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ROBERT MENZIES BROADCASTS ON STATION
2UE, SYDNEY - 1942
The Forgotten People
It follows the full text transcript of
Robert Menzies' The Forgotten People
speech, broadcast from Sydney, Australia — May 22, 1942.
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Quite recently, |
a bishop wrote a
letter to a great daily newspaper. His theme was
the importance of doing justice to the workers.
His belief, apparently, was that the workers are
those who work with their hands. He sought to
divide the people of Australia into classes. He
was obviously suffering from what has for years
seemed to me to be our greatest political
disease - the disease of thinking that the
community is divided into the rich and
relatively idle, and the laborious poor, and
that every social and political controversy can
be resolved into the question: What side are you
on?
Now, the last thing that I want to do is to
commence or take part in a false war of this
kind. In a country like Australia the class war
must always be a false war. But if we are to
talk of classes, then the time has come to say
something of the forgotten class - the middle
class - those people who are constantly in
danger of being ground between the upper and the
nether millstones of the false class war; the
middle class who, properly regarded, represent
the backbone of this country.
We do not have classes here as in England, and
therefore the terms do not mean the same; so I
must define what I mean when I use the
expression "middle class’.
Let me first define it by exclusion. I exclude
at one end of the scale the rich and powerful:
those who control great funds and enterprises,
and are as a rule able to protect themselves -
though it must be said that in a political sense
they have as a rule shown neither comprehension
nor competence. But I exclude them because in
most material difficulties, the rich can look
after themselves.
I exclude at the other end of the scale the mass
of unskilled people, almost invariably
well-organized, and with their wages and
conditions protected by popular law. What I am
excluding them from is my definition of middle
class. We cannot exclude them from the problem
of social progress, for one of the prime objects
of modern social and political policy is to give
to them a proper measure of security, and
provide the conditions which will enable them to
acquire skill and knowledge and individuality.
These exclusions being made, I include the
intervening range - the kind of people I myself
represent in Parliament - salary earners,
shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men
and women, farmers, and so on. These are, in the
political and economic sense, the middle class.
They are for the most part unorganized and
unselfconscious. They are envied by those whose
social benefits are largely obtained by taxing
them. They are not rich enough to have
individual power. They are taken for granted by
each political party in turn. They are not
sufficiently lacking in individualism to be
organized for what in these days we call
"pressure politics". And yet, as I have said,
they are the backbone of the nation.
The communist has always hated what he calls the
"bourgeoisie", because he sees clearly that the
existence of one has kept British countries from
revolution, while the substantial absence of one
in feudal France at the end of the eighteenth
century and in Tsarist Russia at the end of the
last war made revolution easy and indeed
inevitable.
You may say to me, "Why bring this matter up at
this stage, when we are fighting a war in the
result of which we are all equally concerned?"
My answer is that I am bringing it up because
under the pressures of war we may, if we are not
careful - if we are not as thoughtful as the
times will permit us to be - inflict a fatal
injury upon our own backbone.
In point of political, industrial and social
theory and practice there are great delays in
time of war. But there are also great
accelerations. We must watch each, remembering
always that whether we know it or not, and
whether we like it or not, the foundations of
whatever new order is to come after the war are
inevitably being laid down now. We cannot go
wrong right up to the peace treaty and expect
suddenly thereafter to go right.
Now, what is the value of this middle class, so
defined and described? First, it has "a stake in
the country". It has responsibility for homes -
homes material, homes human, homes spiritual.
I do not believe that the real life of this
nation is to be found either in great luxury
hotels and the petty gossip of so-called
fashionable suburbs, or in the officialdom of
organized masses. It is to be found in the homes
of people who are nameless and unadvertised, and
who, whatever their individual religious
conviction or dogma, see in their children their
greatest contribution to the immortality of
their race. The home is the foundation of sanity
and sobriety; it is the indispensable condition
of continuity; its health determines the health
of society as a whole.
I have mentioned homes material, homes human,
and homes spiritual. Let me take them in their
order. What do I mean by "homes material"?
The material home represents the concrete
expression of the habits of frugality and saving
"for a home of our own". Your advanced socialist
may rage against private property even while he
acquires it; but one of the best instincts in us
is that which induces us to have one little
piece of earth with a house and a garden which
is ours: to which we can withdraw, in which we
can be among our friends, into which no stranger
may come against our will.
If you consider it, you will see that if, as in
the old saying, "the Englishman’s home is his
castle", it is this very fact that leads on to
the conclusion that he who seeks to violate that
law by violating the soil of England must be
repelled and defeated.
National patriotism, in other words, inevitably
springs from the instinct to defend and preserve
our own homes.
Then we have homes human. A great house, full of
loneliness, is not a home. "Stone walls do not a
prison make", not do they make a house. They may
equally make a stable or a piggery. Brick walls,
dormer windows and central heating need not make
more than a hotel. My home is where my wife and
children are. The instinct to be with them is
the great instinct of civilized man; the
instinct to give them a chance in life - to make
them not leaners but lifters - is a noble
instinct.
If Scotland has made a great contribution to the
theory and practice of education, it is because
of the tradition of Scottish homes. The Scottish
ploughman, walking behind his team, cons ways
and means of making his son a farmer, and so he
sends him to the village school. The Scottish
farmer ponders upon the future of his son, and
sees it most assured not by the inheritance of
money but by the acquisition of that knowledge
which will give him power; and so the sons of
many Scottish farmers find their way to
Edinburgh and a university degree.
The great question is, "How can I qualify my son
to help society?" Not, as we have so frequently
thought, "How can I qualify society to help my
son?" If human homes are to fulfill their
destiny, then we must have frugality and saving
for education and progress.
And finally, we have homes spiritual. This is a
notion which finds its simplest and most moving
expression in "The Cotter’s Saturday Night" of
Burns. Human nature is at its greatest when it
combines dependence upon God with independence
of man.
We offer no affront - on the contrary we have
nothing but the warmest human compassion -
towards those whom fate has compelled to live
upon the bounty of the State, when we say that
the greatest element in a strong people is a
fierce independence of spirit. This is the only
real freedom, and it has as its corollary a
brave acceptance of unclouded individual
responsibility. The moment a man seeks moral and
intellectual refuge in the emotions of a crowd,
he ceases to be a human being and becomes a
cipher. The home spiritual so understood is not
produced by lassitude or by dependence; it is
produced by self-sacrifice, by frugality and
saving.
In a war, as indeed at most times, we become the
ready victims of phrases. We speak glibly of may
things without pausing to consider what they
signify. We speak of "financial power",
forgetting that the financial power of 1942 is
based upon the savings of generations which have
preceded it. We speak of "morale" as if it were
a quality induced from without - created by
others for our benefit - when in truth there can
be no national morale which is not based upon
the individual courage of men and women. We
speak of "man power" as if it were a mere matter
of arithmetic: as if it were made up of a
multiplication of men and muscles without
spirit.
Second, the middle class, more than any other,
provides the intelligent ambition which is the
motive power of human progress. The idea
entertained by many people that, in a
well-constituted world, we shall all live on the
State in the quintessence of madness, for what
is the State but us ? We collectively must
provide what we individually receive.
The great vice of democracy - a vice which is
exacting a bitter retribution from it at this
moment - is that for a generation we have been
busy getting ourselves on to the list of
beneficiaries and removing ourselves from the
list of contributors, as if somewhere there was
somebody else’s wealth and somebody else’s
effort on which we could thrive.
To discourage ambition, to envy success, to hate
achieved superiority, to distrust independent
thought, to sneer at and impute false motives to
public service - these are the maladies of
modern democracy, and of Australian democracy in
particular. Yet ambition, effort, thinking, and
readiness to serve are not only the design and
objectives of self-government but are the
essential conditions of its success. If this is
not so, then we had better put back the clock,
and search for a benevolent autocracy once more.
Where do we find these great elements most
commonly? Among the defensive and comfortable
rich, among the unthinking and unskilled mass,
or among what I have called the "middle class"?
Third, the middle class provides more than
perhaps any other the intellectual life which
marks us off from the beast: the life which
finds room for literature, for the arts, for
science, for medicine and the law.
Consider the case of literature and art. Could
these survive as a department of State? Are we
to publish our poets according to their
political color? Is the State to decree
surrealism because surrealism gets a heavy vote
in a key electorate? The truth is that no great
book was ever written and no great picture ever
painted by the clock or according to civil
service rules. These things are done by man, not
men. You cannot regiment them. They require
opportunity, and sometimes leisure. The artist,
if he is to live, must have a buyer; the writer
an audience. He finds them among frugal people
to whom the margin above bare living means a
chance to reach out a little towards that heaven
which is just beyond our grasp. It has always
seemed to me, for example, that an artist is
better helped by the man who sacrifices
something to buy a picture he loves than by a
rich patron who follows the fashion.
Fourth, this middle class maintains and fills
the higher schools and universities, and so
feeds the lamp of learning.
What are schools for? To train people for
examinations, to enable people to comply with
the law, or to produce developed men and women?
Are the universities mere technical schools, or
have they as one of their functions the
preservation of pure learning, bringing in its
train not merely riches for the imagination but
a comparative sense for the mind, and leading to
what we need so badly - the recognition of
values which are other than pecuniary?
One of the great blots on our modern living is
the cult of false values, a repeated application
of the test of money, notoriety, applause. A
world in which a comedian or a beautiful
half-wit on the screen can be paid fabulous
sums, whilst scientific researchers and
discoverers can suffer neglect and starvation,
is a world which needs to have its sense of
values violently set right.
Now, have we realized and recognized these
things, or is most of our policy designed to
discourage or penalize thrift, to encourage
dependence on the State, to bring about a dull
equality on the fantastic idea that all men are
equal in mind and needs and deserts: to level
down by taking the mountains our of the
landscape, to weigh men according to their
political organizations and power - as votes and
not as human beings? These are formidable
questions, and we cannot escape from answering
them if there is really to be a new order for
the world.
I have been actively engaged in politics for
fourteen years in the State of Victoria and in
the Commonwealth of Australia. In that period I
cannot readily recall many occasions upon which
any policy was pursued which was designed to
help the thrifty, to encourage independence, to
recognize the divine and valuable variations of
men’s minds. On the contrary, there have been
many instances in which the votes of the
thriftless have been used to defeat the thrifty.
On occasions of emergency, as in the depression
and during the war, we have hastened to make it
clear that the provision made by man for his own
retirement and old age is not half as sacrosanct
as the provision the State would have made for
him had he never saved at all.
We have talked of income from savings as if it
possessed a somewhat discreditable character. We
have taxed it more and more heavily. We have
spoken slightingly of the earning of interest at
the very moment when we have advocated new
pensions and social schemes. I have myself heard
a minister of power and influence declare that
no deprivation is suffered by a man if he still
has the means to fill his stomach, clothe his
body and keep a roof over his head. And yet the
truth is, as I have endeavored to show, that
frugal people who strive for and obtain the
margin above these materially necessary things
are the whole foundation of a really active and
developing national life.
The case for the middle class is the case for a
dynamic democracy as against a stagnant one.
Stagnant waters are level, and in them the scum
rises. Active waters are never level; they toss
and tumble and have crests and troughs; but the
scientists tell us that they purify themselves
in a few hundred yards.
That we are all, as human souls, of like value
cannot be denied. That each of us should have
his chance is and must be the great objective of
political and social policy. But to say that the
industrious and intelligent son of
self-sacrificing and saving and forward-looking
parents has the same social deserts and even
material needs as the dull offspring of stupid
and improvident parents is absurd.
If the motto is to be, "Eat, drink and be merry,
for tomorrow you will die, and if it chances you
don’t die, the State will look after you; but if
you don’t eat, drink and be merry, and save, we
shall take your savings from you", then the
whole business of life will become
foundationless.
Are you looking forward to a breed of men after
the war who will have become boneless wonders?
Leaners grow flabby; lifters grow muscles. Men
without ambition readily become slaves. Indeed,
there is much more slavery in Australia than
most people imagine. How many hundreds of
thousands of us are slaves to greed, to fear, to
newspapers, to public opinion - represented by
the accumulated views of our neighbors! Landless
men smell the vapors of the street corner.
Landed men smell the brown earth, and plant
their feet upon it and know that it is good.
To all of this many of my friends will retort,
"Ah, that’s all very well, but when this war is
over the levelers will have won the day." My
answer is that, on the contrary, men will come
out of this war as gloriously unequal in many
things as when they entered it. Much wealth will
have been destroyed; inherited riches will be
suspect; a fellowship of suffering, if we really
experience it, will have opened many hearts and
perhaps closed many mouths. Many great edifices
will have fallen, and we shall be able to study
foundations as never before, because the war
will have exposed them.
But I do not believe that we shall come out into
the over-lordship of an all-powerful State on
whose benevolence we shall live, spineless and
effortless - a State which will dole out bread
and ideas with neatly regulated accuracy; where
we shall all have our dividend without
subscribing our capital; where the Government,
that almost deity, will nurse us and rear us and
maintain us and pension us and bury us; where we
shall all be civil servants, and all presumably,
since we are equal, heads of departments.
If the new world is to be a world of men, we
must be not pallid and bloodless ghosts, but a
community of people whose motto shall be, "To
strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield".
Individual enterprise must drive us forward.
That does not mean that we are to return to the
old and selfish notions of laissez-faire. The
functions of the State will be much more than
merely keeping the ring within which the
competitors will fight. Our social and
industrial obligations will be increased. There
will be more law, not less; more control, not
less.
But what really happens to us will depend on how
many people we have who are of the great and
sober and dynamic middle-class - the strivers,
the planners, the ambitious ones. We shall
destroy them at our peril.
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