Section G (I.) 



SOCIAL AND STATISTICAL SCIENO^^^/*-^*^ 

 ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT, 



Professor FRANCIS ANDERSON, University of Sydney. 



LIBERALISM AND SOCIALISM. 



It is just 40 years ago since John Bright, in reviewing the ppUtical 

 situation in England, said, " We have got household suffrage ; we have 

 got the ballot. In a year or two we are pretty certain to have national 

 education ; and after that I really do not see what there is that Parlia- 

 ment can usefully do for reform or progress." Many things have 

 happened during those 40 years. Many changes have taken place 

 in political theory and political practice. But the greatest change 

 has been a change in the way of looking at social and political problems, 

 a change of mental attitude. Such changes of attitude on a grand 

 scale are rarely sudden or spasmodic, although their results may be 

 made manifest in what seem sudden, even revolutionary, changes to 

 those who are blind to the signs of the times. Acts of legislation, even 

 when they appear to be leaps in the dark, breaches with an honored 

 past, are themselves effects and symptoms of a change in national 

 temperament and outlook. It is only when we hear voices from the 

 past, speaking words like those I have quoted, that the magnitude of 

 the change is made plain to us. It is a change of sentiment. Our 

 hopes and fears are not the same as those of the generation of English 

 liberals who found in John Bright their most eloquent, if not their 

 most thoughtful, representative. And behind the change of sentiment 

 there is a change of ideas. Words like progress and reform are, in them- 

 selves, almost meaningless. As Disraeli said, " Thev are phrases, and 

 not facts : words to mystify the millions." An Oxford undergraduate 

 luminously defined progress as " advance in the direction in which 

 things happen to be moving." But that definition would apply to 

 progress down a steep place into the sea. Words like progress and 

 reform have meaning only in reference to certain ends or ideals, and 

 it is clear that the ends or ideals which now govern the social and 

 political effort of great bodies of men, transforming and creating political 

 parties, and altering profoundly the character of legislation, have out- 

 grown the formulas which seemed to most of our predecessors to sum 

 up the whole faith and duty of the practical politician. 



If we are content for the moment to use the words Liberalism and 

 Socialism as describing general tendencies rather than cut and dried 

 creeds, we may not err in calling the nineteenth century the age of liberal- 

 ism and in naming, in anticipation, the twentieth century the century 

 of socialism. 



