“FUTURE OF LIBERTY"

Taranaki Daily News, 29 December 1934, Page 20 (Supplement)

“FUTURE OF LIBERTY"

NOTABLE ADDRESS GIVEN DANGERS OF THE TIMES. GENERAL SMUTS’S WARNING. General Smuts, as Lord Rector by a majority vote of the students cast so long ago as November 17, 1931, appeared before the University of St Andrews on October 15 and delivered his address, which thus came just before the end of the period of three years for which he was elected. The address, “The Future of Liberty,” was a masterly survey of the condition of the European world to-day. The speaker began by referring to the common bond between small nations like Scotland and his own. “We small ones of the earth feel mutually drawn to each other in a world which has largely gons crazy with the problems of size and scale,” he said. In particular, he continued, they both cherished and practised liberty. as the fundamental rule of life. While inclined by their religious traditions to question the freedom of the will as a metaphysical principle, they both . made amends by applying freedom with. all the more energy as the practical rule of life. They' declined to submerge the individual in the State or the group, and they based their organisation of the State and society on individual freedom and the free initiative of the citizen. Their outlook remained that of free men in a world in which the tradition of freedom was, alas! steadily weakening,

There was a decay of principles which was eating at the very vitals of free government, and to him that appeared to be a far more serious danger than the risk of war. There was today a decay of tire individual’s responsibility and share in government which seemed to strike at the roots of human advance. c . THE INDIVIDUAL BASIC. The individual was basic to any world-order that was worth while. Individual freedom, individual independence of mind, individual participation in the difficult work of government seemed to him essential to all true progress. Yet to-day the individual seemed more and more at a discount in the new experiments of government which were being .tried out The sturdy individualism which had created all their best human values, seemed to be decaying in An atmosphere of lassitude and disillusion. Men and women had suffered until they were abdicating their rights as individuals. In their misery and helplessness they were surrendering to the mass will which led straight to autocracy. The feebleness of Continental democracy, its ineffectiveness in a crisis calling for swift and. decisive action, had contributed to this defeatist attitudp of the individual. And the result , was that, with. . this individualist prop of freedom gone, freedom itself seemed to be in danger. A . new sort of heroworship was arising, very different from that which Carlyle preached, which sappedthe foundations of individuality and made the individual prostrate himself before his national leader as before a god. “That way extreme danger lies,” he said. “The road to Caesarism lies clear. The disappearance of the sturdy, in-dependent-minded, freedom-loving individual, and his replacement by a servile mass-mentality is the greatest human menace of our time. Here we reach what I firmly believe is the heart of the problem, the issue round which the greatest battles of this and the coming generation will be fought—if the cause of our civilisation itself is to be saved. I A CALL TO YOUTH. “As an old soldier in this cause I hope you will excuse me when I state thus bluntly my views on the dangers ahead as I see them. The issue of freedom, the most fundamental issue of all our civilisation, is once more squarely raised by what is happening in the world, and cannot be evaded. The danger signals are up in many colours and in many lands. The new tyranny, disguised in attractive patriotic colours, is enticing youth everywhere into its service. Freedom must make a great counterstroke to save itself and our fair Western civilisation. Once more the heroic call is coming to our youth. The fight for human freedom is indeed the supreme issue of the future, as it has always been in the past.

Although the ancient homelands of constitutional liberty ip the West are not yet seriously affected, we have to confess sadly that over large parts of Europe the cult of force—what in the Great War we used to call Prussianism

—has for the moment triumphed. Popular self-government and Parliaments are disappearing. The guarantees for private rights and civil liberties are going. Minorities are trampled upon; dissident views are not tolerated and are forcibly suppressed. For those who do not chose to fall into line there is the concentration camp, the distant labour camp in the wilds, or on the islands of the sea. “Intellectual freedom is disappearing with political freedom. Freedom of Conscience, of speech, of the Press, of thought and teaching, is in extreme danger. One party in the State usurps power and suppresses its opponents and becomes the State. The Press is made to write to order, and publia opinion is manufactured for the support of the autocracy. Even freedom of religion is no longer safe, and religious persecution, after being long considered obsolete, once more shows its horrid head. In many, if not most, European countries the standard of human freedom has already fallen far below that of the nineteenth century.

“perhaps I do not exaggerate jtfhen I

say that of what we call liberty in its full human meaning—freedom of thought, speech, action, self-expression —there is to-day less in Europe than there has been during the last 2000 years. In ancient Athens, in ancient Rome there was at any rate freedom of thought and speculation and teaching, and generally of religion. Now, in the twentieth century, intolerance threatens to once more become the order of the day. In spite of all our scientific expansion our essential human rights are contracting. The new dictatorship is nothing but the old tyranny writ large. I fear the new tyranny more than I fear the danger of another Great War. Tyranny is infectious. As Burke said, it is a weed which grows in all soils, and it is its nature to spread. Even in this island home of constitutional freedom I do not know that you are quite immune. Democracy seems to be going out of favour and out of fashion, and unles its methods can be overhauled, its unpopularity may involve the cause of liberty itself. “Let me state quite clearly that I am not against new experiments in human government. The extraordinary difficulties and complications of modem governments call for revised methods and new experiments. What I am here concerned with is the serious threat to freedom and self-government which is involved in the new experiments now being tried out bn the Continent. They are all based on a denial of liberty—not as a temporary expedient, but on principle. The assertion that they aim at the eventual enlargement of liberty is vain, in view of the fundamental negation of liberty on which they are based and the absorption of the individual by the State or the group which is their real objective. “I maintain that such a basis of human government is an anchronism, and a moral impossibility in our Western civilisation. The denial of free human rights must in the long run lead to a cataclysm. The machinery of democracy may call, and does call for reform, and the methods of enabling the people to exercise in freedom their influence on government may have to be altered from those at present in vogue. Our legislative machine especially is out of gear. But to suppose that in the modem world you can dispense with freedom in human government, that you can govern without the consent of the governed, is to fly in the face of decent human nature as well as the facts of history. “Dictatorship can only be tolerated as a temporary expedient, and can never be a permanent substitute fot free self-government. Freedom is the most ineradicable craving of human nature. Without it peace, contentment, and happiness, even manhood itself, are not possible. The declaration of Perides in his iuugsal Qiatisu feqJda.

for all time:—‘Happiness is Freedom, and Freedom is Courage.’ That is the fundamental equation of all politics and. all human government, and any system which ignores it is built on sand. “In these days of widespread backsliding, of lukewarmness or downright disloyalty to our fundamental human ideals, the countries which have always been in the forefront of the historic fight for human liberty have a very grave duty imposed on them. They cannot refuse the challenge of the times. They dare not abandon the cause which our forefathers rightly placed along with religion itself as calling for the highest loyalty and the greatest sacrifices. For even more than political principles and constitutions are at stake. The vision of freedom, of the liberation of the human spirit from its primeval bondage is perhaps the greatest light which has yet dawned on our human horizon. It forms the real spur of progress, the lure of our race in its ceaseless striving toward the future. According to Plato the movement of the world is from brute force to freedom, from fate or necessity to reason, from compulsion ta persuasion. Man’s progress through the ages is from a regime of domination to one of understanding, consent, and free co-operation. That great movement of liberation is the glory of our past. It is also bur inescapable programme for the future.”