After reading this article you will learn about the structure of government in its relation to the rights of civil and economic liberty.
Government by all has an intrinsic value, and is, of itself and in itself, something which is for the benefit of all and makes for the common good of all. Considered simply as a process, and apart from any results or product outside the process, it is a way of the development of the capacities of personality. But it has also an extrinsic value; it is also valuable for the results which it produces, and for the new rights—other than those of political liberty, and over and above them—which are added by its operation to the common fund of enjoyment.
If we look at the matter historically, we are led at once to the conclusion that during the days of struggle men pressed for the political right of government by the people not as an end in itself, or not only as art end in itself, but because they wished to secure for themselves and their fellows, by the exercise of this right, the enjoyment of other rights hitherto denied, or at any rate confined to the few.
The Chartists, for example, were vehement in urging the justice of their six political points; but the ultimate aims of their endeavour were economic aims. If that was true in the days of struggle, it is also true, as experience shows, that the actual achievement of political rights raises at once in the days of attainment two questions of economic rights – the question, first, of the economic rights which ought to follow on political rights by the logic of consistency, in order to secure more liberty for the worker in the course of his work and thus make the economic system correspond better with the political; and, secondly, the question of the economic rights which will inevitably and in any case follow on the acquisition of political rights by the simple logic of fact, or, in other words, as a result of the fact that the mass of the people now have the vote and will tend to use it in order to secure economic rights which they regard as the necessary conditions of economic liberty.
It follows then, alike by the logic of consistency and by the logic of fact, that an extension of the rights of political liberty must involve a similar extension of the rights of economic liberty. When the structure of government is altered, by the extension of political rights, the altered structure of government will alter in turn the economic structure, and it will do so by means of the extension of economic rights.
This extension of rights will take two forms. One of these forms is the extension to all of old rights, already recognized as belonging to the members of a section of the community, but not hitherto recognized as belonging to the members of the community as a whole, irrespective of section or class.
The other form is a still further extension by the recognition of new rights, not hitherto recognized at all, and their general distribution to all the members of the community. In brief, we have both an extension of the number of those among whom rights are distributed and an extension of the number of the rights distributed.
For the present we may confine ourselves to the extension of the number of those among whom rights are distributed. That rights are for all, and not merely for the members of a single section, is a simple proposition which now seems self-evident; but the actual extension to all even of old and long-recognized rights has been a slow historical process.
The width of vision which sees that ‘a man is a man for all that’, whatever the rank and the guinea’s stamp, is a slow historical acquisition. There was long a defect of vision, honest and genuine in its own day, which made men as it were near-sighted, and prevented them from seeing beyond a small and limited circle.
Privileged classes, accepting the idea of the general social necessity of different social functions arranged in an ordered hierarchy of ascending degrees or stations, proceeded from that idea to a firm conviction that the masses were confined by the nature of their functions—as ploughmen and artificers—to the one office of manual work, and were not intended, and indeed were not fit, either for the political right of the suffrage or for the civil and economic rights (full personal security, full personal freedom of movement, and the full ownership of personal property) which they themselves enjoyed.
We may almost say that they naturally thought in terms of ‘two nations’, or even of two grades of humanity and two classes of human beings. Three movements of thought, two of them belonging to the eighteenth century, and the third emerging in the course of the nineteenth, have radically altered these terms.
The first is the movement of humanitarianism, mainly based (at any rate in England) on the foundations of the Christian Gospel, and inspired by a fervent conviction that the benefits of the Gospel belonged to all and must be extended to all—to the slave, the prisoner, the factory-worker, and whoever else needed the comfort of a recognition of his common humanity and his common human rights.
Whether this Christian humanitarianism were Evangelical or Catholic, whether it proceeded from the Low Church or the High, it changed and widened men’s view of the distribution of rights, and altered the narrow terms in which they had hitherto thought.
The other two movements which have worked in the same direction, however different they may be both from Christian humanitarianism and from one another, are the Benthamite utilitarianism which emerged at the end of the eighteenth century and the Marxian socialism which began to grow from the middle of the nineteenth.
The Benthamites, going on the principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and holding that all were capable of happiness and had therefore the right to enjoy it, attacked the limitation of this universal right by the sinister interests of a privileged few, and advocated a structure of government under which all alike had a voice and a vote and the majority could use their voice and their vote to counteract sinister interests and to enthrone general happiness.
The Marxians, going on the assumption (not altogether unwarranted by the history of the past) that the existing structure of government was based on the domination of a small and interested social class, which made law to suit its own interest and thus limited rights to its own members, urged that the largest and the most numerous social class, the class of the workers, should acquire domination in its turn, and should then extend and generalize rights by instituting a workers’ State in which all would be workers and all would enjoy the common rights belonging to workers.
There is an obvious difference between the Benthamites and the Marxians. The Benthamites laid their primary emphasis on the rights of political liberty: they held that the extension of the suffrage was the key to a greater enjoyment of happiness by a greater number of individuals – they expected a peaceable extension of the rights of civil and economic liberty, following easily and naturally on a similar extension of the right of political liberty.
The Marxians were primarily concerned with economic liberty: they held that its attainment demanded effort, and even violence: they respected less the rights of individuals than the rights and the status of a whole class.
But great as is the difference between Benthamism and Marxianism, the effects of both have been so far similar, that both have tended towards the extension of rights to all, and both have helped to abolish the old assumption of a graded society marked by a graded enjoyment of rights.