Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1837-1901; Liberalism -- Great Britain
Somewhat similar questions arise about race, which many people wrongly
confuse with nationality. So far as elementary rights are concerned
there can be no question as to the attitude of Liberalism. When the
political power which should guarantee such rights is brought into view,
questions of fact arise. Is the Negro or the Kaffir mentally and morally
capable of self-government or of taking part in a self-governing State?
The experience of Cape Colony tends to the affirmative view. American
experience of the negro gives, I take it, a more doubtful answer. A
specious extension of the white man's rights to the black may be the
best way of ruining the black. To destroy tribal custom by introducing
conceptions of individual property, the free disposal of land, and the
free purchase of gin may be the handiest method for the expropriator. In
all relations with weaker peoples we move in an atmosphere vitiated by
the insincere use of high-sounding words. If men say equality, they mean
oppression by forms of justice. If they say tutelage, they appear to
mean the kind of tutelage extended to the fattened goose. In such an
atmosphere, perhaps, our safest course, so far as principles and
deductions avail at all, is to fix our eyes on the elements of the
matter, and in any part of the world to support whatever method succeeds
in securing the "coloured" man from personal violence, from the lash,
from expropriation, and from gin; above all, so far as it may yet be,
from the white man himself. Until the white man has fully learnt to rule
his own life, the best of all things that he can do with the dark man is
to do nothing with him. In this relation, the day of a more constructive
Liberalism is yet to come.
8. _International Liberty._
If non-interference is the best thing for the barbarian many Liberals
have thought it to be the supreme wisdom in international affairs
generally. I shall examine this view later. Here I merely remark: (1) It
is of the essence of Liberalism to oppose the use of force, the basis of
all tyranny. (2) It is one of its practical necessities to withstand the
tyranny of armaments. Not only may the military force be directly
turned against liberty, as in Russia, but there are more subtle ways, as
in Western Europe, in which the military spirit eats into free
institutions and absorbs the public resources which might go to the
advancement of civilization. (3) In proportion as the world becomes
free, the use of force becomes meaningless. There is no purpose in
aggression if it is not to issue in one form or another of national
subjection.
9. _Political Liberty and Popular Sovereignty._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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