HISTORY is much decried;it is a tissue of errors,we are told,no doubt correctly;and rival historians expose each other's blunders with gratification.Yet the worst historian has a clearer view of the period he studies than the best of us can hope to form of that in which we live.The obscurest epoch is to-day;and that for a thousand reasons of inchoate tendency,conflicting report,and sheer mass and multiplicity of experience;but chiefly,perhaps,by reason of an insidious shifting of landmarks.Parties and ideas continually move,but not by measurable marches on a stable course;the political soil itself steals forth by imperceptible degrees,like a travelling glacier,carrying on its bosom not only political parties but their flag-posts and cantonments;so that what appears to be an eternal city founded on hills is but a flying island of Laputa.It is for this reason in particular that we are all becoming Socialists without knowing it;by which I would not in the least refer to the acute case of Mr.Hyndman and his horn-blowing supporters,sounding their trumps of a Sunday within the walls of our individualist Jericho -but to the stealthy change that has come over the spirit of Englishmen and English legislation.A little while ago,and we were still for liberty;'crowd a few more thousands on the bench of Government,'we seemed to cry;'keep her head direct on liberty,and we cannot help but come to port.'This is over;LAISSER FAIRE declines in favour;our legislation grows authoritative,grows philanthropical,bristles with new duties and new penalties,and casts a spawn of inspectors,who now begin,note-book in hand,to darken the face of England.It may be right or wrong,we are not trying that;but one thing it is beyond doubt:it is Socialism in action,and the strange thing is that we scarcely know it.
Liberty has served us a long while,and it may be time to seek new altars.Like all other principles,she has been proved to be self-exclusive in the long run.She has taken wages besides (like all other virtues)and dutifully served Mammon;so that many things we were accustomed to admire as the benefits of freedom and common to all were truly benefits of wealth,and took their value from our neighbours'poverty.
A few shocks of logic,a few disclosures (in the journalistic phrase)of what the freedom of manufacturers,landlords,or shipowners may imply for operatives,tenants,or seamen,and we not unnaturally begin to turn to that other pole of hope,beneficent tyranny.Freedom,to be desirable,involves kindness,wisdom,and all the virtues of the free;but the free man as we have seen him in action has been,as of yore,only the master of many helots;and the slaves are still ill-fed,ill-clad,ill-taught,ill-housed,insolently treated,and driven to their mines and workshops by the lash of famine.So much,in other men's affairs,we have begun to see clearly;we have begun to despair of virtue in these other men,and from our seat in Parliament begin to discharge upon them,thick as arrows,the host of our inspectors.The landlord has long shaken his head over the manufacturer;those who do business on land have lost all trust in the virtues of the shipowner;the professions look askance upon the retail traders and have even started their co-operative stores to ruin them;and from out the smoke-wreaths of Birmingham a finger has begun to write upon the wall the condemnation of the landlord.Thus,piece by piece,do we condemn each other,and yet not perceive the conclusion,that our whole estate is somewhat damnable.Thus,piece by piece,each acting against his neighbour,each sawing away the branch on which some other interest is seated,do we apply in detail our Socialistic remedies,and yet not perceive that we are all labouring together to bring in Socialism at large.Atendency so stupid and so selfish is like to prove invincible;and if Socialism be at all a practicable rule of life,there is every chance that our grand-children will see the day and taste the pleasures of existence in something far liker an ant-heap than any previous human polity.And this not in the least because of the voice of Mr.Hyndman or the horns of his followers;but by the mere glacier movement of the political soil,bearing forward on its bosom,apparently undisturbed,the proud camps of Whig and Tory.If Mr.
Hyndman were a man of keen humour,which is far from my conception of his character,he might rest from his troubling and look on:the walls of Jericho begin already to crumble and dissolve.That great servile war,the Armageddon of money and numbers,to which we looked forward when young,becomes more and more unlikely;and we may rather look to see a peaceable and blindfold evolution,the work of dull men immersed in political tactics and dead to political results.
