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THE LETTERS

THE letters included in this volume show Case's vigorous, far-seeing intellect and his wide interests. He was a philosopher. Philosophy was to him essentially the love of wisdom; but it was no solitary study. He laboured quietly, powerfully, unceasingly to give the benefit of his reflections and observations to mankind. Truth and the common good were his passions; yet he was never carried away by his convictions; in all that he wrote, as in all that he spoke, he was patient, courteous, judicious. Yet he never forbore, from fear or favour, to voice his opinions clearly and forcibly. He hated shams and sophistries; and he tested everybody's public acts and words by two questions only: were they honest, and were they aimed at the common good?

This insistence upon the common good as the sole aim of active life was the basis of all his letters upon politics, as they were of all his teaching upon political science. It was equally the basis of his objection to Benthamism and to Marxism, to the theory of the greatest good of the greatest number, or to the theory of the good of a class. He had no prepossessions except this of the common good; his ideas were not fixed, but were changed, although not very often, after prolonged reflection and experience. Nevertheless, he was pleased to remember towards the end of his life, that his character, his general outlook, even from early boyhood, had always been the same.

The printed letters show a mind rich in stores of political and social wisdom, humane, courteous, well-read. As political prophecies, warnings, and guides, they must be ranked as a remarkable performance.

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The letters on the question of women's education at Oxford and Cambridge may be left without comment, for the controversy is over and done with; the letters retain their value now as historical documents. Two statements in these letters, however, may be especially noted: one, that the scheme is only manageable while it is on a small scale'. The question of the proportion between the number of women and the number of men at Oxford engaged the attention of the University from time to time. The second statement is that the education of women at the established universities would decide 'the future impossibility of women's universities' [pp. 34, 57].

Case's views on education in general, like his views on women's education in particular, cannot fail always to interest people, and not less to interest even with those who disagree with his views. Although a convinced and unswerving supporter of Greek and Latin studies, he was always an equally determined champion of a view that natural science should be included with classical studies in the course of every undergraduate in the faculty of liberal arts. He maintained, and many experienced teachers will agree with him, that the anarchy of education' can only be solved, not by omitting this and adding that, but by a better spirit; therefore he wrote, in the course of one of his longest contributions to The Times: Ought not boys to work harder, go to Oxford and Cambridge at not later than eighteen, and then work harder still?' [p. 72]. In his last published letter on education in The Times he

wrote:

'I suggested years ago in your columns that all candidates ' in responsions should be examined in Greek and Latin, ' mathematics and mechanics, so that they might bring up to 'the University minds directed to things in general both ' without and within themselves, and at the University should 'be able to specialize without becoming narrow. I think so 'still' [below, p. 93].

Case was always an advocate of private support to the University rather than of public assistance. His view was that a small State-subvention was unnecessary; a large subvention would lead to Stateinterference; and that, with financial assistance from the State, the University would have to agree to teach only such things as the democracy of the country might choose to ordain. So keenly did he value the independence of the University that he courageously opposed the establishment of an Endowment Fund controlled not by the State but by private individuals who were not teachers or residents of the University. He was equally careful of Oxford's self-respect: it is to be hoped', he wrote, ' that nobody will take upon himself to say that the University is asking for money' [p. 108].

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In politics and public finance Case kept in view with a single mind his great principle of the public good; with unflinching honesty he went straight to what seemed to him the root of the matter, thrusting aside any considerations that savoured of weak sentimentalism or sham. His reading of the history of past empires was that all great countries had ruined themselves from within before they were conquered from without. He was apprehensive that the British people, relying on the prosperity which was the achievement of the Victorian Age was slipping, little by little, into extravagance. This extravagance was one of the temptations of Democracy, through its 'multitude of wants' and its natural but ' impatient desire to satisfy them all at once'. With unerring prescience he foresaw a time to come when Great Britain would require a reserve fund: 'We live in prosperity' (he wrote in the year 1899); but what will happen in those times of adversity which no nation has ever been able to escape?' [p. 181]. Economy in good times would give the Empire financial security in bad times. It was not guess

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work nor the gift of prophecy but merely rational induction that led him to warn Great Britain in 1901 of a possible condition of affairs which actually came to pass in 1914. When the South African War was over he wrote:

We have too many irons in the fire, and too many vulner'able points..., in India, in all Asia, in America, in Egypt, ' in South Africa. Suppose that after this war we were to 'drift into another, accompanied by a revolt in South Africa 'or elsewhere, and that at the same time the delicately-balanced 'equilibrium of our commercial prosperity were to suffer dis' turbance?' [p. 185].

In another letter he states succinctly his plan for a national reserve fund: after explaining why Government should refrain from engaging in trade, should curb municipal expenditure, and should use death duties for paying off debt, he added: 'If all this were achieved, then at last out of the reduced income-tax and out of the capital of death-duties there would be the comfort of a national reserve for War' [p. 192].

Politically Case called himself a Palmerstonian Liberal'. Generally, his outlook might be described as moderately conservative. He believed in free trade, and (as he often remarked) in 'never doing anything by law if it could be done by voluntary means'. He opposed the interference of the State with industry, because he believed that such interference would diminish the well-being of the whole people. He held that it would 'diminish self-help, produce over-population, lower the rate of wages, heighten the rate of taxation, descend into competition with private business, and, after all, perhaps multiply the unemployed' [p. 175]. On the whole, Case's ideal of a constitution, so far as an ideal could be found existing in practice in the world, was that of the United States; here, he pointed out in a letter published during the Great War, there was the sovereignty of the people, but limited by a scien

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