III. LIBERAL

1

A suspicion broods over the country that the nation has suffered betrayal.

Not the betrayal of Versailles. That is sufficiently self-evident: the Fourteen Points became the four hundred and forty articles of the Peace Treaty, signed and sealed by the Founder of Peace himself.

These other betrayals arose from the abuse of ideals for a selfish end. Our enemies saw that they could not do better for themselves than be persuading us to abandon, in the cause of peace, a war which we had not yet won; they saw that it would be best of all if they could induce some Germans themselves to persuade us into accepting these ideals. Whether we concentrate attention on the betrayers or the betrayed, we find ourselves in a peculiar atmosphere where high-falutin’ principles are talked of: while a deal is being put through.

Our opponents exploited this peculiar atmosphere for their own advantage and to our injury. The atmosphere to which we allude is charged with a dangerous mental infection, the carriers of which enjoy an immunity which enables them to ruin their victim. It is the disintegrating atmosphere of liberalism, which spreads moral disease amongst nations, and ruins the nation whom it dominates. This deadly liberalism is not to be conceived as being the prerogative of any one political party. It originated in a general European party to which it owes its name, but it subsequently exercised its baneful influence on all parties and blurred the distinctions between them: it created the familiar figure of the professional party leader.

The principle of liberalism is to have no fixed principle and to contend that this is in itself a principle.

2

When the World War broke out, the western newspapers blazed with the headline: la liberté est en jeu! This misled world opinion. The particular cause became a general cause and acquired a halo. What our enemies sought was not liberty but power. Anyone who had examined the question with an open mind would have made the discovery that in liberal countries political freedom is not enjoyed by the people, who on the contrary are carefully shepherded by certain ruling classes. What these ruling classes mean by liberty, is freedom and scope for their own intrigues. This they attain by means of parliamentism which secures them power under cover of the constitution and the so-called representation of the people. Such is the specious mask which liberalism wears when it shouts "liberty": the mask it wore at the outbreak of the War. This was the first betrayal.

When our enemies were not able to break our resistance in the first clash of arms, they then proceeded to decoy the German people. They trotted out the idea of progress, which is so easily confused with the idea of liberty. If the nations had been compared in respect of their achievement, Germany would have come brilliantly out of the comparison, and the western powers would have been put to shame. But from the standpoint of parliamentary institutions Germany could be made to appear behind the times. The German people were assured that they were oppressed under their constitution. Pacifist and anti-military questions were dragged into the foreground—since no one could pretend that we were suffering economically—and foreign politics were skilfully confused with domestic affairs, with the German constitution and even the Prussian suffrage. Our enemies had too bad a conscience to touch, except with the utmost caution, on the question of the origin of the War. They obscured the real causa causans—their policy of encirclement—with the irrelevant and accidental facts of the actual declaration of war, and they ignored as far as possible that their Russian ally bore the responsibility for the first mobilization. Their eloquence grew greater when they pointed out, as one war-year succeeded another and the end was not yet in sight, that Germany would be the greatest sufferer by a prolongation of the War. The intoxicating message reached us in solemn words from the White House: "There must be Peace without Victory."

This message reached a people who had not wanted the War and who did not realize that their whole future was at stake. The German people were not at one on the question of their War aims, which we could only formulate as the War progressed, whereas our enemies had all along been clear about theirs, and had reached secret understandings amongst themselves and spoke openly to their public, treating their aims as self-evident. The conduct of Germany demonstrated at every turn how utterly unprepared she was for this War, the guilt of which has been laid at her door. She now saw the opportunity of regaining that peace in which she had been before so well content. "Peace without Victory" sounded acceptable to a people who with an heroic constancy and a quiet sense of duty had hitherto endured the privation, suffering and sacrifice that had been heaped upon it. They welcomed the idea with that innate credulity and good faith which makes us always ready to accept what our advisers—outside advisers in this case—recommend as the wise thing, be it never so unwise.

The senseless war would retrospectively acquire a meaning if it lead to a reconciliation of the nations which would accord to each nation its due and would rob none. Our German democrats and the liberal elements in the nation were the first to be lured by this snare, and thus the way was paved for those intrigues which led to our overtures for peace in 1917. This same credulity offered fruitful soil to Northcliffe’s propaganda, which was directed to all malcontents, traitors and revolutionaries, to all would-be socialist, progressive, parliamentarian elements: liberals all, but now not merely over-credulous liberals, but criminal liberals. Credulity and treachery prepared the ground for the events of 1918 and 1919: these things inevitably brought about the Insurrection, the conditions of the Armistice, the surrender of the battle fleet, the decoying away of our mercantile marine; and the most grievous of our deceptions: that we had only to confess ourselves guilty of the outbreak of the War to win for ourselves by this easy lie more favourable peace conditions. That was the second betrayal.

A little time passed before the Founder of Peace himself stood revealed as the liberal that he was. The words "Peace without Victory" were spoken before our peace overtures of 1917. When we had once been guided into the path our enemies wished us to take, these words were never repeated to us. Still less were they fulfilled after our collapse in 1918, when our enemies had reached their goal. Today it is almost a matter of indifference whether Wilson ever believed his own words, or whether he only pronounced them at a moment when he thought those powers to whom he wished success would prove unable to achieve for themselves a "Peace with Victory." But no. It is not a matter of indifference, because it involves the whole liberal attitude of mind. It is peculiarly characteristic of the liberal to indulge in mental reservations; retrospectively to formulate his goal when he has ascertained what he is likely to be able to attain. Wilson brought with him to Europe a sensitive personal ambition and a most remarkable obstinacy. When he once fell amongst statesmen, his chosen role of arbitrator proved as galling to them as his previous support had been welcome. It then became manifest that he was by no means the great, well-founded, impregnable tower of strength that he had seemed. He was not the man who will see the heavens fall before he will abate one tittle of his plighted word: such a man saves the world. Wilson was aware that ideals as well as political interests were at stake, that liberalism in his person and in the person of the American people was being tried in the balance. He must endeavour to make good . . . or . . . perhaps . . . to compromise. If liberalism was to stand by its own pronouncements, if Wilson—who had rejected the Pope’s proffered arbitration in favour of his own League of Nations folly—was to stand by his, the World War must be made a means to the pacification of the nations. But there was now no further talk of the promises to Germany that if she would put an end to the War by a Revolution she would be received into the elect company of the "free peoples" as an "emancipated nation." Liberalism was talking less and less about ideals. In Versailles the chaffering was about anise and cummin seed. Wilson prevented a certain amount of grab. We almost regret it today. He only postponed developments that are bound to come.

In some respects Wilson proved even more "liberal" than his French and English colleagues. He insisted on one thing only: that all interpretations, evasions and transgressions of his stipulations should be considered as—applications of his principles. Liberalism always bemuses the liberal; he would fain perhaps take his liberal principles seriously, but when this is not possible, he is content so long as appearances are kept up. The moment always come when the liberal shows his true colours and with a cold unscrupulousness takes the most advantageous short cut to his goal. As Clemenceau did. His whole life long, his liberalism was merely a matter of tactics; by the end he had become the tough old bull-dog who will not loose his prey. Similarly Lloyd George. His liberalism is rooted in a native opportunism which qualifies him to play the mediator and enables him to trim his sails to every breeze. His light-heartedness waved every difficulty aside, subordinated everything to England’s advantage and permitted him to return home triumphant. Against two such men Wilson had no chance. He could not prevent their winning. His dishonesty consisted in complacently posing as being himself the winner. That was the third betrayal.

The Peace brought the world not liberty, but enslavement: and not even peace.

Yet the statesmen of Versailles had the effrontery to boast of their work as an achievement of progress and justice.

It was the effrontery of men deceived. The explanation of deceivers detected. The statesmen of Versailles owed their political power to the lack of principle that poses as principle, to that accursed gift the liberal has of employing ideals as means to an end, and using ideals to camouflage his ends.

3

Liberalism in Germany today is suspect. This suspicion is directed against a system of nets and snares set throughout the world in whose toils Germany is believed to have been caught.

In the same connection Freemasonry lies under a cloud. We observe that it was masonic forces which stimulated the anti-German pre-War combinations that united during the War to compass Germany’s annihilation. We observe further that the statesmen assembled at Versailles, were one and all freemasons. These things set us turning the pages of history to get behind the veil of mystery that enshrouds freemasonry. Why should the lodges divide their members into initiates and non-initiates? May some political motive lie behind this? It has been suggested that the origins of freemasonry go back perhaps to the Egyptian and Eleusinian mysteries, or to the Druids or to the Assassins. The clue that led from the knightly orders to the Rosicrucians and the Illuminati and from these to the mason’s lodges was followed up: the mysterious activities which set in with the formation of the new English Grand Lodge in 1717, and those which were precursors of the French Revolution of 1789, of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the German Revolution of 1918.

Such genealogical excurses, however, provide no clue to any common underlying aim. The most superficial reflection shows that there must always have been secret societies, and that such societies will always have tended to take something the same form: but this does not imply that their aims will have been identical. The very reverse is, in fact, the case. Freemasonry itself has been marked by the most chameleon quality. This would cause no surprise, were it not that the changeability of freemasonry suggests a question. May not the speed, the irresponsibility, the suspicious ease with which freemasonry has carried out its opportunist adaptations point to a mental peculiarity which it shares with liberalism? Freemason and liberal alike, appear to be men who either possess no principles, or are ever ready to set them aside; men who are always prepared—for a price—to abandon any principle, and indeed feel most at home in such barterings. We note that the lodges were at first intended to be strictly non-political; it was not long until their first and favourite pursuit was politics. Early freemasonry declared for a policy of rationalism and enlightenment yet the grey Scotch brothers who introduced it into France were Roman Catholics and Jacobites. During the long Whig tenure of power, which coincided with the first period of parliamentary corruption, the lodges adopted a policy to which they expressly gave the name of liberalism and thus made themselves constitutionally acceptable to the powers that were. Such a change of attitude appeared only wise. Freemasons justify every deviation from principle by an appeal to "the circumstances." Here are doctrinaires whose doctrines mean nothing to them; here are criminals who elaborate in advance an opportunist philosophy in case they should ever be called to account.

So freemasonry evolved a bogus rationalism which taught that whatever is advantageous must of necessity be logical. The lodges had begun as upholders of the Christian philosophy. Why should they refuse to admit the non-Christian to membership, especially if intercourse with the non-Christian could be turned to the advantage of the cause? The English Grand Lodge led the way by admitting, in exceptional cases, Jewish members: out of commercial considerations. The Englishman, though he might confess the New Testament, felt much in tune with the materialist, practical spirit of the Old. Similarly the French Grand Orient soon ceased to distinguish between deists and atheists. Was not positivism also a religion, or at least a faith, a rationalist faith that superseded the faiths of revelation? In reality the French freemasons accepted these new members because they all moved in the same society and speculated on the same stock exchange; pursued with a same opportunism the same political aims, and possessed a community of interests.

The very politicians of the Grand Orient who passed the Vatican Laws have no scruples about crossing the Pope’s threshold to worship Foch’s new saint, the Maid of Orleans, whom they have hitherto spat upon as the harlot of Voltaire’s Pucelle. In any case it was quite worth the while of liberals, who are so cosmopolitan in word and so chauvinist in deed, to forget their hereditary feud with the Vatican, if they could gain the papal support for their plans, whether in Poland or on the Rhine.

The history of the peace negotiations is the tale of the surrender of one principle after another; the invention of one pretext after another to represent as right every injustice that could be done to the enemy.

The liberals needed for their purpose a man who could pose as the spokesman of a humane philosophy, and who at the same time should be self-righteous and dogmatic enough to uphold before the world the morality of whatever sacrifices of principle he made. They found the very man for their purpose, who prated continually of "impartial justice" but allowed his own flow of words to impair his power of judgment: President Wilson. Wilson, who would hear nothing of a War-indemnity, but acquiesced in reparations, which the victors interpreted into meaning payment for the entire War; Wilson, who repudiated all annexation of colonies, but distributed "mandates"; Wilson, who sacrificed the "freedom of the seas," and "trade equality" and "disarmament" in order to carry home safe in his pocket his "League of Nations": only to find that his countrymen would have none of it. When Brother Woodrow embarked on the George Washington he left behind not the God-given peace he had dreamt of, but a peace which was the joy of liberalism; at least an actual peace drawn up by the victors and signed by the vanquished.

The Jesuits hold that the end sanctifies the means; the liberal holds that the ideal sanctifies the interpretation—and the interpretation in turn sanctifies the ideal.

4

To get behind a system we must discover the psychology of it.

All the humbug about ideals leads us to the humbug of the plan which underlay the origins of the War and the exploitation of the peace. We need not go so far as to suppose that the plan was thought-out and agreed on beforehand: but it was certainly existent and effective. The liberals had left themselves every liberty of action, but when the opportune moment had arrived they speedily reached a practical understanding, as the policy of encirclement and the cordial co-operation of the western powers abundantly prove.

The plan depended on the men; it depended on the liberal; it depended on a human, psychological, almost physiological affinity which was easily translated into a political affinity: a coincidence of impulse and a coincidence of aim.

Freemasonry is only a clue. It points on to liberalism. The activity of the one passes over imperceptibly into the activity of the other, so that foreground and background are indistinguishable. White magic wages incessant warfare with black, the one is the obverse of the other. Freemasonry, which likes to affect an air of harmless purity, is neither white magic nor black; it is a blend: the grey magic of reason, born of grey theory. Or rather, since an alliance is no more possible between magic and reason than between mysticism and rationalism, freemasonry is an attempt to substitute for a world from which God has been driven, a world in which all men are brothers. Liberalism has no magic to offer: it leads either to stupidity or crime. Sometimes it does not distinguish the two. Sometimes it does.

The age of reason wanted her mysteries; she took refuge in freemasonry. What she created was a mystery of banality. Those who pose as initiates are wholly uninitiated in the great, essential, decisive things. The lodges insist that freemasonry consists in a personal experience which cannot be communicated; they talk of their "royal craft."

The freemasons feel the inadequacy of all this. The pettier among them cling together in little cliques and pour scorn on every revelation, and cherish a childish hatred for all tradition which they stigmatize as hostile to their lauded "progress," and foster hostility not only to the Church but to every vital spiritual inheritance of the past, and to everything that forms the basis of the state. The more serious and more cultivated among them, though narrow-minded still, hail all humane thinkers, whether it be Jesus or St. Francis, Dante or Goethe, as original free-thinkers, and claim them for their lodges.

All this is to supply the lack of a great personality, such as freemasonry itself has never brought to birth. With all the elaborate grading of their members they have never yet produced a Grand Master of any spiritual power who has become a historical personage. These grades lend importance to the nobodies and satisfy the vanity of the ambitious. The German lodges protest that they know nothing about international intrigue. They are entirely honest; they can now divine what the game was, and how little they were accounted of.

The whole of freemasonry is anonymous. This is psychologically characteristic. Freemasonry welcomes intelligence; it has no use for character or genius. They have no Founder; their history is associated with no great names; they have no heroes, no pioneers, no martyrs. If freemasonry is to be measured by the values it has created, it is the most poverty-stricken of all spiritual movements. The Encyclopaedists could at least point to their three and thirty folio volumes: an effective deed of negation. They at least showed their mettle in the fight against clericalism and absolutism. The Jesuits can point to the spiritual achievements of their Basque founder, Ignatius Loyola; the Puritans can boast their Milton; the Pietists the Confessions of many a Beautiful Soul. The freemasons have nothing and nobody. They attracted the masses with their talk of "humanity" and "progress" and, above all, of "liberty." They said little about "equality"—which would not have suited them—but, in compensation, a lot about "brotherhood," for brotherhood amongst brothers costs little and repays itself. Hence the lodges have become the refuge of the mediocre.

The cliquishness of the freemasons turns among the liberals to a political clannishness; the difference is that the liberal does not seek good fellowship, but power. No one in the caucus would venture to strive for power if left to himself. But why should not the many get together and by their numbers supplement each other? Why not call the room they require for their activities "liberty"? President Wilson spoke of the relatively small number of men who control a country economically; someone in Germany spoke of three hundred financiers who control the world today. This suggests that there exists a small group of secret leaders—a group which includes freemasons and Jesuits and probably bolshevists—who make history.

The liberal is inspired by the ambition of the world-be great man who does not want to take the lower seat, the anxiety of the inadequate person to miss nothing. Jealousy of power explains this hate of genius, of anyone who is great, who does, singlehanded, things which can never be done by the many. Jealousy of power explains this hate of the dynasties with their hereditary prestige and privilege; this hate of the Papacy with its traditional authority transmitted to the wearer of the tiara; the hostility to Louis XIV’s and to Pius IX’s doctrines of infallibility. This jealousy of power explains no less that passion for constitutions which make power dependent on elections; this craze for parliaments to take control of the state; this mania for republics in which the parties divide the power and party leaders draw the pay and the electors enjoy the party patronage; or the preferences for a limited monarchy that has resigned all real power but still lays claim to grace. This diverts attention from the real rulers and sometimes allows a king—not as a king but as private individual—to further the designs of his business friends, as Edward VII loved to do.

This rise to power of the liberal, the man who delegates responsibility and introduces disintegration just where cohesion is most needed, becomes possible only where the instinct of conservatism has become weakened. The history of liberalism is therefore the history of enfeebled dynasties whose representatives have become emasculated and effeminate, or middle-class: like the Louis of the House of Bourbon, or the Georges of the House of Hanover. The freebooters of the French Revolution slunk away before the face of Napoleon; the most adaptable of them, Talleyrand and Fouché, crept under his wing and later found a refuge even under a new legitimist regime. The German liberals wilted similarly before Bismarck. The romanticism of William II had nothing conservative about it, and his dilettantism had so strong a liberal taint that liberals quickly swarmed about him to claim a share in his power for their own ends. At the court of, and under the favour of, William II, they were able to pursue their liberal machinations, which, however, brought them into rivalry with French and English liberals.

It was again this jealousy of power which devised the scheme of encirclement to which the stupid liberalism of Germany fell a prey. Jealousy of power conspired against a throne and smote a people: under the skilful manipulations of Edward VII, German statesmen were taught to be jealous of the Kaiser and to intrigue against his power. Finally the other nations grew jealous of a people whose economic efficiency—in spite of political unreadiness—threatened to win for it a position of power. The driving force of liberalism came here again into play, inciting the petty and the many against the One. On the plane of domestic politics the liberal had hitherto been relatively innocuous; he now transferred his activities, with the greatest mustering of forces that recent history has ever seen, to the plane of foreign politics with intent to exploit an entire people.

The liberal professes to do all he does for the sake of the people; but he destroys the sense of community that should bind outstanding men to the people from which they spring. The people should naturally regard the outstanding man, not as an enemy but as a representative sample of themselves.

Liberalism is the party of upstarts who have insinuated themselves between the people and its big men. Liberals feel themselves as isolated individuals, responsible to nobody. They do not share the nation’s traditions, they are indifferent to its past and have no ambition for its future. They seek only their own personal advantage in the present. Their dream is the great International, in which the differences of peoples and languages, races and cultures will be obliterated. To promote this they are willing to make use, now of nationalism, now of pacificism, now of militarism, according to the expediency of the moment. Sceptically they ask: "What are we living for?" Cynically they answer: "Just for the sake of living!"

It was this denationalized, irresponsible liberalism that successfully let loose the horrors of the World War. It devised a watchword—LIBERTY—to entrap the imagination of men and nations.

The liberal has flourished at all periods. The nobody is always eager to imagine himself a somebody. The man who is a misfit in his own society is always a liberal out of amour propre. The disinterestedness of the conservative cherishes the sacredness of a cause that shall not die with him; the liberal says: après moi le déluge. Conservatism is rooted in the strength of man; liberalism battens on his weakness. The liberal’s conjuring trick consists in turning others’ weakness to his own account, living at other men’s expense, and concealing his art with patter about ideals. This is the accusation against him. He has always been a source of gravest danger.

5

Liberalism has undermined civilization, has destroyed religions, has ruined nations. Primitive peoples know no liberalism. The world is for them a simple place where one man shares with another. Instinctively they conceive existence as a struggle in which all those who belong in any way to one group must defend themselves against those who threaten them.

Great states have always held liberalism in check. When a great individual arose amongst them who gave the course of their history a new direction, they have been able to incorporate him into their tradition, to make his achievements contribute to their continuity.

Nations who had ceased to feel themselves a people, who had lost the state-instinct, gave liberalism its opportunity. The masses allowed an upper crust to form on the surface of the nation. Not the old natural aristocracy whose example had created the state; but a secondary stratum, a dangerous, irresponsible, ruthless, intermediate stratum which had thrust itself between. The result was the rule of a clique united only by self-interest who liked to style themselves the pick of the population, to conceal the fact that they consisted of immigrants and nouveaux riches, of freedmen and upstarts. They did not care whether their arrogance and new-won privilege was decked out with the conceptions of feudal or of radical ideology, though they preferred a delicate suggestion of aristocracy. But they found it most effective and successful to style themselves democrats.

Liberalism was the ruin of Greece. The decay of hellenic freedom was preceded by the rise of the liberal. He was begotten of Greek "enlightenment." From the philosophers’ theory of the atom, the sophist drew the inference of the individual. Protagoras, the Sophist, was the founder of individualism and also the apostle of relativity. He proclaimed that: "Opposite propositions are equally true." Nothing immoral was intended. He meant that there are no general but only particular truths: according to the standpoint of the perceiver. But what happens when the same man has two standpoints? When he is ready to shift his standpoint as his advantage may dictate? This same Protagoras proclaimed that rhetoric could make the weaker cause victorious. Still nothing immoral was intended. He meant that the better cause was sometimes the weaker and should then be helped to victory. But the practice soon arose of using rhetoric to make the worse cause victorious. It is no accident that the sophists were the first Greek philosophers to accept pay, and were the most highly paid. A materialist outlook leads always to a materialist mode of thought. This is very human: but true.

All this was hailed as progress: but it spelt decay. The same process continues: the disciples of reason, the apostles of enlightenment, the heralds of progress are usually in the first generation great idealists, high-principled men, convinced of the importance of their discoveries and of the benefit these confer on man. But no later than the second generation the peculiar and unholy connection betrays itself which exists between materialist philosophy and nihilist interpretation. As at the touch of a conjuror’s wand the scientific theory of the atom reduces society to atoms.

The sophist was not originally a politician. As far as state affairs were concerned his sympathies were aristocratic rather than democratic. He was first and foremost a cosmopolitan whose favourite home was Athens, the town of culture, of mental and physical delight: the town also of great illusions, of political obtuseness, of the final national betrayal. A straight line leads from the sophists to the epicureans till finally the philosophers disappear in the hellenic dispersion in which the Hellene was as much despised for his present as honoured for his past.

The Stoa at length re-established human dignity. The stoics restored to man his responsibility for thought and act.

The town of stoic philosophy was Rome. The sense of responsibility accompanied every Roman officer; it inspired even the latest Roman emperors. Rome was a State.

6

Modern liberalism had its roots where the individual shook off the conventions of the middle ages. The liberal afterwards claimed to have freed himself from them. This freedom of his was an illusion.

The conventions of the middle ages were achievements, the achievements of Church and State, the constructive Gothic achievements which for ten centuries prevented the disintegration of the ancient world. These were the mighty achievements which denoted what—on an immensely smaller scale and applied to far more trivial things—is now styled "progress." The men to whom these achievements were due, were rooted in these conventions, which also were of their creation. The conventions of the middle ages were the mighty foundations of mighty activities. No one prated of liberty, because everyone creatively possessed it: as will in action.

A disintegrating generation succeeded to this great inheritance. Humanism brought men the consciousness of human dignity. The renaissance imposed on individualism moderation, form, a classic attitude. The men of the renaissance drew from the literature of classical antiquity the forces which they felt they required as models. In the certain assurance that life must have a firm foundation if it was not to fall asunder, the men of the renaissance made a last effort at linking up with the past.

Men retain their creative power, however, only as long as the nations are creative. The nations were now developing a society which was divorced from the people. Monumental art was yielding its place to mere decoration. Recent centuries have achieved results in chemistry, mathematics, astronomy and most lately in sociology. But they have not produced men with the insight to see that all these are only partial glimpses into nature. They have made scientific research an end in itself, which is to turn an imaginary searchlight on to an imagined truth. This they called enlightenment.

Man was committed to his reason, and reason was self-sufficient. Revelation was replaced by experiment. Men no longer perceived and felt; they only observed. They no longer drew dogmatic conclusions as faith had done. They no longer drew visionary conclusions like the mystic. They drew no idealist conclusions like the humanists; they drew critical conclusions: "there are no inborn ideas"—"there is no God"—"man is not free." Negatives all! "What discoveries!" they cried. They failed to see that they were tilting only against nomenclature, while the phenomena remained. They did not dream that all their speculations dealt only with the foreground of things while the background remained more and more incomprehensible. In the pride of his reason the man of enlightenment claimed the right to cast adrift from all conventions. He did so, regardless of the consequence. He committed life to a reason abandoned to her own devices. He knew what he was doing. Or did he not? He did the reasonable thing. Or not? We must ask of the liberals who as the party of enlightenment took over the justification of the age of reason.

Amongst the discoveries which reason made, the most fateful was this: that man is not free. It might well have seemed the most obviously reasonable thing to hedge this unfree man with state conventions. Instead, the liberals demanded that this man—who was biologically unfree—should have perfect individual and political freedom.

This curious logic showed a deliberate intention to mislead. It bore, in fact, all the characteristic signs of liberalism, which is prepared to endorse any contradiction and to look on at any destruction with which the magic word liberty can by any means be associated.

Liberalism began with a false idea of liberty, which it misunderstood even as it formulated it; and it ended with a false idea of liberty which it employed no longer to defend liberty but to pursue advantage.

All human error lies here, and many a crime.

7

The Age of Reason was an affair of the West.

The affair more particularly of England and France, and, in spite of the contradiction, the affair also of Germany.

The English always talked of freedom. They always sought their own freedom at the expense of everyone else’s. They early developed a peculiar mode of thought based on a confusion of ideas, which gave precedence not to a cause for its own sake but to the advantage they themselves derived from it. There was no hypocrisy in this: though it looked like hypocrisy. It was merely an incredible naïveté combined with a natural brutality of approach. The English were perfectly unconscious of these things. Their trump card was their stupidity, and in their stupidity lay their highest shrewdness.

The power to change the point of view according to whose aims were in question—one’s own or another’s—the firm intention always to pursue what was expedient, led the English to develop ultimately a most practical logic of their own. The renaissance introduced Machiavellianism into English thought. Machiavelli had given passionate expression to a despairing, almost hopeless, love of country. The practical Englishman’s first thought was to make sure that the means lay to hand for putting his doctrines into practice. When the question arose: "What is freedom?" Hobbes answered: "Freedom is power." Here spoke the practical politician, the positivist, the first tory. Hobbes protected England against the dangers of the age of reason. Henceforth the English thinker could safely indulge in liberal thought. When the question arose: "What is power?" the Englishman, who is a blend of the liberal moralist and the political immoralist, answered comfortingly: "Power is right." Without this assurance no whig could have slept with an easy conscience; with it, he slept admirably. Power even is so surely right that it can take precedence of right, without right’s ceasing to be right. Hence the Englishman was free to assert his own right and trample on everyone else’s. The logic of this has always been perfectly clear to every English mind. Right or wrong: it was ultimately always a question of the welfare of the country, for whose sake its people required political power.

If a link was missing in this chain, it was supplied by the English method of concentrating thought on utility. Utilitarianism became the English national philosophy. Progress, which was the favourite conception of the rationalist, could find its obvious justification in utility; and progress became particularly valuable when it marched with the Englishman’s advantage and the disadvantage of the foreigner. From the standpoint of utility, every opportunism can be justified and every lack of principle. Not the least virtue of the English party system lay in the fact that it permitted individuals or groups to shift from one standpoint to another whenever it seemed momentarily useful or necessary, without an overt sacrifice of principle which was stoutly maintained throughout. Parliamentism, to which the party system accommodated itself with a power of adaptation that has never yet failed in England, would seem to have been invented solely in order to make it constitutionally possible to temper drastic measures with liberal ambiguities.

English liberalism started by being very clean, honest and law-abiding. An English freethinker once summed up the very spirit of England in the formula: Freedom, Truth and Health! The ideas of equality and fraternity would never have occurred to an Englishman. English liberalism, however, lived up to these three watchwords only to a very limited degree. The practical English mind was hard and pitiless. England has tolerated many encroachments on freedom; she tolerates truth so long as society is not exposed. She is the land of the pauper and shuts her eyes to poverty and the uncleanness it brings in its train, so long as these things only affect strata of the population who constitute no danger to the state. The English liberals were credulous, well-meaning fellows, but fools: children who liked to cultivate illusions. When Bentham formulated his utilitarianism he genuinely deceived himself into thinking that self-interest, if only rightly understood, would lead to the welfare of all. A certain slovenliness pervades liberal thought: everything is good if it can be termed "free" and twice good if it can be called "useful" as well. Bentham interpreted the psychology of English utilitarianism fairly exactly when he explained duty, conscience and unselfishness on a basis of man’s self-interest and claimed for his own doctrine that it aimed at "regulating egotism." He followed the epicurean tendency which has always co-existed with the stoic.

This philosophy supplied a self-confidence which became the sober virtue of the whole nation. Every political Englishman took an almost sadistic pleasure in "regulating" English interests throughout the world. This philosophy supplied also a sense of strength, cold, calm and tenacious, taking itself for granted, mindful always of its own limitations but by its concentration on the useful, potent to protect the nation against injury and against effeminacy.

The English did not observe how gravely they gave themselves away by so exclusive a devotion to utilitarianism. A certain sense of justice still survived amongst them, however, which on occasion looked to the cause and not to the advantage. During the American war Burke had the courage to speak in Parliament in favour of the Americans. But Burke was a conservative. The English sense of justice survived more amongst the tories than the whigs. We must also point out that the English liberals of today who condemn the Peace of Versailles cannot be taken seriously until they express themselves in something more than words. Asquith movingly and eloquently regretted that the Peace had turned out as it had, and that his party had not known in time the line it would take, so that they might have worked towards another result. But this liberal eloquence proves nothing unless it sets afoot serious effort to alter the result instead of quietly acquiescing in it. In the meantime it is content to register emotion—and accept advantage.

8

French rationalism had deeper roots. It sprang from the rationalism of the middle ages and the casuist philosophy of the Paris scholastics with their doctrine of a dual theological and philosophic truth. As a philosophy of life it sprang from the renaissance. And as long as the French sceptic clung to the cultured grace of Montaigne and the harmlessness of Rabelais, French thought continued to move and make its own observations on a superficial plane of wit and wisdom. Humanism brought with it, however, a misunderstanding that proved fateful in the Revolution: the dignity of man merged in the rights of man! German, Prussian rationalism subsequently had no little difficulty in getting back to the line that leads from Luther to Kant and reinstating duty in the consciousness of man.

The renaissance throbbed with passion; mighty men lived their lives to the full and their policies were determined by the instincts to which they gave rein. Machiavelli wrote his great and ruthless textbook; he was a criminal from sheer patriotism, a man full of ambition for Italy, a thoroughly unliberal man in his fearless honesty. At this point weariness overtook mankind. The renaissance had revealed man as a microcosm; the age of reason revealed him as matter. Next the discovery was made that man is not free, and the memorably illogical conclusion was drawn that he must therefore be made politically free. It was also discovered that this unfree man does all he does from self-interest. Voltaire expressly declared that self-interest "is the means to self-preservation" and further said of it: "it is necessary, it is dear to us, it gives us pleasure and we must take pains to conceal it." The liberal faithfully obeyed this last injunction. In all cases where the liberal had good reason to wish to conceal things he has taken refuge in the principle: tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.

The Englishman interpreted the dignity of man as self-reliance; the Frenchman as self-complacency. By an adroit application of liberal principles the Englishman secured modest, calculable advantages, and harvested them the more certainly that he did so in silence. The livelier and more passionate Frenchman was not content to do the same; he wanted to boast of them too. The French were to be the nation to give the new ideas their historical importance. The material might be dry; their wit could lend it charm. Montesquieu and Voltaire therefore took the conceptions of the English rationalists very seriously, and on their return from London trumpeted them aloud for all the world to hear, that France might be the centre of men’s talk, and all men’s eyes might turn to Paris.

The rationalists finally fell victims to their age of reason. The nobility and the clergy, the court and the salons, finally the king himself, were the sacrifice. These circles, which had long since exhausted all the delights that life can given, found a new thrill; they discovered the simple man, and they acclaimed him as better than themselves. The finances of the country were flagging, so they took up popular economics. Their personal finances were in a bad way so they went in for speculation. They even neglected classic for economic studies. The state set about fulfilling all the demands that Voltaire and Montesquieu had made on it: freedom of the corn trade was introduced, freedom of the press was granted. The tiers état was flattered on every hand, though it had never sought this treatment, nor done anything to deserve it. Reason surely never wrought more havoc than in the rationalist circles of France. Everything they did recoiled on themselves. They did it because it was liberal: in the name of the rights of man and the ideal of a liberal state—now transformed into the ideal of a revolutionary state—they were persecuted, dispossessed, exterminated by the tiers état, to whom they had been the first to preach its peculiar claim to the rights of man.

The number of aristocrats who continued to lead the people along progressive lives of thought—from the Duke of La Rochefoucald to the Duke of Saint Simon—is practically negligible. The greater number of them lapsed into inanity. The courtier did homage to the man of letters; the officer yielded pride of place to the scholar. The proud aristocracy of France grew effeminate and fatuous in true rococo style. They gave up their knightly virtues to become delicate, lady-like, artificial. This was the aristocracy which ran away after the shameful defeat of Rossbach and later behaved so unworthily at Coblenz.

France had certainly reached a point at which she needed a Revolution to provide her with new men. Montesquieu had still been able to speak of the forefathers of the nation who lived beyond the Rhine, though Voltaire cynically asked whether Frenchmen might not possibly be sprung from some humble Gallic stock. Sieyès demanded that the descendants of the Frankish conquerors should be hunted back into the German forests whence they had emerged. Caesar’s strictures on the Gallic character were now fully vindicated. The Revolution brought again to light the Gaul’s incalculability, his fickleness, his vanity. A new national feeling arose: bestial and cruel. The sovereign people ran about the streets seizing everyone who did not acquiesce in the will of the people and "compelling him to be free." "The people cannot err." It is one of the ironies of history that the first victims of the sovereign people should have been the Girondins, the liberals of the Revolution who had dreamt of establishing a Republic of Virtue.

To the seventeen articles proclaiming the rights of man and of the citizen, which had been copied from the American constitution, there stood, in addition to the oddly-interpreted "freedom," a new clause, not easily to be misunderstood, a clause regarding the sanctity of property. This is a conception which the Frenchman has never surrendered and which can never become out of date in France. It did not relate so much to inherited as to acquired possessions. It referred to the property of the new rich who in the sacred names of liberty, equality and fraternity had divided the wealth of France between them. The security of this property was the sole preoccupation of French liberalism.

The French have never honestly confessed their attachment to possession, as the Englishman has confessed his to utility. They have never developed a philosophy of dividends nor the psychology of the rentier. As a nation they are the incarnation of the pettiest lust for possession, but they need to clothe it with fairer words. For a while "virtue" sufficed them, but finally they decided in favour of "liberty." In the manifesto of 1791 Condorcet wrote: "The French nation abjures wars of conquest for all time: she will never employ her strength against the liberties of another nation; this is the sacred vow which makes our happiness the happiness of other nations." Boutroux and Bergson used similar phrases during the World War. But Napoleon instead of liberté, egalité and fraternité, gave the nation: la gloire. He gave his Frenchmen Europe and the wealth of other lands, and the intoxicated nation followed him: "the people cannot err." When the intoxicating dream was over, a sobered nation welcomed its Bourbons back again.

Then they welcomed the House of Orleans, and lastly the Napoleonids. For a while it seemed as if le roi bourgeois was the monarchy they needed, the kindly man with his round hat and under the umbrella of le juste milieu, who counted lawyers and bankers his friends. Liberalism, however, had still to be reckoned with. The political battles of the next decade revolved around the electoral law, which was to secure to the middle classes the right to vote and the right to be elected. So the liberal employed the years of the restoration to stabilize his power. Then he engineered the July Revolution and the February Revolution and the Third Republic. The aim was always the same: to secure political power for an ever-widening circle; to achieve it, the liberal allied himself with clericals; to achieve it, the liberal became an nationalist. He never lacked raison oratoire to conceal the real motives of French politics. Gambetta, Boulanger, Clemenceau, they all employed the same liberal rhetoric, resonant with justice and freedom, and concealing the while the one thought of advantage. Poincaré used the same phrases: the man with the empty face of a grand bourgeois, who caused the outbreak of war, fled from its dangers to Bordeaux, and afterwards played the role of the imperturbable. He used these phrases, knowing that he lied. But the end justifies the means, and ideals serve as means to an end.

9

Liberalism in Europe is one thing, liberalism in Germany another.

When two augurs of the west are met together, they both know what liberalism is: a political trick: the trick with which the upstart society of the tiers état was able to swindle the tiresome, remaining plebs out of the promises of 1789. The augurs know what "liberty" means, that most seductive of the three catchwords with which the champions of the rights of man lured the deluded masses away from their dangerous barricades and shepherded them to the innocuous ballot-box. When the Germans decry themselves as backward, they overlook the fact that this is what gives them in Europe their strength, their advantage, their future. An illusion used to pervade Germany that we must introduce all the new western ideas as well as all the new western institutions, before we should deserve to share on equal terms in civilized history and be received in the society of liberalized nations. So we also set foot on the path of liberalism, not to our advantage, not to our credit, but to our doom—as the consequences of our collapse have shown. The westerners triumphed once more. England has got rid of her rival. France lives at our expense. Instead of "progress" we reaped ruin. Could we ask, simpletons that we are, a more terrible proof that the ways of liberalism are not ours? But we took the path, logically, inevitably, in harmony as we imagined, with the general trend of human civilization: we took it with German thoroughness. It seemed the only path for a man of the twentieth century—or even of the nineteenth. Socialists and liberals alike, turned their eyes to the west—not perceiving that socialism and liberalism are mutually exclusive—and even allied themselves in common opposition to the German state. For over a century we strayed amongst the errors, illusions and fallacies of democracy, under the impression that whatever a people wanted must be for its good as a nation—not realizing the danger that it might be the nation’s death warrant.

The opportunity was open to us of choosing another path: the path of conservatism, inspired by the national spirit, based on our own values and on all the living and vital institutions of our past. Freiherr von Stein powerfully advocated this course to us at the beginning of the century. Following him we might have made a stand against liberalism, opposing religion to reason, society to the individual, cohesion to disintegration, growth to "progress." Just as our conservatives turned their backs on Stein, they also failed to join forces with Rodbertus. They did not of course repudiate Stein—for had he not been a "patriot"?—but they failed to realize all it meant that here was a man who in the revolutionary present would not snap the links that bound us to the past, a man who for the sake of the future would fain have forged these links the faster. The post-revolutionary conservatives, however, were outsiders, whose fate it was—from the disciples of Adam Müller down to Paul de Lagarde and Langbehn—to be unrecognized, unheeded or forgotten by the nation.

The conservative party, instead of inscribing the ideas of these men on its banner and bearing it aloft before the people, concentrated what thought it had left, on slogans like "for Throne and Altar" or "for Church and State." It produced no single politician of note, and in the intellectual and spiritual barrenness that had overtaken it, was reduced to delegating the philosophic, legal and political leadership to Stahl. The party in its simplicity even rejoiced in this strange auxiliary and there are still conservatives, constitutional lawyers even, who see in Stahl the founder of conservatism in Germany. Stahl was in fact not the founder, but the destroyer of German conservatism. He tried to rescue conservatism, to analyse it into a new synthesis. One of his recent apologists pleads: "if Stahl was a man of compromises, he compromised on principle" without realizing that this plea is the condemnation of Stahl as a conservative politician. Conservatism can tolerate no compromise, the food on which liberalism battens. Bismarck’s Realpolitik showed no trace of compromise and its eternal see-sawing: "on the one hand . . . on the other hand. . . ." Stahl, both as man and politician, belonged essentially to the liberalism which he attacked, rather than to the conservatism for which he fought. His dogma of the Third Empire of a Christian State was an amalgam of protestant and catholic, professional and constitutional, mediaeval and modern ingredients. It is highly characteristic that the idea which weighed least in his system was that of nationality, which had been the corner stone of Freiherr von Stein’s. Stahl the rationalist possessed no mystic experience, no nationalist experience, no vision—only a conception of painstaking construction. His saying that we need not fear revolution but only disintegration, nevertheless remains memorable.

It would be unfair to say that Stahl disintegrated the conservative party, but he did disintegrate the conservative philosophy. The party remained a reactionary party, and a time came when the more reactionary a politicians was, the more the conservatives welcomed him. Instead of the natural, organic, national basis which conservative philosophy had possessed in Stein and Bismarck, Stahl introduced an eclectic, formal, utilitarian basis. Conservatism lost the battle against revolution and became more and more helpless, while it made more and more concessions to liberalism. Bismarck had observed that the conservative party was beginning to lack an inner raison d’être and commended to it the conception of "conservative progress." This rudderless drift of the conservatives led to the foundation of a new "free-conservative" party, a makeshift which strove to unite two incompatibles, liberalism and conservatism.

The century in Germany was the century of liberalism, not the loud-voiced, national-liberalism that made itself so vocal after the foundation of the Empire, but the free-thinking, rational liberalism of the earlier days. It was this which undermined all parties and principles, and which destroyed our unity in the War. Its vice was opportunism and lack of principle; its peculiarity was that its adherents always fell victims to their own liberalism because their logic ended in theory and was never effectively translated into practice. Then they gazed in mute amazement at the broken crockery round their feet and fled from the scene as betrayers betrayed. Such was German liberalism. Its greatest crime was its crass stupidity. Stupidity passed into crime when liberalism ceased to be the toy of idealists, students and worthy democrats—as it had been from 1814–1818—and fell into the hands of publicists. Then the intellectual knight errants broke loose, trampled in their inky warfare on the German language—which has never been so badly mauled as by Young Germany—and finally knocked those breaches in our classical inheritance which for half a century allowed the floods of a vulgar materialism to pour in. To add a political to their literary misdeeds they withdrew the support they owed to Friedrich List and tormented that great man to death with their petty persecutions. Finally it was they who opposed every conceivable obstacle to Bismarck’s efforts to unite the nation. It was their political economists again who just before the outbreak of the World War preached their comforting doctrine of free trade, assuring us that in the case of war Germany was the most happily situated of all the nations, surrounded by friendly neutral countries from whom she could easily provision and supply herself. Now, when tragedy has overtaken us, and the hopes held out by President Wilson have deceived us—and no one believed so firmly in these as our liberals—they raise the most illogical whine (for by hypothesis the democrat is necessarily a pacifist) that the German government should have seized the unique opportunity of the Russo-Japanese war to eliminate for ever the enemy on our eastern frontier! It is of course more than doubtful whether the Government, had it been ever so inclined, could at that time have persuaded a Reichstag riddled with liberalism to adopt so un-liberal and imperialist a policy!

Our enemies were very differently situated. Their reason proved an admirable guide: by lying (of course), by a most cunning propaganda based on the crafty distortion of fact, by foul means if not by fair, they at any rate reached their goal. Their outward success is so brilliant that it tends to mask their moral failure. Disillusionment exists only on our side. We are the only people to enquire: what has become of the ideas of 1789: liberty, equality, fraternity?

Fraternity? Versailles dealt a blow to the brotherhood of nations from which it will not readily recover. We realize too late that the imperialism we opposed is still the best social scheme for an overpopulated country and that we were the nation in Europe which most had need of it. After a peace which robs the German working man of the chance to work, there can exist only one foreign policy for us: one which shall secure us freedom of movement, one which shall burst the gates of the prison house in which otherwise we are doomed to perish. Equality? Before the War, Germany was ahead of other countries in social reform; her social-democrat party seemed the socialist group in Europe which was most likely consistently to think socialist doctrines to their conclusions, and put them to a practical test as soon as it attained to power. We know today how slow and heavy-footed our socialist thought has been. The Revolution would have brought us at least one advantage if it had convinced us that the problems confronting socialism is not the conflicting interests of classes, but the unity of the nation as a whole, assuring to each class its right to live, treating as superfluous only the profiteers of war and revolution. The greatest war-profiteers are our enemies, who nation by nation carried off the spoils of war.

Liberty? Before the War we were the freest people on the earth; we have since become the most enslaved: enslaved within, enslaved without. Our sole freedom consists in the paper constitution we have given ourselves; and in exercising this freedom we are wholly dependent on the will of our enemies. We were told that we could safely trust ourselves to the liberality of our enemies, who were willing to conclude peace with a democratic Germany. It would be another gain from our Revolution though not the one the Revolution aimed at—if it taught us to revise our whole idea of liberalism. Our enemies interpreted freedom differently from us. They found that it produced most excellent results. There was no need to define the term, the magic of the word sufficed. There was no party, in any of the countries boasting enlightenment, that did not shrewdly dub itself liberal. In France, radical and clerical, socialist and royalist are liberal. Whigs and tories are liberal in England; in America both the parties. In all parties the simple-minded are liberal in good faith, the schemers with evil intent. No party, however, can forgo the advantage of calling itself liberal; yet their idea of freedom precludes no intolerance, no persecution of others, no slavery; it coexists with extension of territory and the strangulation of border states. The German liberal looks on with embarrassment and often with righteous indignation when he sees the old, lofty ideals betrayed: nationality, self-determination, protection of minorities; when he sees the casuistry which is used to throw an appearance of justice over all the injustice that is being wrought at the expense of one nationality. The German freemason (who is always a liberal) protests, when he is reproached with all the proved intrigues of the German lodges before the War, that he knew nothing of all this, that he had nothing to do with it. We believe him. The German lodges were the victims of the everlasting German credulity. We took as sacred gospel whatever yarns our enemies chose to spin: we believed in the great watchwords for which the War was waged. Our enemies gave them the interpretation that happened to suit them. Our German liberals were obliged enough to act as intermediaries, to such good effect that every liberal in Germany turned his back on the German cause. This suited the plans that underlay the World War. The War was not a conspiracy timed for a given day and hour. It was something much more dangerous. Germany was safely left to suffer the effects of German liberalism. The Allies had no better ally than simple human stupidity.