Rarely has a politician received a heavier blow than this which fell upon Clemenceau in 1893. Ordinarily, a man of his intellectual eminence and remarkable political faculties has no difficulty, if he loses one seat in the National Assembly of any country, in speedily getting another. Not so with Clemenceau. His very success as leader of the advanced Left and the proof that, though always a comparatively poor man, he had remained thoroughly honest amid all the intrigues and financial scandals around him told against him. He interfered with too many ambitions, was a stumbling-block in the way of too many high policies, to be able to command his return for another constituency. The same interests and jealousies which had combined against him at Draguignan would have attacked him with redoubled fury elsewhere. Persistent determination to carry really thorough democratic reforms in every department, combined with very high ability, relentless disregard of personal claims, complete indifference to mere party considerations and perfect honesty are qualities so inconvenient to modern politicians of every shade of opinion that the wonder is Clemenceau had held his position so long as he did. To have destroyed no fewer than eighteen more or less reactionary administrations, while always refusing to form a Cabinet himself, was a title to the highest esteem from the mass of his countrymen: it was a diabolical record from the point of view of the Ministers whom he had displaced and the cliques by whom they had been surrounded. Not a French statesman but felt that his reputation and his hold upon office were more secure now that Clemenceau’s masterly combinations and[128] dynamitical oratory were safely excluded from the National Assembly. So Clemenceau, at this critical period of his life and career, could rely upon no organised political force strong enough to encounter and overcome the persistent hostility of his enemies.
A weaker man would have felt this exclusion less and have been discouraged more. After seventeen years of such valuable work as Clemenceau had done, to be, to all appearance, boycotted from the Assembly for an indefinite period was a strange experience. I wrote him myself a letter of sympathy, and in his reply he expressed his special bitterness at the attitude of the Socialists towards him. This hostility might have been easily averted without any sacrifice of principle on Clemenceau’s part. But Clemenceau, defeated and driven out of his rightful place in active French politics, did not hesitate for a moment as to the course he would pursue. He had left the National Assembly as the first Parliamentarian in France: he at once turned round and at the age of fifty-two became her first journalist. Nothing in his long life of stress and strain is more remarkable than the success he then achieved and the vigour with which he devoted himself to his new vocation.
It is no easy matter, especially in France, for a publicist and journalist to discover a fresh method of bringing his opinions to bear upon the public. Yet this is what Clemenceau did. He applied his humanist-materialist philosophy to the everyday incidents of French life. That philosophy is a strange compound of physical determinism and the ethical revolt against universal cruelty involved in the unregulated struggle for existence. The fight for life is inevitable. So far, throughout historic times it has been a long campaign in which the usurping minority have always won. Wholesale butchery and cannibalism by conquering tribes have been transformed first into slavery, then into serfdom, lastly into the wage-earning system of our own time. In each and every case the many have been at the mercy of the dominating few. There is little or no effective attempt made to remedy the evils arising out[129] of such a state of things. The struggle for mere subsistence still goes on below, and those who revolt against it or endeavour seriously to ameliorate it by strikes or combinations are treated as misdemeanants or criminals. Mining capitalists, industrial capitalists, railway capitalists, landowners large and small have the law, the judges, the magistrates, the police and all the reactionary forces on their side. Hence the grossest injustice and the most abominable oppression of the poor.
Therefore the State ought to intervene, not in order to repress the aspirations and punish the attempts of the wage-earning class to obtain better conditions of life for themselves and their children, but to protect this most important portion of the community in every possible way: to secure for them shorter hours of labour, thorough education, full opportunity for legitimate combination, boards of arbitration to avert strikes, fair play at the hands of the courts and the police. The State, in fact, is to act as a national conscience and perpetual trustee for the poor. Note that the struggle for existence, the fight for subsistence must go on—Clemenceau has never contemplated the possibility of a human scheme of co-operation by which competition would be wholly eliminated—but its harsher features ought to be reduced. There is no complete overthrow of mutual destruction, and no condition of universal fellowship is in view. Only the mind and heart of the community must be changed; men must survey modern society from the point of view of humane guidance and prepare the material development and economic arrangements which shall by degrees render individual injustice and cruelty as unheard-of as now is anthropophagy.
At the back of all this lies a picturesque pessimism and what nowadays is frequently spoken of as a philosophy of despair. No sooner has this planet, its solar system, its galaxy of suns and worlds reached its full development than they all begin to traverse the downward path which leads slowly and inevitably to decay and eventual destruction, until the entire process unconsciously and inevitably begins over again. Infinity[130] oppresses us all: the cosmos with its interminable repetitions eludes conception by the human intelligence. Yet we live and strive and feel and hope and have our conceptions of justice and sympathy and duty which come we know not whence and pass onwards we know not whither. Man as a highly organised individual entity becomes superior to the mere matter of which his mind is a function, because as an individual he can rise up out of himself and criticise and reflect upon that which, without any such power of conception, surrounds, upholds and then immolates him. “The universe crushes me,” wrote Pascal, “yet I am superior to the universe, because I know that it is crushing me and the universe knows nothing about it at all.” Strange to find Clemenceau quoting and agreeing with an intelligence so wholly different from his own as Pascal’s!
Then, fate, necessity, the Nemesis of Monism working on to its foreseen but uncontrollable destiny, dominates the cosmos and through the cosmos that infinitesimally small but sentient and critical microbe man, who creates an individual ethic out of this determinist material evolution. Francis Newman, the brother of the famous John Henry the Cardinal, said that it is as impossible for man to comprehend matter developing and reproducing itself from all time as it is for him to conceive of an omnipotent deity superintending the matter he has created in its evolution from all time. We are therefore driven back, whether we like it or not, upon the ancient and never-ending discussion of free-will and predestination in a non-theological form which leaves in the main all the psychologic phenomena untouched, including Clemenceau’s own social morality that impels him to champion the cause of the oppressed. Beyond the demand for justice in the abstract and freedom in the abstract applied as a test to each special case as it arises, there is no guiding theory in Clemenceau’s philosophy. The recognition of the struggle for existence among human beings, as among plants and animals, does not imply any conscious co-ordination of effort, arising out of the growth of society, in order to do away with the antagonism engendered by life itself.[131] So with all his humanism Clemenceau will not accept the theories of scientific Socialism which could give an unshakable foundation to his own views of life. That is the weakness which runs through all his books and articles. His own individuality is so powerful that he simply cannot grasp the possibility of anything but individual effort, personal suasion and isolated measures of reform.
Nevertheless, we come upon a passage which, written obviously in perfect good faith, would, within its limits, be accepted as a fair statement of Socialism from an outsider: “Socialism is social beneficence in action, it is the intervention of all on behalf of the victim of the murderous vitality of the few. To contend, as the economists do, that we ought to oppose social altruism in its efforts is to misrepresent and seriously calumniate mankind. To complain that collective action will degrade the individual by some limitation of liberty is to argue in favour of the liberty of the stronger which is called oppressive. Is it not, on the contrary, to strengthen the individual by restraining and controlling every man who injures another man as does the employer of to-day when left to the bare exigences of competition? . . . Follow the laissez-faire policy for the individual, says the anti-social economist, and speedily a whole regiment of devotees will rush to the succour of the vanquished. We always wait, but see nothing save the terrible condition of humanity which ever remains. . . . Against this anarchy it is man’s glory to revolt. He claims the right to soften, to control fatality if he cannot escape from it. How?”
And then Clemenceau, whom in active life none would accuse of undue sentiment, goes off into a series of moral reflections and the need for perpetual moral preachments which really lead us nowhither; though, some pages further on, he quotes Karl Marx, who speaks of the unemployed as the inevitable “army of reserve” due not to human immorality but to the necessary functioning of the unregulated competitive capitalism of our period. Yet the great French Radical shrinks from the[132] organised social collective action and revolution needed to lift us out of this anarchy of oppression. He turns to the individual himself and his hard lot under the domination of fate. He has a justifiable tilt at free-will and personal responsibility. Thus:—
“But what is absurd, contradictory, idiotic is the responsibility of the creature before the creator. I say to God, ‘If you are not satisfied with me, you had only to make me otherwise,’ and I defy him to answer me.” And then, quoting from “Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead,” he cites Minos as discussing with a new-comer who is brought before him for punishment:
“All that I did in life,” says Sostrates, “was it done by me voluntarily, or was not my destiny registered beforehand by Fate?”
“Evidently by Fate,” answers Minos.
“Punish Fate, then,” is the reply.
“Let him go free,” says Minos to Mercury, “and see to it that he teaches the other dead to question us in like manner.”
“Substitute Fate for Jehovah or by the laws of the Universe, and tell me,” puts in Clemenceau, “when the pot owes his bill to the potter.” All this and the farewell benediction which the author vouchsafes to the human plaything of all these pre-ordered decisions of society do not get us much further, even though after so many mischances he may live on only to appreciate more thoroughly “the sublime indifference of things eternal.” That is not very consolatory by way of a materialist viaticum. But it is the best Clemenceau can give.
None the less it is easy to comprehend why this sort of philosophy, illustrated and punctuated by the keenest criticism and sarcasm on the wrongs and injustice of our existing society, produced a great effect. The commonest incidents of everyday life were made the text for vitriolic sermonising on the shortcomings of statesmen and judges, priests and police, industrial capitalists and mine-owners. Here and there, also, a description of working-class life is given, so accurate, so vivid, so telling that administrators of the easiest conscience were led to feel uncomfortable at the kind of social system with which[133] they had been hitherto satisfied. With no phase of French life is Clemenceau better acquainted than with the habits and customs of the French peasantry. Thus we have a description of the peasant tacked on to a nice little story of a poor fellow who, strolling along the highway on a hot day and feeling thirsty, plucks a few cherries from the branch of a cherry-tree which overhangs the road. The small proprietor is on the look-out for such petty depredations and at once kills the atrocious malefactor who had thus plundered him. The cherry-eater “had despoiled him of two-ha’porth of fruit!” It justified prompt execution of the thief by the owner. That such small robbery did not at once give the latter the power of life and death over the thief is a point of view that the peasant can never take. Why? Because of the penal servitude for life to which he is condemned by the very conditions of his existence, and the greed for property driven into him from birth to death. It is the outcome of private ownership: the result of the fatal saying, “This is mine.”
“The peasant is the man of one idea, of a sole and solitary love. Bowed, he knows only the earth. His activity has but one end and object: the soil. To acquire it, to own it, that is his life, harsh and rapacious. He speaks of my land, my field, my stones, my thistles. To till, to manure, to sow the land, to mow, to uproot, to prime, to cut what comes from the land, that is the eternal object of his entire physical or intellectual effort. Amusement for him: not a bit of it. He has no other resource than to console himself for the disappointment of to-day with the hope of to-morr............