The Abandoned Road

A programme whose basic thesis is, not that the system of free enterprise for profit has failed in this generation, but that it has not yet been tried. F. D. Roosevelt.

When the course of civilisation takes an unexpected turn, when instead of the continuous progress which we have come to expect, we find ourselves threatened by evils associated by us with past ages of barbarism, we blame naturally anything but ourselves. Have we not all striven according to our best lights, and have not many of our finest minds incessantly worked to make this a better world? Have not all our efforts and hopes been directed towards greater freedom, justice, and prosperity? If the outcome is so different from our aims, if, instead offreedom and prosperity, bondage and misery stare us in the face, is it not clear that sinister forces must have foiled our intentions, that we are the victims ofsome evil power which must be conquered before we can resume the road to better things? However much we may differ when we name the culprit, whether it is the wicked capitalist or the vicious spirit of a particular nation, the stupidity of our elders, or a social system not yet, although we have struggled against it for half a century, fully overthrown-we all are, or at least were until recently, certain of one thing: that the leading ideas which during the last generation have become common to most people of goodwill and have determined the major changes in our social life cannot have been wrong. We are ready to accept almost any explanation of the present crisis of our civilisation except one: that the present state of the world may be the result of genuine error on our own part, and that the pursuit of some of our most cherished ideals have apparently produced results utterly different from those which we expected.

While all our energies are directed to bringing this war to a victorious conclusion, it is sometimes difficult to remember that even before the war the values for which we are now fighting were threatened here and destroyed elsewhere. Though for the time being the different ideals are represented by hostile nations fighting for their existence, we must not forget that this conflict has grown out of a struggle of ideas within what, not so long ago, was a common European civilisation; and that the tendencies which have culminated in the creation of the totalitarian systems were not confined to the countries which have succumbed to them. Though the first task must now be to win the war, to win it will only gain us another opportunity to face the basic problems and to find a way of averting the fate which has overtaken kindred civilisations.

Now, it is somewhat difficult to think ofGermany and Italy, or of Russia, not as different worlds, but as products of a development of thought in which we have shared; it is, at least so far as our enemies are concerned, easier and more comforting to think that they are entirely different from us and that what happened there cannot happen here. Yet the history of these countries in the years before the rise of the totalitarian system showed few features with which we are not familiar. The external conflict is a result of a transformation of European thought in which others have moved so much faster as to bring them into irreconcilable conflict with our ideals, but which has not left us unaffected.

That a change of ideas, and the force of human will, have made the world what it is now, though men did not foresee the results, and that no spontaneous change in the facts obliged us thus to adapt our thought, is perhaps particularly difficult for the English to see, just because in this development the English have, fortunately for them, lagged behind most of the European peoples. We still think of the ideals which guide us and have guided us for the past generation, as ideals only to be realised in the future, and are not aware how far in the last twenty-five years they have already transformed, not only the world, but also this country. We still believe that until quite recently we were governed by what are vaguely called nineteenth-century ideas or the principle of laissez-faire. Compared with some other countries, and from the point of view of those impatient to speed up the change, there may be some justification for such belief. But although till 193 1 this country had followed only slowly on the path on which others had led, even by then we had moved so far that only those whose memory goes back to the years before the last war know what a liberal world has been like. 1

The crucial point of which people here are still so little aware is, however, not merely the magnitude of the changes which 1 Even in that year the Macmillan Report could speak already of “the change of outlook of the government of this country in recent times, its growing preoccupation, irrespective of party, with the management of the life of the people” and add that “Parliament finds itself increasingly engaged in legislation which has for its conscious aim the regulation of the day-to-day affairs of the community and now intervenes in matters formerly thought to be entirely outside its scope”. This could be said before, later in the same year, the country finally took the headlong plunge and, in the short space ofthe inglorious years 193 1 to 1939, transformed its economic system beyond recognition.

have taken place during the last generation, but the fact that they mean a complete change in the direction of the evolution of our ideas and social order. For at least twenty-five years before the spectre of totalitarianism became a real threat, we had progressively been moving away from the basic ideas on which European civilisation has been built. That this movement on which we have entered with such high hopes and ambitions should have brought us face to face with the totalitarian horror has come as a profound shock to this generation, which still refuses to connect the two facts. Yet this development merely confirms the warnings of the fathers of the liberal philosophy which we still profess. We have progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past. Although we had been warned by some of the greatest political thinkers of the nineteenth century, by de Tocqueville and Lord Acton, that socialism means slavery, we have steadily moved in the direction of socialism. And now that we have seen a new form ofslavery arise before our eyes, we have so completely forgotten the warning, that it scarcely occurs to us that the two things may be connected. 1

How sharp a break not only with the recent past but with the whole evolution of Western civilisation the modern trend towards socialism means, becomes clear if we consider it not merely against the background ofthe nineteenth century, but in a longer historical perspective. We are rapidly abandoning not the views merely of Cobden and Bright, of Adam Smith and Hume, or even of Locke and Milton, but one of the salient I Even much more recent warnings which have proved dreadfully true have been almost entirely forgotten. It is not yet thirty years since Mr. Hilaire Belloc, in a book which explains more of what has happened since in Germany than most works written after the event, explained that “the effect of Socialist doctrine on Capitalist society is to produce a third thing different from either ofits two begetters-to wit, the Servile State” (The Servile State, 191 3, 3rd ed. 1927, p. xiv).

characteristics of Western civilisation as it has grown from the foundations laid by Christianity and the Greeks and Romans. Not merely nineteenth- and eighteenth-century liberalism, but the basic individualism inherited by us from Erasmus and Montaigne, from Cicero and Tacitus, Pericles and Thucydides is progressively relinquished.