The methods and traditions of British politics maintain the form of two great parties, with rider groups seeking to gain specific ends in the event of a small Government majority.These two main parties are more or less heterogeneous in composition.Each, however, has certain necessary characteristics.The Conservative Party has always stood quite definitely for the established propertied interests.The land-owner, the big lawyer, the Established Church, and latterly the huge private monopoly of the liquor trade which has been created by temperance legislation, are the essential Conservatives.Interwoven now with the native wealthy are the families of the great international usurers, and a vast miscellaneous mass of financial enterprise.Outside the range of resistance implied by these interests, the Conservative Party has always shown itself just as constructive and collectivist as any other party.The great landowners have been as well-disposed towards the endowment of higher education, and as willing to co-operate with the Church in protective and mildly educational legislation for children and the working class, as any political section.The financiers, too, are adventurous-spirited and eager for mechanical progress and technical efficiency.They are prepared to spend public money upon research, upon ports and harbours and public communications, upon sanitation and hygienic organisation.Acertain rude benevolence of public intention is equally characteristic of the liquor trade.Provided his comfort leads to no excesses of temperance, the liquor trade is quite eager to see the common man prosperous, happy, and with money to spend in a bar.
All sections of the party are aggressively patriotic and favourably inclined to the idea of an upstanding, well-fed, and well-exercised population in uniform.Of course there are reactionary landowners and old-fashioned country clergy, full of localised self-importance, jealous even of the cottager who can read, but they have neither the power nor the ability to retard the constructive forces in the party as a whole.On the other hand, when matters point to any definitely confiscatory proposal, to the public ownership and collective control of land, for example, or state mining and manufactures, or the nationalisation of the so-called public-house or extended municipal enterprise, or even to an increase of the taxation of property, then the Conservative Party presents a nearly adamantine bar.It does not stand for, it IS, the existing arrangement in these affairs.
Even more definitely a class party is the Labour Party, whose immediate interest is to raise wages, shorten hours of labor, increase employment, and make better terms for the working-man tenant and working-man purchaser.Its leaders are no doubt constructive minded, but the mass of the following is naturally suspicious of education and discipline, hostile to the higher education, and--except for an obvious antagonism to employers and property owners--almost destitute of ideas.What else can it be?
It stands for the expropriated multitude, whose whole situation and difficulty arise from its individual lack of initiative and organising power.It favours the nationalisation of land and capital with no sense of the difficulties involved in the process;but, on the other hand, the equally reasonable socialisation of individuals which is implied by military service is steadily and quite naturally and quite illogically opposed by it.It is only in recent years that Labour has emerged as a separate party from the huge hospitable caravanserai of Liberalism, and there is still a very marked tendency to step back again into that multitudinous assemblage.
For multitudinousness has always been the Liberal characteristic.
Liberalism never has been nor ever can be anything but a diversified crowd.Liberalism has to voice everything that is left out by these other parties.It is the party against the predominating interests.
It is at once the party of the failing and of the untried; it is the party of decadence and hope.From its nature it must be a vague and planless association in comparison with its antagonist, neither so constructive on the one hand, nor on the other so competent to hinder the inevitable constructions of the civilised state.
Essentially it is the party of criticism, the "Anti" party.It is a system of hostilities and objections that somehow achieves at times an elusive common soul.It is a gathering together of all the smaller interests which find themselves at a disadvantage against the big established classes, the leasehold tenant as against the landowner, the retail tradesman as against the merchant and the moneylender, the Nonconformist as against the Churchman, the small employer as against the demoralising hospitable publican, the man without introductions and broad connections against the man who has these things.It is the party of the many small men against the fewer prevailing men.It has no more essential reason for loving the Collectivist state than the Conservatives; the small dealer is doomed to absorption in that just as much as the large owner; but it resorts to the state against its antagonists as in the middle ages common men pitted themselves against the barons by siding with the king.The Liberal Party is the party against "class privilege"because it represents no class advantages, but it is also the party that is on the whole most set against Collective control because it represents no established responsilibity.It is constructive only so far as its antagonism to the great owner is more powerful than its jealousy of the state.It organises only because organisation is forced upon it by the organisation of its adversaries.It lapses in and out of alliance with Labour as it sways between hostility to wealth and hostility to public expenditure....
