Editing Robert Louis Stevenson (section)

==Politics: "The Day After Tomorrow"==
[[File:Robert-louis-stevenson.jpg|thumb|upright|Photographic portrait, c. 1887]]
[[File:A bibliography of the works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Frontispiece.jpg|thumb|upright|Bibliography frontispiece]]

During his college years, Stevenson briefly identified himself as a "red-hot socialist". But already by age 26 he was writing of looking back on this time "with something like regret. ... Now I know that in thus turning Conservative with years, I am going through the normal cycle of change and travelling in the common orbit of men's opinions."<ref>{{Cite book |last=Stevenson, Robert Louis |title=Crabbed Age and Youth and Other Essays |publisher=Thomas B. Mosher |year=1907 |location=Portland, Maine |pages=11–12 |chapter=Crabbed Age and Youth |orig-year=originally written 1877 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=qqsNAAAAYAAJ&q=robert%20louis%20stevenson%20crabbed%20age%20and%20youth&pg=PA11}}</ref> His cousin and biographer [[Sir Graham Balfour]] claimed that Stevenson "probably throughout life would, if compelled to vote, have always supported the Conservative candidate."<ref>{{Cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=EE29rkc7DM0C&pg=PA30 |title=Robert Louis Stevenson: Interviews and Recollections |publisher=U of Iowa P |year=1996 |isbn=978-0-87745-512-7 |editor-last=Terry |editor-first=R. C. |location=Iowa City |page=30}}</ref> In 1866, then 15-year-old Stevenson did vote for [[Benjamin Disraeli]], the [[One-nation conservatism|Tory democrat]] and future Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, for the [[Rector of the University of Edinburgh|Lord Rectorship of the University of Edinburgh]]. But this was against a markedly illiberal challenger, the historian [[Thomas Carlyle]].<ref>Reginald Charles Terry (1996). "Robert Louis Stevenson: Interviews and Recollections". p. 49. University of Iowa Press,</ref> Carlyle was notorious for his anti-democratic and pro-slavery views.<ref>Goldberg, David Theo (2008). "Liberalism's Limits: Carlyle and Mill on "the Negro Question'," ''Nineteenth-Century Contexts'', Vol. XX, No. 2, pp. 203–216.</ref><ref>Cumming, Mark (2004). [https://books.google.com/books?id=8Nvdx-4-CzoC&dq=%22Carlyle+and+Hitler%22&pg=PA223 ''The Carlyle Encyclopedia''] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230510131700/https://books.google.com/books?id=8Nvdx-4-CzoC&dq=%22Carlyle+and+Hitler%22&pg=PA223 |date=10 May 2023 }}. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, p. 223 {{ISBN|978-0-8386-3792-0}}</ref>

In "The Day After Tomorrow", appearing in ''The Contemporary Review'' (April 1887),<ref>Stevenson, Robert Louis (1887), ''The Contemporary Review'', Vol. LI, April, pp. 472-479.</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://digital.nls.uk/rlstevenson/browse/archive/90460506|title=Robert Louis Stevenson - National Library of Scotland|website=digital.nls.uk|accessdate=8 December 2022|archive-date=27 September 2022|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220927013717/https://digital.nls.uk/rlstevenson/browse/archive/90460506|url-status=live}}</ref> Stevenson suggested: "we are all becoming Socialists without knowing it". Legislation "grows authoritative, grows philanthropical, bristles with new duties and new penalties, and casts a spawn of inspectors, who now begin, note-book in hand, to darken the face of England".<ref>Collected Works pp. 286-287</ref> He is referring to the steady growth in social legislation in Britain since the first of the Conservative-sponsored [[Factory Acts]] (which, in 1833, established a professional [[Factory inspector|Factory Inspectorate]]). Stevenson cautioned that this "new waggon-load of laws" points to a future in which our grandchildren might "taste the pleasures of existence in something far liker an ant-heap than any previous human polity".<ref>Collected Works pp. 288</ref> Yet in reproducing the essay his latter-day libertarian admirers omit his express understanding for the abandonment of [[Whiggism|Whiggish]], [[Classical Liberalism|classical-liberal]] notions of [[laissez faire]]. "Liberty", Stevenson wrote, "has served us a long while" but like all other virtues "she has taken wages". <blockquote>[Liberty] has dutifully served Mammon; so that many things we were accustomed to admire as the benefits of freedom and common to all, were truly benefits of wealth, and took their value from our neighbour's poverty...Freedom to be desirable, involves kindness, wisdom, and all the virtues of the free; but the free man as we have seen him in action has been, as of yore, only the master of many helots; and the slaves are still ill-fed, ill-clad, ill-taught, ill-housed, insolently entreated, and driven to their mines and workshops by the lash of famine.<ref>Collected Works pp. 287-288</ref></blockquote>

In January 1888, aged 37, in response to American press coverage of the [[Land War]] in Ireland, Stevenson penned a political essay (rejected by ''Scribner's'' magazine and never published in his lifetime) that advanced a broadly conservative theme: the necessity of "staying internal violence by rigid law". Notwithstanding his title, "Confessions of a [[Unionism in Ireland|Unionist]]", Stevenson defends neither the [[Acts of Union 1800|union with Britain]] (she had "majestically demonstrated her incapacity to rule Ireland") nor "landlordism" (scarcely more defensible in Ireland than, as he had witnessed it, in the goldfields of California). Rather he protests the readiness to pass "lightly" over crimes—"unmanly murders and the harshest extremes of [[boycott]]ing"—where these are deemed "political". This he argues is to "defeat law" (which is ever a "compromise") and to invite "anarchy": it is "the sentimentalist preparing the pathway for the brute".<ref>{{Cite book |last=Stevenson |first=Robert Louis |url=https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044086813177&view=1up&seq=10 |title=Confessions of a Unionist |date=1921 |publisher=Privately Printed by G.G. Winchip |location=Cambridge, Massachusetts |access-date=27 October 2020 |archive-date=15 August 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210815023342/https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044086813177&view=1up&seq=10 |url-status=live }}</ref>