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Title: The Rights of Man
Author: Harold Joseph Laski (1883-1950)
Date of first publication: 1940
Place and date of edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Macmillan, 1940 (First Edition)
   [Macmillan War Pamphlets 8]
Date first posted: 7 February 2008
Date last updated: 7 February 2008
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #78

This ebook was produced by: Dr Mark Bear Akrigg




    MACMILLAN WAR PAMPLETS 8
    3d net




    THE RIGHTS OF MAN

    _By_

    HAROLD J. LASKI


    LONDON
    MACMILLAN AND CO. LTD
    1940




THE RIGHTS OF MAN



I


For something like a century and a half it has been the
central purpose of Western civilisation to find the secret
of combining individual freedom with social order. The
fulfilment of that purpose has been achieved in different
ways, and in different degrees; there has been one method in
France and another in Great Britain. But it is an aim the
fulfilment of which has been generally and increasingly
desired wherever there has been respect for human
personality.

Because this is the case, during the last century and a half
men have striven consistently to limit all privilege,
whether it was built upon birth or creed or race. They have
battled to impose upon governments the duty to avoid
arbitrary action, to rule in terms of law and not in terms
of discretion. They have claimed the right for ordinary
people to choose the governments by which they will be
ruled. That is why, after long struggles, free and equal
suffrage has been established. That is why, also, the common
man has been given the opportunity, at stated intervals, to
change the persons by whom he has been governed, if he so
desires. Before the war of 1914, it was widely regarded as
one of the supreme triumphs of civilisation that government
should be based upon free discussion and that minority
opinion should have the right to win political power by
persuasion.


The Independence of Justice

Parallel with his growing fulfilment was the recognition
that each member of the community had a right to citizenship
in the fullest sense of the term. He was entitled to voice
his grievances; he could organise, with his fellow-citizens,
to obtain redress for them. He was not to be penalised for
doing so unless the manner of his protest threatened social
peace. To secure him in these liberties, civilised States
developed, with an increasing sense of its importance, the
great principle inherent in the English writ of habeas
corpus. It is the principle that no man should legally
suffer penalties unless it could be shown by evidence before
independent judges that he had broken a specific law. This
principle was felt to be the very essence of individual
freedom; and it was because it was so regarded that the most
careful steps have been taken, in every democratic State, to
safeguard the independence of the judges. Neither king nor
prime minister, neither parliament nor civil servant, could
interfere with the judge's performance of his task. Here was
the secret which prevented the development of tyranny in our
rulers.


Constitutional Government

The right to help in the choice of those by whom he was to
be governed; the right, at stated intervals, to refuse the
re-appointment to office of those who operated the power of
the State; these were of the essence of that constitutional
government which, as England discovered in the seventeenth
century, made change compatible with peace. From England, in
the eighteenth century, the doctrine spread to America and
the Continent of Europe; after 1789, its acceptance became
the ambition of every State which recognised that necessary
social adaptation could not otherwise be peacefully
achieved, and to make those rights effective, it was
increasingly realised that constitutional government could
not be maintained unless there were (i) freedom of
expression and (ii) freedom of association. For if men are
penalised when they speak and organise freely, that
utterance and organisation are alone likely which please
those who sit in the seats of power; and sooner or later,
they will suppress all whose speech and action they find
inconvenient. History confirmed the experience that the
narrower the numbers of those to whom the rights of man were
conceded, the smaller would be the number of those to whom a
share in the benefits of social organisation was possible.
It is not accident that the wider the area of citizens to
which a government has been compelled to appeal, the wider
has been both the extent and intensity of its response to
their wants.

There is nothing mysterious in these principles. They were
wrested, after infinite effort and profound suffering, from
a society in which the claims of the many were sacrificed to
the privileges of the few. No doubt their realisation has
been both slow and incomplete. Yet it is difficult to
compare the results of their operation in States which have
adopted them with the results in States from which they have
been absent without a profound sense of the importance they
have had for the dignity and happiness of the common man.
For it is out of them that the workers have been able to
build their trade unions and the co-operative movement. It
is out of them, also, that political parties, like the
Labour Party in Britain, which, a hundred years ago, would
pretty certainly have been denied a legal existence, have
now become not merely an element in the national life, but
the vital alternative to the government in power. Out of
them, too, has come the inestimable benefit of religious
toleration; no State which lives by these principles seeks
to discriminate against the private faith a man may choose
to hold, or his right, if he so desire, to have no faith at
all. And it is out of them, further, that, above all in the
last forty years, the negative State has been transformed
into the positive State.


A Century Ago

That phrase deserves some annotation, not least in a British
context. The citizen of this country who was born after 1906
can hardly realise the rights he enjoys compared with those
at the disposal of his predecessor who was born during the
Napoleonic wars. There was no national educational system a
century ago; if a primitive factory legislation existed,
until 1844. there was no means of its effective enforcement.
There were no workmen's compensation, no trade boards, no
serious local self-government, no public health services of
any kind. What industrial conditions were like can be read
in the grim pages of Dickens' _Hard Times_, or the
remorseless analysis of Engels' _Condition of the English
Working Class of 1844_. Trade unions were still illegal;
and even after the repeal of the Combination Acts in 1825,
their status was at the mercy of a prejudiced bench. Public
libraries were a vague dream in a few scattered minds.
Unemployment and health insurance were undreamed of: neither
locally nor centrally did a competent civil service exist.
Typhus and cholera still raged in the great towns. The
enfranchisement of the masses was dreaded by an aristocracy
which controlled at least a third of the seats in the House
of Commons and was the major part of every cabinet.
Newspapers were few, and so expensive that even those who
could read could hardly afford them unless their situation
was comparatively comfortable. The standard of living was,
at best, one-quarter of what it is to-day. Maternity and
child welfare were unknown. The "condition of England"
question did not, until the time of Robert Owen and the
Chartist movement, make any serious impact upon the mind of
that generation. The notion that a working man had the right
to state his case in the House of Commons would have been
regarded as an outrage by even the most advanced members of
the leading political parties of the day.


The Popular Will

The change from a negative to a positive State is the
history, slow, it is true, but sure, of the deliberate use
of the power of the State to mitigate the consequences of
social inequality. It was a change which came piece by
piece; but what is significant in its coming was the fact
that it was always a response made by the political party in
power to the demands of the working-class voter to share in
the gain as well as in the toil of living. He wanted to see
his needs translated into terms of statute; and because he
exercised an increasingly active political power, he had the
right to compel that response. But that right would have
been meaningless unless he could call for the support of an
active body of citizens, able to say what they wanted,
accustomed to organise, and capable of protecting their
power to convince others that they were entitled to secure
the satisfaction of their claims. The condition, in a word,
of social progress was the increasing acceptance of the
rights of man, the recognition that these inhered in him as
a citizen regardless of class or creed or race. The rights
of man meant, and were understood increasingly to mean, that
the popular will, and only the popular will, was the
effective source of power.


The Tyrant's Will

It is not necessary to deny the inadequate fulfilment of all
that this development has made possible to recognise that
upon the conception it embodies the whole fulfilment of
personality depends. For once the conception is denied that
it is the obligation of all governments to respect these
rights, that their claim to obedience rests upon that
respect, it follows at once that citizens are transformed
from persons with the right to be consulted, with the
opportunity, therefore, of influence, into persons with no
prospect of influence and no function save the duty
passively to accept the orders that are issued to them by
government.

There is no place then in the State for consent; power is
bound to rest upon naked coercion. All criticism becomes
proof of ill-will; all opposition is transformed into
conspiracy. The only means, in such an atmosphere, that the
government can have of knowing the mind of its citizens is
by espionage; and dependence upon such means involves, that
it may retain its power, the suppression of all whom it is
unable to coerce into active support. The symbols of its
regime then become the secret police and the concentration
camp. It is driven to coerce because it no longer feels able
to persuade.

Having, therefore, made intolerance its central principle of
action, it can no longer treat human beings as ends; they
become, inevitably, mere instruments of purposes upon which
it has decided. They have no right to share in the making of
those purposes; they are deprived of the opportunity to
speak their minds about them. All that is demanded of them
is the mentality of slaves; and every aspect of intellectual
life is rigorously co-ordinated to produce that mentality.
Order and obedience become the highest good; freedom is
decried as an evil thing. The atmosphere, as always happens
under dictatorship, breeds arrogance and cruelty in those
who rule, servility and hypocrisy in those who obey. And
because, as again always happens under a dictatorship, some
compensation must be offered to a people for its slavery,
conquest abroad is attempted to draw the mind of its
subjects away from their misery and servitude at home. Over
two thousand years ago, Aristotle, analysing the experience
of that ancient world he knew so profoundly, remarked that
the end of dictatorship is war. The tyrant cannot afford the
luxury of peace; he requires the drama of external conflict
to build his victims into that desperate unity which would
otherwise be destroyed in civil war at home.



II


The Nazi System

This prologue is the background in which it is necessary to
set the proper perspective of the Nazi system. The
explanation of Hitler's rise to power is not a simple one.
Partly, it was due to the frustrated nationalism which
hungered for revenge after defeat in the War of 1914.
Partly, also, it was the outcome of the grave economic
crisis which previous German governments were unable to
solve. Partly, again, it was due to the fact that
constitutional government, which, in a full sense, was new
in Germany, was associated with defeat and economic crisis;
it paid the penalty for sins for which it had little
responsibility save the lack of will to repress
conspirators. Division among its friends, a propaganda of
consistent lying, the formation of private armies condoned
by high officials and financed by organised reaction, the
use of violence against men too proud (or too weak) to
retort in kind, even though they had the legal right and
duty to repress it, the general misery of a population
psychologically weary of endless political conflict
resulting always in weak government, all these played their
part. Something is due to mean intrigue, not a little to the
faithless betrayal of his high office by President
Hindenburg. The outcome of these complexities was the
admission of Hitler to the Chancellorship of the German
Reich in January 1933. The outcome of his accession to power
was not merely the destruction of the rights of man. The
outcome was the establishment of a regime which denies all
validity to the conception of human rights. Its maker boasts
openly that his only purpose is the predominance of the
German State in Europe, and that everything must be
sacrificed to securing that predominance.


The Nazi Method

The results are stark indeed. Let us set out in detail what
has been done to this end and the methods by which it has
been achieved.

1. No opposition to the government is permitted. All
organisations, therefore, the principles of which are
opposed to those of the government are destroyed; all
organisations the members of which express, as individuals,
doubts of, or hostility to, the methods of the regime are
persecuted. There is, therefore, only one political party,
the Nazi Party; all others, without exception, have been
suppressed. The government and the Nazi Party are now
identical. There are no longer elections to the legislature.
Local self-government, in the British sense, has
disappeared; in its stead, its destinies are entrusted to
officials appointed by, and responsible to, the Nazis. From
time to time a plebiscite approving Hitler's policies has
been taken. The fact that ninety-eight to ninety-nine per
cent. of the population has voted, and that all but a
handful of them have voted in his favour, is ample proof
that the voting is unfree when it is remembered that, in the
last free elections to the legislature, he did not obtain,
as in a free election he has never obtained, a majority
there. The legislature still meets occasionally to hear a
pronouncement from him. But it is immediately dismissed, and
that without the right of discussion, even though its
members have been hand-picked by the Nazi Party.


Labour

2. All the trade unions have been abolished. Workers are
organised into a "Labour Front", the main officials of which
are appointed by the Nazi Party. There is no right to
strike, and all industrial differences are settled by the
officials of the Labour Front, that is, by the government.
It is obviously a consequence of this that there has been a
serious decline in wages and that the hours of labour have
been considerably lengthened since the Nazis came to power.

3. As the trade unions have gone, so also the co-operative
movement has been destroyed as a free form of control by
organised consumers. Its connection with similar democratic
movements abroad has been sufficient to make it suspect to a
party which will tolerate no criticism of its will.


Religion

4. Organised religion has been fiercely attacked by the
government wherever it has failed to accept the aims of
Nazism. Those who sought, in the Protestant churches, to
render to Csar what was due to Csar and to God the things
that are God's, have been cut off from financial support,
forbidden to preach, to use the property of the Church, or
to publish their opinions; in extreme cases of protest, they
have been sent, like the famous Pastor Niemller, to
concentration camps. A pagan religion, under the patronage
of Rosenberg, the "philosopher" of Nazism, has been
encouraged. The Roman Catholic Church, despite a concordat
between Hitler and the Holy See, has been even more severely
treated. Its courageous refusal to accept the monstrous
racial theories of the Nazis has led to what is called the
"White" war against priests and nuns. Scandalous trials have
been staged against them for currency violations and moral
turpitude; and hundreds have been sent to prison and
concentration camps. The leaders of the Nazi Party are
openly contemptuous of Christianity, partly because its
insistence on the universality of the rights of man is
inconsistent with Nazi racial theory, and partly, no doubt,
because they greatly covet the immense property of the
Churches as a fund through which to cope with their
financial difficulties.


Freedom of Thought

5. There is no longer any freedom of opinion in the German
Reich. All newspapers, periodicals, books, plays, music,
art, the wireless and the films are under the censorship of
the notorious Dr. Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda.
Nothing can be published which is not approved by his
Department, and the "line" to be taken by publications is
indicated to their authors. No one, either, may be a
journalist unless he is a member of the journalists'
organisation, admission to which depends upon the Ministry's
approval. Broadly speaking, therefore, the German people has
no access to any information save what the Ministry of
Propaganda approves. It is a serious offence to listen to
foreign broadcasts. Much of the socialist and democratic
literature of the past is now inaccessible to readers except
by permission. Famous German writers of Jewish origin, like
Heine, may no longer be quoted; and important works of
modern scientists, like those, for instance, of Freud and
Einstein, are officially banned, either because they are by
Jews, or because their tendency is disapproved by the
government.


Education

6. All forms of education have been strictly subordinated to
Nazi purposes. Thousands of "unsound" teachers, i.e.,
teachers who were suspected of a lack of sympathy with
Nazism, have been dismissed. The curriculum has been
transformed so that the glorification of war and Nazi racial
theories are now an essential element in it. From the
earliest period, children are indoctrinated with the worship
of Hitler. They are even encouraged to report at school any
criticisms of the regime they may hear at home. The purpose
is to produce a well-regimented mass obedient to the
discipline imposed from above. In the Universities, hundreds
of the most eminent professors have been compelled to
resign, and their places, only too often, have been taken by
incompetent party hacks. Lists have even been compiled of
names students may not cite in their doctoral theses; many
of these--those, for instance, of Spinoza and Karl Marx--are
recognised outside Nazi Germany as among the supreme names
in our intellectual heritage. The German student, in short,
is being made the prisoner of a narrow and imposed
tradition, conformity with which is the condition of a
successful career. It is not, therefore, remarkable that
careful observers report a decline in the standards of all
German Universities, even in the more technical subjects
like medicine and the physical sciences.


Justice

7. It is the frank claim of Hitler that the law is simply
the embodiment of his supreme will. In the service of this
definition, the older independence of the courts has gone;
gone, also, is the notion of fixed legal rules. "Law is what
is useful to the German nation." In accordance with this
view, all judicial officers not willing to act in this
spirit have been removed from the Bench, and their places
taken by party-members. Trials need no longer be held in
public. Punishments are immensely more severe. It is even
dangerous to defend those whom the government has decided to
find guilty; the defender of Thlmann, the Communist leader,
for example, was a distinguished ex-naval officer who, after
1918, took up the study of the law. For attempting to take
the defence of his client with the proper seriousness, he
was sent to a concentration camp, whence he escaped abroad.
It is possible to be held for long periods without trial. It
is possible to be accused of one offence and to be
convicted, not on that ground, but because the court holds
that the accused's attitude is incompatible with the
well-being of the State. In the People's Court, a
revolutionary tribunal with the right to inflict the highest
penalties, two of the three members are chosen from amongst
the Nazi Party "because of their special knowledge of the
defence against subversive activities, or because they are
most intimately connected with the political trends of the
nation". It is as though, in Britain, leading members of the
Conservative Party were to judge their opponents in
political cases when a Conservative government was in
office, and leading members of the Labour Party to do the
same for their opponents when the Labour Party was in
office. Obviously, under such circumstances, a fair trial is
impossible. And this impossibility is made even greater when
the law orders punishment for such vague offences as acts
"deemed in conflict with the healthy sentiment of the
people" even when no specific statute has been violated.
Law, under the Nazis, is degraded to the position of a mere
instrument of a political party.


Terror

8. But there is not merely the tragedy of this degradation
of the law. The Nazi Party rules by terror, and its weapons
are the secret police and the concentration camp. The
activities of the former are endless. Its real business is
to prevent the growth of criticism and opposition in
Germany. It opens private correspondence; it taps private
telephones; it installs dictaphones in private houses, even,
it is alleged, in the embassies of foreign Powers; it
organises espionage through hired and voluntary informers;
it uses _agents-provocateurs_; it even organises the
kidnapping of enemies of the regime living abroad. It has
the power of detention without trial, and literally scores
of thousands of its victims, some, no doubt, guilty, but the
overwhelming majority innocent of any offence, have been
sent to concentration camps. There, as we know from
incontrovertible evidence, terrorism is the normal order of
the day. Men are beaten, tortured, starved, subjected to
indescribable humiliations, often for no other offence than
being a Jew, or having had "liberal" or socialist
convictions. At least hundreds have died as the result of
their treatment in these camps, many have committed suicide;
many have been driven insane. Outright murder by the camp
guards--often concealed under the fiction of "shot whilst
trying to escape"--has not been infrequent.

The purpose of the system is to terrorise the masses into
obedience; and the worst features of it have been employed
against supporters of the regime whose loyalty has been for
some reason suspected, not less than against its opponents.
Jews and Communists have perhaps suffered most. But perhaps
the most striking example of the Brown Terror was the
infamous night of June 30, 1934, when Hitler and Gring were
directly responsible, under hideous circumstances, for the
assassination of some thousands of their own supporters,
including some of the best-known members of the party, for
alleged conspiracy. No proofs of that conspiracy have ever
been produced; and Hitler's only justification for what was,
in fact, simply a brutal mass-murder was that on that June
night he represented "the supreme embodiment of justice".


The Leader and the Race

9. Underlying these methods are two conceptions, neither of
which can be termed intelligible to a British citizen. The
first is the conception of the Fhrer (leader) as the
incarnation, almost the Divine incarnation, of the German
people, through whom its mission is to be fulfilled. The
second, closely related to the first, is the conception of
the German people as the embodiment of the highest racial
values, the true State-builders, the essential pioneers in
science and culture, the great creators of eternal works of
art. The German race is the noblest of all races; its purity
must be safeguarded at all costs. It is entitled to dominate
all others; by so doing it gives to the world a higher
culture than any inferior race can do. To preserve its
purity, the German State is entitled to control all Germans
who live under other States; it is thus the fulfilment of a
racial obligation to bring Austria, Memel, Danzig and the
Sudetenland under the power of Germany. That, also, is why
German minorities living abroad, as in the South Tyrol and
the Baltic States, must be repatriated to Germany; why,
again, those Germans who continue to live abroad, as, for
example, in the United States of America, owe their first
allegiance to the German race, and, hence to the German
State which is its political expression.

To preserve "racial" purity, marriage between Germans, and
certain "inferior" races is forbidden; and compulsory
sterilisation may be imposed on persons in whom hereditary
disease may injure the purity of the "race". Physicians are
compelled by law to notify all such diseases to the health
authorities. It is reliably asserted that over
half-a-million persons have been sterilised on these
grounds; and the code of domestic relations and of
inheritance has been harshly revolutionised in the name of a
supposed "racial science" that is adjudged worthless by
every competent biologist in every country outside the Nazi
realm. The whole conception is simply a fantastic notion of
Hitler's, picked up by him from writers whose authority he
was quite incompetent to judge, and imposed on the German
people by him only because the law is simply his will and
there is no one to say him nay.


The Jews

10. The most tragic aspect of this "racialism" is the
results it has had upon the position of the Jews.
Anti-Semitism is one of Hitler's cardinal beliefs, and he
attributes all the ills of civilisation to the Jews. As soon
as he came into power, their wholesale persecution began.
They were rapidly eliminated from all public offices. They
were denied the right to practise in any of the main
professions. They could not write for the Press or act in
the theatre. They were excluded from the Universities beyond
one and one-half per cent. of the total student-body. They
had to sit on special benches in the elementary schools.
Marriage or sex-relations between Jews and Germans was made
a crime. They were deprived of all civic rights. They cannot
be members of the Labour Front. They are excluded from many
towns, and from many areas and public buildings in other
towns. Thousands of them have been sent to
concentration-camps, for no offence but being born a Jew.
Thousands more have been compelled to sell their businesses
to non-Jewish Germans with heavy loss. Thousands, again (it
is probable that the number is more than 150,000) have been
driven into exile, often with the loss of everything they
possess. The synagogues have been desecrated. Pogroms have
been frequent. Enormous fines have been imposed on the
Jewish community in Germany.

The extreme agony of the persecution was reached on January
1, 1939, when an ordinance prohibited any Jew from the
ownership or operation of any retail or wholesale business,
or from the occupation of an independent artisan; and all
Jewish children were compelled to attend special Jewish
schools. Almost all avenues of employment, in fact, are now
closed to the Jew, and the choice before him is that of
emigration or starvation. The organ, indeed, of the Hitler
guard, wrote of these measures that the day had now come
when impoverished Jewry "would sink into criminality and
could be wiped out by fire and sword". Yet when Hitler came
to power in January 1933, the whole Jewish community of
Germany represented only half a million citizens in a nation
of over seventy millions.

Nothing like these infamies has been known in Europe since
the worst excesses of the Middle Ages. They have been
condemned by public opinion all over the world. Great public
figures, the Pope, the President of the United States, the
Prime Minister of Great Britain, have given expression to
their horror at these brutalities; President Roosevelt, in
November 1938, withdrew the American Ambassador from Berlin
as a protest against them.

As a campaign, it has been based upon accusations again and
again refuted, and no longer accepted by any rational mind.
Its explanation lies, probably, in three realms. In part, it
is the outcome of the pathological psychology of Hitler
himself; the depth of this is evident from his discussion
of, indeed obsession with, the Jewish problem. In part, it
is the result of the need, inherent in any dictatorship
built upon terror, to have an enemy to whom all wrong can be
attributed, and against whom victories may be continually
announced. In part, further, the persecution of the Jews has
provided opportunities for satisfying Hitler's followers
with the posts, in the professions and businesses, the Jews
formerly occupied. But the whole world has realised how evil
a thing it is to revive, as the considered practice of a
government, barbaric intolerance from which, for centuries,
humanity has been striving to rid itself. To accustom a
nation to accept persecution as part of its way of life is
to sap its moral foundations. The men who were trained and
encouraged to destroy the Jews are the men who have gone on,
by a natural sequence, to impose revolting cruelties on
Czechs and Poles. Persecution becomes a habit which grows by
what it feeds on.


The State is All

11. Underlying all the strategy of the Nazi system there
lies one central principle of the first importance: a
complete contempt for the common man. The underlying
assumption of the Nazi regime is the unimportance of the
individual. In countless speeches and writings, Hitler and
his chief followers have emphasised this view. The masses
are made only to be led. They are plastic material to be
moulded by the leader into any shape he pleases. They are
not fit to exercise power; that is the business of a
specially chosen governing class alone fit to preside over
the destinies of the State. They are convinced that there
is no limit to the degree in which the people can be
deceived; its natural role is submission. In itself, it is
ignorant and anarchic, and incapable of great actions save
as it is dominated by the leader's will. Left to itself, the
people is pacifist and materialist; it becomes capable of
greatness only as the leader subdues it to purposes he only
can understand.

The Hitler Government, therefore, rejects all the democratic
and liberal notions of Western civilisation. The individual
has no rights, but only duties. He is not an end in himself,
but the means to another end which the leader defines. His
duty, therefore, is simply to obey the will of the State as
that is shaped by the leader. It is treason to question it,
it is a betrayal of the folk-spirit in which alone he can
find his meaning. He must not criticise the findings of that
spirit; to do so is to weaken it by a rationalism which,
because it doubts, jeopardises the unity of the nation. To
maintain that unity, to keep it ever more strong, is the
highest task of the State. Beside it, the happiness of the
ordinary man is nothing; his little purposes must give way
to that supreme purpose.

It is upon this basis that the whole legislation and
organisation of Nazi society has been built. Man is educated
for the State; he lives and works for the State; woman, in
her turn, is an instrument to breed children for the State.
And in return, the individual can comfort himself with the
knowledge that, as the State grows ever more strong, it
becomes the dominating factor in the life of the world. What
it wants, it takes. Whatever it wants, it is justified in
taking since it is the organised expression of the people
that is called to rule the world. To fulfil that mission
everything is justified. The goodness of a treaty, the
rightness of a war, the validity of domestic legislation,
all these depend upon the single test of whether they lead
to the fulfilment of the national mission. The leader is his
people; his will is its law. Where he goes, it must follow,
and he is always right. The only test of his actions is
their success. He has the right to do whatever he has the
power to achieve. His only sin is weakness.



III


The Western Ideal

No one can compare the way of life this outlook embodies
with that of the civilisation to which we are accustomed in
Britain without recognising at once that it is incompatible
with all the major things we value. The last hundred years,
at least, of our history have been the record of a
continuous and persistent effort to break down the barriers
of privilege in the interest of ordinary men and women; the
seven years of the Nazi regime are the history of a
deliberate and conscious effort to build up a new privileged
class whose will alone is to count in the direction of the
State. We have sought increasingly to realise equality
before the law; the Nazi regime is a denial that this is
legitimate. We have attempted to protect the individual in
his civic capacity by insisting that his experience must be
taken account of, that he may freely report it, that he may
organise to make it effective; the Nazi philosophy starts by
an insistence on the worthlessness of individual experience.
We have given independence to our judges because there is no
government we are prepared to trust to be at once prosecutor
and judge in its own cause; the Nazis have made the judge
the creature of the State and, even beyond that, have given
the police an authority over citizens which may make thought
itself a dangerous adventure. We have insisted that no
government is fit to rule unless, at stated intervals, it
has to justify its policy to those from whom it has derived
its power; the Nazi scheme confers permanent authority upon
Hitler and his followers without any right in the people to
judge of its results. Religious toleration, racial equality,
the right of each nation-state to live its life in its own
way, these principles we have sought increasingly to make
the basis of our national and international policy; all of
them are denied by those who now shape the destinies of the
Nazi State.


Greece and Christianity

In a broad way, the path which, until the advent of the
Nazis to power in Germany, Western civilisation as a whole
was seeking to follow was one which resulted from the impact
on our lives of the philosophies of Greece and Christianity.
Its keynote was the discovery of the infinite worth of the
individual human being, the insistence that the
justification of social institutions lay in their power to
evoke that worth and to give it the increasing chance of
fulfilment. Democracy and toleration were born of nearly
three thousand years' growing confidence in the validity of
this ideal. It was a confidence, be it added, increasingly
proven in human experience. We found that men excluded from
a share in power were excluded, also, from the benefits of
power. We found that all governments which were free from
popular control inevitably tended to degenerate. We found
that the rule of one, or of a few, bred arrogance and
cruelty in those who exercised power, and servility and
brutishness in those who were its subjects. We found that,
in every society, the more numerous the citizens who shared
in the active life of the State, the more responsive did it
prove to the wants they felt. We found, perhaps above all,
that the more profoundly we could build the policy of the
State upon the free consent of its citizens, the greater was
the moral self-respect they displayed. We could not regard
the State as something different from its citizens. It found
its fulfilment in their fulfilment, its success was their
successes. Its power lay in the happiness they achieved
through its operations.

This is the central tradition of Western civilisation. For
all its imperfections in realisation, it is the tradition to
the fulfilment of which, in increasing measure, all modern
history has contributed. It is, let it be noted, a tradition
which all political parties have shared in common.
Conservative and Socialist, Liberal and even Communist,
Christian and Jew and Agnostic, may have differed about its
realisation in method or in pace; about the validity of the
large ends it has in view they have hardly differed at all.
To make the common man the master of his own destiny; to
recognise in democratic freedom the atmosphere in which that
mastery can alone be attained; to insist that the attainment
of democratic freedom means the admission of rights in the
citizen which the State denies at its peril; these have been
the accepted commonplaces of Western civilisation. However
often they have been denied, in the long run they have
always triumphed over their denial; and whenever they have
been denied, the abuse of authority for ends incapable of
national justification has always been the consequence.
Those who have sought to resist their affirmation have
seemed, as Edmund Burke once said, to resist the eternal
principle of human dignity.

It is against this central tradition of Western civilisation
that Nazism is in revolt. It seeks power for the sake of
power. It is hostile to freedom, hostile to rights, hostile
to the vital postulate of the infinite worth of human
beings. What it cannot convince, it is prepared to coerce;
what it cannot take by duplicity, as in the case of Prague,
it is prepared to take by violence, as in the case of
Warsaw. Because it refuses to admit the validity of any
experience of which its leaders do not approve, it will
persecute and destroy as it hacks its way to power. There is
nothing new in Nazism; an old tyranny wears only a new mask.
It is uglier than past tyrannies because it is better
organised, more cruel because it is more efficient. But it
raises an ancient question once again, even if more sharply
and more poignantly than in any previous time.


The Evil Challenge

It is the question of whether the masses are to be free men
with rights, or slaves without rights, who live therefore at
the behest of others. Mankind has faced that challenge
before; and answered it triumphantly. No doubt in the form
in which it is made to-day it is more brutal and more
menacing than any since the Reformation; rarely in the past
have those who sought to subdue the world to their despotism
boasted of the ugly methods by which they propose to fulfil
their purpose. But it is natural that this should be the
case. To put a whole people in chains, as the Nazis have put
the German people in chains, has struck with horror all
those who still cherish the traditions of our essential
inheritance. To seek to make the whole world a prison of
which the Nazi leaders are the jailers could only be
accomplished by men to whom that tradition has ceased to
have meaning. They are driven by the logic of their attitude
to refuse to men those rights for which they have fought for
over two thousand years. For those rights are incompatible
with their power; they are intended to be the safeguards
against their manner of its exercise. The Nazi leaders
represent that ultimate corruption of the human spirit which
pervades and infects every government which denies its
responsibility to ordinary men. Like the Satan of Milton's
great epic they have identified good with evil. In battling
against the ends they seek to realise we are fighting to
restore the authority of procedures upon which the whole
quality of civilised life has been found to depend.

One final word may be said in defending, as in this war we
are defending, the concept of the rights of man against the
claims of naked power; we defend a cause as high as there is
in the record of mankind. It will not be an easy victory;
and its accomplishment on any showing, will be attended with
grave risks. The vital task before us is not merely to win;
even more, it is to win by the method of freedom. The way to
vindicate our rights against the challenge they have
encountered is to make them everywhere more ample and more
profound. The way to attack the principle of despotism is to
make the principle of our democratic faith more living that
its hold upon the common man may be more profound. There is,
on the experience of history, an active strength in the free
consent of democratic peoples which has an endurance beyond
the power of any tyranny to rival. The source of that
strength is in the faith of the common man that those who
govern him respect his rights and search for their
enlargement in terms of his demands. Where faith can evoke
that loyalty, a people can meet its challenge with
confidence. It has those qualities of magnanimity and wisdom
upon its side against which the "evil things" have never, in
the long run, been able to prevail.


PRINTED BY PURNELL AND SONS, LTD.,
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MACMILLAN WAR PAMPHLETS

1. LET THERE BE LIBERTY
A. P. HERBERT

2. WAR WITH HONOUR
A. A. MILNE

3. NORDIC TWILIGHT
E. M. FORSTER

4. THE CROOKED CROSS
THE DEAN OF CHICHESTER

5. NAZI AND NAZARENE
RONALD KNOX

6. WHEN I REMEMBER
J. R. CLYNE

7. FOR CIVILIZATION
C. E. M. JOAD

8. THE RIGHTS OF MAN
HAROLD J. LASKI




[End of _The Rights of Man_ by Harold Laski]