LIBERTY.

Auckland Star, Volume LVX, Issue 268, 12 November 1934, Page 6

LIBERTY.

ANOTHER REVOLUTION NEEDED

WORLD'S NEW IDEAL.

(By GEORGE BIRMINGHAM.)

To say that we are living through a period of revolution is to utter the triteat of commonplaces. The most careless of observers can scarcely have failed to notice that country after country—Jßuesia, Italy, Germany, Spain, with others of less importance—have upset their old system of government and embarked on seas of experiment. All that is obvious. Nor is there anything about the fact itself which will strike the student of European history as strange. We have had times befoi e when the revolutionary spirit has possessed men and a passion tor change has set thrones tottering and shaken the foundations of social order. What is strange and rather terrifying is that our revolutions are different in their ideals from any that went before. Their aim is new; so new that it would strike all their predecessors in revolution as outrageous arid even extremely wicked. All previous revolutions had liberty as their avowed aim. It was so in seventeenth-century England. Hampden and Cromwell may not have achieved liberty, but they certainly wanted it. Milton, the literary representative of the revolutionary spirit of the time, wrote of Liberty with a passion like that which inspired the Hebrew prophets when they declaimed about truth and righteousness. When the. Americans in the eighteenth century accomplished their revolution they set up the famous Statue of Liberty as an expression of the idea which inspired them. The lady still stands there, though less admired than she used to be by strangers entering New York. We look at her, if, indeed, w e glance her way at all, with slightly pitying smiles, as at one whose clay is over. She was a beauty in her day, no doubt, and men toasted her with songs and shouts, but her face is a little wrinkled now and her eyes have lost their brightness. Yet she was adored once and the men who set her up believed in her.

The French, making their revolution, added Equality and' Fraternity to the Original Liberty, making a kind of trinity of their god. But these two did not keep their places long. Equality among men was so obviously an absurdity that the craziest idealist could not cling to it for long. Fraternity perished, choked with gore, when they got the guillotine going. Liberty, the true inspiration of the revolution, remained sincerely worshipped, sung by poets as the only goddess whom men can worship without loss of self-respect. The Old Ideal. Tho mid-nineteenth century revolutionary movements were all inspired by the same idea. It was the hope of Liberty which set Garibaldi marching, which won the "Ausgleich" for Hungary, erected barricades in the streets of Paris and inspired Mitchell and Davis in Ireland. The Englishman, who may or may not take his pleasures sadly, is certainly sober over ideals. He does not shout about them. But the thought of Liberty was at the back of the whole Victorian idea* of progress. He conceived it not so much as a battle flag, but as a kind of amendment to an Act of Parliament, something which "broadens slowly down, from precedent to precedent." But tho English most heartily desired Liberty. We might, if we wished, go back far beyond modern Europe. Tacitus, who wrote that Liberty must bo bought afresh every day— "Libortus quotidie emenda est"—certainly regarded it as something worth buying even if the price were high. St. Paul conceived of Liberty as one of the great gifts of Christianity to men. His city of God, that Jerusalem which is above, "is free." Tho effect of faith in Christ or men is to make them free. Liberty is something for which wo should "stand fast." It would be easy to cull expressions of this desire for Liberty from the writings of the greatest men of many ages and races. How strange, then, that it should disappear! Men no longer want it, or, if they wish for it at all, they prefer anything else when the choice is given to them. Pope credits Horace's peasant with a longing for "a crust of bread and Liberty." The peasant of our days is apparently of a different mind. He wants something better than a crust of bread and is quite content to let liberty go. Acceptance of Authority.

Whatever forms our revolutions take —Bolshevist in Russia, Fascist in Italy or Nazi in Germany—they are all united in their contempt for what men once held to be the most precious thing of all. They want efficiency. They want for prosperity. They even, rather pathetically, want peace and security (which they seldom get). They do not want Liberty. A blind, patient acceptance of authority is the characteristic of all our newer political movements, whether we dignify them with the title of revolutions or not. And this is not merely an apathy born of hopelessness and suffering. It comes of an intellectual conviction, clearly expressed by leaders of thought, dumbly accepted by the rest of us, that the whole idea of Liberty is a mistaken one. Not only is it so difficult to realise as to be practically unobtainable. "Oh, Liberty I worshipped thee and found thee but a shade." It is actually regarded as in itself wrong. Men ought not to be free —this is what it comes to.

So vigorously has this doctrine been preached that it has won almost universal acceptance. Only among English-speaking peoples is there any survival of the conception of Liberty as something desirable. Even among them it seems to bo weakening, if not perishing. Politically we are content to suffer with scarcely a protest the continual encroachments in the executive power on the sphere of legislation. We are inclined to acquiesce in the idea that it is the function of government to create public opinion, instead of submitting to it. Examples from other countries of this mass suggestion are startling and horrible, but they have not warned us of the danger of such policies here. There are occasionally signs of a desire to curtail the independence of the judiciary. In commercial life there are similar signs of a tendency to accept the dictatorship of union or trust, so that the idea of a man's doing what he likes with his own, so dear to our fathers, has almost vanished from among us. Another Revolution. Why should not we have a revolution, here or in America or both? We should be in the fashion, for every self-respecting people is either having or threatening to have one. There would be nothing surprising about it, for we are constantly being told that such a thing is impending and so we must be accustomed to the idea. But let ours be a revolution of the old-fashioned kind, one that aims at securing, not at suppressing. Liberty. We could do the thing in proper stylo and keep up the recognised standard in the number of our executions. There are plenty of people who profess to despise Liberty, as old-fashioned and out of date. They could be hanged, shot or otherwise disposed of without exciting an indignant reaction. Instead of feeling "out of things" and admitting a shameful insularity, we shall be in the midstream of a great movement, revolutionaries in a i world given over to revolution. Yet we should be no blind followers of Slavs, Latins or Teutons. We should ■proclaim our originality by revoluting the other way round, the opposite way from that chosen by everybody General Press.)