30 OCTOBER 1886, Page 5

DR. DALE ON THE NEW LIBERALISM.

THE report of the great meeting held at Birmingham on Tuesday, to do honour to Mr. Schnadhorst, the late Chairman of the Liberal Association, does not contain much to interest outsiders. Mr. Schnadhorst is a good organiser—his friends say, the beat in England—and he may deserve all honour from the Liberals of Birmingham ; but the results of his unusual experience which would be most interesting, are not to be found in his speeches. He is, perhaps necessarily, reticent on all subjects of dispute. The proceedings, therefore, however interesting to Birmingham itself, were to distant Liberals a little dull ; bat there was one much-applauded speech by Dr. Dale, which deserves more than passing attention. Dr. Dale, in the absence of Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Schnadhorst, is the most influential Liberal in Birmingham, usually the most advanced of Liberal towns, and he tried on Tuesday to explain carefully what he believed to be the guiding principle of the newer, as opposed to the older Liberalism of the country. That is a most worthy effort, and one in which we should wish a special success to Dr. Dale ; because if he suc- ceeded we should know the inner thought of those whom he represents—that is, all the philanthropic Nonconformists, and probably a much larger class—better than if it were filtered through the mind of any statesman. Unfortunately, Dr. Dale did not altogether succeed in his attempt. His words are as clear as words can be, but they do not generate in the minds of his audience equally clear thoughts. He describes, or rather defines, the difference between the old and the new Liberalism thus :—" We have no more fervour for our country than ,our fathers had, no more passionate zeal than theirs for political liberty ; yet there is a difference between the old school of Liberalism and the new. The cry of the old reformers was for political justice. They demanded the reform or the aboli- tion of institutions and laws which imposed a restriction on the personal rights and freedom of individual Englishmen. There was great need for a movement of that kind in their days, and I am not quite sure that the work which they began has been as yet altogether finished. But I venture to think that the new Liberalism derives its force, not so much from a love of inflexible justice, as from a deep pity for the hard- ships of the poor, for the misery which remains among us notwithstanding the growth of national wealth and prosperity, for the monotonous and cheerless lives of great masses of the people for the awful waste of the intellectual powers and the possibilities of moral nobleness among the less fortunate of our population. Our cry, indeed, is still for justice, but I am inclined to think that what we mean is really a cry for pity and for mercy. Our fathers seem to have thought that as far as Government was concerned, both municipal and national, all that was necessary was to leave to the people the free exercise of their powers. They anticipated and applied to politics the great scientific law of the survival of the fittest. They asked that in the struggle for existence Government should leave the powers and industry of the people altogether unfettered, and allow the strong to achieve the success which their strength enabled them to win. During the last fifteen or sixteen years some of us have come to have other thoughts. We have asked whether it is not possible for Government, both national and municipal, instead of leaving the weak to be crushed by the strong, instead of leaving the fallen to be trampled in the dust, by the prosperous army which is advancing to victory and wealth,—whether it is not possible for the strong to use their strength to lift the weak to a higher and nobler position, and to raise the fallen from their low estate V"

The defect of that statement is, that with much superficial clearness it is seen when carefully examined, to be hope- lessly vague. What does Dr. Dale want sincere Liberals actually to do I If he only means, that having done justice, and still intending to do justice, we should now also see whether we cannot also "raise the weak," every Liberal will be with him, and we should acknowledge that he was

teaching only an application of Christianity to politics. If, for example, having made law just, and intending still to keep it just, we should turn to consider whether the poor are not unfairly weighted by the cost of law, we should be examining into a grievance which it might turn out to be a national duty to remove. But is there not in Dr. Dale's mind an idea which goes a good deal further than this He seems, at all events, to imply that justice and pitifulness have hitherto been at variance ; that we have opened the road to the strong, to the direct detriment of the weak. Is that tame It certainly was not the idea of the older Liberals, who thought that in opening the road to the strong—in, for example. removing all commercial restrictions—they were directly benefiting the weak. The feebler the man, the more does he feel the closing of the road. The accumulation of wealth, the cheapening of food, the diffusion of knowledge, all improve instead of deteriorating the conditions of the lot of the weak. A proportion of the poor are still badly fed, wretchedly housed, and unhappily situated in respect to security of wages ; but the great body of them, 80 per cent., say, of all the industrious, are infinitely better-off than they ever were,—are probably better-off than any thick population not endowed with limitless land ever was since history began. We forget too much the condition of the residuum between 1820 and 1845, a condition worse than that of savages in good climates. Dr. Dale complains that the strong prevail ; and, in a sense, that is true. But does he mean to assert that the State can alter or even modify that cardinal law of Nature? He may smooth the road for the weak till it is as level as a billiard-table, but the strong will only travel along it all the faster. What does he desire I. That the successful should surrender part of their gains to the unsuccessful Well, we do not object. We approve, so long as

surrender is voluntary; but if it is to be involuntary, Dr. Dale, besides diminishing the stimulus to industry, will very soon find himself running athwart the moral law. The fact that John is too comfortable for his own good, does not entitle Tom to take his comfort away, either by direct force or through the agency of the State. We have a right to tax all, in order to keep all alive ; but we have no right to tax all, in order that all, weak and strong, lazy and in- dustrious, unsuccessful and prosperous, should have equal comfort. That is a mere device for arresting progress, which depends, as far as material civilisation is concerned, upon the fact that he who makes most exertion will advance farthest. There is no effortless progress possible in this world ; and if there is to be effort, those who can make the most will be the most valuable and the best rewarded citizens of the community. If they are not, because they are impeded by

" pitiful " legislation, then they are robbed of what is certainly theirs. Like Dr. Dale, we believe there are principles higher than the survival of the fittest ; but still, that survival is a law which it is in vain to try to alter. Dr. Dale must have had many competitors in the struggle for influence in Birmingham ; but if Birmingham had " pitied " them all, and kept them all equal, or even all with their proportion of influence, would that have benefited Birmingham?

Dr. Dale will probably tell us that he is not thinking of laws to impede free competition, or laws to remedy inequalities, or any laws which Socialists would approve, but only of plans to use the aggregate strength of the community for the benefit of all. He wishes, that is, to see the community, or rather the municipality—for he clearly sees this must be local work —make a great effort to rehouse the people, to give them good education, to provide them free libraries, to extend the appli- cation of insurance, and perhaps to add considerably to the means and the range of medical relief. He does, indeed, say that he would like to make municipal life lighter and brighter for the poor ; and these, or plans like these, may be his accepted means. If that is so, the quicker he passes from generalities to particulars the better ; but then, why does he dwell on these ideas as differentiating the newer from the older Liberalism ? As far as we know, the older Liberals reject no plans of improvement in principle, though they sometimes object to detailed plans as likely to diminish self-reliance. They supported the Poor Law, though they reformed it ; they secured education for the people ; they carried the Vaccination Law, which in principle involves the whole theory of sanitation for the poor; they passed or con- sented to the Free Library Act, and the Lodging-house Act, and all the Acts which forbid the over-tasking of the weak, or like the Truck Act, their plunder under plausible pretexts. They are perfectly willing to do what remains to be done, if only

the reformers will point out the need and show them the road to its relief. All they object to do is to take away the pro- perty of one class for the benefit of another, as might have been done under Mr. Collings's original proposal ; or to destroy private enterprise by State competition, as would have been done through the village Stores once suggested by Mr. Chamberlain; or to impair parental responsibility, as would be the effect of giving really free education. There is no division, still less quarrel, between the sections upon plans thus limited, except as to details which, under the attrition of discussion, could speedily be filed down into shape. They are as benevolent as their rivals, though with a deeper consciousness of the hardness of natural laws, and perhaps a stronger feeling of distaste for that position of dependence into which some of the newest Radicals would cheerfully throw a fourth of the population. They have, we admit, an impres- sion that independence is something worth retaining, even if it be only independence of the charitable and the good. The only substantial difference is, we suspect, betrayed in a little slip of Dr. Dale's. He says he thinks that by "justice," new Radicals mean "pity." The older Liberals think so too ; and as they think justice and pity different things, and the first of them indispensable to the maintenance of any society at all, they object to the confusion between the two which Dr. Dale, in his creditable zeal for the poor, openly approves.