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significance of the word liberty. This is the pith 
o£ >vhat we are fighting for, and, consequently, if we 
in this country are to secure the unity of thought anH 
will which we need to secuic oiid at ^>lla.U we are all 
feiming, it is out of this word that we must wring it. 
And it Is to be done. If the reader will look 
Steadily at tlie word liberty he will see the dust of party 
politics settle and clear away from around it, untU it 
appears as the central inspiration of our national 
potion. What will be his first discovery? Liberty, he 
will perceive, is the Instinct of a man to be himself and 
to develop and grow in accordance with the laws of his 
own being; and tliis is not merely a human, but a 
universal, instinct, for it is one which man shares with 
all nature. The master impulse and principle of life 
which inhabits every bird, or beast, or insect, every 
plant, or tree, or flower is precisely the impulse towards 
self-realisation, the impulse to exist and develop in 
accordance with the law which constitutes its own 
identity and the assertion of which by every natural 
organism maintains what we call tiie struggle for 
existence. Man's desire for Uberty, for the liberty of 
self-expression, self-realisation, self-development, is a 
natural instinct. 
This is our first discovery ; but, then, continuing 
our examination, we maiie another. Man is a herding 
or gregarious animal. And here, too, we are dealing 
with something fundamental. Nay, here, too, the 
animal precedent comes in again, for it may be said that 
at least all animals of a benign and progressive ten- 
dency (as cattle, horses, doji) are herding or social 
animals, while those which we especially stigmatise as 
wild beasts (tigers, panthers, lions, &c.) are solitary 
and anti-social. So it is with man. It is evident that 
all co-operation, all possible progress of whatever kind, 
material, Intellectual, or spiritual, depend upon and 
are the outcome of the gregarious instinct. 
Man, then, would be free, but man would herd. 
But immediately he finds himself in this difficulty — that 
the two chief instincts of his nature clash. He cannot 
at once herd and be free. The social cement consists of 
the measure of free will which each individual sur- 
renders to society. Out of these contributions govern- 
ments and laws are composed, which aie society's in- 
struments, and which must, if society is not to disin- 
tegrate into its separate atoms, be permitted to coerce 
jsmd control the individual will. 
Here, then, are two points of view, both natural 
to man and instinctive in him — the point of view of 
tlie individual and the point of view of society. And 
according as men's temperaments incline them, they 
take opposite sides in the unending argument which 
goes on between these two, some insisting with all 
their might on the right of the individual to free self- 
development, and others insisting with all their might 
on the sanctity of law and order and the superior rights 
of society as a whole. On this basis is built our party 
system, and as each side is conscious of the other only 
as an obstructive influence, tlieir mutual antagonism is 
fanned into a perpetual controversy. 
But now we take our last and most earnest look 
at the meaning of this word liberty, and what do we 
see? We see that, in eiTect, tlie fierce opposition just 
noted is itself a delusion — it is superficial. Under tliat 
apparent opposition there is real unity. Neither of the 
two ideals involved, neither liberty nor society, can 
exist save in a degraded and stunted form, otherwise 
than through the help of the otlier. Liberty in itself, 
liberty uncurbed, unordered, unsocialised, is no more 
than the instinct of the tiger in the jungle. To grow to 
anything, to be susceptible of advance, it must submit 
to such restraints as will adapt it to the social state. So 
that the party which is the guardian of liberty, though 
constantly at loggerheads with its rival the guardian of 
social order, yet in reality has vital need of this party's 
assistance. 
And the converse also holds true. For what the 
party of order wants is not social order as a (ast-iron 
system — ^the social order of ancient Eg7pt^fox:£xii^>*r^^» 
which existed In such utterlrar»->J'-«*'7''3SeffectuaIly to 
o^-guuve every monoiT'ofintellectual and spiritual 
development. No, the party of order, as much as any, 
desires vitality, progress, thought. It is the guardian 
of society; but It is a living, not a dead, society it would 
maintain, and this condition of progress, of life, of 
development, can only be inspired by the presence and 
constant operation of the spirit of liberty. 
Therefore it appears that both the great English 
political parties need each other and lean upon each 
other. They have always co-operated. Both have been 
equally concerned in tlie task, which together they 
have accomplished, of building up a social structure 
which contains within itself toe principle of liberty 
while preserving at every step the principle of order. 
This it is, this ideal of an ordered liberty, which our 
Empire itself is an attempt outwardly to realise; and, 
more than that, this it is which is in process of becom- 
ing (with certain grim and terrible exceptions) the poli- 
tical ideal of the European nations. It is indeed 
wonderful and most signiiicant how, State by State, all 
along the South and East of Europe, where the night 
of tyranny has brooded longest, the whisper that the 
cause of liberty Is being fought for is firing the young 
nations to its defence. Has tlie reader considered what 
it must be to every patriot, to every lover of Uberty, 
to watch the power of that spirit which is drawing from 
East and West the British Colonial contingents to the 
defence of such an Empire as ours ? Has he thought 
what so signal a proof of the might and power of 
ordered freedom must mean to those States which are 
struggling out of Austrian or Turkish servitude towards 
the realisation of the same ideal ? 
This task, then — the realisation on an imperial 
scale pf the idea of ordered freedom — has been Britain's 
task in the world. Every Briton and all Britons 
have co-operated in it. This it is that we are fighting 
to defend, .and out of our knowledge of our common 
share in this it is that we must wring the assured and 
absolute unity of will and sentiment which there is a 
disposition to attain, a longing to attain in all 
quarters, j^et which somehow we have not quite 
succeeded in attaining. 
We all know what is lacking. A Coalition Govern- 
ment has been formed, but what does that imply ? Does 
it not imply a like coaUtion of sentiment all through 
society ? What signifies unity at the head if it is 
lacking throughout the body It has been said that,; 
to secure such unity, we must set aside party con- 
siderations in the present crisis. I do not like " set 
aside." We are fighting now to preserve what, through 
all our history, the two political parties have been 
fighting to build up. To set aside party purposes is 
to set aside the very cause and justification of the war. 
No, we must not set them aside, but, looking at them 
in the fierce light that now plays on them, we must 
look through tliem. We must realise them in their 
joint action, in their mutual need of each other, in their 
common result. In that result — in the British Empire 
as it stands to-day — is the justification and fruition of 
all that is really constructive and sound in the theories 
of Conservative and Liberal. Let neither give up a 
jot of his own thought, but let each complete it by 
adding to it the thought of tlie other. We should have 
done then with those party wrangles in the House of 
Commons and in the columns of our newspapers which 
are such a constant source of weakness and discord 
among us. Then we should achieve the unity we are 
in search of. The German kind of unity, the fierce, 
outv/ard, Deulschland uber Alles unity, which is an 
offence and a threat to others, and which excites the 
more horror the better it is known, is not for us. But 
for us is another kind of unity, which spreads and 
grows, drawing to itself ally after ally, as the meaning 
of the word liberty and its significance for the future 
of mankind spreads, like light, through the mind of 
the world. 
IS 
