yiiOpi;it ill O' "> ' '^p^ fy C^^ ^^ a\ ,^ >^' .^^'^H % ^ -^^' /^//Z^% ^O -A' X^^ •J"'^ •>^, ^^ c^ .5 I o^ #^' . '^o .Oo K^'".^ ^^^#/l^■ '\^ -:^,. ,^x * S 1 A .^- % Cil$^> .^ ;.'*:.• I .■» .^^5:^.^ ^ . ^ ■^> ^^^ \* /X^ '^^ v\ ^h'- "^C.- v^'' ~l "^ -c. 7 ■— ' \^ r * .•^- V T IS the pathos of many hackneyed things that they are intrinsically delicate and are only mechanically made dull. Any one who has seen the first white light, when It comes in by a window, knows that day- light is not only as beautiful but as mysterious as moonlight. It is the subtlety of the colour of sunshine that seems to be colourless. So patriotism, and especially English patriotism, which is vulgarised with volumes of verbal fog and gas, is still in itself something as tenuous and tender as a climate. The name of Nelson, with which the last chapter ended, might very well summarise the matter; for his name is banged and beaten about like an old tin can, while his soul had something in it of a fine and fragile eighteenth-century vase. And it will be found that the most threadbare things contemporary and connected with him have a real truth to the tone and meaning of his life and time, though for us they have too often degenerated into dead jokes. The ex- pression ''hearts of oak,'' for instance, is no un- happy phrase for the finer side of that England 245 246 A Short History of England of which he was the best expression. Even as a material metaphor it covers much of what I mean; oak was by no means only made into bludgeons, nor even only into battle-ships ; and the English gentry did not think it business- like to pretend to be mere brutes. The mere name of oak calls back like a dream those dark but genial interiors of colleges and country houses, in which great gentlemen, not degen- erate, almost made Latin an English language and port an English wine. Some part of that world at least will not perish ; for its autumnal glow passed into the brush of the great English portrait-painters, who, more than any other men, were given the power to commemorate the large humanity of their own land; immor- talising a mood as broad and soft as their own brush-work. Come naturally, at the right emo- tional angle, upon a canvas of Gainsborough, who painted ladies like landscapes, as great and as unconscious with repose, and you will note how subtly the artist gives to a dress flowing in the foreground something of the divine quality of distance. Then you will understand another faded phrase and words spoken far away upon the sea; there will rise up quite fresh before you and be borne upon a bar of music, like words you have never heard before: 'Tor England, home, and beauty." Aristocracy and the Discontents 247 When I think of these things, I have no temptation to mere grumbling at the great gen- try that waged the great war of our fathers. But indeed the difficulty about it was something much deeper than could be dealt with by any grumbling. It was an exclusive class, but not an exclusive life; it was interested in all things, though not for all men. Or rather those things it failed to include, through the limitations of this rationalist interval between mediaeval and modern mysticism, were at least not of the sort to shock us with superficial in- humanity. The greatest gap in their souls, for those who think it a gap, was their complete and complacent paganism. All their very de- cencies assumed that the old faith was dead; those who held it still, like the great Johnson, were considered eccentrics. The French Revolution was a riot that broke up the very formal funeral of Chris- tianity; and was followed by various other complications, including the corpse coming to life. But the scepticism was no mere oligar- chic orgy; it was not confined to the Hell-Fire Club, which might in virtue of its vivid name be regarded as relatively orthodox. It is pres- ent in the mildest middle-class atmosphere; as in the middle-class masterpiece about *'North- anger Abbev," where we actually remember it 248 A Short History of England is an antiquity, without ever remembering it is an abbey. Indeed there is no clearer case of it than what can only be called the atheism of Jane Austen. Unfortunately it could truly be said of the English gentleman, as of another gallant and gracious individual, that his honour stood rooted in dishonour. He was, indeed, some- what in the position of such an aristocrat in a romance, whose splendour has the dark spot of a secret and a sort of blackmail. There was, to begin with, an uncomfortable paradox in the tale of his pedigree. Many heroes have claimed to be descended from the gods, from beings greater than themselves; but he him- self was far more heroic than his ancestors. His glory did not come from the Crusades but from the Great Pillage. His fathers had not come over with William the Conqueror, but only assisted, in a somewhat shuffling manner, at the coming over of William of Orange. His own exploits were often really romantic, in the cities of the Indian sultans or the war of the wooden ships; it was the exploits of the far-off founders of his family that were painfully real- istic. In this the great gentry were more in the position of Napoleonic marshals than of Norman knights, but their position was worse ; for the marshals might be descended from Aristocracy and the Discontents 249 peasants and shop-keepers; but the oHgarchs were descended from usurers and thieves. That, for good or evil, was the paradox of Eng- land; the typical aristocrat was the typical up- start. But the secret was worse; not only was such a family founded on stealing, but the fam- ily was stealing still. It is a grim truth that all through the eighteenth century, all through the great Whig speeches about liberty, all through the great Tory speeches about patriotism, through the period of Wandewash and Plassy, through the period of Trafalgar and Waterloo, one process was steadily going on in the central senate of the nation. Parliament was passing bill after bill for the enclosure, by the great landlords, of such of the common lands as had survived out of the great communal system of the Middle Ages. It is much more than a pun, it is the prime political irony of our history, that the Commons were destroying the com- mons. The very word "common," as we have before noted, lost its great moral meaning, and became a mere topographical term for some remaining scrap of scrub or heath that was not worth stealing. In the eighteenth century these last and lingering commons were con- nected only with stories about highwaymen, which still Hnger in our literature. The ro- 250 A Short History of England mance of them was a romance of robbers, but not of the real robbers. This was the mysterious sin of the English squires, that they remained human, and yet ruined humanity all around them. Their own ideal, nay their own reality of life, was really more generous and genial than the stiff sav- agery of Puritan captains and Prussian no- bles; but the land withered under their smile as under an alien frown. Being still at least English, they were still in their way good- natured; but their position was false, and a false position forces the good-natured into bru- tality. The French Revolution was the chal- lenge that really revealed to the Whigs that they must make up their minds to be really democrats or admit that they were really aris- tocrats. They decided, as in the case of their philosophic exponent Burke, to be really aris- tocrats; and the result was the White Terror, the period of anti- Jacobin repression which re- vealed the real side of their sympathies more than any stricken fields in foreign lands. Cob- bett, the last and greatest of the yeomen, of the small farming class which the great estates were devouring daily, was thrown into prison merely for protesting against the flogging of English soldiers by German mercenaries. In that savage dispersal of a peaceful meeting Aristocracy and the Discontents 251 which was called the Massacre of Peterloo, English soldiers were indeed employed, though much more in the spirit of German ones. And it is one of the bitter satires that cling to the very continuity of our history, that such sup- pression of the old yeoman spirit was the work of soldiers who still bore the title of the Yeo- manry. The name of Cobbett is very important here; indeed it is generally ignored because it is im- portant. Cobbett was the one man who saw the tendency of the time as a whole, and challenged it as a whole; consequently he went without support. It is a mark of our whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet by the fight because it is a sham fight; thus most of us know by this time that the Party System has been popular only in the same sense that a football match is popular. The division in Cobbett's time was slightly more sin- cere, but almost as superficial; it was a differ- ence of sentiment about externals which di- vided the old agricultural gentry of the eigh- teenth century from the new mercantile gen- try of the nineteenth. Through the first half of the nineteenth century there were some real disputes between the squire and the merchant. The merchant became converted to the impor-, 252 y. Short History of England tant economic thesis of Free Trade, and ac- cused the squire of starving the poor by dear bread to keep up his agrarian privilege. Later the squire retorted not ineffectively by accus- ing the merchant of brutalising the poor by overworking them in his factories to keep up his commercial success. The passing of the Factory Acts was a confession of the cruelty that underlay the new industrial experiments, just as the Repeal of the Corn Laws was a con- fession of the comparative weakness and un- popularity of the squires, who had destroyed the last remnants of any peasantry that might have defended the field against the factory. These relatively real disputes would bring us to the middle of the Victorian era. But long before the beginning of the Victorian era, Cob- bett had seen and said that the disputes were only relatively real. Or rather he would have said, in his more robust fashion, that they were not real at all. He would have said that the agricultural pot and the industrial kettle were calling each other black, when they had both been blackened in the same kitchen. And he would have been substantially right; for the great industrial disciple of the kettle, James Watt (who learnt from it the lesson of the steam engine), was typical of the age in this, that he found the old Trade Guilds too fallen, Aristocracy and the Discontents 253 unfashionable and out of touch with the times to help his discovery, so that he had recourse to the rich minority which had warred on and weakened those Guilds since the Reformation. There was no prosperous peasant's pot, such as Henry of Navarre invoked, to enter into al- liance with the kettle. In other words, there was in the strict sense of the word no common- wealth, because wealth, though more and more wealthy, was less and less common. Whether it be a credit or discredit, industrial science and enterprise were in bulk a new experiment of the old oligarchy; and the old oligarchy had always been ready for new experiments — be- ginning w4th the Reformation. And it is characteristic of the clear mind which was hid- den from many by the hot temper of Cobbett, that he did see the Reformation as the root of both squirearchy and industrialism, and called on the people to break away from both. The people made more effort to do so than is com- monly realised. There are many silences in our somewhat snobbish history; and when the educated class can easily suppress a revolt, they can still more easily suppress the record of it. It was so with some of the chief features of that great mediaeval revolution the failure of which, or rather the betrayal of which, was the real turning-point of our history. It was so with 254* A Short History of England thie revolts against the religious policy of Henry VIII. ; and it was so with the rick-burn- ing and frame-breaking riots of Cobbett's epoch. The real mob reappeared for a mo- ment in our history for just long enough to show one of the immortal marks of the real mob — ritualism. There is nothing that strikes the undemocratic doctrinaire so sharply about direct democratic action as the vanity or mum- mery of the things done seriously in the day- light; they astonish him by being as unprac- tical as a poem or a prayer. The French Revo- lutionists stormed an empty prison merely be- cause it was large and solid and difficult to storm, and therefore symbolic of the mighty monarchical machinery of which it had been but the shed. The English rioters laboriously broke in pieces a parish grindstone, merely be- cause it was large and solid and difficult to break, and therefore symbolic of the mighty oligarchical machinery which perpetually ground the faces of the poor. They also put the oppressive agent of some landlord in a cart and escorted him round the county, merely to exhibit his horrible personality to heaven and earth. Afterwards they let him go, which marks perhaps, for good or evil, a certain na- tional modification of the movement. There is something very typical of an English revolu« Aiistocracy and the Discontents 255 tion in having the tumbril without the guillo- tine. Anyhow, these embers of the revolutionary epoch were trodden out very brutally; the grindstone continued (and continues) to grind in the scriptural fashion above referred to, and, in most political crises since, it is the crowd that has found itself in the cart. But, of course, both the riot and repression in England were but shadows of the awful revolt and ven- geance which crowned the parallel process in Ireland. Here the terrorism, which was but a temporary and desperate tool of the aristo- crats in England (not being, to do them jus- tice, at all consonant to, their temperament, which had neither the cruelty and morbidity nor the logic and fixity of terrorism), became in a more spiritual atmosphere a flaming sword of religious and racial insanity. Pitt, the son of Chatham, was quite unfit to fill his father's place, unfit indeed (I cannot but think) to fill the place commonly given him in history. But if he was wholly w^orthy of his immortality, his Irish expedients, even if considered as immedi- ately defensible, have not been worthy of their immortality. He was sincerely convinced of the national need to raise coalition after coali- tion against Napoleon, by pouring the commer- cial wealth then rather peculiar to England 256 ji Short History of England upon her poorer Allies, and he did this with indubitable talent and pertinacity. He was at the same time faced with a hostile Irish rebel- lion and a partly or potentially hostile Irish Parliament. He broke the latter by the most indecent bribery and the former by the most indecent brutality, but he may well have thought himself entitled to tlie tyrant's plea. But not only were his expedients those of panic, or at any rate of peril, but (what is less clearly realised) it is the only real defence of them that they were those of panic and peril. He was ready to emancipate Catholics as such, for religious bigotr}^ was not the vice of the oli- garchy, but he was not ready to emancipate Irishmen as such. He did not really want to enlist Ireland like a recruit, but simply to dis- arm Ireland like an enemy. Hence his settle- ment was from the first in a false position for settling anything. The Union may have been a necessity, but the Union was not a Union. It was not intended to be one, and nobody has ever treated it as one. We have not only never succeeded in making Ireland English, as Bur- gundy has been made French, but we have never tried. Burgundy could boast of Ra- cine, though Racine was a Norman, but we should smile if Ireland boasted of Shakespeare. Our vanity has involved us in a mere contradic- Aristocracy and the Discontents 257 tion; we have tried to combine identification with superiority. It is simply weak-minded to sneer at an Irishman if he figures as an Eng- lishman, and rail at him if he figures as an Irishman. So the Union has never even ap- plied English laws to Ireland, but only coer- cions and concessions both specially designed for Ireland. From Pitt's time to our own this tottering alternation has continued, from the time when the great O'Connell, with his mon- ster meetings, forced our Government to listen to Catholic Emancipation to the time when the great Parnell, with his obstruction, forced it to listen to Home Rule, our staggering equi- librium has been maintained by blows from without. In the later nineteenth century the better sort of special treatment began on the whole to increase. Gladstone, an idealistic though inconsistent Liberal, rather belatedly realised that the freedom he loved in Greece and Italy had its rights nearer home, and may be said to have found a second youth in the gateway of the grave, in the eloquence and emphasis of his conversion. And a statesman wearing the opposite label (for what that is worth) had the spiritual insight to see that Ireland, if resolved to be a nation, was even more resolved to be a peasantry. George Wyndham, generous, imaginative, a man 258 A Short History of England among politicians, insisted that the agrarian agony of evictions, shootings, and rack-rent- ings should end with the individual Irish get- ting, as Parnell had put it, a grip on their farms. In more ways than one his work rounds off almost romantically the tragedy of the rebellion against Pitt, for Wyndham him- self was of the blood of the leader of the rebels, and he wrought the only reparation yet made for all the blood, shamefully shed, that flowed around the fall of FitzGerald. The effect on England was less tragic; in- deed, in a sense it was comic. Wellington, himself an Irishman, though of the narrower party, was preeminently a realist, and, like many Irishmen, was especially a realist about Englishmen. He said the army he com- manded was the scum of the earth; and the remark is none the less valuable because that army proved itself useful enough to be called the salt of the earth. But in truth it was in this something of a national symbol and the guardian, as it were, of a national secret. There is a paradox about the English, even as distinct from the Irish or the Scotch, which makes any formal version of their plans and principles inevitably unjust to them. England not only makes her ramparts out of rubbish, but she finds ramparts in what she has herself Aristocracy and the Discontents 259 cast away as rubbish. If it be a tribute to a thing to say that even its failures have been successes, there is truth in that tribute. Some of the best colonies were convict settlements, and might be called abandoned convict settle- ments. The army was largely an army of gaol-birds, raised by gaol-delivery; but it was a good army of bad men; nay, it was a gay army of unfortunate men. This is the colour and the character that has run through the realities of English history, and it can hardly be put in a book, least of all a historical book. It has its flashes in our fantastic fiction and in the songs of the street, but its true medium is conversation. It has no name but incongru- ity. An illogical laughter survives every- thing in the English soul. It survived, per- haps, with only too much patience, the time of terrorism in which the more serious Irish rose in revolt. That time was full of a quite top- sy-turvy tyranny, and the English humourist stood on his head to suit it. Indeed, he often receives a quite irrational sentence in a police court by saying he will do it on his head. So, under Pitt's coercionist regime, a man was sent to prison for saying that George IV. was fat, but we feel he must have been partly sus- tained in prison by the artistic contemplation of how fat he was. That sort of liberty, that 260 A Short History of England sort of humanity, and it is no mean sort, did indeed survive all the drift and downward eddy of an evil economic system, as well as the dragooning of a reactionary epoch and the drearier menace of materialistic social science, as embodied in the new Puritans, who have purified themselves even of religion. Under this long process, the worst that can be said is that the English humourist has been slowly driven downwards in the social scale. Fal- staff was a knight, Sam Weller was a gentle- man's servant, and some of our recent restric- tions seem designed to drive Sam Weller to the status of the Artful Dodger. But well it was for us that some such trampled tradition and dark memory of Merry England survived; well for us, as we shall see, that all our social science failed and all our statesmanship broke down before it. For there was to come the noise of a trumpet and a dreadful day of visi- tation, in which all the daily workers of a dull civilisation were to be called out of their houses and their holes like a resurrection of the dead, and left naked under a strange sun with no religion but a sense of humour. And men might know of what nation Shakespeare was, who broke into puns and practical jokes in the darkest passion of his tragedies, if they had only heard those boys in France and Flanders Aristocracy and the Discontents 261 who called out ''Early Doors!" themselves in a theatrical memory, as they went so early in their youth to break down the doors of death. XVII — The Return of the Barbarian THE only way to write a popular history, as we have already re- marked, would be to write it back- wards. It would be to take com- mon objects of our own street and tell the tale of how each of them came to be in the street at all. And for my immediate purpose it is really convenient to take two objects we have known all our lives, as features of fashion or respectability. One, which has grown rarer recently, is what we call a top-hat; the other, which is still a customary formality, is a pair of trousers. The history of these humorous objects really does give a clue to what has hap- pened in England for the last hundred years. It is not necessary to be an aesthete in order to regard both objects as the reverse of beau- tiful, as tested by what may be called the ra- tional side of beauty. The lines of human limbs can be beautiful, and so can the lines of loose drapery, but not cylinders too loose to be the first and too tight to be the second. Nor is a subtle sense of harmony needed to see that while there are hundreds of differ- 262 The Return of the Barbarian 263 ently proportioned hats, a hat that actually grows larger towards the top is somewhat top- heavy. But what is largely forgotten is this, that these two fantastic objects, which now strike the eye as unconscious freaks, were orig- inally conscious freaks. Our ancestors, to do them justice, did not think them casual or commonplace; they thought them, if not ridicu- lous, at least rococo. The top-hat was the topmost point of a riot of Regency dandyism, and bucks w^ore trousers while business men were still wearing knee-breeches. It will not be fanciful to see a certain oriental touch in trousers, which the later Romans also regarded as effeminately oriental; it was an oriental touch found in many florid things of the time — in Byron's poems or Brighton Pavilion. Now, the interesting point is that for a whole serious century these instantaneous phantasies have remained like fossils. In the carnival of the Regency a few fools got into fancy dress, and we have all remained in fancy dress. At least, we have remained in the dress, though we have lost the fancy. I say this is typical of the most important thing that happened in the Victorian time. For the most important thing was that nothing happened. The very fuss that was made about minor modifications brings into relief the rigid- 264 A Short History of England ity with which the main lines of social life were left as they were at the French Revolution. We talk of the French Revolution as something that changed the world ; but its most important relation to England is that it did not change England. A student of our history is con- cerned rather with the effect it did not have than the effect it did. If it be a splendid fate to have survived the Flood, the English oli- garchy had that added splendour. But even for the countries in which the Revolution was a convulsion, it was the last convulsion — until that which shakes the world to-day. It gave their character to all the commonwealths, which all talked about progress, and were occu- pied in marking time. Frenchmen, under all superficial reactions, remained republican in spirit, as they had been when they first wore top-hats. Englishmen, under all superficial reforms, remained oligarchical in spirit, as they had been when they first wore trousers. Only one power might be said to be growing, and that in a plodding and prosaic fashion — the power in the North-East whose name was Prussia. And the English were more and more learning that this growth need cause them no alarm, since the North Germans were their cousins in blood and their brothers in spirit. The Return of the Barbarian 265 The first thing to note, then, about the nine- teenth century is that Europe remained herself as compared with the Europe of the great war, and that England especially remained herself as compared even with the rest of Europe. Granted this, we may give their proper impor- tance to the cautious internal changes in this country, the small conscious and the large un- conscious changes. Most of the conscious ones were much upon the model of an early one, the great Reform Bill of 1832, and can be considered in the light of it. First, from the standpoint of most real reformers, the chief thins: about the Reform Bill was that it did not reform. It had a huge tide of popular enthusiasm behind it, which wholly disap- peared when the people found themselves in front of it. It enfranchised large masses of the middle classes; it disfranchised very defi- nite bodies of the working classes; and it so struck the balance between the conservative and the dangerous elements in the common- wealth that the governing class was much stronger than before. The date, however, is important, not at all because it was the begin- ning of democracy, but because it was the be- ginning of the best way ever discovered of evading and postponing democracy. Here en- ters the homoeopathic treatment of revolution, 266 A Short History/ of England since so often successful. Well into the next generation Disraeli, the brilliant Jewish adven- turer who was the symbol of the English aris- tocracy being no longer genuine, extended the franchise to the artisans, partly, indeed, as a party move against his great rival, Gladstone, but more as the method by which the old popu- lar pressure was first tired out and then toned down. The politicians said the working-class was now strong enough to be allowed votes. It would be truer to say it was now weak enough to be allowed votes. So in more recent times Payment of Members, which would once have been regarded (and resisted) as an inrush of popular forces, was passed quietly and with- out resistance, and regarded merely as an extension of parliamentary privileges. The truth is that the old parliamentary oligarchy abandoned their first line of trenches because they had by that time constructed a second line of defence. It consisted in the concentration of colossal political funds in the private and irresponsible power of the politicians, col- lected by the sale of peerages and more im- portant things, and expended on the jerryman- dering of the enormously expensive elections. In the presence of this inner obstacle a vote became about as valuable as a railway ticket when there is a permanent block on the line. The Return of the Barbarian 267 The fagade and outward form of this new secret government is the merely mechanical application of what is called the Party System. The Party System does not consist, as some suppose, of two parties, but of one. If there were two real parties, there could be no system. But if this was the evolution of parliamen- tary reform, as represented by the first Reform Bill, we can see the other side of it in the social reform attacked immediately after the first Reform Bill. It is a truth that should be a tower and a landmark, that one of the first things done by the Reform Parliament was to establish those harsh and dehumanised work- houses which both honest Radicals and honest Tories branded with the black title of the New Bastille. This bitter name lingers in our lit- erature, and can be found by the curious in the works of Carlyle and Hood, but it is doubtless interesting rather as a note of contemporary indignation than as a correct comparison. It is easy to imagine the logicians and the legal orators of the parliamentary school of prog- ress finding many points of differentiation and even of contrast. The Bastille was one central institution; the workhouses have been many, and have everywhere transformed local life with whatever they have to give of social sympathy and inspiration. Men of high rank 268 A Short History of England and great wealth were frequently sent to the Bastille, but no such mistake has ever been made by the more business administration of the workhouse. Over the most capricious op- erations of the Lettres de Cachets there still hovered some hazy traditional idea that a man is put in prison to punish him for something. It was a discovery of a later social science that men who cannot be punished can still be im- prisoned. But the deepest and most decisive difference lies in the better fortune of the New Bastille, for no mob has ever dared to storm it, and it never fell. The new Poor Law was indeed not wholly new in the sense that it was the culmination and clear enunciation of a principle foreshad- owed in the earlier Poor Law of Elizabeth, which was one of the many anti-popular effects of the Great Pillage. When the monasteries were swept away and the mediaeval system of hospitality destroyed, tramps and beggars be- came a problem, the solution of which has al- ways tended towards slavery, even when the question of slavery has been cleared of the ir- relevant question of cruelty. It is obvious that a desperate man might find Mr. Bumble and the Board of Guardians less cruel than cold weather and the bare ground — even if he were allowed to sleep on the ground, which (by The Return of the Barbarian 269 a veritable nightmare of nonsense and injus- tice) he is not. He is actually punished for sleeping under a bush on the specific and stated ground that he cannot afford a bed. It is ob- vious, however, that he may find his best physi- cal good by going into the workhouse, as he often found it in pagan times by selling himself into slavery. The point is that the solution remains servile, even when Mr. Bumble and the Board of Guardians ceased to be in com- mon sense cruel. The pagan might have the luck to sell himself to a kind master. The principle of the new Poor Law, which has so far proved permanent in our society, is that the man lost all his civic rights and lost them solely through poverty. There is a touch of irony, though hardly of mere hypocrisy, in the fact that the Parliament which effected this re- form had just been abolishing black slavery by buying out the slave-owners in the British colonies. The slave-owners were bought out at a price big enough to be called blackmail, but it would be misunderstanding the national mentality to deny the sincerity of the senti- ment. Wilberforce represented in this the real wave of Wesleyan religion which had made a humane reaction against Calvinism, and was in no mean sense philanthropic. But there is something romantic in the English 270 A Short History of England mind which can always see what is remote. It is the strongest example of what men lose by being long-sighted. It is fair to say that they gain many things also, the poems that are like adventures and the adventures that are like poems. It is a national savour, and there- fore in itself neither good nor evil, and it de- pends on the application whether we find a scriptural text for it in the wish to take the wings of the morning and abide in the utter- most parts of the sea, or merely in the saying that the eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth. Anyhow, the unconscious nineteenth-cen- tury movement, so slow that it seems station- ary, was altogether in this direction, of which workhouse philanthropy is the type. Never- theless, it had one national institution to com- bat and overcome; one institution all the more intensely national because it was not official, and in a sense not even political. The modern Trade Union was the inspiration and creation of the English; it is still largely known throughout Europe by its English name. It was the English expression of the European effort to resist the tendency of Capitalism to reach its natural culmination in slavery. In this it has an almost weird psychological in- terest, for it is a return to the past by men ig- The Return of the Barbarian 271 norant of the past, like the subconscious action of some man who has lost his memory. We say that history repeats itself, and it is even more interesting when it unconsciously repeats itself. No man on earth is kept so ignorant of the Middle Ages as the British workman, ex- cept perhaps the British business man who em- ploys him, yet all who know even a little of the Middle Ages can see that the modern Trade Union is a groping for the ancient Guild. It is true that those who look to the Trade Union, and even those clear-sighted enough to call it the Guild, are often without the faintest tinge of mediaeval mysticism, or even of mediaeval morality. But this fact is itself the most strik- ing and even staggering tribute to mediaeval morality. It has all the clinching logic of coin- cidence. If large numbers of the most hard- headed atheists had evolved, out of their own inner consciousness, the notion that a number of bachelors or spinsters ought to live together in celibate groups for the good of the poor, or the observation of certain hours and offices, it would be a very strong point in favour of the monasteries. It would be all the stronger if the atheists had never heard of monasteries; it would be strongest of all if they hated the very name of monasteries. And it is all the stronger because the man who puts his trust in 272 A Short History of England Trades Unions does not call himself a Catho- lic or even a Christian, if he does call himself a Guild Socialist. The Trade Union movement passed through many perils, including a ludicrous attempt of certain lawyers to condemn as a criminal con- spiracy that Trade Union solidarity of which their own profession is the strongest and most startling example in the world. The struggle culminated in gigantic strikes which split the country in ever^ direction in the earlier part of the twentieth century. But another process, with much more power at its back, was also in operation. The principle represented by the new Poor Law proceeded on its course, and in one important respect altered its course, though it can hardly be said to have altered its object. It can most correctly be stated by saying that the employers themselves, who al- ready organised business, began to organise social reform. It was more picturesquely ex- pressed by a cynical aristocrat in Parliament who said, 'We are all Socialists now." The Socialists, a body of completely sincere men led by several conspicuously brilliant men, had long hammered into their heads the hopeless sterility of mere non-interference in exchange. The Socialists proposed that the State should not merely interfere in business but should The Return of the Barbarian 273 take over the business, and pay all men as equal wage-earners, or at any rate as wage- earners. The employers were not willing to surrender their own position to the State, and this project has largely faded from politics; but the wiser of them were willing to pay better wages, and they were specially willing to bestow various other benefits so long as they were bestowed after the manner of wages. Thus we had a series of social reforms which, for good or evil, all tended in the same direc- tion ; the permission to employees to claim cer- tain advantages as employees, and as some- thing permanently different from employers. Of these the obvious examples were Employ- ers' Liability, Old Age Pensions, and, as mark- ing another and more decisive stride in the process, the Insurance Act. The latter in particular, and the whole plan of the social reform in general, were modelled upon Germany. Indeed the whole English life of this period was overshadowed by Ger- many. We had now reached, for good or evil, the final fulfilment of that gathering influence which began to grow on us in the seventeenth century, which was solidified by the military alliances of the eighteenth century, and which in the nineteenth century had been turned into a philosophy — not to say a mythology. Ger- 274 A Short History of England man metaphysics had thinned our theology, so that many a man's most solemn conviction about Good Friday was that Friday was named after Freya. German history had simply an- nexed English history, so that it was almost counted the duty of any patriotic Englishman to be proud of being a German. The genius of Carlyle, the culture preached by Matthew Arnold, would not, persuasive as they were, have alone produced this effect but for an ex- ternal phenomenon of great force. Our in- ternal policy was transformed by our foreign policy; and foreign policy was dominated by the more and more drastic steps which the Prussian, now clearly the prince of all the Ger- man tribes, was taking to extend the German influence in the world. Denmark was robbed of two provinces; France was robbed of two provinces; and though the fall of Paris was felt almost everywhere as the fall of the capital of civilisation, a thing like the sacking of Rome by the Goths, many of the most influen- tial people in England still saw nothing in it but the solid success of our kinsmen and old allies of Waterloo. The moral methods which achieved it, the juggling with the Augusten- burg claim, the forgery of the Ems telegram, were either successfully concealed or were but cloudily appreciated. The Higher Criticism TJie Return of the Barbarian 275 had entered into our ethics as well as our the- ology. Our view of Europe was also distorted and made disproportionate by the accident of a natural concern for Constantinople and our route to India, which led Palmerston and later premiers to support the Turk and see Russia as the only enemy. This somewhat cynical reaction was summed up in the strange figure of Disraeli, who made a pro-Turkish settle- ment full of his native indifference to the Christian subjects of Turkey, and sealed it at Berlin in the presence of Bismarck. Disraeli was not without insight into the inconsistencies and illusions of the English ; he said many sa- gacious things about them, and one especially when he told the Manchester School that their motto was 'Teace and Plenty amid a starving people, and with the world in arms." But what he said about peace and plenty might well be parodied as a comment on what he himself said about Peace with Honour. Returning from that Berlin Conference he should have said, ''I bring you Peace with Honour ; peace with the seeds of the most horrible war of his- tory; and honour as the dupes and victims of the old bully in Berlin." But it was, as we have seen, especially in social reform that Germany was believed to be leading the way, and to have found the secret 276 'A Short History of England of dealing with the economic evil. In the case of Insurance, which was the test case, she was applauded for obliging all her workmen to set apart a portion of their wages for any time of sickness; and numerous other provisions, both in Germany and England, pursued the same ideal, which was that of protecting the poor against themselves. It everywhere in- volved an external power having a finger in the family pie ; but little attention was paid to any friction thus caused, for all prejudices against the process were supposed to be the growth of ignorance. And that ignorance was already being attacked by what was called education — an enterprise also inspired largely by the example, and partly by the commercial competition of Germany. It was pointed out that in Germany governments and great em- ployers thought it well worth their while to apply the grandest scale of organization and the minutest inquisition of detail to the instruc- tion of the whole German race. The govern- ment was the stronger for training its scholars as it trained its soldiers; the big businesses were the stronger for manufacturing mind as they manufactured material. English educa- tion was made compulsory; it was made free; many good, earnest, and enthusiastic men la- boured to create a ladder of standards and ex- The Return of the Barbarian 277 aminations, which would connect the cleverest of the poor with the culture of the English uni- versities and the current teaching in history or philosophy. But it cannot be said that the connection was very complete, or the achieve- ment so thorough as the German achievement. For whatever reason, the poor Englishman remained in many things much as his fathers had been, and seemed to think the Higher Criticism too high for him even to criticise. And then a day came, and if we were wise, we thanked God that we had failed. Educa- tion, if it had ever really been in question, would doubtless have been a noble gift; educa- tion in the sense of the central tradition of his- tory, with its freedom, its family honour, its chivalry which is the flower of Christendom. But what would our populace, in our epoch, have actually learned if they had learned all that our schools and universities had to teach ? That England was but a little branch on a large Teutonic tree; that an unfathomable spiritual sympathy, all-encircling like the sea, had always made us the natural allies of the great folk by the flowing Rhine ; that all light came from Luther and Lutheran Germany, whose science was still purging Christianity of its Greek and Roman accretions ; that Germany was a forest fated to grow ; that France was a 278 A Short History of England dung-heap fated to decay — a dung-heap with a crowing cock on it. What would the ladder of education have led to, except a platform on which a posturing professor proved that a cou- sin german was the same as a German cousin ! What would the guttersnipe have learnt as a graduate, except to embrace a Saxon because he was the other half of an Anglo-Saxon? The day came, and the ignorant fellow found he had other things to learn. And he was quicker than his educated countrymen, for he had nothing to unlearn. He in whose honour all had been said and sung stirred, and stepped across the border of Belgium. Then were spread out before men's eyes all the beauties of his culture and all the benefits of his organization; then we beheld under a lifting daybreak what light we had fol- lowed and after what image we had laboured to refashion ourselves. Nor in any story of mankind has the irony of God chosen the fool- ish things so catastrophically to confound the wise. For the common crowd of poor and ig- norant Englishmen, because they only knew that they were Englishmen, burst through the filthy cobwebs of four hundred years and stood where their fathers stood when they knew that they were Christian men. The Eng- lish poor, broken in every revolt, bullied by The Return of the Barbarian 279 every fashion, long despoiled of property, and now being despoiled of liberty, entered history with a noise of trumpets, and turned them- selves in two years into one of the iron armies of the world. And when the critic of politics and literature, feeling that this war is after all heroic, looks around him to find the hero, he can point to nothing but the mob. XVIII — ConcltLsion IN so small a book on so large a matter, finished hastily enough amid the neces- sities of an enormous national crisis, it would be absurd to pretend to have achieved proportion; but I will confess to some attempt to correct a disproportion. We talk of historical perspective, but I rather fancy there is too much perspective in history; for perspective makes a giant a pigmy and a pigmy a giant. The past is a giant foreshortened with his feet towards us; and sometimes the feet are of clay. We see too much merely the sunset of the Middle Ages, even when we ad- mire its colours; and the study of a man like Napoleon is too often that of "The Last Phase." So there is a spirit that thinks it reasonable to deal in detail with Old Sarum, and would think it ridiculous to deal in detail with the Use of Sarum; or which erects in Kensington Gardens a golden monument to Albert larger than anybody has ever erected to Alfred. English history is misread espe- cially, I think, because the crisis is missed. It is usually put about the period of the Stuarts; 280 Conclusion 281 and many of the memorials of our past seem to suffer from the same visitation as the me- morial of Mr. Dick. But though the story of the Stuarts was a tragedy, I think it was also an epilogue. I make the guess, for it can be no more, that the change really came with the fall of Rich- ard II., following on his failure to use mediae- val despotism in the interests of mediaeval democracy. England, like the other nations of Christendom, had been created not so much by the death of the ancient civilisation as by its escape from death, or by its refusal to die. Mediaeval civilisation had arisen out of the re- sistance to the barbarians, to the naked bar- barism from the North and the more subtle barbarism from the East. It increased in lib- erties and local government under kings who controlled the wider things of war and taxa- tion; and in the present war of the fourteenth century in England, the king and the populace came for a moment into conscious alliance. They both found that a third thing was al- ready too strong for them. That third thing was the aristocracy ; and it captured and called itself the Parliament. The House of Com- mons, as its name implies, had primarily con- sisted of plain men summoned by the King like jurymen; but it soon became a very special 282 A Short History of England jury. It became, for good or evil, a great or- gan of government, surviving the Church, the monarchy and the mob ; it did many great and not a few good things. It created what we call the British Empire; it created something which was really far more valuable, a new and natural sort of aristocracy, more humane and even humanitarian than most of the aristocra- cies of the world. It had sufficient sense of the instincts of the people, at least until lately, to respect the liberty and especially the laugh- ter that had become almost the religion of the race. But in doing all this, it deliberately did two other things, which it thought a natural part of its policy; it took the side of the Pro- testants, and then (partly as a consequence) it took the side of the Germans. Until very lately most intelligent Englishmen were quite honestly convinced that in both it was taking the side of progress against decay. The ques- tion which many of them are now inevitably asking themselves, and would ask whether I asked it or no, is whether it did not rather take the side of barbarism against civilisation. At least, if there be anything valid in my own vision of these things, we have returned to an origin and we are back in the war with the barbarians. It falls as naturally for me that the Englishman and the Frenchman Conclusion 283 should be on the same side, as that Alfred and Abo should be on the same side, in that black century when the barbarians wasted Wessex and besieged Paris. But there are now, per- haps, less certain tests of the spiritual as dis- tinct from the material victory of civilisation. Ideas are more mixed, are complicated by fine shades or covered by fine names. And whether the retreating savage leaves behind him the soul of savagery, like a sickness in the air, I myself should judge primarily by one political and moral test. The soul of sav- agery is slavery. Under all its mask of ma- chinery and instruction, the German regimen- tation of the poor was the relapse of barbarians into slavery. I can see no escape from it for ourselves in the ruts of our present reforms, but only by doing what the medisevals did after the other barbarian defeat: beginning, by guilds and small independent groups, gradu- ally to restore the personal property of the poor and the personal freedom of the family. If the English really attempt that, the English have at least shown in the war, to any one who doubted it, that they have not lost the courage and capacity of their fathers, and can carry it through if they will. If they do not do so, if they continue to move only with the dead momentum of the social discipline w4iich we 284} A Short History of England learnt from Germany, there is nothing before us but what Mr. Belloc, the discoverer of this great sociological drift, has called the Servile State. And there are moods in which a man, considering that conclusion of our story, is half inclined to wish that the wave of Teutonic barbarism had washed out us and our armies together; and that the world should never know anything more of the last of the English, except that they died for liberty. JTHEi ^ND THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND By GILBERT K. CHESTERTON i27no. Cloth. $1.00 net npHE crimes of England have consisted of her -■- failures to check the advance of Germany and to resist all invasions of German ideas. In his satiri- cal letter of introduction to a certain Professor Whirlwind, Mr. Chesterton offers a list of these offenses. ''On many occasions we have been very wrong indeed," he confesses. "We were very wrong indeed when we took part in preventing Europe from putting a term to the impious piracies of Frederick the Great. We were very wrong indeed when we allowed the triumph over Napoleon to be soiled with the mire and blood of Blucher's sullen savages. . . . We were very wrong indeed when we praised the soulless Prussian education and copied the soulless Prussian laws." Each of the "crimes" named is treated in a chapter. "Here we have Mr. Chesterton at his best." The Nation. "Mr. Chesterton has never written a cleverer or a more characteristic book. " — New York Evening Post. "All that has been said of Mr. Chesterton's satirically humorous style, his scintillating wit, his pungency of sarcasm, is justified by this book. " — Springfield Union. "The book is delicious reading for the pro-ally. And it is really a book of valuable historical essays. " Cleveland Plain Dealer. JOHN LANE COMPANY. NEW YORK By GILBERT K. CHESTERTON ORTHODOXY i2mo. Cloth. $1.50 net "A work of genius. ''—Chicago Evening Post. " 'Orthodoxy' is the most important religious work that has appeared since Emerson." — North American Review. "Mr. Chesterton was luminous; he has become incan- descent. He has become orthodox — and proves it in most heterodox fashion." — Chicago Tribune. "I have just read Chesterton's 'Orthodoxy* with the greatest delight. It is certainly the best book of his that I have ever read. Its remarkable brilliancy ought to do a great deal of good. " Wm. Lyon Phelps, Yale University. HERETICS i2mo. Cloth. $1.50 net "It is likely to produce a sensation. It is an extraor- dinary book and will be much read and talked about. It will come as a surprise to Mr. Chesterton's readers, since it shows him serious — beyond a doubt. But in becoming serious Mr. Chesterton has not ceased to be clever. His epigrams still pop and his paradoxes bewilder. In writing of serious things, he apparently sees no reason for being sad about them. " — N. Y. Globe. JOHN LANE COMPANY, NEW YORK ^^ 'R o o K, oj^ Inspiration CARRY ON LETTERS IN WARTIME BY LIEUTENANT CONINGSBY DAWSON Author of ••The Garden Without Walls," •'Slaves of Freedom," etc. Frontispiece, i2mo. Cloth, $i.oo net. "The bcx)k ranks beyond anything he has previously written in vividness of impression, reality, tenderness, sympathetic insight, and exquisite literary grace." Chicago Tribune. "It is a book which should be read by everyone in this country, for it breathes forth inspiration and courage, and fills us with faith in our cause and its ultimate success." Norfolk Ledger Dispatch. *'Coningsby Dawson has given us something better than a novel in his latest volume of letters, for his new book is one of the most interesting productions of the subjective side of the war that has yet appeared." St. Louis Democrat. "Perhaps the most striking thing about the letters is the spirit of buoyant determination from which the book derives its title — 'Carry On' — the phrase which has also become the slogan of those who have battled for nearly three years on the Western front in France." Philadelphia Press. "These letters were not intended for publication and are therefore intimate and affectionate and more self- revealing than they would otherwise have been, but they may be accepted as expressing the moral and spiritual temper of the hundreds of thousands of young men under arms." Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger. NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY The International Studio Universal Press Opinions of the Magazine New York Tribune : " The Studio is to-day, by all odds, the most artistic periodical printed in English." Boston Globe : " It is like walking through a select art gallery to look over the Studio, and like attending a course of first-class lectures to read it." Detroit Free Press : " A publication that the up-to-date art lover cannot do without." Washington Times: "This is the most beautiful of all magazines in pictorial embellishment and the extrinsics of superb book- making. Troy Times : " Has become famous for the beauty of its illustra- tions. It is simply invaluable." 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