolling-stone” knows nothing of; in its use, an increased sense of responsibility, a wider economic outlook, a practical medium for the expression of moral and intellectual qualities.

It is for Conservatism to see to it that this pathway to the development of character is opened wide to the people; and to expound to the nation—what no one else apparently dares or cares to—the vital inter-relation between character and private possessions.

Equally clear, equally fundamental, is the relation between the possession of private property by the people and the stability of the State. This, too, has been left for the Conservative to expound. So deeply, indeed, has Conservatism felt the importance of this relation, that in the past it was wont to maintain that only those who possessed private property should exercise political functions. That doctrine has not this new and pregnant application—that since, to-day, practically all citizens have political rights, all should possess something of their own. Mocked and jeered at in the past as “the Party of Property,” it is precisely as such, now that the wheel has turned full circle, that Conservatism in the new era holds in its keeping the key to the problem.

To make democracy stable and four-square; to give the wage-earner property and status; to bridge the economic gulf set between Labour and Capital; to present a view of life in which private property, instead of being reckoned, as the Socialist reckons it, a shameful thing, will be recognised to be an essential vehicle for the moral and economic progress of the individual; these are the tasks which the opportunity, the problem, and its own principles alike call Conservatism to perform in the new era.

For what are the principles of Conservatism, these leading ideas and ideals which are the essence of its view of life?

The first of these is the stability of the social structure. A stable condition of society is the main preoccupation of Conservatism. This is the real clue to its whole political philosophy. If change has been resisted, it has been because the Conservative has feared that it would produce confusion and instability. When it has been clear that only by change can stability be re-established, no party has been more fearless in making the most drastic changes. And similarly, the situations which have given to Conservatism its moments of intense anxiety have been those when “marginal cases” have arisen in which the problem has been whether stability is best secured by the existing conditions or by the proposed change.

And this insistence upon stability is no fad or catchword, for as the generations come and go, the opportunity offered for full enjoyment and full development to each individual during his little span of consciousness depends upon the society and community which surrounds and contains him being stable—at peace with itself, not at war.

But stability is not stagnation. Stability is as much the condition of steady progress for a society as it is for a ship. Stagnation, since life is movement, means necessarily that atrophy is at work; that tissues are dying which should be living; that dead matter is accumulating which must, by more or less violent means, be cast out. To confuse stability with stagnation is, however, from the nature of things, a special danger for Conservatism, for it is the natural defect of its virtue. And just because Conservatism is the real guardian of stability in the community—the school of thought which alone gives stable conditions their just valuation—it has a special duty constantly to search out the means by which stability threatened can be saved, stability lost can be recovered.

The second fundamental Conservative principle is that the character of the individual citizen being the greatest asset of the State, the primary object and the best test of all legislation which deals with the individual is its influence upon his character.

Everything that weakens individual character and lessens individual effort and initiative is anathema to the Conservative. Everything that strengthens and increases these is very near to his heart. The consequences flowing from this principle are so manifold that they cannot be elaborated here. The main and most essential one is the insistence by Conservatism on the necessity of limiting the action of the State as far as possible to “helping the individual to help himself.” Further, it follows that the best kind of social legislation is that which gives to the citizens a better chance of helping themselves during their working lives, and that only second best (though admittedly essential in many cases) is direct State intervention to sustain, shelter, and support those who have failed in health or occupation. For these failures only touch the fringe of the life of the nation. It is improvement in conditions during the working life which marks the real advance.

III — Problem and Principle

And the fundamental problem of this new era—what of it? Beneath the tangle of immediate anxieties—unemployment, the housing of the people, the agricultural emergency, the financial burdens of the State—is it possible to detect a master-problem which, while it remains unsolved, exercises a profound and malign influence upon the mental outlook and the material condition of the people?

If the analysis of the new era which has been attempted is in any degree correct, such a master-problem is not far to seek. For the mass of the people—those who mainly live by the wages of industry—political status and educational status have outstripped economic status.

The structure has become lop-sided. It is therefore unstable.

Until our educated and politically minded democracy has become predominantly a property-owning democracy, neither the national equilibrium nor the balance of the life of the individual will be restored.

To restore than balance is the master-problem of the new era.

The wage-earner has for long been attempting to solve the problem for himself. In the Co-operative movement, the Friendly Societies, the Savings Banks, and on their benefits side the Trade Unions, he has made a most determined effort to build up for himself (either by way of income to meet illness, unemployment, old age, or by way of capital) “something of his own” behind hum, and the large amounts of wealth thus accumulated show how strong and persistent the impulse has been. These organizations are, indeed, the outstanding economic and social achievement of the wage-earner; they have at once exhibited developed and tested his business capacity and his social sense, and in the steady devotion, hard work and unostentatious self-sacrifice shown in their management they have made a splendid contribution to the public life of the community. But the most remarkable proof of the wage-earner’s determination to become a property-owner is to be found in the success of the War Savings Certificates scheme. Despite the fact that unemployment insurance, health insurance, and old-age pensions were in either partial or full operation when it was introduced, the steady flow of his savings, in good times and bad, into War Savings Certificates shows how fully the wage-earner appreciates the security and economic freedom which the possession of private property gives.

Yet the effort, large and fruitful as it has been, has not in itself solved the problem. And it is not difficult to see why. In the first place, it has been made by the wage-earners as a separate, isolated class. Its national importance has been overlooked. The Liberal, concentrating his attention on political rights, has passed it by. The Conservative, though he has aided it, has certainly not considered it in its full bearing upon the social structure; while the Socialists has seized the opportunity thus given him to pervert the impulse behind it into an element in the view of life which he presents; he declares, that is, that ownership by the State is ownership by the people, implying that that means a property-owning democracy. In fact, of course, it does not. What everybody owns, nobody owns; and far from expressing the wage-earner’s ideal, Socialism makes it unattainable, while communal ownership, when obtained, neither interests nor influences a single human being. We have yet to hear of the man who, in the Great War, rushed to arms to preserve his share in the London County Council Tramways or in Battersea Park.

And the effort has been isolated in another sense. It has had no direct relation with the wage-earner’s life as a worker. It has had nothing to do with his work. His thrift effort and his work have, moreover, not only been carried on independently, but in two opposite moods. His mood is “Capitalist” when he saves; it is “Labour” while he works. And the mental confusion resulting from that opposition of moods has had startling results, of which the most amazing example is the large application of the funds of the Co-operative Societies to assist and support the Socialist movement.

But most vital of all, these intense and prolonged efforts have not altered the industrial status of the wage-earner. Whatever his savings may be in the Co-operative Society, or in War Savings Certificates, the wage-earner, as industrialist, has only the economic status of a machine; for his wages, as such, are, and can only be, part of the costs of production, occupying the same position as the expenses of running the machines of the factory or workshop in which he is employed. Small wonder, then, if the wage-earner’s isolated and barely recognised effort to become a property-owner has left, at the beginning of the new era, his own life and the whole social structure lop-sided and unstable.

It is these very efforts, however, which are largely responsible for the instinctive sympathy between the main body of the nation and Conservatism. Can it be doubted that the mass of the people feel that the only school of political thought which understands and is capable of solving the problem is the Conservative, and that it is for this very purpose (intuitively felt, indeed, rather than logically reasoned out) that the country preserves and approves Conservatism to-day?

A view of life, a statement of fundamental principles, can only be met by the presentation of a truer view and of principles more fundamental. If Conservatives are not to fight with one hand tied behind their backs, the active principles of Conservatism must be felt anew. The whole intellectual content of Conservatism, its moral and intellectual foundations, its practical applications, must, whatever “the mental strife” involved, be made plain to educated democracy. Conservatism must expound its “view of life.”

Clearly this implies an extension of the functions of the Conservative politician, a new meaning so far as he is concerned, of the word “politics.” Conservatism believes in a restricted field for the action of the State, and most emphatically the view of life, the ideal of advance, it must present to the nation, cannot be exhaustively embodied in Acts of Parliament. In the new era we must step outside the old limits and depart from the view that politics mean only public affairs, and that public affairs mean only public business. No doubt this makes politics more difficult, for it is easier to explain the provisions of a Bill than to present a “view of life.”

But the older, narrower view is a caretaker’s only: it confuses the function of the politician with that of the policeman. Historically, it is the survival into the era of educated democracy of methods which were successfully practiced in the period of the triumphant bourgeoisie. But in the new era it will not serve: for it is to abandon the intellectual and moral leadership of the community: it is to withdraw from the duty of moulding and shaping public opinion. It may look like ruling: it is really abdicating.

One further word must be added. The prosperous, peach-fed classes do not readily understand the angle from which the mass of the people approach political life. To the former, politics is not a medium of education, of general culture. That side of life, they have an infinite number of other means of enjoying—fastidious living, beautiful homes, the enjoyment of literature, art, travel, the closeness and variety of their points of contact with human culture and civilisation. Because their general interests are wider, the intellectual area they allot to politics is correspondingly narrower. And for those who are the heirs of “the governing classes” of the past, politics naturally means, above all, administration.

To the mass of the people the opposite is the case. Politics is their main point of contact with general ideas; the paramount expression of the life of the community; the chief, if not the only means of satisfying their goût des grandes choses. But their attitude towards politics it is which makes true the definition of man as “a political animal”; for the mass of the people feel the reality, the life, the organic, as opposed to the mechanical, quality of politics. To them political deliberation is a high function, as the gravity and sincerity of a “popular audience” testify. If the British people do not now take their pleasures sadly, they certainly take their politics seriously.

Such, then, is the situation. A people at the dawn of a new era, equipped with full political power, educated, and still more, highly sensitive to educative influences, presented by a powerful and devoted Socialist Party with a view of politics which is really a comprehensive “view of life,” and yet instinctively trusting to their natural Conservative instincts: a Conservative Party, inclined, perhaps, in common with other parties in the past, to regard politics with only a caretaker’s eye, and yet, obviously, from the wider point of view, charged with the duty of expounding the Conservative “view of life,” since in it lies embedded the true solution of the fundamental problem the new era presents.

Meantime, upon this educated democracy—alert, sensitive, receptive, plastic—another Party in the State plays unceasingly, feeding the newly aroused intellectual appetites, the highly responsive social conscience, with wide and glowing general principles—comprehensive, challenging, alluring. It is to no purpose to reply that Socialism finds its strength in appeals to cupidity, envy, and hatred. That may be true also: but it is the least part of the truth, and to emphasise it—much more, to treat it as fundamental—is entirely to misread the true appeal of Socialism. For the real strength of Socialism lies in the fact that it is making an intellectual appeal at the very moment when the craving for mental nourishment is so universal. It is presenting a “view of life” to the nation in a method admirably suited to the mood and atmosphere of the new era. The Socialist finds a welcome because he comes disguised as an educator and teacher.

And just because it is presenting a comprehensive view of life, Socialism has very greatly extended the boundaries of politics. It is, of course, easy for Socialism to draw into the traditional territory of politics the whole structure of national life, for politics in its accepted meaning deals with the actions of the State and, in the Socialist ideal, the action of the State is co-extensive with the life of the nation. This widening of the territory of politics is, indeed, a reaction of the new situation, which even in the most general survey cannot be passed by unnoticed.

The battles between Whig and Tory, Unionist and Liberal, were, like those of an earlier stage of armed warfare, fought on a narrow front and by small armies of professionals, whose passage through the life of the nation affected it hardly more than a charabanc disturbs the countryside to-day—some vapour and much noise, a rut left in the highway, a film of dust on the hedgerow.

But Socialism fights on the broadest of fronts, and this breadth of front must dominate the strategy and tactics of the new era; for envelopment and the crushing defeat which successful envelopment achieves form the danger against which Conservatism must guard in the great battles ahead.

II — The New Era

What then, are the main, the special features of the new era, in which Conservatism must play a constructive part, or perish? There are two on which attention must be concentrated, because in importance, in their reach and power, they stand in a class by themselves.

First, Britain is now, electorally, a complete democracy. A new and tremendous element is this in the situation, particularly because the acquisition of political rights by women has flung into the seething pot of our political life a fresh and distinctive ingredient, has brought into the general pool, and given opportunity for the expression of a mental and moral outlook, a temperament and a tradition which are different (though to what extent and even in what respects might be matter of controversy) from those of the previous exclusively male electorate. However that may be, Conservatism, now and for the future, is face to face with democracy. Democratic electoral rights are, in a word, no longer a plank in political programmes, they are the medium in which the statesmanship of the future must work. This feature of the new era at last opens the way to the full operation of Conservative principles and, incidentally, makes it unnecessary even to mention Liberalism as a school of thought: for Liberalism, which had in the past so much to say about political freedom, has nothing to do in our era, when complete political freedom has been attained.

Secondly, the new era is one not merely of democracy, but of an educated democracy. Education is so gradual a process that its growth is easily overlooked. Yet, as in all continuous processes of growth, there are decisive moments when change is apparent. Last week the cherry was in bud, to-day it is “hung with snow.”

Such a decisive moment was the War. In a flash, the distance which Britain had gone along the road of education was revealed. The technical ability, the rapidity in acquiring new kinds of knowledge and in mastering new duties, the self-reliance, the self-respect, the power to accept responsibility, the spontaneous facing of sacrifice, the large grasp of the issues at stake, the firmness and fineness of temper, the general spaciousness of character and outlook displayed by the men and women of Britain meant, and could only mean, that the influences of education had penetrated deeply and strongly into their minds and character. The present writer, who on four fronts saw men under the most varying conditions of danger and of dullness, has never wavered in his conviction that it was largely to the extent to which the mass of the people had absorbed the benefits of some forty years of strenuous education that we owed our achievements in the War.

And the more the temper and psychology of our people are seen and studied, the more apparent becomes the fact that ours in an educated democracy. A habit of mind, alert, sensitive, receptive, has replaced one traditionally prone to be sluggish and prejudiced. And if alertness has brought with it a wholesome inquisitiveness into the validity of traditional points of view, sensitiveness has produced a rapid appreciation of principle; and receptiveness, particularly marked in all the qualities which may be grouped under the phrase “the social conscience,” has given a remarkable power of appreciating what lawyers call “the merits” of a question.

The change is so profound that only by a several mental effort can the new situation it has produced by envisaged. The Conservative Party must make that mental effort, and the even greater one necessary to think out all the reactions which must follow in the political life of the people. If it does not, how can it meet the instinctive trust of the people with a view of politics fitted for the new era?