The History of England by A. E. Pollard
It is mainly a battle of phrases, in which few pause to examine what their opponents or they themselves
mean by the epithets they employ. In the sense in which the individualist uses the term socialist, there are
hardly any socialists, and in the sense in which the socialist uses the term individualist, there are
practically no individualists. In reality we are all both individualists and socialists. It is a question of
degree and not of dogma; and most people are at heart agreed that some economic socialism is required
in order to promote a certain amount of moral and intellectual individualism. The defect of so-called
economic individualism is that it reduces the mass of workers to one dead level of common poverty, in
which wages, instead of increasing like capital, barely keep pace with the rise of rent and prices, in which
men occupy dwellings all alike in the same mean streets, pursuing the same routine of labour and same
trivial round of relaxation, and in which there seems no possibility of securing for the individual
adequate opportunities for that development of his individuality by which alone he can render his best
service to the community.
That service is the common end and object towards which men of all parties in English history have
striven through the growth of conscious and collective action. A communist has maintained that we are
all communists because we have developed a common army, a common navy, and a common national
government, in place of the individualistic forces and jurisdictions of feudal barons. We have, indeed,
nationalized these things and many others as well, including the crown, the church, the administration of
justice, education, highways and byways, posts and telegraphs, woods and forests. Even the House of
Lords has been constrained to abandon its independence by a process akin to that medieval peine
forte et dure, by which the obstinate individualist was, when accused, compelled to surrender his
ancient immunity and submit to the common law; and this common control, which came into being as the
nation emerged out of its diverse elements in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and slowly gathered
force as it realized its strength under the Tudors, has attained fresh momentum in the latest ages as the
state step by step extended to all sorts and conditions of men a share in the exercise of its power.
This is the real English conquest, and it forms the chief content of English history. It is part of the
triumph of man over the forces of nature and over himself, and the two have gone hand in hand. An
English state could hardly exist before men had made roads, but it could no more exist until they had
achieved that great victory of civilized government by which a minority agrees for the sake of peace to
submit to the greater number. Steam and railways and telegraphs have placed further powers in the hands
of men; they have conquered the land and the sea and the air; and medical science has built up their
physique and paved the way for empire in tropical climes. But while he has conquered nature, man has
also conquered himself. He has tamed his combative instincts; he has reduced civil strife to political
combats, restrained national conflicts by treaties of arbitration, and subdued private wars to judicial
proceedings; it is only in partially civilized countries that gentlemen cannot rule their temper or bend
their honour to the base arbitrament of justice. He looks before and after, and forgoes the gratification of
the present to insure against the accidents of the future, though the extent to which the community as a
whole can follow the example of individuals in this respect remains at the moment a test of its
self-control and sense of collective responsibility.
Whether this growth of power in the individual and in the state is a good or an evil thing depends on the
conscience of those who wield it. The power of the over-mighty subject has generally been a tyranny;
and all power is distrusted by old-fashioned Liberals and philosophic Anarchists, because they have a
traditional suspicion that it will fall into hostile or unscrupulous hands. But the forces of evil cannot be
overcome by laissez faire, and power is an indispensable weapon of progress. A powerless state
means a helpless community; and anarchy is the worst of all forms of tyranny, because it is irresponsible,
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