months later we nearly went to war with Germany because Bismarck had promptly annexed them. Meanwhile the problem of the relation between Liberal principles and private property was slowly developing. Liberalism had assumed that an instructed democracy would understand that the existing inequalities of private property (except in so far as they were caused by primogeniture and entail) were due rather to natural law than to the will of man. In 1890 the Trade Union Congress passed a series of socialistic resolutions, and henceforth Liberalism had to compete with a class-conscious Labor Party in applying the principle of Liberty to a condition of economic inequality which was now widely thought of as due to human action in the past, and as modifiable by human action in the future. The Liberal Government of 1892 to 1895 fell more rapidly than did that of 1880-1885 because their inability to construct an intelligible social or Irish policy on the principle of Liberty had become still more clear. Gladstone, for the quarter of a century from 1868 to 1893, was the Liberal Party, and drove his party with unsurpassed powers of personal work and leadership; but Gladstone the orator and financier and "old parliamentary hand" was also Gladstone the author of Homeric Studies and of The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture, the man for whom there had been "a battle between Eton and education and Eton had won."33 Liberty to Gladstone was always the "great and precious gift of God" without which "human excellence cannot grow up in a nation"; 3* but to the end of his life Gladstone no more understood

33 Morley's Life of Gladstone, Vol. I, p. 50. 34 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 84.

the psychological processes involved in the more complex problems of Liberty than he did the mental processes involved in the composition of the Iliad and the Pentateuch.

During the years of Liberal eclipse from 1895 to 1905, the practical necessities of an industrial democracy ruling an overseas empire; the increasing power of the Labor Party; the influence of the Hegelian philosophy of history on a few able Oxford politicians; and the economic, political, and military pressure of German competition, combined to produce a conscious break in the minds of the Liberal leaders with the simple principle of Mill on Liberty. In 1906 the Liberal Party came back from the elections with a majority of nearly two to one over all other parties combined. It was no longer the party which Gladstone had led, Mill had inspired, and Matthew Arnold had derided. In 1902 there had appeared a book on Liberalism by Sir Herbert Samuel with an introduction by Mr. Asquith. Mr. Asquith wrote that "it may seem a truism to say that the Liberal Party inscribes among its permanent watchwords the name of Liberty. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association and combination . we in these latter days have come to look upon as standing in the same category as the natural right to light and air. . . . But with the growth of experience a more matured opinion has come to recognize that Liberty (in a political sense) is not only a negative but a positive conception. Freedom cannot be predicated in its true meaning either of a man or a society merely because they are no longer under the compulsion of restraints which have the sanction of positive law. To be really free they must be able to make

the best use of faculty, opportunity, energy, life."35 Mr. Asquith here, like Mr. Webb and others, was at that time attempting to use the idea of Liberty mainly as a support for the different though almost equally important idea of equality. He therefore indicates no difference between human and non-human hindrances to our faculties. Nor does he distinguish between Mill's automatic conception of human energy and the conative conception of Pericles and Matthew Arnold. Sir Herbert Samuel (whose notes refer to Kant and Green and Bradley, as well as to Mill and Sidgwick) pushes his analysis much further, though not so far as Pericles: He sees that the political idea of Liberty must involve not only Mr. Webb's "practical opportunity of . . . exercising our faculties," but a conscious and organized will to do so. He declares that ""advance of the age,' 'evolution of society,' 'the natural progress of mankind,' these are no more than phrases, summarizing the results of human effort.”3

35 H. H. Asquith (January, 1902), in an introduction to Liberalism: its principles and proposals, by Herbert Samuel, pp. 9 and 10. 36 Liberalism, by Herbert Samuel, p. 16.

CHAPTER VIII

RIGHTS, HONOR, AND INDEPENDENCE

T

HE analysis of Liberty will help us in analyzing certain other political principles, of which the

most important historically is Natural Right. The term Natural Right acquires a definite and measurable meaning if we consider it, as we considered Liberty, in relation to the psychological fact that obstruction by human action of the normal course of certain instinctssex, property,1 family affection, "leadership and following," etc.-causes a feeling of painful resentment. When this happens, if we conceive of our position as primarily one of personal helplessness, we say we are “unfree”; if we conceive of our position as a certain relation to society we say that we are "wronged"; the two feelings of unfreedom and wrong are different but closely related.

Natural Rights are therefore real things, arising from real and permanent facts in our psychology. But because the instinct which creates them was evolved to meet the needs of a primitive environment, we must remember that

1 For the instinct of property and its relation to modern property systems see my Human Nature in Politics, Part I, Chap. I.

in our modern environment it is no more invariably good for us to receive all our natural rights than it is to be completely free. It may be better on any particular occasion to endure the pain involved in the obstruction of the instincts which make us claim our rights; or to "sublimate” those instincts by satisfying them in a new way; or even to inhibit them by an effort of will, based on a calculation of results, and leading to a disciplined but unstable habit. All this may sound obvious enough; but if one considers the use of the term Natural Right during the centuries when it had its greatest driving force, one continually finds that confusion and bloodshed was caused by the fact that there was no common ground between men who felt a passionate instinctive desire for their Rights, and men who demanded a rational explanation and delimitation of them.

In October and November, 1647, for instance, a series of debates on the future government of England took place in the General Council of the "New Model" army at Putney, and a shorthand note of them was taken by William Clarke. Colonel Rainborow, the leader of the extremists, said in his speech, “Every man born in England cannot, ought not, neither by the Law of God nor the law of nature, to bee exempted from the choice of those who are to make lawes for him to live under, and for him, for ought I know, to loose his life under” (p. 305). Ireton made an equally sincere protest that the idea of natural right, and of the justice and injustice that followed from it, meant nothing but the casual opinion of any speaker at any moment. "When I do hear men speake of laying aside all engagements to [consider only] that wild or vast notion of what in every man's conception is