Page:Home rule (Beesly).djvu/5

5 Auguste Comte. "The working class is not, properly speaking, a class at all, but constitutes the body of society. From it proceed the various special classes, which we may regard as organs necessary to that body." From which it follows that any political or social arrangements which are for the true and permanent advantage of the working class, are for the advantage of the community as a whole; and that to aim at such arrangements is to set up not an ignoble ideal, but the noblest that can be conceived.

Now one of the first things the working man is likely to find out, when he comes to consider how he shall use his political influence, is that big states and empires exist mainly for the advantage of big people. There are few well-to-do Englishmen who have not one or more relatives snugly provided for by posts which would disappear if we gave up the Imperial business. You yourself, Mr. Journalist, I strongly suspect, once drew an enormous salary in India, and are still quartered on the Indian Revenue. Every fresh annexation means new prizes and promotion for officials. The working class has nothing to do with all this.

Pride in the ever extending area of British territory, and the vast population subject to our rule, is a feeling confined to the well-to-do. It is a survival of military manners, and of the old belief that the material prosperity as well as the glory of any nation depended on its ability to bully its neighbours. The working class, inheriting not military but industrial manners and ideas does not share this sentiment. It has no thirst for war, conquest, or dominion. All its aspirations are peaceful, and therefore inconsistent with any political union which is not perfectly voluntary. "Imperial Democracy" has no existence except in the schemes and dreams of half-trained statesmen and half-crazy publicists.

Our superior friend, the West-End journalist, is beginning to have his misgivings. "Demos is henceforth our master.&emsp;*&emsp;*&emsp;*&emsp;How will "Home Rule affect him? Has it anything to do with three acres and a cow? Is not the United Kingdom the work of the rich, and would not its dismemberment, perhaps, give the poor man his chance?