Protection in Historical Perspective

From A.P. Thirlwall and Penélope Pacheco-López, Trade Liberalisation and The Poverty of Nations Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2008)

Protection in Historical Perspective

The best historical description of the role of protection in the early industrialisation phase of the now-developed countries is given by Ha-Joon Chang, the Cambridge economist, in three fascinating books: Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective (2002); Why Developing Countries Need Tariffs? (2005); and Bad Samaritans: Rich Nations, Poor Policies and the Threat to the Developing World (2007). In this section we rely heavily on the evidence in these books.

The current developed countries of the world, including Britain, the United States and the countries of continental Europe and Scandinavia did not develop their economies on the basis of free trade. On the contrary, they heavily protected their domestic industries, and also did their utmost to prevent the countries that they colonised from competing with them. Britain started to protect and foster industries as early as the late 15th century when Henry VII took the deliberate decision to challenge the successful woollen manufacturing industry of Belgium and Holland, which was reliant on the export of British wool. He taxed the

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export of raw wool and banned export of some types of unfinished cloth in order to encourage processing at home. Henry VIII continued the protectionist policy, and by the middle of the reign of Elizabeth I, Britain had sufficient processing capacity to ban the export of wool entirely, which ruined the cloth industry of the Low Countries. Britain first became rich on its woollen industry nurtured by the State. Serious protection of new manufacturing industries started with Robert Walpole in 1721, using tariffs, subsidies, tariff rebates on imported inputs and other protective devices – all of which are deemed to be damaging to developing countries today. In the early 19th century, Britain imposed some of the highest tariff rates on manufactured goods in the world, averaging 45–55 per cent.

Britain also prevented its colonies from producing manufactured goods. William Pitt the Elder, the British Prime Minister from 1766 to 1768, is quoted by Friedrich List (1885) as saying that ‘the colonies should not be permitted to manufacture so much as a horsenail’. All sorts of devices were resorted to in the 18th century to keep the colonies as producers of primary commodities, giving subsidies to production, and reducing tariffs on raw material imports into Britain. A law passed in 1699 forbade the export of processed wool products from the English colonies, including Ireland. In 1700, all cotton goods from India were prohibited. In the 1720s, Walpole gave export subsidies and abolished import duties on raw materials produced in the American colonies so that their comparative

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advantage stayed in primary products. Some manufacturing activities were even prohibited, such as high value-added steel products in America. The use of tariffs by the colonies was either banned or, where used for revenue purposes, a tax was imposed on the industry concerned to neutralise its competitive advantage. In other countries not colonised by Britain, ‘unequal treaties’ were signed which took away the tariff autonomy of the countries and set ‘binding’ tariffs that countries could not exceed, typically about 5 per cent in countries such as Brazil, China, Japan, Siam (now Thailand) and Persia (now Iran). With regard to Europe, Britain also tried to protect itself against competition, although to less effect. The export of some types of machinery embodying new technology was banned, and for over sixty years from 1719 to 1782 there was a ban on the emigration of skilled labour from Britain. Those who defied the ban, and did not return within six months, had their possessions confiscated and citizenship withdrawn.

Britain’s industrial revolution gathered momentum in the mid-18th century, when protection still prevailed. It would be a rewriting of history, therefore, to argue that Britain started its development process on the basis of free trade. Britain did not start dismantling its structure of protection until the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, but by then it had already attained technological superiority over all other countries in the world. From then on, Britain preached free trade, but as List (1885) remarked, such preaching was like ‘kicking away

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the ladder’ up which one has climbed oneself so that no-one else can reach the top. List comments:

It is a very common clever device that where anyone has attained the summit of greatness, he kicks away the ladder by which he has climbed up, in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up after him. In this lies the secret of the cosmopolitan doctrine of Adam Smith, and the cosmopolitan tendencies of his great contemporary William Pitt, and of all his successors in the British Government administrations. Any nation which by means of protective duties and restrictions on navigation has raised her manufacturing power and her navigation to such a degree of development that no other nation can sustain free competition with her, can do nothing wiser than throw away these ladders of her greatness, to preach to other nations the benefits of free trade, and to declare in penitent tone that she has hitherto wandered in the paths of error, and has now for the first time succeeded in discovering the truth. (pp. 295–6)

The United States followed Britain’s protectionist route at the end of the 18th century, contrary to Adam Smith’s advice in the Wealth of Nations. Here is what Smith had to say:

Were the Americans, either by combination or by any other sort of violence to stop the importation of European manufactures, and, by thus giving a monopoly to such of their own countrymen as could manufacture the like goods, divert any considerable part of their capital into this employment, they would retard instead of accelerating the further increase in the value of their annual produce, and would obstruct instead of promoting the progress of their country towards real wealth and greatness. (pp. 347–8)

If the United States had followed Adam Smith’s advice, it would have remained an economic

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backwater for a long time, instead of becoming the richest industrialised country in the world. In the 19th century, the US economy was the fastest growing in the world, and also the most protectionist. Paul Bairoch (1993) has described the United States as ‘the mother country and bastion of modern protectionism’. It was the US Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton in 1791, who first coined the term ‘infant industry’, and who first argued the case for industrialisation by protection using tariffs, subsidies and other means, recognising that without protection it would be impossible for America to compete against more advanced countries, notably Britain. List, in his classic book The National System of Political Economy, first published in German in 1841, claims that he first learnt the infant industry argument for protection while in exile in the US in the 1820s. The US first imposed tariffs on industrial goods in 1789. Protection continued to increase in the 19th century and by 1870, import tariffs accounted for more than 50 per cent of the value of imports. Protection continued in the early 20th century, and was even strengthened in the 1930s with the ‘Smoot–Hawley’ tariff which raised the average tariff on manufactured goods to nearly 50 per cent. According to Bairoch (1993) no other country implemented a more protectionist policy to promote its industry than the United States. Only after the Second World War did it start to liberalise its trade, having already established industrial supremacy, and was able to ‘kick away the ladder’, as Britain had done a century earlier.

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German industrial policy in the 19th century was heavily influenced by the views of List. He believed that import duties should not only be used to protect industry but also to promote it, supported by the State. Germany’s average tariff rate on industrial goods was not as high as in the US, but the German State actively promoted industry by ‘assigning monopoly rights, establishing industrial cartels, providing export subsidies, importing industrial experts and skilled labour, establishing large banks and making large investments in coal production and railway and road construction’ (Skarstein, 2007).

Japan was prevented from using tariffs up to 1911 because of the ‘unequal treaties’ signed, as referred to earlier. But after 1911, Japan embarked on a comprehensive development strategy, a major part of which included substantial tariff protection, combined with subsidies to key (infant) industries and State investment in infrastructure. Just before the First World War, Japan’s average tariff on manufactured imports was 30 per cent. The protectionist stance continued after the Second World War, with tariffs on car imports, for example, of nearly 40 per cent. Protectionism in the 1950s and 1960s was combined with the highest GDP growth rate of any country in the world. If Japan had listened to the free-traders, it would have no industrial base.

The average tariff rates on manufactured goods for selected developed countries in their early stages of development are shown in Table 1.1.

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Notice the very high tariff rates for the UK and US in 1820, the continued high rates in the US up to 1950, and the relatively high rates in France, Germany and Italy too. These are much higher rates that the average nominal tariff on imports of manufactures into today’s developing countries.

Average tariff rates for developed countries fell dramatically after 1950, but it is interesting to note that five of the six fastest growing countries during the ‘golden age’ of growth 1950–73 were still the highest tariff countries: Japan (8.05 per cent), Italy (4.95 per cent), Austria (4.90 per cent), Finland (4.25 per cent) and France (4.05 per cent). Germany was the only fast growing country in this period with the lowest tariffs.

The historical record tells the same story. O’Rourke (2000) takes ten of today’s developed countries over the period 1875–1914 and shows a positive relation between tariff rates and GDP growth, controlling for other factors influencing growth. Clemens and Williamson (2001) examine 35 developed and developing countries over the period 1875–1908 and 1924–34 and also find a positive relation between the level of tariffs and growth. Vamvakidis (2002) takes the inter-war period 1920–40 and finds a positive relation between tariff rates and growth across 22 countries (although not for the period 1870–1910). Studies of more recent years show the same positive relation between levels of trade restrictions and growth, controlling for other variables. Yanikkaya (2003) takes more than 100 countries over the period

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1970–97 and finds that both tariffs and export taxes seem to be associated with faster growth. He concludes: ‘these results . . . provide support for the infant industry case for protection and for strategic trade policy’. And Rodrik (2001) asserts: ‘cross national comparisons of the literature reveals no systematic relationship between a country’s average level of tariff and non-tariff restrictions and its subsequent economic growth rate. If anything the evidence for the 1990s indicates a positive (but statistically insignificant) relationship between tariffs and economic growth’ (italics in the original).

It can be said with some confidence that tariffs never harmed economic progress in the countries now developed. On the contrary, they ‘climbed the ladder’ on the back of tariffs and other protectionist devices. All we know is that as countries get richer they dismantle trade restrictions, not that they get richer because they liberalise trade. The issue for developing countries today is not whether to protect, but how to protect in order to ensure the dynamic efficiency of its nascent industrial activities.

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References:

Bairoch, P. (1993), Economics and World History – Myths and Paradoxes (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf).
List, F. (1885), The National System of Political Economy, translated from the original German edition published in 1841 by Sampson Lloyd (London: Longmann, Green and Company).
O’Rourke, K. (2000), Tariffs and Growth in the Late 19th Century, Economic Journal, April.
Rodrik, D. (2001), The Global Governance of Trade: As If Development Really Mattered (New York: UNDP).
Skarstein, R. (2007), Free Trade: A Dead End for Underdeveloped Countries, Review of Political Economy, July.
Smith, A. (1776), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: George Routledge and Sons).
Vamvakidis, A. (2002), How Robust is the Growth – Openness Connection: Historical Evidence, Journal of Economic Growth, March.
Yanikkaya, H. (2003), Trade Openness and Economic Growth: A Cross-Country Empirical Investigation, Journal of Development Economics, October.

yamaguchy upload

A great little website, yamaguchy.netfirms , seems down for good. The anonymous creator/s had compiled a library of works primarily devoted to the money question, with hard to find books and essays by Arthur Kitson, Christopher Hollis, June Grem, Robert McNair Wilson, A.N. Field, Charles Lindbergh (Sr.), Ezra Pound among many others.

It seems a great shame that this resource might be lost, so I am thankful that I downloaded the entire site to my hard drive some time ago. I have uploaded a zip file of the entire site to megaupload so that others may download it. Zipped the package is 50MB, unzipped about 95MB but better viewing. Navigate from the index page.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=UZ0HIM4T

Ezra Pound on Brooks Adams

In the Greenwood Press Ezra Pound Encyclopedia:

Carta da Visita
Written in Italian, Carta da Visita was published in Rome in 1942 by Giambattista Vicari. A new edition was published in Milan in 1974 by Vanni Scheiwiller, and an English version, in a translation by John Drummond and titled A Visiting Card, was published in London in 1952. This translation was reprinted, with some revisions, in Impact (1960), pages 44–74, and without the revisions in Selected Prose 1909–1965 (1973), pages 306–335.

Carta da Visita consists of some thirty headwords, apparently disjointed but with a certain internal coherence, dealing with economics, politics, history, and culture. The concept of the nation, its control of the economy, its monetary system and policies (the right to coin and to lend money, the introduction of stamp script), and its falling under hostile forces such as international monopolism and usurocracy govern Pound’s choice for headwords. Characteristically Pound traces the history of his favorite conflict through positive and negative models: Monte dei Paschi di Siena and the monetary experiment of Wörgl versus Bank of England. He also points to the affinities between the American and the Fascist Revolutions. As regards culture, he advances his “canon” (Homer, Sappho, the Latin elegists, Troubadours, Cavalcanti, Dante, etc.) in a dense but imprecise language for whose renewal and reinvigoration he is hoping.
Stefano Maria Casella

One of the thirty joints as published in Impact:

Brooks Adams

This member of the Adams family, son of C. F. Adams, grandson of J. Q. Adams, and great-grandson of J. Adams, Father of the Nation, was, as far as I know, the first to formulate the idea of Kulturmorphologie in America. His cyclic vision of the West shows us a consecutive struggle against four great rackets, namely the exploitation of the fear of the unknown (black magic, etc.), the exploitation of violence, the exploitation or monopolization of cultivable land, and the exploitation of money.

But not even Adams himself seems to have realized that he fell for the nineteenth-century metaphysic with regard to this last. He distinguishes between the swindle of the usurers and that of the monopolists, but he slides into the concept, shared by Mill and Marx, of money as an accumulator of energy.

Mill defined capital “as the accumulated stock of human labour.”

And Marx, or his Italian translator: “commodities, in so far as they are values, are materialized labour,”

so denying both God and nature.

With the falsification of the word everything else is betrayed.

Commodities (considered as values, surplus values, food, clothes, or whatever) are manufactured raw materials.

Only spoken poetry and unwritten music are composed without any material basis, nor do they become “materialized.”

The usurers, in their obscene and pitch-dark century, created this satanic transubstantiation, their Black Mass of money, and in so doing deceived Brooks Adams himself, who was fighting for the peasant and humanity against the monopolists.

“ ... money alone is capable of being transmuted immediately into any form of activity.” -- This is the idiom of the black myth!

One sees well enough what he was trying to say, as one understands what Mill and Marx were trying to say. But the betrayal of the word begins with the use of words that do not fit the truth, that do not say what the author wants them to say.

Money does not contain energy. The half-lira piece cannot create the platform ticket, the cigarettes, or piece of chocolate that issues from the slot-machine.

But it is by this piece of legerdemain that humanity has been thoroughly trussed up, and it has not yet got free.

Without history one is lost in the dark, and the essential data of modern history cannot enlighten us unless they are traced back at least to the foundation of the Sienese bank, the Monte dei Paschi; in other words to the perception of the true basis of credit, viz., “the abundance of nature and the responsibility of the whole people.”

The difference between money and credit is one of time.

Credit is the future tense of money. Without the definition of words knowledge cannot be transmitted from one man to another. One can base one’s discourse on definitions, or on the recounting of historical events (the philosophical method, or the literary or historical method, respectively).

Without a narrative prelude, perhaps, no one would have the patience to consider so called “dry” definitions.

The war in which brave men are being killed and wounded, our own war here and now, began - or rather the phase we are now fighting began - in 1694, with the foundation of the Bank of England.

Said Paterson in his manifesto addressed to prospective shareholders, “the bank hath benefit of the interest of an moneys which it creates out of nothing.”

This swindle, calculated to yield interest at the usurious rate of sixty percent, was impartial. It hit friends and enemies alike.

In the past the quantity of money in circulation was regulated, as Lord Overstone (Samuel Lloyd) has said, “to meet the real wants of commerce, and to discount all commercial bills arising out of legitimate transactions.”

But after Waterloo Brooks Adams saw that “nature herself was favouring the usurers.”

For more than a century after Waterloo, no force stood up to the monopoly of money. The relevant passage from Brooks Adams is as follows:

“Perhaps no financier has ever lived abler than Samuel Lloyd. Certainly he understood as few men, even of later generations, have understood, the mighty engine of the single standard. He comprehended that, with expanding trade, an inelastic currency must rise in value; he saw that, with sufficient resources at command, his class might be able to establish such a rise, almost at pleasure; certainly that they could manipulate it when it came, by taking advantage of foreign exchange. He perceived moreover that, once established, a contraction of the currency might be forced to an extreme, and that when money rose beyond price, as in 1825, debtors would have to surrender their property on such terms as creditors might dictate.” *

I’m sorry if this passage should seem obscure to the average man of letters, but one cannot understand history in twenty minutes. Our culture lies shattered in fragments, and with the monetology of the usurocracy our economic culture has become a closed book to the aesthetes.

The peasant feeds us and the gombeen-man strangles us - if he cannot suck our blood by degrees.

History is written with a knowledge of the despatches of the ambassador Barbon Morosini (particularly one dated from Paris, 28 January, 1723 (Venetian style), describing the Law affair), together with a knowledge of the documents leading up to the foundation of the Monte dei Paschi, and the scandalous pages of Antonio Lobero, archivist of the Banco di San Giorgio of Genoa.

We are still in the same darkness which John Adams, Father of the Nation, described as “downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.”

* Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay

Lymington: Nature, the Family, and the Nation

This essay first appeared as chapter one of Alternative to Death: The Relationship Between Soil, Family and Community (London: Faber & Faber, Ltd., 1943), pp. 11–31, and was recently republished in the IHS Press essay collection Distributist Perspectives Volume II.

This biography of Lymington appears in the IHS collection:

Gerard Vernon Wallop (1898-1984), the Viscount Lymington, became the 9th Earl of Portsmouth early in 1943, upon the death of his father, Oliver. He was born in Chicago and raised in the United States, where his parents had a farm near Sheridan, Wyoming. He was educated in England at Farnborough, Winchester College, and Balliol College, Oxford. In 1923 he took over a 150-acre farm on a family estate. As a farmer and landowner he was, according to Dr. Philip Conford, “successful and progressive.”

He served as Conservative MP for Basingstoke (1929–34) and was a leading member of the English Mistery, founded in 1931 by William Sanderson, before splitting with him in 1937 to form the back-to-the-land “English Array.” The Array’s journal was the Quarterly Gazette, and the movement was dedicated to, as Lymington put it, the regeneration of the English stock and soil; opposition to alien corruption, internationalism, and usury; craftsmanship and domestic responsibility; and the employment of organic agricultural methods to replenish the soil and produce healthy food. While leading the Array, he founded an additional journal, the New Pioneer, whereupon he collaborated with John Warburton Beckett (an ex-socialist MP), A. K. Chesterton, Anthony Ludovici, Philip Mairet and others; he was also its editor from 1938 to 1940.

In the face of the increasing likelihood of war in Europe, he founded (also in 1938) the British Council Against European Commitments, while Array activities ceased in 1940. He also joined the British People’s Party, and collaborated in the foundation, with Rolf Gardiner, of the Kinship in Husbandry – of which he was, with Gardiner, effectively the heart. It was an informal but influential alliance of ruralists, whose aim was, according to Drs. Richard Moore-Colyer and Conford, to restore the English yeomanry, establish local and regional self-sufficiency, resurrect the craft tradition, and repopulate the English countryside. The group included as members other figures such as H. J. Massingham, Philip Mairet, and Adrian Bell, and it influenced other organicist and ruralist organizations such as the Rural Reconstruction Association of A. J. Penty and Montague Fordham and the well-known Soil Association. He was also a member of the Council for Church and Countryside, founded by David Peck and Reverend Patrick McLaughlin.

His books include Horn, Hoof and Corn, Ich Dien: The Tory Path, Famine in England (at the time a Sunday Times “book of the month”), Alternative to Death, and A Knot of Roots, his 1965 autobiography. He contributed to Massingham’s 1945 anthology The Natural Order and wrote for John Middleton Murry’s paper, The Adelphi. After the war he settled in Kenya, where he was eventually to own about ten thousand acres of land, and where he would remain for about 25 years. He served there as member of the Board of Agriculture, chairman and later president of the Electors’ Union, and member for agriculture of the Legislative Assembly, which latter post he maintained for three and a half years, beginning in 1957. In 1965 he was invited by Jomo Kenyatta to become a special advisor to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food. He held the post until 1976, when he suffered a stroke and returned to England. Speaking of the Lymington legacy, Conford notes that he was “crucially important in development of the organic movement.”

Nature, the Family, and the Nation
by Viscount Lymington

When McCarrison discovered that rats fed on the equivalent diet of many of our city dwellers grew diseased, nervous, treacherous, quarrelsome, and cannibalistic, but that similar rats fed on the fresher, whole, simple diet of some Indian hill tribes were fertile, gentle, and healthy, he thumbed a long nose at the last two centuries of “progress.” His experiment diagnosed one root cause rather than the symptom of a sick world. Fresh food from well-tilled land is the basis of physical health, for earth is the matrix and the grave of our physical existence. Body, mind, and spirit in our span on the earth are one whole; thus, if we neglect the matrix, the grave alone remains the “fine and private (final) place.”

History may resound to the tramp of armed men and the liberal historians may put battles down to economics and a lust for freedom: that is, licence to pursue economic gain.

But the fundamental history of civilization is the history of the soil The understanding of this is vital to all peoples who stand at the gateway of death. The whole white civilization stands there today. In any civilization there comes a moment when, if it is to continue, civilization must become ruralization. All its economics, all its amenities, its armies, and its splendour depend on one thing: the reverent use of its soil. The writing on the wall is there; we are being weighed in the balance and found wanting – in ruralization.

The writing is scrawled in erosion across the world. At present it goes almost unheeded; so we must return to history for proof of our present follies. Only in rare and fortunate cases does the jungle triumph and do vines choke the city walls while monkeys chatter in the roofless courts of kings. Mostly the sand and the silence drift across the crumbled splendour of man’s too careless endeavours. In reasons which caused the ruins of Gobi and Sahara and the buried cities of Arabia we have more to learn for human survival than in all the chemistry, plumbing, and germ theories of today. The desert has succeeded to the cities of the past because, being cities, they bred a race which forgot the soil on which it fed. Today there are well-schooled but poorly educated children in English industrial areas who cannot believe that milk comes from the cow, and not the tin. These children had their counterparts in Rome and Nineveh.

The background of human wisdom is the ever present consciousness that the soil nourishes the plant, the plant the animal, and plant and animal the human being. Thus, the city is built from the produce of the soil. When there are too many in the city for the soil, the soil and the city perish together, as a rabbit warren is eaten bare and then poisoned by the rabbits. As soon as the soil is made the servant of the city, and not the master partner in the civilization, the desert begins. Even useless wars and gigantic wastes like the burning forests only serve to underline men’s madness in forgetting their own source of life: Quem deus perdere vult, prius dementat.

Man, insofar as he is an animal, is bound to the soil, however heaven-born he thinks himself. When he enters the city he cuts himself off from one side of his own cosmic nature, and even his fertility fails so that he has to be constantly renewed from the country stock. But the longer he remains urban bred, the more his nature is divorced from the background of human wisdom. As he develops the habits of the parasite, be he lawyer or money-changer, scribe, broker or huckster, he is fastened ever more heavily on the servant of the soil, who sinks beneath his weight. The peasant thus exploited either moves to the city to become a parasite, or else, to live, exploits the soil itself, and so with gradually increasing speed destroys his own and the parasite’s source of livelihood. First the soil is exhausted of its human stock, and then of its own life-giving qualities. For many years the human exhaustion can go on, but once the exhaustion of the soil’s own stores of fertility sets in, the town gives way to desert.

The fate of the Roman Empire should be our lesson. It is so curiously paralleled today: A hardy peasant stock subdues a fertile peninsula. It is a stock full of the sturdy characteristics of those who live for the soil. War kills off some of the best of that stock. War also brings opportunities to the natural parasites who congregate in the city while the battle rages outside. Already the seeds of decay are sown. Being a peninsula the sea is a natural highway leading to Empire, and above all, to trade. Trade leads to usury, and usury is to demand that money grows at the expense of living growth.

Trade for its own sake means more urban population, and successful war means an abundance of slaves. The slaves lower the market value of the free peasant’s hard-won fruits of his labour. The peasant is displaced, drifting workless to the town. The latifundia, the large-scaled slave-worked farm, is made possible by the huge fortunes annexed through war or trade. The city population grows as the material wealth increases; conquests of corn-growing land in Africa and elsewhere are exploited by money-lenders to bring food to the city’s workless, who must have bread and circuses; for if they are not drugged by uncreative amusement they are just as likely to turn against their Emperors as if they are not fed. The latifundia in Italy must be worked harder and harder to compete with the grain ships. All that is best in the old Empire goes to the edges where there is still a man’s work to be done, and the shame of corruption at the heart is deadened by distance. Food and amusements are imported and the best go out to the perimeters to prop up a worm-ridden empire. Throughout the corruption gets worse because of the foreign customs and foreign purveyors of vices and titillating innovations which pour in to keep the capital amused, or in the form of foreign slaves to keep the now crossbred parasites in idleness. The Barbarian sweeps over the old barriers and the dark ages succeed. But it is not the barbarian who has broken Rome, it is the neglect of the soil and its servants. The once fertile granary of Africa from the Atlas to Cyrene is a desert, and Italy is stripped bare.

Transpose this lesson to our own times: for latifundia and slaves read “international capitalism and mass production,” for Africa read “the dust-bowl of America,” for bread and circuses read “the dole, Hollywood, and the headline press.” The parallel in the waste of land and the degradation of a fine yeoman stock is complete.

Reports and commissions, invention and finance will not help us if we do not remember this lesson and seek a salvation which can make integrate men; that is beings integrated within themselves and living in harmony with the whole of their environment.

I cannot believe that the Golden Age is a mere myth of superstitious ancients, or the Utopian figment of self-deceived idealists. I believe it to be a race memory, well-nigh universal of times when peoples in differing places had achieved a way of living in partnership and harmony with Nature. They possessed the secret, almost perfect, of adaptation to their environment, so that health, gentleness, beauty and strength were the rule and not the exception. That is the adaptation expressed in the Book of Job “when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy” – man conscious of his relationship to God and his unity with creation. The memory was nearer to the most ancient Egyptians and the earlier Greeks, even to the Aztecs, than to ourselves. Sometimes we may believe that there is more than a trace surviving still, when we read of the Hunzas of northern India living among the eaves of the world, or remember what Tahiti must have been before it was despoiled.

Even the story of Eden is a race memory of natural harmony and adaptation broken into by adding knowledge which could not be assimilated into wisdom. So far in this century, if we are honest with ourselves, we see that we have scientific knowledge but not the wisdom to use the knowledge to save us from shattered bodies and empty souls. We calculate our children with contraceptives but omit to make the wholeness of environment and love which is home. We are full of medical knowledge without health; scientific exploitation of the soil without the love and care, experience, and foresight to know that what we take we must return. The philosopher and the seer are at a discount, when they are most needed.

Self-knowledge must drive us to ask in humility: how may we regain a harmony with Nature* – with the ordering of life unspoiled by man’s quick-tempered and unmeditative arrogance; with a pattern of life that is essentially religious, sometimes in despite of religions? Even a cursory review of legends of the Golden Age, and observation of extant survivals or historic records of healthier, fuller, and calmer ways of living, show that care for the soil and ordering of life have been fused in an almost unconscious radiance of love. Happiness born of exuberant health, nurtured by patient adherence to the common purposes are its hallmarks.

[* This does not mean returning to a state of Nature. Man has altered Nature for too many thousands of years for this to be possible, were it even desirable. But it does mean that we should reach a conscious understanding of our nature, instincts, and biological make-up in relation to the soil, plant, and animal life with which, and by means of which, we have to live, and that we may yet have to learn the relationship of all these matters with the solar system.]

Again and again we find the story of descent from some human being transcendent in wisdom and health, transmitting his qualities to family or tribe, by whom order and tradition were established. It would be fair to say that in nearly every case one gets evidence of intense respect for the soil and its conservation, based upon the continuing close-bred life of the family. There is evidence also that in physical matters these happier human beings had not lost their instinct of physical adaptation to the order of Nature which may be found from the newts to the felidi.

On the reverse picture one gets evidence that civilization broke down because it disregarded the right use of the soil, and disintegrated because it had too much knowledge, but had lost its wisdom. We know that half the deserts of the world are monuments to human folly. The popular study of anthropology, collated with a biological knowledge of medicine and modes of agriculture, leaves us grounds for supposing that the debased savage and the cannibal were not simply laggards in the supposed race of evolution, but the relics of peoples who have taken the wrong turning earlier than ourselves. It is not difficult now to doubt the turning which our technocratic material civilization has taken in the last three hundred years. We can begin to understand how living has been divided from life, and body from spirit. When man is fragmentary and no longer integrated, it is no wonder in the endless crisis of our own disordering that men snatch at tendered panaceas – vitamin pills for the body and quack religions for the soul. We are so used to a readymade world that many ask for a ready-made mass religion to salve their souls and even to comfort their bodies. It is only the over-weening materialist who salve their souls and even to comfort their bodies. It is only the over-weening materialist who could flatly deny that by their approach to God the great mystics have left the human race in their debt. It is perhaps true that we need the influence of these seekers today, and that the world is parched for lack of striving after the ultimate wholeness which is assimilation into Being beyond our diurnal comprehension. But, although we may acknowledge, we cannot fulfil the need for such persons as we would apply an engineering technique to a new invention.

However, hunger for unfulfilled spiritual leadership and authority, for what we fondly believe is a short cut, should not leave us without either the energy or the faith to see that workaday solutions can be achieved, with the strength of purpose to work for these ends, and discipline to adhere to the values which shape them. Perhaps then, and only then, will the revived spiritual authority come to men of our day.

If we are sufficiently humble we should understand that the instinct of right living has been overlaid just as we have cast away the traditions which those instincts made.

On the other hand, however disordered our knowledge, however superficial our intellectual pride, we can still, with the power of reason and co-ordination of knowledge reproduce wisdom, and again give the best of our instinct the chance to assert itself for enduring ends. Reason, which does not apply its power for achieving harmony with Nature, or ally itself to liberating and guiding human instinct, can only plan Utopias and achieve Genevas.

The chapters which follow in this book are a tentative effort to use knowledge and experience in trying to point out on practical lines some, but by no means all, of the methods which could first restore to no inconsiderable number of the English, integrity of health for body and mind, in alliance with, rather than in opposition to, Nature. My hope and belief is that these methods might make such a nucleus of sound men and women that the example and influence would grow until it embraced the whole. Therefore, before proceeding to indicate solutions, I shall have to establish the principles upon which they are to be based, and incidentally at times to refute established errors, the virtues of which are taken for granted.

I have based this book primarily on the soil; on the family; on responsibility; and the development of instinctive excellence of craft and leadership. To believe that it is possible to found and maintain a great civilization without first using, maintaining, and even enriching its soil is to court disaster – disaster due to insecurity, subnormal health, and repressed instinct. The soil is the limiting factor. It is the liberator or inhibiter of inheritance according to its quality. Breed counts, but it cannot function properly on bad or ill-used soil; only when we cherish the sources of life can sound blood fulfil its potent destiny.

If, for instance, one were to feed a well-bred race-horse on the diet of a Neapolitan cab-horse, it is unlikely that one would even get a superior cab-horse; rather an ill-tempered, illadapted misfit in the shafts. The nature of the soil means more than the quality of food: it affects the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the quality of the sunshine. Ill-used soil can mean bad water and unhealthy air. Science might alleviate, but could not cure these fundamental effects.

The soil constitutes our environment in the truest sense; it courses through our blood, moulds our muscle and builds our bones. It even influences our thought and characterizes our actions. I believe that we should have the humility to acknowledge that character of the soil, rather than our own convenient predilections, should determine the nature of our customs and institutions. Therefore, it should determine even the size of the population which it carries. It is an error to consider that if we could guarantee the permanent security of imports and food for all from overseas, it would bring us either health or spiritual fulfilment.

God who ordered Nature must have clearly intended that the food we eat should be as fresh as possible; just as it was intended that the wastes from that food should go back to the soil whence it comes. These are the two most obvious biological reasons why the nature of the soil should determine our institutions. There are, however, spiritual reasons as well. When men cannot see cause and effect, they forget the relationship between the two. Reverence for the soil of far countries can never be the same as reverence for the particular plot which a man may cultivate himself. Therefore, men will not care until it is too late, if the soil is abused, when they eat imported foodstuffs. This is also a most cogent argument against great cities, since the metropolitan townsman forgets that the countryside is the source of life, rather than his playground.

The soil itself is the source of responsibility in craftsmanship. It is easier to escape the consequences of bad material and scamped workmanship in mass production than in dealing with Nature. Crop and animal alike will give the lie to the scrimshanker or the second-rate, but fine workmanship and generous care receive their accolade from life. Nor can the husbandman tolerate faulty tools, however simple they may be, and so he spreads the craftsman’s instinct far wider than himself. The craftsman’s instinct is the foundation of culture, since it satisfies needs which must otherwise explode in barbarism. Head-hunter and gangster are substitutes for true culture. To deny the creative instinct is to enlarge the restless forces of destruction.

While the soil provides our environment, internal as well as external, it forces us to use and not abuse the instinct which makes life continue. The soil decrees the unit of the family; since, except for the infant, each member fits into his or her place for livelihood. Even the children find work which is at the same time play and school for future responsibility in the household and the field. Later, as eyes grow dim, or muscles slacken, a niche of usefulness remains. If the family is the natural unit for the organization of the husbandman, his work should teach him the importance of his function as a procreator. It is hardly an accident that with tremendous urban growth the denial of breeding values is always present.

Those reared only on bread and circuses may claim the more unreal responsibility of a vote, but they can and do lose the tradition of trusteeship and the instinct of sound perpetuation. The instinct to choose a lifelong partner and home-maker with health and stamina, both physical and spiritual, is warped into attraction which mistakes a spurious sex appeal for true vitality, and the mutual capacity to enjoy tinsel amusements with the character to share life. They become the mob rushing to destruction. Only half-conscious that they have lost the status of life, they clamour against the truth which whispers that “the fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Uncertain of themselves they both deny and hate inherent superiority.

The farmer knows full well the importance of environment, and he does not belittle it. But he knows that without sound stock and type he will not flourish. He will not willingly or wittingly sow bad seed or use bad sires. When people are in true harmony with Nature there is least often unsound mating among human beings. Men and women learn instinctively to choose a good type for each other. This is of supreme importance among ourselves in Great Britain where the Industrial Revolution has gone far to smother such sound instinct, and where the scientist and priest have been too prone to gratify the delusions of the mob with half-truths.

The results of our false values in suicidal economics has meant that the sound in every walk of life have had an increasing burden thrust upon them to support the wreckage of the system. The State has dealt meanly with its servants in Army, Navy, or Imperial Civil Services. The devoted men who brought order and justice to, and fought famine and disease in India and elsewhere have not been able to perpetuate their kind. They had to choose between serving a great purpose or bringing up a family large enough to carry on their blood. We have forgotten that taxation for social services, or repayment of the usurer must ultimately fall upon the shoulders of the primary producer. Taxation has fallen more hardly upon the responsible individual than the exploiter and speculator. Social maintenance has supported in far too many cases the incompetent at the expense of the better workman who tries to succour his family with his efforts, unaided by the State. The unwholesome and the feckless have been helped to flourish. This does not mean that we should leave the hindmost to the devil, but that our social efforts should have been based on values which should first aim at the survival of the best in mind and body.

A ‘nation’ of hirelings

Two friends, both of whom have worked as self-employed builders for years, are now working in a bread factory on day-to-day contracts for an employment agency.

“The Hireling flieth, because he is a Hireling.” (St. John x:13.)

Those eight words are themselves a complete condemnation of a system in which the Hireling is normal. Our Lord does not condemn the Hireling. He flies, not because he is a coward or a villain, but because he is a Hireling, and clearly no state in which the bulk of the people are of this category can attain either a real organic order, or a true civilisation. The point need not be elaborated.

Distributist Harold Robbins in an essay entitled ‘The Buttress of Freedom’ from Distributist Perspectives Volume 1.

Confused, Darling?

Alistair Darling is feigning puzzlement at the reluctance of banks to lend to small business. He’d better hope that the sheep don’t watch Money Masters, they might realise they’re being fleeced:

[The Goldsmiths] also discovered that extra profits could be made by “rowing” the economy between easy money and tight money. When they made money easier to borrow, then the amount of money in circulation expanded. Money was plentiful. People took out more loans to expand their businesses. But then the goldsmiths would tighten the money supply. They would make loans more difficult to get.

What would happen? Just what happens today. A certain percentage of people could not repay their previous loans, and could not take out new loans to repay the old ones. Therefore they went bankrupt, and had to sell their assets to the goldsmiths or at auction for pennies on the dollar.

The same thing is still going on today, and today we call this rowing of the economy, up and down, the “Business Cycle,” or more recently in the stock markets, “corrections”.

You can’t blame Darling, though:

[T]he American people elected Republican James Garfield President. Garfield understood how the economy was being manipulated. As a Congressman, he had been chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and was a member of the Banking and Currency Committee. After his inauguration, he slammed the Money Changers publically in 1881:

“Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce... and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.”

Garfield understood. Within a few weeks of making this statement, on July 2 of 1881, President Garfield was assassinated.

Watch the video here: Part One, Part Two

A.L. Morton’s ‘A People’s History of England’ II

This is Part II of a look at Morton's account of empire. Part I can be read here.

All that follows is a direct quotation of the third section of Chapter XV of Morton's History, Colonial Expansion - Egypt:

The story of British dealings in Egypt is worth telling in some detail, not only because of its intrinsic importance but because it contains in the most concentrated form the whole essence of imperialist method. What took centuries in India was here crowded into little more than a generation, while the compact and unified character of the country, the valley of a single great river, enables the whole scene to be realised at a glance.

From the time of the Mohammedan conquest in the seventh century to the beginning of the nineteenth, there were few fundamental changes in Egypt. New dynasties arose, trade routes came into being and declined, but the unchanging basis of peasant cultivation dependent upon the annual cycle of the Nile remained unaltered. Napoleon came and departed, the Turkish empire crumbled away, leaving Egypt virtually independent under its khedive. Almost as shadowy as the authority of the Turkish sultan in Egypt was that exercised by the khedive over the vast territory of the Sudan and the even remoter Somali coast.

In the 1850s came the project of the Suez Canal, and European capitalists began to turn their attention to the Nile valley. The canal was opened in 1869. Much of the capital was French, but the khedive Ismail had subscribed nearly half of the shares. At once Egypt became the key to the most important waterway in the world. Britain was more vitally concerned with the control of the Suez than France because the canal was on the main route to India. At the same time, the development of important cotton plantations in Egypt, to which a powerful impetus had been given by the American Civil War, was another reason for British interest in this region, since Britain was the chief importer of cotton and the plantations had been developed largely with British capital.

Naturally, therefore, when Ismail began, in the 1860s and 70s, to introduce Western improvements, it was to London that he turned for the capital that did not exist in his own country. These were merry years. In little more than a decade 900 miles of railways, hundreds of bridges, thousands of miles of canals and telegraphs, costly docks at Suez and Alexandria were built.

The operations proved almost boundlessly profitable to British bankers and industrialists. First of all the loans had to be raised. Between 1864 and 1873 four great loans amounted to over £52,500,000, raised at heavy rates of interest. But Egypt received only £35,400,000 of this sum, the rest going to the London financiers as commission and expenses. This was only the beginning since almost all the money raised was at once paid over to British contractors, who in their turn made vast profits. Thus, the harbour works at Alexandria, for which the Egyptian Government paid £2,500,000, realised a profit of £1,100,000 for the contractors. By 1876 the indebtedness of Egypt was about £80,000,000, and the interest on this sum was £6,000,000 a year out of a total state revenue of £10,000,000, all of which had to be screwed out of a peasant population of about eight million, cultivating less than five and a half million acres of land. In 1875, the khedive was forced to sell his shares in the Suez Canal, which were bought by the British government through the Rothschilds.

Year by year, as loan was piled upon loan, the country became more and more bankrupt. The peasants, who benefited least by the new railways and docks, were bled white to pay the foreign bond-holders. In 1878 there was cattle plague and famine and it was clear that a crisis was at hand. The Egyptian state machine was breaking down and it was time for Britain, as the representative of the financiers, to step in and protect their interests. A strong agitation compelled the khedive Ismail to grant a constitution, and a nationalist party, openly anti­-foreign, began to gain support. This was too much for the British, who had Ismail deposed and replaced by the more subservient Tewfik. The nationalist movement continued to grow, led by Arabi and other army officers. In 1881 they seized power and established a government determined to resist foreign encroachments.

Britain and France sent warships to Alexandria, where they organised a 'massacre' of Christians, mostly Greeks and Armenians, by hired Bedouin assassins, as a pretext for intervention. But the antagonisms between the different European Powers made immediate action impossible. A conference was held in June 1882, at which Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Russia and Austria agreed not to seek any 'territorial advantage, nor any concession of any exclusive privilege', except, according to British addendum, 'in case of special emergency'.

On 11 July the British created their 'special emergency' by bombarding the forts of Alexandria on the excuse that they were being repaired by the Egyptians. An army was landed which defeated Arabi's forces at Tel-el-Kebir, and by the end of September the British were in full military control of the whole country. The most solemn assurances were of course given that the occupation was only temporary and would end when order was restored. For the next twenty-five years the real ruler of Egypt was Sir Evelyn Baring (of Baring Brothers the bankers, later Lord Cromer) whose official post was that of Consul­ General. Before describing the policy on which Baring re­organised Egypt in the interests of high finance, it is necessary to outline the events by which British rule was extended to the Sudan.

The Sudan, stretching south from Egypt almost to the equa­tor, was important not only for its fertility and natural riches but because the upper reaches of the Nile pass through it and whoever controls the Sudan also controls Egypt. Towards the end of the century it became of special value to Britain as a link in the chain of territory which it was hoped would extend right across Africa from Egypt to the Cape.

About 1880 a religious nationalist movement under Mahommed Ahmed, better known as the Mahdi, spread over the whole country. From Dafur in the West to Suakim on the Red Sea and south to the great lakes, the Egyptian garrisons were swept away. In 1883 an Egyptian army which had been sent up the Nile against the Mahdi under Colonel Hicks was entirely destroyed. Only Khartoum remained in Egyptian hands, and the large garrison there was threatened.

Sir Evelyn Baring and the majority of the British Cabinet, including Gladstone who was Prime Minister at the time, decided that the Sudan must be abandoned for the moment. A powerful minority, working in close harmony with Lord Wolseley and other leading army officers, thought otherwise. Making use of a stunt journalist, W. T. Stead, they whipped up an intense and apparently spontaneous agitation to have General Gordon sent to Khartoum to organise the withdrawal of the garrison, though he had publicly declared his opposition to this policy. Baring's protests were overruled and Gordon arrived at Khartoum in February 1884.

Instead of proceeding with the evacuation as he had been instructed to do, he allowed himself to be besieged, apparently with the idea of blackmailing the government into sending a relief force, defeating the Mahdi and reconquering the Sudan. A relief force was sent, after much delay, but it did not arrive till 28 January 1885, two days after Khartoum had fallen and Gordon had been killed. The expedition then returned, since the re-conquest of the Sudan was impracticable till after the reorganisation of Egypt had been completed. But British imperialism gained something more immediately useful than a new province, it gained a saint and martyr. The very peculiarities which had made Gordon an imperfect instrument when alive, his naive piety, his indiscipline and his contempt for convention, made him all the more suitable for canonisation, since the vein of sentimentality running through the British ruling class would have prevented their accepting a saint who was not also something of a simpleton.

For twelve years the Sudan was abandoned. During this time much happened: the position in Egypt had been consolidated, Britain, France and Italy were penetrating the Somali Coast, Abyssinia and Uganda, the vision of Rhodes of a British empire running unbroken from north to south was being embodied in the settlement of Rhodesia. And, in opposition to this, the French were planning an east to west block which would cut across the British somewhere on the upper Nile.

Then, on 1 March 1896, the first Italian attempt to conquer Abyssinia was shattered at Adowa. Adowa was more than a defeat for Italy. Indirectly it was a defeat for Britain, Italy's ally in East Africa, and a victory for France which had been supplying Abyssinia with arms and posing as its only genuine friend, with the object of using that country as a base from which to conquer the Sudan and turn the flank of the British. Adowa meant that the way was now clear for such an attempt.

Within a week the British government had decided to begin the invasion of the Sudan. General Kitchener, with a powerful Anglo-Egyptian army, moved slowly up the Nile, consolidating every step and building a railway as he advanced. In September 1898 Khartoum was re-taken after the Sudanese had been routed in a bloody battle at Omdurman. Soon after, the victor­ious army encountered a handful of French soldiers who had occupied Fadosha, still higher up the river. For a short time, war between France and Britain seemed likely, but the French gave way, partly because their rivals were in effective military occupation of the Sudan but more because they dared not risk a war of which a hostile Germany might take advantage.

The finance of the conquest was somewhat peculiar. Egypt had to pay two-thirds of the £2,500,000 bill, and for years after paid the heaviest part of the cost of administration. But the profits from the exploitation of the new province went entirely to British capitalism. Railways and other works were constructed on the same terms as those in Egypt, and the Sudan soon became a producer of fine quality cotton. The highest point of co-operation between the British government and the cotton planters was reached in the case of the Sudan Plantations Syndicate, of which the ex-Prime Minister Asquith was one of the directors. Over a large area in which an irrigation scheme was carried out all the land was forcibly rented by the government from its Sudanese owners at 2s. an acre, and then re-allotted to the original peasant occupiers on condition that one-third of each holding of thirty acres was used for cotton growing. The cultivator was allowed 40 per cent of the proceeds of the cotton crop and the remaining 60 per cent was divided between the syndicate and the government. It is not, perhaps, surprising that for the first eight years of its working the syndicate made an average profit of 25 per cent. Besides being a cotton-growing area, the Sudan became an important and steady market for the products of British heavy industry.

The principle on which Baring ruled Egypt during the twenty-five years of his consulship was that 'the interests of the bond-holders and those of the Egyptian people were identical'. In practice this meant that the surplus for export must be increased so that the charges on loans could be regularly met. By 1907 cotton exports had increased from £8,000,000 a year to about £30,000,000. As the proportion of land under cotton rose, food had to be imported for a population previously self-supporting. Thus the peasants provided two new sets of profits, one for the exporters of cotton and one for the importers of wheat. While the total productivity of the country rose, they received a steadily diminishing proportion of the value of their crops.

Egypt was governed by a bureaucracy entirely under British control, and for a long time organised opposition was impossible. In 1906, however, a particularly gross example of misrule in the judicial massacre at Denshawai provided the spark which set ablaze the smouldering discontent and a new nationalist movement began to develop. Under pressure of this movement small concessions had to be made but the First World War, during which Egypt became a point of first-class strategic importance, provided an opportunity for even stricter control. Egypt was placed under martial law, her nominal connection with the Turkish empire was at last broken, a rigid censorship was imposed and nearly a million peasants and workers were conscripted for war service in spite of the most specific pledges that this would not be done.

After the war the nationalist agitation was resumed. In 1919 there were widespread riots and strikes in course of which over one thousand Egyptians were killed. After a struggle lasting for more than a decade Britain was forced to grant Egypt a nominal independence, in which the reality of British rule was preserved, first by a strong military occupation of the Suez Canal zone and secondly by the continued occupation of the Sudan. The great irrigation works which have been constructed on the upper Nile made it possible for Egypt's vital water supply to be interrupted at any time, and it has therefore always been a prime demand of the Egyptian nationalists that the whole Nile valley should be united under a single independent regime.

A.L. Morton’s ‘A People’s History of England’ I

I posted a comment at Laban Tall's yesterday which included a quotation that I think would benefit from some context. I did not want to intrude too much on someone else's blog, so I decided to become a blogger myself - of sorts - and post extended passages from A.L. Morton's classic 'A People's History of England'. These passages relate certain episodes from Britain's imperial past which I believe might be instructive for all opponents of today's Empire.

LT posted a link to a book of 'patriotic' verse extolling the virtues of empire, but to me, patriotism and empire are in opposition. Patriotism is a love of the local, particular, and traditional, while empire turns away from these to seek satisfaction in the exotic, distant, and new, and tends inevitably to destroy the local and particular attachments of both imperialist and colonised peoples.

A Victorian Bishop is quoted from the foreword to the book:

To consolidate the Empire, and to animate it as a whole with noble ideas, is one of the greatest needs and duties of the present day; and an empire, like an admiral, lives not by bread alone, but by its sentiments, its ambitions, its ideals.

LT, perhaps rightly, wrote that many Bishops of 2008 would call the Victorian a 'fascist'. But I wanted to comment on the inherent tension between empire and patriotism, I wrote:

Substitute 'international community' for empire and you'd be hard-pressed to find a Bishop who doesn't swoon with relief at being offered the soft alternative. The Bishops pretend not to see that the 'international community' pursues the same ends as empire, and readily resorts to hard-empire military invasions when frustrated.

Empire and patriotism are, almost by definition, polar opposites, but like the Victorians we are being trained not to see this. A.L. Morton in 'A People's History of England' wrote:

It is entirely characteristic that it was just as the Tory Party ceased to be really representative of the landowners that it adopted a pretentiously self conscious 'Merrie England' propaganda patter. The peculiar task of Disraeli was to reconcile the English aristocracy to their position of junior partner in the firm of Imperialism Unlimited.

Topical substitutions for key words in that passage, and parallels with today's Empire, are various and obvious.

Here is the quotation from Morton in context:

It was during the government of Gladstone that attention was forced upon Ireland by the Fenians. Nothing could be more revealing than Gladstone’s famous exclamation when he was called on to take office in 1968, ‘My mission is to pacify Ireland.’ Here ‘pacify’ is the operative word. For all sections of the ruling class, Ireland was a conquered province to be governed in their interests, peacefully if possible, but by violence when necessary. It was within the limits set by this conception that the whole struggle between Liberals and Tories over the Irish question was waged during the late nineteenth century. Their differences were purely tactical and it was among the working class alone that the belief that Ireland was a nation with the right to determine its own destiny found any support.

One outstanding event of the period, and the one which marks decisively the turn into a new age, must receive more detailed consideration in a later chapter.* This was the purchase by the British government in 1875, on the initiative of Disraeli and with the assistance of the Rothschilds, of the shares in the Suez canal held by the Khedive of Egypt. It is important both for its place in the development of the British Empire and for the close co-operation it reveals between the Tory government and the powerful international financial oligarchy.

New figures appear on the scene, Goschens, Cassels and the like, to balance the already established Barings and Rothschilds, and they exercise an increasing influence upon British policy and turn it into a new direction. As they grew in power, and as the influence of banking over industry extended, the Liberal party became more and more a party of the middle class and its authority diminished while the rise of the Labour party on the other side ate away its mass basis among the workers. It is entirely characteristic that it was just as the Tory Party ceased to be really representative of the landowners that it adopted a pretentiously self conscious 'Merrie England' propaganda patter. The peculiar task of Disraeli was to reconcile the English aristocracy to their position of junior partner in the firm of Imperialism Unlimited.

It was indeed a pressing necessity for the British bourgeoisie to learn new ways, for in the late 1870s a deep economic and social crisis was upon them, not to be overcome so lightly as the periodic crises of the bounding years of dominant Liberalism.

* Morton's account of the British Empire in Egypt forms Part II of this posting.

Earlier in Chapter I, Morton had written of Disraeli:

The revolt against Peel was led by a young and almost unknown Jewish politician, Benjamin Disraeli, and it was Disraeli who re-created the Tory party at the beginning of the age of imperialism, no longer primarily as a party of the landowners but as the party of the new power of finance capital.