F. S. Oliver

Frederick Scott Oliver (20 February 1864 – 3 June 1934), was a prominent Scottish political writer and businessman who advocated tariff reform and imperial union for the British Empire. He played an important role in the Round Table movement, collaborated in the downfall of Prime Minister H. H. Asquith's wartime government and its replacement by David Lloyd George in 1916, and pressed for "home rule all round" to resolve the political conflict between Britain and Irish nationalists.

Quotes

• It was impossible, in Hamilton's view, for a nation to act towards other nations as a man of warm feelings would act towards his neighbours. A nation cannot afford to indulge itself in hatred or affection, magnanimity or revenge. In deciding upon its course of action, sentiment is as irrelevant a consideration as malice, and wars of chivalry are as iniquitous as wars of religion. The statesman who bends to an emotional outburst of public opinion as richly deserves to be shot as a general who surrenders a city out of compassion for the inhabitants. The stern test of the righteousness of a war is the permanent security of the state. A government which goes knight-erranting out of sympathy for foreign nations is like a trustee who subscribes to charities out of the property he has undertaken to administer. A government, like a trustee, is responsible for the estate. Its business is sound investments, not the encouragement of deserving institutions or the succour of honest, poor men overwhelmed by adversity. Pity and prejudice are equally out of place when ministers, in whom king or people has placed the serious confidence of decision, come to determine the tremendous issues of alliances and wars.
  • Alexander Hamilton: An Essay on American Union (1906), pp. 333-334

• The spirit of the nation is a great force, but it is one which cannot be always on the alert, and while it sleeps, the part of noble institutions is to keep watch.
  • Alexander Hamilton: An Essay on American Union (1906), p. 410

• The only two men who really seem to understand that we are at war are Winston and Lloyd George. Both have faults which disgust one peculiarly at the present time, but there is a reality about them and they are in earnest, which the others aren't.
  • Letter to his brother (4 March 1915), quoted in The Anvil of War: Letters Between F.S. Oliver & His Brother, 1914–1918, ed. Stephen Lucius Gwynn (1936), p. 92

• Danger is the inseparable companion of honour. The greatest deeds in history were not done by people who thought of safety first. It is possible to be too much concerned even with one's own salvation. There will not be much hope left for humanity when men are no longer willing to risk their immortal as well as their mortal parts. With all the temptations, dangers and degradations that beset it, politics is still, I think, the noblest career that any man can choose.
  • The Endless Adventure, Vol. I (1930), p. 99

• If a country will not stand up for its rights it must certainly lose them. The spirit of giving in is the most fatal disease to which nations are subject, and it is apt to attack them, like cancer, when they have arrived at the meridian. Jingoism itself is less fatal than the appeal on all occasions to material scales, in order to decide whether the injury that threatens the country is likely to be less or greater than the sacrifices that may be needed to prevent it. Concessions to unjust or impudent demands have a formidable knack of breeding. The nation that submits from laziness or fear, or because it is too short-sighted to detect the specious fallacies of arithmetic, will certainly lose its own confidence and the respect of its neighbours; and these two things are the very foundations of national prosperity.
  • The Endless Adventure, Vol. I (1930), p. 414

• [W]e have ever in our minds what our easy-going fellow-countrymen are so apt to forget—that an unceasing and desperate struggle for existence—nation against nation—is forever going on; and that it is waged for the most part by very able men, underground, in the chanceries of the world. It has never been otherwise and, so far as we can see, it never will be otherwise; for the nations of the world are like the wild creatures of the jungle and the veld, each one eternally on its guard against the others.
  • The Endless Adventure, Vol. III (1935), p. 177

Quotes about F. S. Oliver

• [T]he Oliver of these pages [i]s essentially an incipient fascist... His ideal clearly is the nation-in-arms, internecine differences abolished, the country disciplined and organised for action. Himself an eminent businessman, accustomed to the autocratic exercise of power, he conceives of national organisation in similar terms. His only object is to win.
  • Harold Laski, review of The Anvil of War in The New Statesman and Nation (15 February 1936), quoted in Michael Pollard, 'Sunset or Dawn? F. S. Oliver's "Endless Adventure" in History and Politics, 1921–1934', History, Vol. 90, No. 3 (299) (July 2005), p. 393

• The biography of Hamilton by the late F. S. Oliver and that of Lincoln by Lord Charnwood ought to be known to every educated man.
  • James Lovat-Fraser, letter to The Times (8 July 1937), p. 17

• [T]hat remarkable man, Fred Oliver...was also engaged in writing his study of Sir Robert Walpole (entitled The Endless Adventure) which I much admired. His conversation and personality were unique; he seemed a cross between a Cheviot shepherd and Matthew Arnold.
  • G. M. Trevelyan, An Autobiography & Other Essays (1949), p. 43

• The nationalist of the type of Justice Wilson clings steadfastly to the essential principle of home rule for local purposes. The principle is one of the foundation stones of the two great nations of the North American Continent—that of local self-government. No nationalist will deny this. What he denies is that local power is sovereign over national concerns. The point is clearly brought out by the British writer, Oliver, in his work on Hamilton, perhaps the most intelligent piece of writing on American politics published in this generation.
  • Frank Buffington Vrooman, The New Politics (1911), p. 223