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GEORGE LlCHTHEIN
ous whole"; and, equally important, "we must not have class
dif–
ferences and wealth differences so great within the community that
we lose the sense of common interest." This was National Socialism
avant la lettre;
Pearson had studied in Bismarckian Germany and knew
what he was talking about.
IV
Against this stream of neo-Hegelian, neo-conservative, pseudo-liber–
al, racist, Darwinist, and national-socialist literature, which by 1900
had become a veritable torrent, the surviving representatives of orthodox
liberalism conducted a hopeless defensive battle. Inevitably they were
compelled, in the interest of self-preservation, to shift their center of
gravity leftward, and eventually many of them broke with middle–
class liberalism altogether and joined the Labor party. The interval
was
filled by Radicalism: the form in which Gladstonian (or Cobdenite)
Liberalism finally gave up the ghost. Why was Radicalism a failure?
For an answer one need go no further than to its theoretical bible.
Hobson's work was the credo of a manufacturing provincial middle
class whose grandfathers in the 1850's had followed Cobden in
his
fruitless campaign against the Crimean War. (It is worth remembering
that when it came to foreign policy, Cobden's failure was no less total
than that of his descendants.) Hobson asserted that imperialism bene–
fited neither the colonies nor the metropolis; the only thing that could
benefit them was free trade. But in 1902 free trade was already
be–
coming an unpopular doctrine, and moreover the camp of its de–
fenders included the Liberal Imperialists, who agreed with the Tories
on the need to prepare for the coming showdown with Germany. It
also included the leading Fabians (notably Sidney and Beatrice Webb)
who maintained the closest contact with the Liberal Imperialist group
and furnished it with a good deal of intellectual ammunition. For the
Webbs, with their faith in planning and a stronger State, Cobdenism
was the enemy, and middle-class pacifist Radicalism a ghost from the
Victorian past. In this attitude they were joined by the future Liberal
War Minister, Haldane, and by the Tory Proconsul of Empire, Milner,
who had started his career as a sympathetic student of socialism. The
London School of Economics was the great creation of the Webbs, and
the man they chose to direct it was the rabid imperialist W.
A.
S.
Hewins. Another of their circle-informally known as "the Coefficients
Club"-was H .
J.
Mackinder, later to become the founder of "geo–
politics," a doctrine subsequently propagated with great success
in
Germany by Karl Haushofer, from whom Hitler acquired what little
