AS Epitomes
Nicholas Murray Butler: The Attack On Liberalism
Abstract
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Contents Updated: Wednesday, 20 February, 2008
N M Butler
Dr Butler was a tireless worker for peace, for democracy, and for sound education on liberal lines. In 1891, he founded the Educational Review, was editor for many years. He was the Director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and had a distinguished academic career mainly with Columbia University. From 1890 to 1902 he was dean of the faculty of Philosophy and in 1901 became president of the University. He was widely published.
Compulsion or Liberty
It took many centuries to define liberty and to establish it as a controlling principle of social and political organization and action. Having been defined and having established itself as a ruling principle of life and thought, it is now face to face with new and powerful challenges to its truth, to its adequacy, and to its practicability. Liberty now finds itself face to face with compulsion again.
The compulsion which liberty had been putting behind it for centuries was the compulsion of the individual despot or that of the small ruling class which gained and held power through the long years. The compulsion which liberty now faces is precisely the same compulsion today that it was in days gone by. It is compulsion through the forms of government, even of democratic government, by a class, whether large or small, which deems itself privileged to rule because either of its number or of its intellectual superiority.
It must not be forgotten that despotism, compulsion, may be exercised by a majority just as much as by a privileged minority or by a single individual. Indeed, there are few more certain tests of the existence of true liberty than the treatment of minorities. If these be free to think as they choose and to give expression to their thought as well as to work and to save, either singly or in co-operation with others, then and only then does civil liberty exist in fact and in truth.
The effective protection of liberty against compulsion must rest not on force, but on moral principle. That moral principle must be openly declared and strictly adhered to if liberty is to continue to exist. Under any other circumstances liberty is doomed. It is precisely this fact which makes the Magna Charta, the Petition of Right, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution of the United States, particularly its ninth and tenth amendments, the Reform Bill, and the subsequent liberal legislation in the history of Great Britain, of such vital importance and significance at this moment. These great historical documents are the charter of liberty.
Liberty and Liberalism
He who supports and defends their principles in any land is a liberal. That honourable and inspiring name must never be allowed to their opponents and critics, no matter in what guise these may present themselves. The real liberal is at once truly conservative, since he preserves and builds upon all that is best in the past, and progressive as well, since he constantly goes forward to new and constructive applications of his fundamental principles. There are few radicals who are liberals. Radicals are almost without exception advocates of compulsion in one or other of its forms.
Today it is liberty and liberalism which are attacked throughout the world. What shall be done about it?
It is of vital importance to inquire what may be the real explanation of these attacks upon liberty, which has hitherto been deemed so precious. On consideration and reflection it will be found that in the realm of politics these attacks are without any substantial foundation whatsoever. It is true that free institutions have not brought in their train all of the blessings that were expected of them, but that is due to the imperfection of human nature.
It was Napoleon who said that “To have a really free people, the governed must be virtuous and the governors must be gods”. In other words, the gospel of liberty assumes a steadily improving humankind which will grow more and more intelligent, more and more unselfish, and more and more public spirited. Where liberty seems to fall short of human expectation, the cause is not to be found in liberty itself, but in that human nature which has not yet grown up to its full stature for the appreciation, the use, and the enjoyment of liberty. What is wanted is not less liberty or restrictions on liberty, but a better humankind to comprehend and to use liberty. Intellectual and moral discipline is the crying need.
It is in the realm of economics that these attacks on liberty seek and find their chief weapons. It is true that too often liberty has been interpreted as licence and too often its name has been seized upon by a false doctrine of liberty, which on the one hand would leave the individual free to respond to the profit-motive in whatever way he might choose, even though some of man's highest ideals were to be impaired or destroyed thereby, and on the other, would resist to the utmost those fundamental and far-reaching social reforms the accomplishment of which should be an essential part of any doctrine of liberty rightly understood and applied in public policy.
Laissez-Faire
It is of the utmost importance to distinguish between the true doctrine of civil, economic, and political liberty and the doctrine of what is known as laissez-faire. The exploitation of one man by his fellows is no part of liberty, it is a form of licence which, in the name of liberty, quickly proves itself to be true liberty's worst enemy. Until the ideal of service dominates every form of human effort, including the profit motive itself, liberty will not be secure.
We are told by many voices that the free competitive system in production which liberty invites has failed, and must necessarily fail, since under its operation there can be no orderly balance between production and consumption. Therefore it is said that, at whatever cost, public control or compulsion must displace liberty in order that there may be no unemployment and that consumption and production may be in balance. But the matter cannot be so easily dealt with. The true reason for the conditions which have called forth this criticism of liberty in more lands than one, is that our world of sovereign nations has not yet been able or willing to adjust itself to those modern conditions which man's new control over Nature and the discoveries of modern science have brought about.
Two thousand five hundred years ago this world was an enormous place. Its parts were so widely separated from each other, and so wholly impossible of contact or intercourse, that they might well have been on different planets. Today this world, with the ordinary obstacles of time and space removed, has become a small, compact, and wholly interdependent group of populations. An important happening in Tokyo, in Vienna, or in Rome is known to the ends of the earth within a few moments of its occurrence. The voice of one with a message to his fellow men may be heard simultaneously by millions of human beings scattered over thousands and thousands of miles of area. Philosophy, science, literature, the fine arts, commerce, have long since shown themselves superior to national boundaries and to any differences of race or of language.
To all these new and truly revolutionary conditions, the governments of the world have failed to readjust their policies or the economic life of the several peoples which they are supposed effectively to represent. They are trying to fight a necessarily losing battle with knowledge and with Nature. Believers in liberty, on the other hand, are trying to practise what they preach in a world of international anarchy and confusion, and this is proving difficult to the point of impossibility. Here is the true cause of the gravest of the world's problems.
The highest task of liberalism today is to meet this situation, to show how to bring this international anarchy and confusion to an end, and to solve these new problems in constructive and forward-facing fashion without being compelled to give way to compulsion in any of its forms.
Federal Principle
It is amazing how little man seems able to learn from the experience of those who have preceded him here on this earth. In one form or another, great or small, this very type of problem has been faced time and again, and yet our governments sit helpless, wringing their hands in its presence as it presses for solution. In ancient Greece it was the city-state which was the political unit, and naturally so. For some 2000 years the nation, in some of its forms, has been the ideal political unit for reasons that can readily be understood. We have now come to the time when, if liberty is to be preserved and extended, its upholders and defenders must be prepared to lead the way to the next stage of political organization. We must find how to apply to the unorganized political and economic world of today those wise and far reaching principles which Hamilton and Madison wrote into the Constitution of the United States.
Joint action and responsibility in all that concerns every nation, with separate organization and responsibility for that which concerns but a single nation, is the ideal now to be achieved. The world is waiting for a new application of the federal principle. If liberty is to survive, it can only do so in a world organized on the principles of liberty, but in terms of present day needs, conditions, and opportunities. Only so can liberty find air to breathe. Through the attempt permanently to balance production and consumption, nation by nation, liberty may easily be suffocated.
There must be brought into existence a society of citizen nations. Sovereignty, neutrality, freedom of the seas, are all eighteenth and nineteenth century words. What they represent has been put behind us and has passed into history. The conception of a United Nations was admirable and far-sighted, but unhappily the foundation upon which it was made to rest was outworn and insecure. It must be rebuilt in terms of today and to-morrow.
The whole theory of a world of armed and jealous nations taking but most casual cognizance of their literally colossal joint and common interests, must be given up for ever. There will be no permanent prosperity for any nation, and no lasting peace, until this is done. Therefore the true liberal is looking to international understanding, international co-operation, and international organization as absolutely necessary if the world is to be saved from political and economic collapse and if liberty itself is to be protected against the vigorous attacks of compulsion in any of its forms, these attacks being everywhere greatly strengthened by doubts and difficulties that are local or national.
Liberal Principles and Limitations
Under the rule of true liberty each individual must have not only freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of worship, but free and open access to an opportunity to earn his livelihood. Shut out from that, the other forms of liberty can have little meaning for him. It is precisely because of this fact that the doctrine of laissez faire is not an essential part of the true philosophy of liberty. No man may be permitted under the forms of liberty either to prey upon his fellows or to take undue advantage of them or to shut for them the door of opportunity. True liberty and its use must combine freedom to earn and to save with ability and willingness to serve.
A truly moral and self-disciplined people would itself observe these limitations, if such they be, upon liberty. But since there is no moral and self-disciplined people, and none seems yet to be in the making, it becomes an essential function of the government which liberty sets up, to protect each individual against exploitation by his fellows. Yet, when free government undertakes this protection, it must not be permitted to undermine the principles upon which it rests. John Stuart Mill put it bluntly when he wrote:
The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.
Moreover, it must be borne in mind that under any economic, social, and political system which is truly liberal, each man is to be treated on his merits and according to his deserts and permitted to make use of his opportunities in his own way and as best he can. Surely the parables of the sower and of the labourers in the vineyard illuminated this principle long ago. If all men are to be treated equally, no two men can be treated precisely alike. Each individual has his own needs, his own characteristics, his own traits, his own excellences, and his own defects, and if he is to be treated equally with his fellows, allowance must be made for each and all of these in the process. The whole history of civilization is a record of the development of differences between individuals and of the discovery of ways and means by which, despite these differences, men may live and work together with increasing understanding, increasing satisfaction, and increasing comfort. These differences extend to everything—talents, earnings, services. To substitute uniformity for these differences is to displace life for death.
All this seems so simple and a lesson so easily learned from the pages of history that one must wonder why its acceptance is even delayed, much less rejected, and why the world continues to flounder in the vale of fruitless experiment when the sunlight of centuries of experience and reflexion is illuminating the mountain tops which surround us on every side.
Backward Thinkers
To be sure, we are confronted by a veritable army of backward thinkers and writers whose volubility is as resounding as their assurance is complete and misleading. The emotional appeals of these men are at the moment sufficiently powerful to hold the civilized world in a state of chaos and anarchy out of which anything may come.
Even before the War, the forces of blind selfishness and economic nationalism were at work to check the progress which had been made, and to break up the world into selfish, self-regarding, and suspicious units. A prosperous world trade which had been slowly building through the centuries, was checked by protective and discriminating tariffs which had as their main purpose not the public interest in the largest sense but rather the support of privileged and self seeking groups and classes in the various nations. The natural and necessary effect of this policy could only be to offer artificial stimulation to the production of certain articles behind the barrier of these protective tariffs while completely destroying the balance and adjustment of production and consumption, of supply and demand, in the world at large. In due time this destruction of the balance between production and consumption extends to each and every individual nation and wrecks its prosperity.
This is another story which has been told so often that one wonders why it should have to be told again, but an enormous outburst of unthinkable enthusiasm can be had at any time, in any land, in support of a proposal to develop home industry, no matter at what cost to the home or to the industry itself. When there is prospect of a quick monetary profit, it is hard indeed to get men to raise their eyes and see the vast losses which this near-by profit conceals from view. Buy American, buy British, buy French, is the most destructive of slogans. Sell American, sell British, sell French, and the buying will take care of itself.
If liberalism is to repel the attacks which are now hurled so vigorously at it, there must be a restatement of liberal principles in terms of present-day economic conditions and problems and a new demonstration of their justice and their adequacy to solve those problems. It will not be enough simply to repeat the old formulre. However true and however practical these once were, they must now be supplemented by the demonstration, in thought and in act, that liberal principles have a constructive answer to offer for present-day questions and that they need not be, and indeed will not be, driven from the field by compulsion in any of its forms.
It may be said, quite bluntly, that compulsion, in addition to being offensive in itself and while it may for a time serve as the instrument of a revolution, is wholly impracticable as a lasting principle of social, economic, or political organization. And it is so simply because human nature will not put up with it. Reduce, if you will, all men to a common level and by nightfall they will have developed a million differences, and these differences are essential to human progress and to human happiness.
The whole philosophy of economic, of social, and of political compulsion is false. It has been tried in every known form and it has failed in every known form. There is nothing new about communism. It was the state of mankind when civilization was beginning to be. It was out of the homogeneous jelly of communism that mankind developed, and the more rapidly he developed individual differences, traits, and capacities, the greater was his true progress and the more obvious the comfort and satisfaction of the human race and the nearer the achievement of its highest ideals.
The declared aims of that milder form of compulsion which is socialism are in large part quite in harmony with the doctrines of true liberalism. The liberal believes, insists, and aims to demonstrate that these ends can be achieved without any encroachment upon the principles of liberty or without calling upon compulsion to displace liberalism. Any free, self-governing people should constantly endeavour to devise and to support those policies which are on the highest plane of morals and of public service. It is the task of education, particularly the education of public opinion, to bring this about.
Liberal Policies
The liberal will exert himself steadily to raise the standard of living of his own people and so to use the power of governmental control over international trade as to stimulate raising the standard of living of other peoples, in whatever part of the world they may be. This is perfectly possible and can be fairly and helpfully accomplished through discriminatory trade regulations. He will prevent the exploitation of the wage earner or the salaried worker as well as the return of child labour, now happily abolished.
He will establish in the several states an economically sound system of social insurance, with such state supervision and co-operation as may be desirable or necessary, in order to safeguard men and women against the risks of modern industry, including unemployment, and against the deprivations attendant upon illness or dependent old age. He will put a stop to the exploitaticm of those natural resources which have not already been alienated, in order that these may be so developed and used as to serve the largest public interest without permitting either monopoly or exploitation of the people.
He will address himself through international conference and action toward bringing about the establishment of an international monetary unit by which the monetary units of the several nations will be measured in terms of an agreed international standard, this to be fixed in terms of gold and silver bullion. This unit will do for the measurement of money what the establishment of the metre and the kilogramme have done for the measurement of length and of weight. The metric system quickly brought order out of what had been chaos. It is precisely this which our many national monetary systems need at this moment. The responsibility for the oversight of such an international monetary system, as well as its general administration, might best be placed in the hands of the Bank for International Settlements at Basle.
He will exert every just influence to lower and to remove the many vexatious barriers to international trade which the prevailing economic nationalism of the world has brought into existence, to the loss of every nation.
He will insist upon the judicial settlement of international disputes through the Permanent Court of International Justice at The Hague and the reduction of the grotesque armies and navies which now oppress the world and are the chief reason for its insecurity to the status of a police force, internationally controlled, to the end that the security of the world may rest upon a moral foundation supported by the collective action of all peoples.
It is only in such ways as these and by widening as well as by integrating the whole area of civilization that the institutions which constitute liberty can be given opportunity to continue to live and to serve under the conditions which mark this twentieth-century world.
It has become plain that within the limits of any single nation, however large or however populous, it is no longer possible to restore and to maintain the balance between production and consumption. Therefore it is that, in order to relieve and to remove those economic conditions upon which the attack on liberalism so largely rests, the Government, the agriculture, the industry, the transportation, the commerce, and the finance of the world must be adjusted to conditions of human life and action as these exist today.
It is amazing what length of time it takes for ideas to make their way in the world. Those who pride themselves upon being practical men resist stubbornly, and to the utmost, every attempt to improve human conditions by the application of sound, if generally ignored, principles in the light of long, if generally unknown, human experience. Just now the handwriting is on the wall. The human race as organized socially, economically, and politically must quickly find ways and means to bring into existence such effective, world wide organization as will relieve the grievous conditions which now exist in practically every land.
Only in this way can new invitation and opportunity be offered to those institutions through which liberty speaks, to strengthen themselves and to develop so as to be able to face these new, indeed stupendous, problems for the solution of which quick choice must certainly be made between liberty and that compulsion which is liberty's only alternative.
