The modern State is the distinctive product of a unique civilization. But it is a product which is still in the making, and a part of the process is a struggle between new and old principles of social order. To understand the new, which is our main purpose, we must first cast a glance at the old. We must understand what the social structure was, which – mainly, as I shall show, under the inspiration of Liberal ideas – is slowly but surely giving place to the new fabric of the civic State. The older structure itself was by no means primitive. What is truly primitive is very hard to say. But one thing is pretty clear. At all times men have lived in societies, and ties of kinship and of simple neighbourhood underlie every form of social organization. In the simplest societies it seems probable that these ties – reinforced and extended, perhaps, by religious or other beliefs – are the only ones that seriously count. It is certain that of the warp of descent and the woof of intermarriage there is woven a tissue out of which small and rude but close and compact communities are formed. But the ties of kinship and neighbourhood are effective only within narrow limits. While the local group, the clan, or the village community are often the centres of vigorous life, the larger aggregate of the Tribe seldom attains true social and political unity unless it rests upon a military organization.

The teaching of Mill brings us close to the heart of Liberalism. We learn from him, in the first place, that liberty is no mere formula of law, or of the restriction of law. There may be a tyranny of custom, a tyranny of opinion, even a tyranny of circumstance, as real as any tyranny of government and more pervasive. Nor does liberty rest on the self-assertion of the individual. There is scope abundant for Liberalism and illiberalism in personal conduct. Nor is liberty opposed to discipline, to organization, to strenuous conviction as to what is true and just. Nor is it to be identified with tolerance of opposed opinions. The Liberal does not meet opinions which he conceives to be false with toleration, as though they did not matter. He meets them with justice, and exacts for them a fair hearing as though they mattered just as much as his own. He is always ready to put his own convictions to the proof, not because he doubts them, but because he believes in them. For, both as to that which he holds for true and as to that which he holds for false, he believes that one final test applies. Let error have free play, and one of two things will happen. Either as it develops, as its implications and consequences become clear, some elements of truth will appear within it.

Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse was the most sophisticated intellectual exponent of the ‘New Liberalism’ which emerged in Britain in the closing years of the nineteenth century. A determined advocate of political and social reform, who worked for years as a journalist on the progressive liberal press, Hobhouse also had a distinguished academic career, occupying the first professorial chair in sociology to be established at a British university. As a political theorist, Hobhouse is most significant for his attempt to reformulate liberalism to recognize more adequately the claims of community, establish the centrality of basic welfare rights, and legitimate an activist democratic state.

Leonard Hobhouse was born in the Cornish village of St Ive in 1864. The son of Caroline Trelawny and an Anglican clergyman, Reginald Hobhouse, he was brought up in comfortable circumstances. Schooled at Marlborough, he went on to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, earning a first-class degree in Greats in 1887. After graduation, Hobhouse stayed on in Oxford, first as a Prize Fellow at Merton College, and later as a full Fellow of Corpus Christi. By the mid-1890s Hobhouse began to feel cramped by the confines of academia; and, eager to play some more definite part in the crusade for social reform, he abandoned his Oxford career to take up a position with the liberal Manchester Guardian in 1897. He remained with the paper as a full-time leader writer until 1902. Between 1903 and 1905 he worked as Secretary to the anti-protectionist Free Trade Union.

Summary

A satisfactory account of the development of property in general has not yet been written, and perhaps in the present state of our knowledge cannot be written. In no department of the study of comparative institutions are the data more elusive and unsatisfactory. The divergence between legal theory and economic fact, between written law and popular custom, between implied rights and actual enjoyment, enables one and the same institution to be painted and, within limits, quite honestly and faithfully painted in very different colours. The legally minded historian will lay stress on forms or principles which have very little bearing on the actual life of the people. The economic historian, impatient of these subtleties, will ask us to look at the actual working of the institution, only to find that by some turn of events the dormant legal principle is awakened, and becomes a potent and perhaps deadly force in the working of a system. The theorist with a generalization to defend can always, by judicious selection and omission, quote travellers, ethnologists, early codes, or points of contemporary custom on his side; for he is singularly unfortunate if he cannot find something either in the every day working of the institution or in its theoretical implications, which, by ignoring other aspects, may be made to tell on his side.

The school of Cobden is affiliated in general outlook both to the doctrine of natural liberty and to the discipline of Bentham. It shared with the Benthamites the thoroughly practical attitude dear to the English mind. It has much less to say of natural rights than the French theorists. On the other hand, it is saturated with the conviction that the unfettered action of the individual is the mainspring of all progress. Its starting-point is economic. Trade is still in fetters. The worst of the archaic internal restrictions have, indeed, been thrown off. But even here Cobden is active in the work of finally emancipating Manchester from manorial rights that have no place in the nineteenth century. The main work, however, is the liberation of foreign trade. The Corn Laws, as even the tariff reformers of our own day admit, were conceived in the interest of the governing classes. They frankly imposed a tax on the food of the masses for the benefit of the landlords, and as the result of the agricultural and industrial revolutions which had been in progress since 1760, the masses had been brought to the lowest point of economic misery. Give to every man the right to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market, urged the Cobdenite, and trade would automatically expand.

The growth of representative institutions is one of the outstanding features of modern history. The movement, like all others, has its ebb and flow, but on a wide view the set of the current is unmistakable. Throughout the civilized world, including now not merely the peoples of Europe and of European descent, but the leading examples of Eastern civilization, we find the principle of self-government germinating where it had hitherto been unknown, and ripening where it had only been immature. In our own country, where alone among great nations Parliamentary institutions had enjoyed continuous vitality from a remote past, the advance took the form, first of consolidating the primacy of the popular House, and secondly of broadening the basis of representation. Of these two processes the first has, it is true, received a check. The vast and growing power of organized wealth has found in an irresponsible Chamber a handy instrument of obstruction. But in so doing it has only raised a constitutional issue of which the final settlement can neither be distant nor doubtful. The second process has been advanced by three great measures of reform, and has now to be completed by a fourth, which will extend the area of representation to the entire adult population.

The movement towards self-government is not to be understood if studied in isolation.

The nineteenth century might be called the age of Liberalism, yet its close saw the fortunes of that great movement brought to their lowest ebb. Whether at home or abroad those who represented Liberal ideas had suffered crushing defeats. But this was the least considerable of the causes for anxiety. If Liberals had been defeated, something much worse seemed about to befall Liberalism. Its faith in itself was waxing cold. It seemed to have done its work. It had the air of a creed that is becoming fossilized as an extinct form, a fossil that occupied, moreover, an awkward position between two very active and energetically moving grindstones – the upper grindstone of plutocratic imperialism, and the nether grindstone of social democracy. ‘We know all about you’, these parties seemed to say to Liberalism; ‘we have been right through you and come out on the other side. Respectable platitudes, you go maundering on about Cobden and Gladstone, and the liberty of the individual, and the rights of nationality, and government by the people. What you say is not precisely untrue, but it is unreal and uninteresting’ So far in chorus. ‘It is not up to date’, finished the Imperialist, and the Socialist bureaucrat. ‘It is not bread and butter’, finished the Social democrat. Opposed in everything else, these two parties agreed in one thing. They were to divide the future between them. Unfortunately, however, for their agreement, the division was soon seen to be no equal one.

All through the nineteenth century the cause of subject nationalities was a constant stimulus to British Liberalism. Successive generations hoped and feared, wept and rejoiced with the rebels of Greece, of Italy, of Hungary, of Poland, of the Balkans. Their successes and failures were events of moment in the calendar of British Liberalism, for they were recognized as essential parts of the democratic movement, and the democratic cause was in that century looked upon as one all the world over. Nor was this sentiment ineffective. The moral support of England was in those days recognized as an asset to a cause. Individuals gave direct and tangible assistance, and there were even times when diplomacy moved. Nationalism, therefore, lay close to the heart of Liberalism. Yet there was all the time one nationality whose claims were not so readily understood as those of Greek or Italian, Pole or Bulgar. Ireland was raising a cry, protesting against grievances, formulating demands, which to impartial ears sounded very like those of other subject peoples. Here it seemed was an oppressed nationality at the British Liberal's own door, with grievances which he could redress by his own efforts if he would. Conscious – perhaps a little too conscious – of the rectitude of his intentions, the British Liberal had some difficulty in seeing himself in the light of an oppressor. But under Mr Gladstone's leadership he learned his lesson in two stages.

To answer the questions proposed at the end of the last lecture would be to write a book in many volumes. The task of measuring the actual movement of civilization becomes manageable only by a division of labour. I have attempted elsewhere to deal with it from the point of view of ethics – a point of view which necessarily involves something of the development of religion and something of the development of jurisprudence within its scope. Recently Dr Müller Lyer, in his Phasen der Kultur, has applied a similar treatment to the development of industry. Enough has been done to indicate some of the difficulties that beset this method of treatment, and also to suggest certain results. These I will endeavour to indicate to you by taking one side of social life, and tracing development on this side as we pass from the simplest to the most advanced modern societies. As some compensation for the limitations of the enquiry, I will take one of the fundamental problems. I will ask you to consider the nature of the social bond, to examine what is common to all societies and what is distinctive, and I shall try to show that what is distinctive in the nature of the social bond forms a fundamental principle of classification in any social morphology, and serves as one of the measuring rods which helps us to determine the nature of the movement which has made modern civilization what it is.

I cannot here attempt so much as a sketch of the historical progress of the Liberalizing movement. I would call attention only to the main points at which it assailed the old order, and to the fundamental ideas directing its advance.

Civil Liberty

Both logically and historically the first point of attack is arbitrary government, and the first liberty to be secured is the right to be dealt with in accordance with law. A man who has no legal rights against another, but stands entirely at his disposal, to be treated according to his caprice, is a slave to that other. He is ‘rightless’, devoid of rights. Now, in some barbaric monarchies the system of rightlessness has at times been consistently carried through in the relations of subjects to the king. Here men and women, though enjoying customary rights of person and property as against one another, have no rights at all as against the king's pleasure. No European monarch or seignior has ever admittedly enjoyed power of this kind, but European governments have at various times and in various directions exercised or claimed powers no less arbitrary in principle. Thus, by the side of the regular courts of law which prescribe specific penalties for defined offences proved against a man by a regular form of trial, arbitrary governments resort to various extrajudicial forms of arrest, detention, and punishment, depending on their own will and pleasure.

From the middle of the nineteenth century two great names stand out in the history of British Liberalism – that of Gladstone in the world of action, that of Mill in the world of thought. Differing in much, they agreed in one respect. They had the supreme virtue of keeping their minds fresh and open to new ideas, and both of them in consequence advanced to a deeper interpretation of social life as they grew older. In 1846 Gladstone ranked as a Conservative, but he parted from his old traditions under the leadership of Peel on the question of Free Trade, and for many years to come the most notable of his public services lay in the completion of the Cobdenite policy of financial emancipation. In the pursuit of this policy he was brought into collision with the House of Lords, and it was his active intervention in 1859–60 which saved the Commons from a humiliating surrender, and secured its financial supremacy unimpaired until 1909. In the following decade he stood for the extension of the suffrage, and it was his Government which, in 1884, carried the extension of the representative principle to the point at which it rested twentyseven years later. In economics Gladstone kept upon the whole to the Cobdenite principles which he acquired in middle life. He was not sympathetically disposed to the ‘New Unionism’ and the semisocialistic ideas that came at the end of the 'eighties, which, in fact, constituted a powerful cross current to the political work that he had immediately in hand.

Our task today is to examine the movement of opinion which has been outlined, in the light of social theory. We held that social progress consists in a harmonious development, and we further defined this conception as including a harmony in the development of the personal life of the members of society, and in the working out and fulfilment of the various and at first sight divergent elements of value which constitute the well-being of the social order. In the movement of opinion we have seen a certain conflict of ideals and our question is whether, if we probe deeper, a basis of reconstruction can be found. To find an answer let us take up the question afresh. Let us start with the conception of the social order which the principle of harmonious development would suggest. Let us consider to what view of the functions of the state and the rights of the individual it would lead and let us, in order to observe the limitations of time, deal with the question with special reference to the problem of liberty.

To begin with, the general theory of society indicated by the ideal of harmonious development is clearly one of co-operation. We may say, with Aristotle, that society is an association of human beings with a view to the good life.

Great changes are not caused by ideas alone; but they are not effected without ideas. The passions of men must be aroused if the frost of custom is to be broken or the chains of authority burst; but passion of itself is blind and its world is chaotic. To be effective men must act together, and to act together they must have a common understanding and a common object. When it comes to be a question of any far-reaching change, they must not merely conceive their own immediate end with clearness. They must convert others, they must communicate sympathy and win over the unconvinced. Upon the whole, they must show that their object is possible, that it is compatible with existing institutions, or at any rate with some workable form of social life. They are, in fact, driven on by the requirements of their position to the elaboration of ideas, and in the end to some sort of social philosophy; and the philosophies that have driving force behind them are those which arise after this fashion out of the practical demands of human feeling. The philosophies that remain ineffectual and academic are those that are formed by abstract reflection without relation to the thirsty souls of human kind.

In England, it is true, where men are apt to be shy and unhandy in the region of theory, the Liberal movement has often sought to dispense with general principles.