Liberalism versus Imperialism

There is no sentiment in a nation so dangerous, there is no sentiment so easy to stimulate, as the false excess of patriotism. There is probably no country in the world from China to Peru in which the sub-conscious voices of national egotism do not persistently whisper in men's ears the same intoxicating tale: ' "We are the pick and flower of nations, and (in one sense or another) the chosen people of God! Various foreigners may or may not have their good points, but only we are really whole and right and normal. Other nations boast and are aggressive; only we are modest and content with our barest due, though it is obvious that we are by nature specially qualified for ruling others, and no unprejudiced person can doubt that our present territories ought to be increased. That our yoke is a pure blessing to all who come under it is a plain fact, proved by the almost unanimous testimony of our own citizens, our historians, our missionaries, our soldiers, our travellers, and only denied out of spite by a few envious foreigners, whom no one believes!"'

Sentiments like these call them patriotism, Jingoism, Chauvinism, or what you will form a strong and persistent force, valuable when checked, dangerous when stimulated, and charged with all the elements of exasperation and explosion whenever there is most need for patience and for care.

There is also in most civilized countries another party, inspired, consciously or unconsciously, by the older school of English Liberals, who do not accept the extravagant pretensions of their own countrymen; who judge of national honour by more or less the same standards as they apply to private honour; who believe in international morality and in the co-operation of nations for mutual help ; who, if they are to dream at all, will dream not of Armageddons and Empires, but of progress and freedom, and the ultimate fraternity of mankind.

Francis Wrigley Hirst, from the Introduction to "Liberalism and the Empire", 1900

The bureaucrat and the business man ...

Ernest Benn; capitalist, smoker, all-round good egg

"The bureaucrat and the business man are from two separate worlds. The former works behind the force of Law: it is not his business to consider his customer, he has merely to issue the form and follow it up with a summons. The latter lives by the favour of his customer and, if he would succeed, every moment of his waking hours must be devoted to the study of better ways of serving and thus winning further favour.

The two worlds are as poles apart, and the inhabitant of one can be nothing but a nuisance in the other. The bureaucrat works by force, he imposes his pleasure upon his victim, he enjoys security firmly founded upon the might of the State, and the ultimate, logical end of all he stands for is slavery and war. The business man goes bankrupt unless he can win the favour of a public free to accept or refuse his proffered service, the logical consequences of his activities being plenty and peace."

Ernest Benn - 'Happier Days' (1949) p 96

He's talking about Britain's exit from the Gold Standard

"To this day sterling's reputation has not recovered from the blow it unwillingly received under the policy adopted in September 1931. And this policy became a "pattern" not only for the British but for many other Treasury chiefs. At first, the damage was moderated by a general understanding that a banker's bankruptcy is "excusable" when his debtors leave him in the lurch. Excusable or not, the result was a violent shock not only to the prestige of England but to the reputation of the whole privately managed system of international finance based on gold.

The downfall of the gold standard became the wellspring of an intentional legend which might be described as the "Keynesian trap." It has become a dogma that it was the 1925 return to sterling's pre-1914 parity that necessitated the subsequent devaluation, if not the Great Depression, altogether. As far as this writer is aware, no one has made any attempt to demonstrate the logical or causal "mechanism" which could connect the abandonment of the gold standard in 1931 with the return to gold in 1925 other than that the one followed the other after a six and a half years' interval!-post hoc ergo propter hoc. Since the burden of proof should rest on proponents of this thesis, a few questions may be pertinent.

1) Would the choice in 1925 of a lower parity to gold, or of no parity at all, have strengthened the British balance of payments beyond providing "monetary" reliefl49 Suffice it to recall that by, or before, the end of 1926 British prices were generally adjusted to theAmerican level.

2) By what mysterious interplay of forces did sterling's return to the old parity bring about a world-wide crisis? How did it promote or provoke the domestic overindebtedness in the United States and the excessive capital flow to Germany-or the illiquidity of German banks and the overproduction of prime commodities? Patently, the purpose of the "Keynesian trap" is to divert attention from the errors, mischiefs, misjudgments, and maladjustments, both public and private; which accumulated and were compounded during the seventeen-year period beginning with the inflationary financing of the war and the world-wide disruptions it brought about.

3) If a chief obstacle to restoring a "healthy" British trade balance was the obstructionism of organized labor, as has been pointed out, how would this obstacle have been removed by returning to a sterling of a lower parity, or of none at all?

Sterling's departure from gold was greeted with sarcasm by Britain's enemies and with enthusiasm by a broad sector of the AngloAmerican economic "intelligentsia." Keynes, who at the moment, oddly enough, was opposed to devaluation, became the hero of the day. Had he not opposed the return to gold in 1925, almost singlehandedly? He was vindicated; the event demonstrating, allegedly, that a postwar gold standard was doomed from the outset. In reality, nothing of. the sort had been established."

Melchior Palyi: 'The Twilight of Gold'. pg 272

More dusty learning

Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Sphere and Duties of Government (The Limits of State Action) (1854 ed.) [1792]

CHAPTER II.

of the individual man, and the highest ends of his existence.

The true end of Man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal and immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole.

Freedom is the grand and indispensable condition which the possibility of such a development presupposes; but there is besides another essential,—intimately connected with freedom, it is true,—a variety of situations. Even the most free and self-reliant of men is thwarted and hindered in his development by uniformity of position. But as it is evident, on the one hand, that such a diversity is a constant result of freedom, and on the other, that there is a species of oppression which, without imposing restrictions on man himself, gives a peculiar impress of its own to surrounding circumstances; these two conditions, of freedom and variety of situation, may be regarded, in a certain sense, as one and the same. Still, it may contribute to perspicuity to point out the distinction between them.

“Germany’s greatest philosopher of freedom.” - Friedrich Hayek

Every human being, then, can act with but one force at the same time: or rather, our whole nature disposes us at any given time to some single form of spontaneous activity. It would therefore seem to follow from this, that man is inevitably destined to a partial cultivation, since he only enfeebles his energies by directing them to a multiplicity of objects. But we see the fallacy of such a conclusion when we reflect, that man has it in his power to avoid this one-sideness, by striving to unite the separate faculties of his nature, often singly exercised; by bringing into spontaneous co-operation, at each period of his life, the gleams of activity about to expire, and those which the future alone will kindle into living effulgence; and endeavouring to increase and diversify the powers with which he works, by harmoniously combining them, instead of looking for a mere variety of objects for their separate exercise. That which is effected, in the case of the individual, by the union of the past and future with the present, is produced in society by the mutual co-operation of its different single members; for, in all the stages of his existence, each individual can exhibit but one of those perfections only, which represent the possible features of human character. It is through such social union, therefore, as is based on the internal wants and capacities of its members, that each is enabled to participate in the rich collective resources of all the others. The experience of all, even the rudest, nations, furnishes us an example of a union thus formative of individual character, in the union of the sexes.

Peter Hitchens: ensnared in the Burkean Knot

Last week I had the pleasure of journalist, writer etc. Peter Hitchens stopping by to hale me across the precipitous gorge which threads between conservative Hatfield and libertarian McCoy.

Unfortunately I fear some other passing flaneur of the bloggevards determined him to push off before I had a chance to test his parry. Crunching further through metaphorical gears, I arrive at my appraisal of his predicament: He is caught in a Burkean knot.

Unable to wriggle backwards or forwards, either way would lead to escape, but instead he remains forever captured in the moment of reaction to revolution, throwing out the baby of natural liberty with the undoubtedly filthy Jacobin bathwater, seeking comfort from institutions made virtuous by their long continuance, and rejecting the pursuit of any lofty principle found outside the compass of Archbishop Cranmer's church.

But back yonder calls him a blind Samson:

the gorgeous John Milton

If every action which is good, or evill in man at ripe years, were to be under pittance, and prescription, and compulsion, what were vertue but a name, what praise could be then due to well-doing, what gramercy to be sober, just or continent? many there be that complain of divin Providence for suffering Adam to transgresse, foolish tongues! when God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had bin else a meer artificiall Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions. ['in the motions' i.e., in a puppet show]

We our selves esteem not of that obedience, or love, or gift, which is of force: God therefore left him free, set before him a provoking object, ever almost in his eyes herein consisted his merit, herein the right of his reward, the praise of his abstinence. Wherefore did he creat passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly temper'd are the very ingredients of vertu?

They are not skilfull considerers of human things, who imagin to remove sin by removing the matter of sin; for, besides that it is a huge heap increasing under the very act of diminishing, though some part of it may for a time be withdrawn from some persons, it cannot from all, in such a universall thing as books are; and when this is done, yet the sin remains entire. Though ye take from a covetous man all his treasure, he has yet one jewell left, ye cannot bereave him of his covetousnesse.

Banish all objects of lust, shut up all youth into the severest discipline that can be exercis'd in any hermitage, ye cannot make them chaste, that came not thither so: such great care and wisdom is requir'd to the right managing of this point. Suppose we could expell sin by this means; look how much we thus expell of sin, so much we expell of vertue: for the matter of them both is the same; remove that, and ye remove them both alike.

John Milton: 'Aeropagitica'.

Forwards beckons a helping hand of Victorian Liberal Virtue, first with a swipe at the socialists, then a definition of the citizen - i.e., Milton's free individual strained through the experience of 200 years :

There is, again, a theory in economics and politics directly the opposite of our own, cutting at the root of our most obvious principles ; and it is growing daily. It involves an attack upon personal production, personal accumulation, and consequent personal possession : a theory which makes the individual and all the individual virtues of small account, and desires to emphasise rather the vague qualities of a State.

It would dissolve thrift, and self-control, and the personal honour which keeps a contract sacred, and replace them by a State reserve, by State control, and by a State system, releasing men from the burden of private rectitude. It is a theory which is absolutely certain to find stronger and stronger support as our economic system develops, unless it is met by an unflinching adherence to those older political principles which have strength left in them to shape the economic system itself. Though it will be dealt with later in this essay, it is worthy of consideration for a moment in these introductory sentences, because it forms so admirable an example of those clear hypotheses that frequently succeed in transforming the politics of a nation.

But though this clause is common to all definitions of Liberalism, there is another idea upon which it is dependent.

Don't laugh - it's Hilaire Belloc

There ran through the Liberal projects a corresponding definition of the citizen as a political unit. And it was a definition of what should be much more than of what was an ideal far more than an assertion of existing fact. But every attempt to make the actual citizen approach more nearly to that ideal, every attempt which might make his material and, above all, his moral conditions suited to such a development, every political movement which was likely to produce that ideal by the mere fact of presupposing it, was befriended and ultimately adopted by the Liberal party.

The citizen whom they saw as the best possible foundation upon which a free State could rest was one whose economic and political independence was not, indeed, irresponsible. He was to be answerable, but answerable not to individual men so much as to the general conditions of the nation around him. He was to be an individual possessor and producer of wealth. He was to exercise that faculty of self-restraint which is, even in the narrow field of mere economic science, the basis of all accumulation and of all sufficient material happiness. He was, again, to be so self-respecting a member of a society which depended upon his consent (and which only demanded his obedience on condition that he helped to frame the law), that he might be counted upon not to give his vote upon a general issue for purposes lower than those of the common good.

Hilaire Belloc: 'The Liberal Tradition', from 'Essays in Liberalism' (1897)

The answer to the Jacobins is not to be found in Burke, who is only a make-do in disaster, but rather in the pure and moral natural rights of Milton or else the idealistic scepticism (or do I mean 'sceptical idealism'?) of Liberal Victoriana.

Not the latest from the education debate

"If men will grant for a moment, and for the sake of argument, that, as some insist, our compulsory rate-supported system of education is wrong; that it is injurious to the domestic life of the poor; that it reduces the teacher to the position of an automaton; that it provides a quality of teaching utterly unsuited to the wants of a labouring population which certainly requires some form of technical training; that, here, it is brought face to face with its own incompetence, for some of the highest practical authorities declare that the technical education given in schools is a farce; that therefore it bars the way to all free arrangements between parents and employers, and to the only system of technical education which deserves the name; if this or even a part of it is true, if at best our educational system is a make-shift not altogether intolerable, how terrible are the difficulties to be overcome before we can retrace our steps and foster into vigorous life a new system, whose early beginnings have been repressed and strangled by the overgrowth of Government monopoly.

Those who still have an open mind should consider carefully this aspect of the question. Each addition to the responsibility of the State adds to the list of ill-contrived solutions of difficulty, and to the enlargement of the sphere of a stereotyped regimentation of human life. Inseparable from this obnoxious growth is the repression of private experiment and of the energy and inventiveness of human character. Instead thereof human character is degraded to a parasitic dependence on the assistance of the State, which after all proves to be but a broken reed."

Thomas Mackay, writing in the introduction to 'A Plea For Liberty' (1891), a collection of essays fighting the fallacies of the Fabians.

Those evil Victorian values

'Watson, we're off to Paris, so remember to bring your revolver'

"A handicap, which we have placed upon youth by expunging the lat remnants of a liberty which took centuries to evolve and which we once knew, is no small part of the charge which justice will lay at the door of the passing generation. Those of us who have passed middle life owe it as a duty to the rest to go on boring them with stories of the world as we knew it. Some day those stories will be remembered, and their value realised. Most young people are totally unaware that the Victorians moved about the world without any form of let or hindrance. Such a thing as a passport was unknown for practical purposes until the war. Travellers in Russia and stranger lands sometimes furnished themselves with a passport - a parchment sheet issues by the Foreign Office on the application of a banker - but even when secured very few of these documents were ever found to be necessary or useful. We walked from ship to quay, or from quay to ship in any port of the world without a question from anybody. No doubt the was on most of the landing stages a police agent on the look out for known criminals, criminals who under a passport system now appear to be the only persons who really succeed in moving freely from country to country.

Modern youth is incapable of understanding the moral indignation and the sense of degradation which afflicts us older people, bred in liberty , as we find ourselves queueing up to pass the iron grid at Dover, and entering even our own country with all the outward appearance of criminals entering gaol."

Sir Ernest J. P Benn - 'Honest Doubt' (1932)

Vox Unpopuli

"If it is suggested that Capitalism to be satisfactory must honour the bill for any stupidity which any parliament cares to devise, find the money at the moment when it is required, and still be able to prosper and provide the maximum standard of comfort for everyone, then some credence might be attached, but even then very little, to the outrageous theory of the failure of Capitalism.

Considered from the other and saner point of view, it becomes apparent that the triumphs and successes of Capitalism are immeasurably greater than is commonly supposed. The imagination boggles at the thought of the wealth and the comfort which might now be available for all if the money squandered by irresponsible and incompetent agents of the State had been left, like the smaller sums of half a century ago, to fructify in the pockets of the people."

Sir Ernest J. P. Benn - 'Honest Doubt' (1932)

Pocket Psychology

Joseph Chamberlain to John Morley:

"You have two faults," he once said, "you are sensitive and you are reserved. It was wrong to think that I meant anything amiss, and if you thought so, it was wrong not to have it out."

"Let me tell you something," I answered. "A man's weak points are usually parts of his strong ones, if he is lucky enough to have any. Sensitive-ness is an element or counterpart of sympathy, and a gift of sympathy either in a public man or anybody else is a tower of strength. Reserve, again, is an element in pride, and pride of the right sort is a tower of strength too. There's a dose of pocket psychology, of which I make you a present."

From John Morley's Recollections (vol 1)

Wisdom from the ombibulous Mr Mencken

What with our latter-day prohibitionists marching up and down and blowing their trumpets, finding ever more things that need banning, restricting and de-normalising, and their new campaign to claim victimhood, I sought relief from debating them with a few quotes from H.L. Mencken, who knew a thing or two about prohibition and its vile champions:

Yikes! What's that in his mouth? Another photo they will need to censor

"Puritanism - The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

“The real victim of moral legislation is always the honest, law-abiding, well-meaning citizen—what the late William Graham Summer called the Forgotten Man. Prohibition makes it impossible for him to take a harmless drink, cheaply and in a decent manner. In the same way the Harrison Act puts heavy burdens upon the physician who has need of prescribing narcotic drugs for a patient, honestly and for good ends. But the drunkard still gets all the alcohol that he can hold, and the drug addict is still full of morphine and cocaine."

"Five years of Prohibition have had, at least, this one benign effect: they have completely disposed of all the favorite arguments of the Prohibitionists. None of the great boons and usufructs that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more. The cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law has not increased, but diminished."

"A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank."

"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."

The good, old days of the Gold Standard

"The gold standard was "sacrosanct" to the generations brought up on the Adam Smith ideals of free markets, free from arbitrary and discriminatory interventions by governmental powers. Indeed, it was an essential instrument of economic freedom. It protected the individual against arbitrary measures of the government by offering a convenient hedge against "confiscatory" taxation, as well as against the depreciation or devaluation of the currency. It was an instrument of "mobility" within and beyond national borders. Above all, it raised a mighty barrier against authoritarian interferences with the economic process. "That insidious and crafty animal, vulgarly called a statesman or politician, whose councils are directed by the momentary fluctuations of affairs" (Adam Smith), had to keep the national budget in good order. Authoritarians of all denominations had to keep their inflationary propensities under control and to refrain from excessive taxation in order to forestall the loss of people's confidence in the currency, the breakdown ofthe standard. The public purse had to be held tight. The business community had to learn to live with the salutary realization that illiquidity caused by short-sighted overinvestment and irrational speculation would be penalized by loss of gold and an "automatic" tightening of the money supply, as well as a rise in the price of money.

The gold standard in the classical sense was part and parcel of an economic order. It was a keystone of the system of public law, social customs and institutions, called "capitalism"-the term coined by Karl Marx-a system that rested on what appears in perspective as virtually unlimited freedom of consumer choice, business enterprise, and markets."

Melchior Palyi; Twilight of Gold, 1914 - 1936, pg 5

RIchard Overton on Natural Rights

I've been doing a bit of reading from the great libertarians of the English Civil War period, one of which being Richard Overton, who laid out very clearly (at least as clear as 17th century English is to the modern reader) the principle of self-ownership, later developed by John Locke and other notables, e.g. Mr Jefferson, and the limits on state power. This was written during his illegal captivity by order of the House of Lords in 1646.

An arrow against all tyrants

An arrow against all tyrants and tyranny, shot from the prison of Newgate into the prerogative bowels of the arbitrary House of Lords and all other usurpers and tyrants whatsoever.

Wherein the original, rise, extent, and end of magisterial power, the natural and national rights, freedoms and properties of mankind are discovered and undeniably maintained;

the late oppressions and encroachments of the Lords over the commons legally (by the fundamental laws and statutes of this realm, as also by a memorable extract out of the records of the Tower of London) condemned;

the late Presbyterian ordinance (invented and contrived by the diviners, and by the motion of Mr Bacon and Mr Tate read in the House of Commons) examined, refuted, and exploded, as most inhumane, tyrannical and barbarous

By Richard Overton

Prerogative archer to the arbitrary House of Lords, their prisoner in Newgate, for the just and legal properties, rights and freedoms of the commons of England. Sent by way of a letter from him, to Mr Henry Marten, a member of the House of Commons

Imprimatur Rectat Justitia

Printed at the backside of the Cyclopian Mountains, by Martin Claw-Clergy, printer to the reverend Assembly of Divines, and are to be sold at the sign of the Subject's Liberty, right opposite to Persecuting Court. 1646

Sir,

To every individual in nature is given an individual property by nature not to be invaded or usurped by any. For every one, as he is himself, so he has a self-propriety, else could he not be himself; and of this no second may presume to deprive any of without manifest violation and affront to the very principles of nature and of the rules of equity and justice between man and man. Mine and thine cannot be, except this be. No man has power over my rights and liberties, and I over no man's. I may be but an individual, enjoy my self and my self-propriety and may right myself no more than my self, or presume any further; if I do, I am an encroacher and an invader upon another man's right — to which I have no right. For by natural birth all men are equally and alike born to like propriety, liberty and freedom; and as we are delivered of God by the hand of nature into this world, every one with a natural, innate freedom and propriety — as it were writ in the table of every man's heart, never to be obliterated — even so are we to live, everyone equally and alike to enjoy his birthright and privilege; even all whereof God by nature has made him free.

And this by nature everyone's desire aims at and requires; for no man naturally would be befooled of his liberty by his neighbour's craft or enslaved by his neighbour's might. For it is nature's instinct to preserve itself from all things hurtful and obnoxious; and this in nature is granted of all to be most reasonable, equal and just: not to be rooted out of the kind, even of equal duration with the creature. And from this fountain or root all just human powers take their original — not immediately from God (as kings usually plead their prerogative) but mediately by the hand of nature, as from the represented to the representers. For originally God has implanted them in the creature, and from the creature those powers immediately proceed and no further. And no more may be communicated than stands for the better being, weal, or safety thereof. And this is man's prerogative and no further; so much and no more may be given or received thereof: even so much as is conducent to a better being, more safety and freedom, and no more. He that gives more, sins against his own flesh; and he that takes more is thief and robber to his kind — every man by nature being a king, priest and prophet in his own natural circuit and compass, whereof no second may partake but by deputation, commission, and free consent from him whose natural right and freedom it is.

And thus sir and no otherwise are you instated into your sovereign capacity for the free people of this nation. For their better being, discipline, government, propriety and safety have each of them communicated so much unto you (their chosen ones) of their natural rights and powers, that you might thereby become their absolute commissioners and lawful deputies. But no more: that by contraction of those their several individual communications conferred upon and united in you, you alone might become their own natural, proper, sovereign power, therewith singly and only empowered for their several weals, safeties and freedoms, and no otherwise. For as by nature no man may abuse, beat, torment, or afflict himself, so by nature no man may give that power to another, seeing he may not do it himself; for no more can be communicated from the general than is included in the particulars whereof the general is compounded.

Read the rest here ...

Lew Rockwell nails American conservatism

"The problem with American conservatism is that it hates the left more than the state, loves the past more than liberty, feels a greater attachment to nationalism than to the idea of self-determination, believes brute force is the answer to all social problems, and thinks it is better to impose truth rather than risk losing one soul to heresy. It has never understood the idea of freedom as a self-ordering principle of society. It has never seen the state as the enemy of what conservatives purport to favor. It has always looked to presidential power as the saving grace of what is right and true about America."

Lew Rockwell, quoted in this article by Laurence M. Vance

Hat tip: Infowars

Ross McKitrick on Earth Hour

Over at Counting Cats I encounter a pithy piece of prose putting the boot into 'Earth Hour', written by Ross McKitrick, Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph, Ontario. Here's a little snippet:

"I abhor Earth Hour. Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity. Giving women the freedom to work outside the home depended on the availability of electrical appliances that free up time from domestic chores. Getting children out of menial labour and into schools depended on the same thing, as well as the ability to provide safe indoor lighting for reading. Development and provision of modern health care without electricity is absolutely impossible. The expansion of our food supply, and the promotion of hygiene and nutrition, depended on being able to irrigate fields, cook and refrigerate foods, and have a steady indoor supply of hot water. Many of the world’s poor suffer brutal environmental conditions in their own homes because of the necessity of cooking over indoor fires that burn twigs and dung. This causes local deforestation and the proliferation of smoke- and parasite-related lung diseases. Anyone who wants to see local conditions improve in the third world should realize the importance of access to cheap electricity from fossil-fuel based power generating stations. After all, that’s how the west developed.

The whole mentality around Earth Hour demonizes electricity. I cannot do that, instead I celebrate it and all that it has provided for humanity. Earth Hour celebrates ignorance, poverty and backwardness. By repudiating the greatest engine of liberation it becomes an hour devoted to anti-humanism. It encourages the sanctimonious gesture of turning off trivial appliances for a trivial amount of time, in deference to some ill-defined abstraction called “the Earth,” all the while hypocritically retaining the real benefits of continuous, reliable electricity. People who see virtue in doing without electricity should shut off their fridge, stove, microwave, computer, water heater, lights, TV and all other appliances for a month, not an hour. And pop down to the cardiac unit at the hospital and shut the power off there too.

I don’t want to go back to nature. Travel to a zone hit by earthquakes, floods and hurricanes to see what it’s like to go back to nature. For humans, living in "nature" meant a short life span marked by violence, disease and ignorance. People who work for the end of poverty and relief from disease are fighting against nature. I hope they leave their lights on."

It's an old one, but it still rings true

It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonored by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.

'Cromwell between two pillars' (?) ; from the British Library

Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter'd your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?

Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defil'd this sacred place, and turn'd the Lord's temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress'd, are yourselves gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.

In the name of God, go!

Oliver Cromwell; closing speech of the Long Parliament, 30 April 1653

Economics and Ethics

"Economics cannot itself decide on ethical judgments. But in order for anyone to make ethical judgments rationally, he must know the consequences of his various alternative courses of ac­tion. In questions of government intervention or union action, economics supplies the knowledge of these consequences. Knowl­edge of economics is therefore necessary, though not sufficient, for making a rational ethical judgment in these fields."

Murray N. Rothbard, from Man, Economy, and State -chapter 10; labor unions

Cobdenic Wisdom

One of the works of Francis W. Hirst, who I mentioned just below, is a collection of speeches and documents laying out the history of the Manchester School of Cobden, Bright and the gang. Here's a great quote from Richard Cobden:

‘I yield to no man in the world (be he ever so stout an advocate of the Ten Hours’ Bill) in a hearty good-will towards the great body of the working classes; but my sympathy is not of that morbid kind which would lead me to despond over their future prospects. Nor do I partake of that spurious humanity which would indulge in an unreasoning kind of philanthropy at the expense of the great bulk of the community. Mine is that masculine species of charity which would lead me to inculcate in the minds of the labouring classes the love of independence, the privilege of self-respect, the disdain of being patronized or petted, the desire to accumulate, and the ambition to rise. I know it has been found easier to please the people by holding out flattering and delusive prospects of cheap benefits to be derived from Parliament rather than by urging them to a course of self-reliance; but while I will not be the sycophant of the great, I cannot become the parasite of the poor.’

From the introduction to 'Free Trade and Other Fundamental Doctrines of the Manchester School'; editor Francis W. Hirst (-for more on brother Francis, here's a short bio by Mark Brady at The Freeman).

Francis Wrigley Hirst: another notable but neglected liberal

I have come across a 'new' writer. Francis W. Hirst, a trenchent Cobdenite liberal and one-time editor of the Economist, until forced to resign due to his opposition to the then current Great War.

It is a shame such a man's work languishes in obscurity, and it seems beholden on us modern, true liberals to raise him and his ilk out of the dusty shadows, and put him on the pedestal he merits.

Some of his works can be found at the Internet Archive. I have been perusing a collection of essays, one of which his, another by Hilaire Beloc, which at the turn of the 20th Century, sounded the trumpet for liberty and laissez-faire, against the old enemy, the protectionist tories and the new enemies, the liberals-in-name-only and their socialist chums.

To explain and justify the guiding principles of Liberal economics is becoming more and more necessary as each day carries us further away from the period of Com Law Repeal Free Trade was taught to the people in those days, firstly by argument, secondly, when argument had succeeded, by the comparison which experience afforded. Then for twenty or thirty years the arguments were forgotten, but belief in Free Trade was regarded as a condition of mental sanity. It was an axiom of English commerce and politics. The few Tory Protectionists who sat for agricultural constituencies were crotchety persons who gave considerable amusement but no uneasiness. Only within the last five years of trade depression has the real Protectionist agitation set in. However well advertised, a quack medicine will not sell in a healthy community. The inventor of a panacea will never make his fortune unless the variety of diseases which he engages to cure is indisputable. For certainty of the disease creates in the human mind a vague presupposition in favour of the promised remedy. The same consideration applied to Economics explains why the quack remedies of Bimetallism and Protection were able to make some head in the lean years of 1890- 1894.

However, alas, the protectionists are back, with happy visions of the past and future ...

"Merrie England " shows plainly enough that the modern monopoliser has the same idyllic cant in reserve ready to be produced for the benefit of the poverty-stricken State employee of the future. The present tactics of these amiable friends of the working man are to disguise from him the steady improvement which his condition is undergoing, and the solid comforts which year by year are being added to his lot. They attempt to distract his reason and excite his imagination by vulgar and overdrawn pictures of the squalor and wretchedness in the worst quarters of our great cities. Here we detect a temper worthy of the revolutionist who wants to upset society to its own certain misery, and then strut over the ruins he has himself created. On the other side stands the true social reformer, who nowadays frankly recognises the splendid progress of the last half century. Like the revolutionist, he refuses to acquiesce in inaction. Unlike him, he acknowledges with gratitude what he has learnt from his predecessors, and regards their conspicuous success as an earnest of that which will attend future efforts, if only they proceed from the same great principles towards the same desired goal.

It is sometimes asserted that there are quite new conditions to face. Society is so totally different to what it was in the days of Cobden and Bright. Humanity itselt has undergone some violent change. Burns was wrong : a man is not a man " for a' that" We are wonderfully in advance of our fathers. The up-to-date ephebe is a Socialist, an Evolutionist ; he can talk about the organic Unity of the State, and he professes an imperial instinct. Let us admit it at once: there has been a change — in terminology. The young man is deceived by the long Latin and Greek words, and so equipped thinks he means something different from what his father thought under more homely terms.

The organic unity of the State is one of those pretentious metaphors transferred from biology to politics, which suggest one kind of unity by another and totally different kind. The good of the community, the danger of sacrificing the whole to the part, and the greatest happiness of the greatest number, were conceptions perfectly understood by'the Corn Law Repealers and by those who abolished the Test Acts. Similarly, evolution is a long and somewhat stupid substitute for progress. Improvement in the common run of mankind depends upon the occasional "eccentricity " of individuals. Where free play is possible an individual will here and there strike out new adaptations to meet new wants. It was not the State or Society that made the steam engine but Stephenson and Watt, though without the State or Society the steam engine would have been an invention in vacuo. But the organised monotony and mechanical unity of a Socialistic State is the negation of free play, and consequently its appropriate motto should be not evolution and progress, but degradation and decay.

Benjamin Constant on Liberty; Ancient and Modern

I have come across an enlightening essay by Benjamin Constant, wherein he contrasts the concept of Liberty, as defined by the ancients, with that which is understood in the modern era. It is a useful analysis, as it sheds light on the causes of various follies which have held sway in the last two hundred years or so, and also confuse the best of us, in trying to assimilate the lessons of history, going back to Rome and Greece. It is worth reading the whole thing, which can be done at the Online Library of Liberty, but here's a snippet:

It follows from what I have just indicated that we can no longer enjoy the liberty of the ancients, which consisted in an active and constant participation in collective power. Our freedom must consist of peaceful enjoyment and private independence. The share which in antiquity everyone held in national sovereignty was by no means an abstract presumption as it is in our own day. The will of each individual had real influence: the exercise of this will was a vivid and repeated pleasure. Consequently the ancients were ready to make many a sacrifice to preserve their political rights and their share in the administration of the state. Everybody, feeling with pride all that his suffrage was worth, found in this awareness of his personal importance a great compensation.

This compensation no longer exists for us today. Lost in the multitude, the individual can almost never perceive the influence he exercises. Never does his will impress itself upon the whole; nothing confirms in his eyes his own cooperation. The exercise of political rights, therefore, offers us but a part of the pleasures that the ancients found in it, while at the same time the progress of civilization, the commercial tendency of the age, the communication amongst peoples, have infinitely multiplied and varied the means of personal happiness.

It follows that we must be far more attached than the ancients to our individual independence. For the ancients when they sacrificed that independence to their political rights, sacrificed less to obtain more; while in making the same sacrifice! we would give more to obtain less. The aim of the ancients was the sharing of social power among the citizens of the same fatherland: this is what they called liberty. The aim of the moderns is the enjoyment of security in private pleasures; and they call liberty the guarantees accorded by institutions to these pleasures .

What is politics?

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy."

Sir Ernest Benn*

* I've not known too much about Sir Ernest Benn until very recently, although I think the name has passed under my nose before, but he was a great campaigner for liberalism and laissez-faire in the first half of the 20th century, and wrote a large number of books and pamphlets, some of which can be found at the Mises Institute website.

If you're interested, he was Tony's uncle.