Citizenship

Extract

In this book is published the series of Lectures delivered by Sir W. H. Hadow on the Stevenson Foundation, in the University and City of Glasgow, 1922. The Lectures are remarkable for their extraordinary treatment of this important subject. If they seek to define Citizenship finally, or, at least, fully— if they aim at giving the average, intelligent citizen of to-day an understanding of his citizenship as something real and worth the having, something which is at once a complexity of rights and a complexity of duties—if their object is to give a clear practical instruction rather than to contribute to an academic controversy concerning civic values—then, most regretfully, they must be marked down as a failure. Indeed, these Lectures are wrongly entitled. They do not deal directly with Citizenship: they discuss Political Theory in its wider reaches. In the main, they present a restatement of the old problem of the Nature of the State; and, reduced to a subordinate part of this thesis, is the abstract relation of the member of the State to the State itself.

Citizenship can be viewed from at least two standpoints : one, a study in political speculation—interesting in its review of historic arguments and philosophic conclusions; two, a study in practical politics—a detailed consideration of the realities constituting the fact called citizenship which (let us remember) is possessed by more than twenty millions of the members of our State, which is used by them, and which to be used rightly must be understood in its practical values, immediate and ultimate, by each single possessor.