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THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND

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THE CRIMES OF
ENGLAND

BY
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON
AUTHOa OF
"BEBEUCS," "orthodoxy," "all things CONSmEKED," EIC.

NEW YORK
JOHN LANE COMPANY
MCMXVI

Copyright, 1916,
Bv John Lane Compaitz

Press of
J. J. Little & Ives Company
New York, U.S. A.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
PAGE
Some Words to Professor Whirlwind . ii
The German Professor, his need of Edu
cation for Debate — Three Mistakes of Ger
man Controversialists — The Multiplicity of
Excuses — Falsehood against Experience —
Kultur preached by Unkultur — ^The Mis
take about Bernard Shaw — German Lack of
Welt-Politik — ^Where England is really
Wrong. CHAPTER II
The Protestant Hero  27
Suitable Finale for the German Em
peror — Frederick II. and the Power of
Fear — German Influence in England since
Luther — Our German Kings and Allies^
Triumph of Frederick the Great.

CHAPTER III
The Enigma of Waterloo .... 45
How we helped Napoleon — The Revolu
tion and the Two Germanics— Religious
5

6 Contents

Resistance of Austria and Russia — Irre
ligious Resistance of Prussia and England —
Negative Irreligion of England — its Ideal
ism in Snobbishness — Positive Irreligion of
Prussia; no Idealism in Anything — ^Alle
gory and the French Revolution — The Dual
Personality of England; the Double Bat
tle — Triumph of Blucher.

CHAPTER IV
The Coming of the Janissaries . . . 6i
The Sad Story of Lord Salisbury — Ire
land and Heligoland — The Young Men of
Ireland— The Dirty Work— The Use of
German Mercenaries — ^The Unholy Alli
ance — ^Triumph of the German Mercenaries.

CHAPTER V
The Lost England  77
Truth about England and Ireland — ^Mur
der and the Two Travellers — Real Defence
of England — The Lost Revolution — Story
of Cobbett and the Germans — Historical
Accuracy of Cobbett — ^Violence of the Eng
lish Language — Exaggerated Truths versus
Exaggerated Lies — Defeat of the People —
Triumph of the German Mercenaries.

Contents

CHAPTER VI
rAGE
Hamlet and the Danes . . . .95
Degeneration of Grimm's Fairy Tales —
From Tales of Terror to Tales of Terror
ism — German Mistake of being Deep — ^The
Germanisation of Shakespeare^Carlyle and
the Spoilt Child— The Test of Teutonism—
Hell or Hans Andersen — Causes of Eng
lish Inaction — Barbarism and Splendid Iso
lation — The Peace of the Plutocrats — Ham
let the Englishman — The Triumph of Bis
marck. CHAPTER VII
The Midnight of Europe . . . • "3
The Two Napoleons— Their Ultimate
Success — The Interlude of Sedan — The
Meaning of an Emperor — The Triumph of
Versailles — The True Innocence of Eng
land—Triumph of the Kaiser.
CHAPTER VIII
The Wrong Horse  127
Lord Salisbury Again — The Influence of
1870 — ^The Fairy Tale of Teutonism— The
Adoration of the Crescent— The Reign of
the Cynics— Last Words to Professor
Whirlwind.

Contents

CHAPTER IX
PAGE
The Awakening of England . . . 145
The March of Montenegro — The Anti-
Servile State — The Prussian Preparation —
The Sleep of England — The Awakening of
England. CHAPTER X
The Battle of the Marne .... 163
The Hour of Peril— The Human Del
uge — The English at the Marne.

THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND

I — Some Words to Professor Whirlwind
Dear Professor Whirlwind,
YOUR name in the original Ger
man is too much for me ; and this
is the nearest I propose to get to
it : but under the majestic image
of pure wind marching in a movement
wholly circular I seem to see, as in a
vision, something of your mind. But the
grand isolation of your thoughts leads you
to express them in such words as are grati
fying to yourself, and have an inconspicu
ous or even an unfortunate effect upon
others. If anything were really to be made
of your moral campaign against the English
nation, it was clearly necessary that some
body, if it were only an Englishman, should
show you how to leave off professing phi
losophy and begin to practise it. I have
therefore sold myself into the Prussian serv
ice, and in return for a cast-off suit of the
Emperor's clothes (the uniform of an Eng
lish midshipman), a German hausfrau's
recipe for poison gas, two penny cigars, and
II

12 The Crimes of England
twenty-five Iron Crosses, I have consented
to instruct you in the rudiments of interna
tional controversy. Of this part of my task
I have here little to say that is not covered
by a general adjuration to you to observe
certain elementary rules. They are, rough
ly speaking, as follows : —
First, stick to one excuse. Thus if a
tradesman, with whom your social relations
are slight, should chance to find you toying
with the coppers in his till, you may possibly
explain that you are interested in Numis
matics and are a Collector of Coins ; and he
may possibly believe you. But if you tell
him afterwards that you pitied him for be
ing overloaded with unwieldy copper discs,
and were in the act of replacing them by a
silver sixpence of your own, this further
explanation, so far from increasing his con
fidence in your motives, will (strangely
enough) actually decrease it. And if you
are so unwise as to be struck by yet anotiier
brilliant idea, and tell him that the pennies
were all bad pennies, which you were con
cealing to save him from a police prosecu
tion for coining, the tradesman may even
be so wayward as to institute a police prose-

Some Words to Prof. Whirlwind 13
cution himself. Now this is not in any way
an exaggeration of the way in which you
have knocked the bottom out of any case you
may ever conceivably have had in such mat
ters as the sinking of the Lusitania. With
my own eyes I have seen the following ex
planations, apparently proceeding from
your pen, (i) that the ship was a troop-ship
carrying soldiers from Canada; (ii) that if
it wasn't, it was a merchant-ship unlawfully
carrying munitions for the soldiers in
France; (iii) that, as the passengers on the
ship had been warned in an advertisement,
Germany was justified in blowing them to
the moon; (iv) that there were guns, and
the ship had to be torpedoed because the
English captain was just going to fire them
off; (v) that the English or American au
thorities, by throwing the Lusitania at the
heads of the German commanders, subjected
them to an insupportable temptation; which
was apparently somehow demonstrated or
intensified by the fact that the ship came up
to schedule time, there being some mysteri
ous principle by which having tea at tea-time
justifies poisoning the tea; (vi) that the ship
was not sunk by the Germans at all but by

14 The Crimes of England
the English, the English captain having de
liberately tried to drown himself and some
thousand of his own countr)mien in order to
cause an exchange of stiff notes between Mr.
Wilson and the Kaiser. If this interesting
story be true, I can only say that such fran
tic and suicidal devotion to the most remote
interests of his country almost earns the cap
tain pardon for the crime. But do you not
see, my dear Professor, that the very rich
ness and variety of your inventive genius
throws a doubt upon each explanation when
considered in itself? We who read you in
England reach a condition of mind in which
it no longer very much matters what ex
planation you offer, or whether you offer
any at all. We are prepared to hear that
you sank the Lusitania because the sea-born
sons of England would live more happily
as deep-sea fishes, or that every person on
board was coming home to be hanged. You
have explained yourself so completely, in
this clear way, to the Italians that they have
declared war on you, and if you go on ex
plaining yourself so clearly to the Ameri
cans they may quite possibly do the same.
Second, when telling such lies as may

Some Words to Prof, Whirlwind 15
seem necessary to your international stand
ing, do not tell the lies to the people who
know the truth. Do not tell the Eskimos
that snow is bright green; nor tell the ne
groes in Africa that the sun never shines in
that Dark Continent. Rather tell the Es
kimos that the sun never shines in Africa;
and then, turning to the tropical Africans,
see if they will believe that snow is green.
Similarly, the course indicated for you is to
slander the Russians to the English and the
English to the Russians ; and there are hun
dreds of good old reliable slanders which
can still be used against both of them. There
are probably still Russians who believe that
every English gentleman puts a rope round
his wife's neck and sells her in Smithfield.
There are certainly still Englishmen who
believe that every Russian gentleman takes a
rope to his wife's back and whips her every
day. But these stories, picturesque and use
ful as they are, have a limit to their use like
everything else; and the limit consists in the
fact that they are not true, and that there
necessarily exists a group of persons who
know they are not true. It is so with mat
ters of fact about which you asseverate so

16 The Climes of England
positively to us, as if tKey were matters of
opinion. Scarborough might be a fortress;
but it is not. I happen to know it is not.
Mr. Morel may deserve to be universally ad
mired in England ; but he is not universally
admired in England. Tell the Russians that
he is by all means; but do not tell us. We
have seen him; we have also seen Scarbor
ough. You should think of this before you
speak. Third, don't perpetually boast that you
are cultured in language which proves tiiat
you are not. You claim to thrust yourself
upon everybody on the ground that you are
stuffed with wit and wisdom, and have
enough for the whole world. But people
who have wit enough for the whole world,
have wit enough for a whole newspaper
paragraph. And you can seldom get
through even a whole paragraph without be
ing monotonous, or irrelevant, or unintelli
gible, or self-contradictory, or broken-mind
ed generally. If you have something to teach
us, teach it to us now. If you propose to
convert us after you have conquered us,
why not convert us before you have con
quered us ? As it is, we cannot believe what

Some Words to Prof, Whirlwind 17
you say about your superior education be
cause of the way in which you say it. If
an Englishman says, "I don't make no mis
takes in English, not me," we can under
stand his remark ; but we cannot endorse it.
To say, "Je parler le Frenche language, non
demi," is comprehensible, but not convinc
ing. And when you say, as you did in a re
cent appeal to the Americans, that the Ger
manic Powers have sacrificed a great deal of
"red fluid" in defence of their culture, we
point out to you that cultured people do not
employ such a literary style. Or when you
say that the Belgians were so ignorant as
to think they were being butchered when
they weren't, we only wonder whether you
are so ignorant as to think you are being
believed when you aren't. Thus, for in
stance, when you brag about burning Venice
to express your contempt for "tourists," we
cannot think much of the culture, as culture,
which supposes St. Mark's to be a thing for
tourists instead of historians. This, how
ever, would be the least part of our unfa
vourable judgment. That judgment is com
plete when we have read such a paragraph
as this, prominently displayed in a paper in

18 The Crimes of England
which you specially spread yourself: "That
the Italians have a perfect knowledge of the
fact that this city of antiquities and tourists
is subject, and rightly subject, to attack and
bombardment, is proved by the measures
they took at the beginning of the war to re
move some of their greatest art treasures."
Now culture may or may not include the
power to admire antiquities, and to restrain
oneself from the pleasure of breaking them
like toys. But culture does, presumably, in
clude the power to think. For less laborious
intellects than your own it is generally suf
ficient to think once. But if you will think
twice or twenty times, it cannot but dawn
on you that there is something wrong in the
reasoning by which the placing of diamonds
in a safe proves that they are "rightly sub
ject" to a burglar. The incessant assertion
of such things can do Httle to spread your
superior culture; and if you say them too
often people may even begin to doubt
whether you have any superior culture after
all. The earnest friend now advising you
cannot but grieve at such incautious garrul
ity. If you confined yourself to single
wjprds, uttered at intervals of about a month

Some Words to Prof. Whirlwind 19
or so, no one could possibly raise any ra
tional objection, or subject them to any ra
tional criticism. In time you might come to
use whole sentences without revealing the
real state of things.
Through neglect of these maxims, my
dear Professor, every one of your attacks
upon England has gone wide. In pure fact
they have not touched the spot, which the
real critics of England know to be a very
vulnerable spot. We have a real critic of
England in Mr. Bernard Shaw, whose name
you parade but apparently cannot spell ; for
in the paper to which I have referred he is
called Mr. Bernhard Shaw. Perhaps you
think he and Bernhardi are the same man.
But if you quoted Mr. Bernard Shaw's state
ment instead of misquoting his name, you
,would find that his criticism of England is
exactly the opposite of your own; and nat
urally, for it is a rational criticism. He does
not blame England for being against Ger
many. He does most definitely blame Eng
land for not being sufficiently firmly and em
phatically on the side of Russia. He is not
such a fool as to accuse Sir Edward Grey of
being a fiendish Machiavelli plotting against

20 The Crimes of England
Germany; he accuses him of being an ami
able aristocratic stick who failed to frighten
the Junkers from their plan of war. Now,
it is not in the least a question of whether
we happen to like this quality or that: Mr.
Shaw, I rather fancy, would dislike such
verbose compromise more than downright
plotting. It is simply the fact that English
men like Grey are open to Mr. Shaw's attack
and are not open to yours. It is not true
that the English were sufficiently clear
headed or self-controlled to conspire for the
destruction of Germany. Any man who
knows England, any man who hates Eng
land as one hates a living thing, will tell you
it is not true. The English may be snobs,
they may be plutocrats, they may be hypo
crites, but they are not, as a fact, plotters;
and I gravely doubt whether they could be if
they wanted to. The mass of the people are
perfectly incapable of plotting at all, and if
the small ring of rich people who finance our
politics were plotting for anything, it was
for peace at almost any price. Any Lon
doner who knows the London streets and
newspapers as he knows the Nelson column
or the Inner Circle, knows that there were

Some Words to Prof. Whirlwind 21
men in the governing class and in the Cabi
net who were literally thirsting to defend
Germany until Germany, by her own act, be
came indefensible. If they said nothing in
support of the tearing up of the promise of
peace to Belgium, it is simply because there
was nothing to be said.
You were the first people to talk about
World-Politics; and the first people to dis
regard them altogether. Even your foreign
policy is domestic policy. It does not even
apply to any people who are not Germans;
and of your wild guesses about some twenty
other peoples, not one has gone right even
by accident. Your two or three shots at my
own not immaculate land have been such
that you would have been much nearer the
truth if you had tried to invade England by
crossing the Caucasus, or to discover Eng
land among the South Sea Islands. With
your first delusion, that our courage was cal
culated and malignant when in truth our
very corruption was timid and confused, I
have already dealt. The case is the same
with your second favourite phrase ; that the
British army is mercenary. You learnt it
in books and not in battlefields; and I should

22 The Crimes of England
like to be present at a scene in which you
tried to bribe the most miserable little loafer
in Hammersmith as if he were a cynical con-
dottiere selling his spear to some foreign
city. It is not the fact, my dear sir. You
have been misinformed. The British Army
is not at this moment a hireling army any
more than it is a conscript army. It is a
volunteer army in the strict sense of the
word; nor do I object to your calling it an
amateur army. There is no compulsion, and
there is next to no pay. It is at this moment
drawn from every class of the community,
and there are very few classes which would
not earn a little more money in their ordi
nary trades. It numbers very nearly as
many men as it would if it were a conscript
army; that is with the necessary margin of
men unable to serve or needed to serve other
wise. Ours is a country in which that demo
cratic spirit which is common to Christen
dom is rather unusually sluggish and far be
low the surface. And the most genuine and
purely popular movement that we have had
since the Chartists has been the enlistment
for this war. By all means say that such
vague and sentimental volunteering is value-

Some Words to Prof. Whirlwind 23
less in war if you think so; or even if you
don't think so. By all means say that Ger
many is unconquerable and that we cannot
really kill you. But if you say that we do
not really want to kill you, you do us an in
justice. You do indeed.
I need not consider the yet crazier things
that some of you have said ; as that the Eng
lish intend to keep Calais and fight France
as well as Germany for the privilege of pur
chasing a frontier and the need to keep a
conscript army. That, also, is out of books,
and pretty mouldy old books at that. It
was said, I suppose, to gain sympathy among
the French, and is therefore not my imme
diate business, as they are eminently capa
ble of looking after themselves. I merely
drop one word in passing, lest you waste
your powerful intellect on such projects. The
English may some day forgive you; the
French never will. You Teutons are too
light and fickle to understand the Latin seri
ousness. My only concern is to point out
that about England, at least, you are invari
ably and miraculously wrong.
Now speaking seriously, my aear Profes
sor, it will not do. It could be easy to fence

24 The Crimes of England
with you for ever and parry every point
you attempt to make, until English people
began to think there was nothing wrong with
England at all. But I refuse to play for
safety in this way. There is a very great
deal that is really wrong with England, and
it ought not to be forgotten even in the full
blaze of your marvellous mistakes. I can
not have my countrymen tempted to those
pleasures of intellectual pride which are the
result of comparing themselves with you.
The deep collapse and yawning chasm of
your ineptitude leaves me upon a perilous
spiritual elevation. Your mistakes are mat
ters of fact ; but to enumerate them does not
exhaust the truth. For instance, the learned
man who rendered the phrase in an English
advertisement "cut you dead" as "hack you
to death," was in error ; but to say that many
such advertisements are vulgar is not an er
ror. Again, it is true that the English poor
are harried and insecure, with insufficient
instinct for armed revolt, though you will
be wrong if you say that they are occupied
literally in shooting the moon. It is true that
the average Englishman is too much at
tracted by aristocratic society; though you

Some Words to Prof. Whirlwind 25
will be in error if you quote dining with
Duke Humphrey as an example of it. In
more ways than one you forget what is
meant by idiom.
I have therefore thought it advisable to
provide you with a catalogue of the real
crimes of England ; and I have selected them
on a principle which cannot fail to interest
and please you. On many occasions we have
been very wrong indeed. We were very
wrong indeed when we took part in prevent
ing Europe from putting a term to the impi
ous 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 sav
ages. We were very wrong indeed when we
allowed the peaceful King of Denmark to
be robbed in broad daylight by a brigand
named Bismarck; and when we allowed the
Prussian swashbucklers to enslave and si
lence the French provinces which they could
neither govern nor persuade. We were very
wrong indeed when we flung to such hungry
adventurers a position so important as Heli
goland. We were very wrong indeed when
we praised the soulless Prussian education

26 The Crimes of England
and copied the soulless Prussian laws.
Knowing that you will mingle your tears
with mine over this record of English
wrong-doing, I dedicate it to you, and I re
main. Yours reverently,
G. K. CHESTERTON

II — The Protestant Hero

A QUESTION is current in our
looser English journalism touch
ing what should be done with
the German Emperor after a
victory of the Allies. Our more feminine
advisers incline to the view that he should be
shot. This is to make a mistake about the
very nature of hereditary monarchy. As
suredly the Emperor William at his worst
would be entitled to say to his amiable Crown
Prince what Charles II. said when his
brother warned him of the plots of assas
sins : "They will never kill me to make you
king." Others, of greater monstrosity of
mind, have suggested that he should be sent
to St. Helena. So far as an estimate of his
historical importance goes, he might as well
be sent to Mount Calvary. What we have to
deal with is an elderly, nervous, not unintel
ligent person who happens to be a Hohen-
zollern; and who, to do him justice, does
think more of the HohenzoUerns as a sacred
caste than of his own particular place in it.
27

28 The Crimes of England
In such families the old boast and motto of
hereditary kingship has a horrible and de
generate truth. The king never dies; he
only decays for ever.
If it were a matter of the smallest im
portance what happened to the Emperor
William when once his house had been dis
armed, I should satisfy my fancy with an
other picture of his declining years; a con
clusion that would be peaceful, humane, har
monious, and forgiving.
In various parts of the lanes and villages
of South England the pedestrian will come
upon an old and quiet public-house, deco
rated with a dark and faded portrait in a
cocked hat and the singular inscription,
"The King of Prussia." These inn signs
probably commemorate the visit of the Al
lies after 1815, though a great part of the
English middle classes may well have con
nected them with the time when Frederick
II. was earning his title of the Great, along
with a number of other territorial titles to
which he had considerably less claim. Sin
cere and simple-hearted Dissenting minis
ters would dismount before that sign (for
in those days Dissenters drank beer like

The Protestant Hero 29

Christians, and indeed manufactured most
of it) and would pledge the old valour and
the old victory of him whom they called the
Protestant Hero. We should be using every
word with literal exactitude if we said that
he was really something devilish like a hero.
Whether he was a Protestant hero or not
can be decided best by those who have read
the correspondence of a writer calling him
self Voltaire, who was quite shocked at
Frederick's utter lack of religion of any
kind. But the little Dissenter drank his
beer in all innocence and rode on. And the
great blasphemer of Potsdam would have
laughed had he known; it was a jest af
ter his own heart. Such was the jest he
made when he called upon the emperors to
come to communion, and partake of the
eucharistic body of Poland. Had he been
such a Bible reader as the Dissenter doubt
less thought him, he might haply have fore
seen the vengeance of humanity upon his
house. He might have known what Poland
was and was yet to be ; he might have known
that he ate and drank to his damnation, dis
cerning not the body of God.
Whether the placing of the present Ger-

30 The Crimes of England
man Emperor in charge of one of these way
side public-houses would be a jest after his
own heart possibly remains to be seen. But
it would be much more melodious and fitting
an end than any of the sublime euthanasias
which his enemies provide for him. That
old sign creaking above him as he sat on the
bench outside his home of exile would be a
much more genuine memory of the real
greatness of his race than the modern and
almost gimcrack stars and garters that were
pulled in Windsor Chapel. From modern
knighthood has departed all shadow of chiv
alry ; how far we have travelled from it can
easily be tested by the mere suggestion that
Sir Thomas Lipton, let us say, should wear
his lady's sleeve round his hat or should
watch his armour in the Chapel of St.
Thomas of Canterbury. The giving and re
ceiving of the Garter among despots and
diplomatists is now only part of that sort of
pottering mutual politeness which keeps the
peace in an insecure and insincere state of
society. But that old blackened wooden sign
is at least and after all the sign of some
thing; the sign of the time when one solitary
Hohenzollern did not only set fire to fields

The Protestant Hero 31

and cities, but did truly set on fire the minds
of men, even though it were fire from hell.
Everything was young once, even Fred
erick the Great. It was an appropriate pref
ace to the terrible epic of Prussia that it
began with an unnatural tragedy of the loss
of youth. That blind and narrow savage
who was the boy's father had just sufficient
difficulty in stamping out every trace of
decency in him, to show that some such
traces must have been there. If the younger
and greater Frederick ever had a heart, it
was a broken heart ; broken by the same blow
that broke his flute. When his only friend
was executed before his eyes, there were two
corpses to be borne away; and one to be
borne on a high war-horse through victory
after victory: but with a small bottle of poi
son in the pocket. It is not irrelevant thus
to pause upon the high and dark house of his>
childhood. For the peculiar quality which
marks out Prussian arms and ambitions from
all others of the kind consists in this wrin
kled and premature antiquity. There is
something comparatively boyish about the
triumphs of all the other tyrants. There
was something better than ambition in the

32 The Crimes of England
beauty and ardour of the young Napoleon.
He was at least a lover; and his first cam
paign was like a love-story. All that was
pagan in him worshipped the Republic as
men worship a woman, and all that was
Catholic in him understood the paradox of
Our Lady of Victories. Henry VIIL, a
far less reputable person, was in his early
days a good knight of the later and more
florid school of chivalry; we might almost
say that he was a fine old English gentleman
so long as he was young. Even Nero was
loved in his first days : and there must have
been some cause to make that Christian
maiden cast flowers on his dishonourable
grave. But the spirit of the great Hohen
zollern smelt from the first of the charnel.
He came out to his first victory like one
broken by defeats ; his strength was stripped
to the bone and fearful as a fleshless resur
rection; for the worst of what could come
had already befallen him. The very con
struction of his kingship was built upon the
destruction of his manhood. He had known
the final shame ; his soul had surrendered to
force. He could not redress that wrong; he
could only repeat it and repay it. He could

The Protestant Hero 33

make the souls of his soldiers surrender to
his gibbet and his whipping-post; he could
make the souls of the nations surrender to
his soldiers. He could only break men in as
he had been broken; while he could break
in, he could never break out. He could not
slay in anger, nor even sin with simplicity.
Thus he stands alone among the conquerors
of their kind ; his madness was not due to a
mere misdirection of courage. Before the
whisper of war had come to him the founda
tions of his audacity had been laid in fear.
Of the work he did in this world there need
be no considerable debate. It was romantic,
if it be romantic that the dragon should swal
low St. George. He turned a small country
into a great one : he made a new diplomacy
by the fulness and far-flung daring of his
lies: he took away from criminality all re
proach of carelessness and incompleteness.
He achieved an amiable combination of
thrift and theft. He undoubtedly gave to
stark plunder something of the solidity of
property. He protected whatever he stole
as simpler men protect whatever they have
earned or inherited. He turned his hollow
eyes with a sort of loathsome affection upon

84 The Crimes of England
the territories which had most reluctantly
become his: at the end of the Seven Years'
War men knew as little how he was to be
turned out of Silesia as they knew why he
had ever been allowed in it. In Poland,
like a devil in possession, he tore asunder
the body he inhabited; but it was long before
any man dreamed that such disjected limbs
could live again. Nor were the effects of
his break from Christian tradition confined
to Christendom; Macaulay's world-wide
generalisation is very true though very
Macaulayese. But though, in a long view,
he scattered the seeds of war all over the
world, his own last days were passed in a
long and comparatively prosperous peace; a
peace which received and perhaps deserved a
certain praise: a peace with which many
European peoples were content. For though
he did not understand justice, he could under
stand moderation. He was the most genuine
and the most wicked of pacifists. He did not
want any more wars. He had tortured and
beggared all his neighbours; but he bore
them no malice for it.
The immediate cause of that spirited dis
aster, the intervention of England on behalf

The Protestant Hero 35
of the new Hohenzollern throne, was due,
of course, to the national policy of the first
William Pitt. He was the kind of man
whose vanity and simplicity are too easily
overwhelmed by the obvious. He saw noth
ing in a European crisis except a war witK
France; and nothing in a war with France
except a repetition of the rather fruitless
glories of Agincourt and Malplaquet. He
was of the Erastian Whigs, sceptical but still
healthy-minded, and neither good enough
nor bad enough to understand that even the
war of that irreligious age was ultimately a
religious war. He had not a shade of irony
in his whole being; and beside Frederick, al
ready as old as sin, he was like a rather bril
liant schoolboy.
But the direct causes were not the only
causes, nor the true ones. The true causes
were connected with the triumph of one of
the two traditions which had long been
struggling in England. And it is pathetic to
record that the foreign tradition was then
represented by two of the ablest men of that
age, Frederick of Prussia and Pitt; while
what was really the old English tradition
was represented by two of the stupidest men

36 The Crimes of England
that mankind ever tolerated in any age,
George III. and Lord Bute. Bute was the
figurehead of a group of Tories who set
about fulfilling the fine if fanciful scheme
for a democratic monarchy sketched by Bol
ingbroke in "The Patriot King." It was
bent in all sincerity on bringing men's minds
back to what are called domestic affairs, af
fairs as domestic as George III. It might
have arrested the advancing corruption of
Parliaments and enclosure of country-sides,
by turning men's minds from the foreign
glories of the great Whigs like Churchill and
Chatham; and one of its first acts was to
terminate the alliance with Prussia, Unfor
tunately, whatever was picturesque in the
piracy of Potsdam was beyond the imagina
tion of Windsor. But whatever was prosaic
in Potsdam was already established at Wind
sor; the economy of cold mutton, the heavy-
handed taste in the arts, and the strange
northern blend of boorishness with etiquette.
If Bolingbroke's ideas had been applied by
a spirited person, by a Stuart, for example,
or even by Queen Elizabeth (who had real
spirit along with her extraordinary vulgar
ity), the national soul might have broken free

The Protestant Hero 37

from its new northern chains. But it was
the irony of the situation that the King to
whom Tories appealed as a refuge from
Germanism was himself a German.
We have thus to refer the origins of
the German influence in England back to
the beginning of the Hanoverian Succes
sion ; and thence back to the quarrel between
the King and the lawyers which had issue at
Naseby; and thence again to the angry exit
of Henry VIII. from the mediaeval council
of Europe. It is easy to exaggerate the part
played in the matter by that great and hu
man, though very pagan person, Martin Lu
ther. Henry VIII. was sincere in his hatred
for the heresies of the German monk, for
in speculative opinions Henry was wholly
Catholic; and the two wrote against each
other innumerable pages, largely consisting
of terms of abuse, which were pretty well de
served on both sides. But Luther was not
a Lutheran. He was a sign of the break-up
of Catholicism; but he was not a builder of
Protestantism. The countries which be
came corporately and democratically Protes
tant, Scotland, for instance, and Holland,
ifoUowed Calvin and not Luther. And Calvin

38 The Crimes of England
was a Frenchman; an unpleasant French
man, it is true, but one full of that French
capacity for creating official entities which
can really act, and have a kind of impersonal
personality, such as the French Monarchy
or the Terror. Luther was an anarchist, and
therefore a dreamer. He made that which
is, perhaps, in the long run, the fullest and
most shining manifestation of failure; he
made a name. Calvin made an active, gov
erning, persecuting thing, called the Kirk.
There is something^! expressive of him in the
fact that he called even his work of abstract
theology "The Institutes."
In England, however, there were elements
of chaos more akin to Luther than to Calvin.
And we may thus explain many things which
appear rather puzzling in our history, nota
bly the victory of Cromwell not only over
the English Royalists but over the Scotch
Covenanters. It was the victory of that
more happy-go-lucky sort of Protestantism,
which had in it much of aristocracy but
much also of liberty, over that logical ambi
tion of the Kirk which would have made
Protestantism, if possible, as constructive
as Catholicism had been. It might be called

The Protestant Hero 39

the victory of Individualist Puritanism over
Socialist Puritanism. It was what Milton
meant when he said that the new presbyter
was an exaggeration of the old priest; it was
his office that acted, and acted very harshly.
The enemies of the Presbyterians were not
without a meaning when they called them
selves Independents. To this day no one
can understand Scotland who does not realise
that it retains much of its mediaeval sympa
thy with France, the French equality, the
French pronunciation of Latin, and, strange
as it may sound, is in nothing so French as
in its Presbyterlanism.
In this loose and negative sense only it
may be said that the great modern mistakes
of England can be traced to Luther. It is
true only in this, that both in Germany and
England a Protestantism softer and less ab
stract than Calvinism was found useful to
the compromises of courtiers and aristo
crats; for every abstract creed does some
thing for human equality. Lutheranism in
Germany rapidly became what it is to-day —
a religion of court chaplains. The reformed
church in England became something better;
it became a profession for the younger sons

40 The Crimes of England
of squires. But these parallel tendencies, in
all their strength and weakness, reached, as
it were, symbolic culmination when the me
diaeval monarchy was extinguished, and the
English squires gave to what was little more
than a German squire the damaged and
diminished crown.
It must be remembered that the Germanies
were at that time used as a sort of breeding-
ground for princes. There is a strange proc
ess in history by which things that decay
turn into the very opposite of themselves.
Thus in England Puritanism began as the
hardest of creeds, but has ended as the soft
est; soft-hearted and not unfrequently soft
headed. Of old the Puritan in war was
certainly the Puritan at his best ; it was the
Puritan in peace whom no Christian could
be expected to stand. Yet those Englishmen
to-day who claim descent from the great
militarists of 1649 express the utmost horror
of militarism. An inversion of an opposite
kind has taken place in Germany. Out of
the country that was once valued as provid
ing a perpetual supply of kings small enough
to be stop-gaps, has come the modern men
ace of the one great king who would swallow

The Protestant Hero 41
the kingdoms of the earth. But the old Ger
man kingdoms preserved, and were encour
aged to preserve, the good things that go
with small interests and strict boundaries,
music, etiquette, a dreamy philosophy, and
so on. They were small enough to be uni
versal. Their outlook could afford to be in
some degree broad and many-sided. They
had the impartiality of impotence. All this
has been utterly reversed, and we find our
selves at war with a Germany whose powers
are the widest and whose outlook is the
narrowest in the world.
It is true, of course, that the English
squires put themselves over the new German
prince rather than under him. They put the
crown on him as an extinguisher. It was
part of the plan that the new-comer, though
royal, should be almost rustic. Hanover
must be one of England's possessions and
not England one of Hanover's. But the fact
that the court became a German court pre
pared the soil, so to speak; English politics
were already subconsciously committed to
two centuries of the belittlement of France
and the gross exaggeration of Germany.
The period can be symbolically marked out

42 The Crimes of England
by Carteret, proud of talking German at the
beginning of the period, and Lord Haldane,
proud of talking German at the end of it.
Culture is already almost beginning to be
spelt with a k. But all such pacific and only
slowly growing Teutonism was brought to
a crisis and a decision when the voice of
Pitt called us, like a trumpet, to the rescue of
the Protestant Hero.
Among all the monarchs of that faithless
age, the nearest to a man was a woman.
Maria Theresa of Austria was a German
of the more generous sort, limited in a do
mestic rather than a national sense, firm in
the ancient faith at which all her own cour
tiers were sneering, and as brave as a young
lioness. Frederick hated her as he hated
everything German and everything good.
He sets forth in his own memoirs, with that
clearness which adds something almost su
perhuman to the mysterious vileness of his
character, how he calculated on her youth,
her inexperience and her lack of friends as
proof that she could be despoiled with safety.
He invaded Silesia in advance of his own
declaration of war (as if he had run on
ahead to say it was coming) and this new

The Protestant Hero 43
anarchic trick, combined with the corrupti
bility of nearly all the other courts, left him
after the two Silesian wars in possession of
the stolen goods. But Maria Theresa had
refused to submit to the immorality of nine
points of the law. By appeals and conces
sions to France, Russia, and other powers,
she contrived to create something which,
against the atheist innovator even in that
atheist age, stood up for an instant like a
spectre of the Crusades. Had that Crusade
been universal and whole-hearted, the great
new precedent of mere force and fraud
would have been broken ; and the whole ap
palling judgment which is fallen upon Chris
tendom would have passed us by. But the
other Crusaders were only half in earnest
for Europe; Frederick was quite in earnest
for Prussia; and he sought for allies, by
whose aid this weak revival of good might be
'stamped out, and his adamantine impudence
endure for ever. The allies he found were
the English. It is not pleasant for an Eng
lishman to have to write the words.
This was the first act of the tragedy, and
with it we may leave Frederick, for we are
done with the fellow though not with his

44 The Crimes of England
work. It is enough to add that if we call all
his after actions satanic, it is not a term of
abuse, but of theology. He was a Tempter.
He dragged the other kings to "partake of
the body of Poland," and learn the meaning
of the Black Mass. Poland lay prostrate
before three giants in armour, and her name
passed into a synonym for failure. The
Prussians, with their fine magnanimity, gave
lectures on the hereditary maladies of the
man they had murdered. They could not
conceive of life in those limbs ; and the time
was far off when they should be undeceived.
In that day five nations were to partake not
of the body, but of the spirit of Poland; and
the trumpet of the resurrection of the peo
ples should be blown from Warsaw to the
western isles.

Ill — The Enigma of Waterloo
THAT great Englishman Charles
Fox, who was as national as
Nelson, went to his death with
the firm conviction that England
had made Napoleon. He did not mean, of
course, that any other Italian gunner would
have done just as well ; but he did mean that
by forcing the French back on their guns,
as it were, we had made their chief gunner
necessarily their chief citizen. Had the
French Republic been left alone, it would
probably have followed the example of most
other ideal experiments; and praised peace
along with progress and equality. It would
almost certainly have eyed with the coldest
suspicion any adventurer who appeared
likely to substitute his personality for the
pure impersonality of the Sovereign People;
and would have considered it the very flower
of republican chastity to provide a Brutus
for such a Caesar. But if it was undesirable
that equality should be threatened by a citi
zen, it was intolerable that it should be simply
45

46 The Crimes of England
forbidden by a foreigner. If France could
not put up with French soldiers she would
very soon have to put up with Austrian sol
diers ; and it would be absurd if, having de^
cided to rely on soldiering, she had hampered
the best French soldier even on the ground
that he was not French. So that whether
we regard Napoleon as a hero rushing to the
country's help, or a tyrant profiting by the
country's extremity, it is equally clear that
those who made the war made the war-lord ;
and those who tried to destroy the Republic
were those who created the Empire. So, at
least. Fox argued against that much less
English prig who would have called him
unpatriotic; and he threw the blame upon
Pitt's Government for having joined the
anti-French alliance, and so tipped up the
scale in favour of a military France. But
whether he was right or no, he would have
been the readiest to admit that England was
not the first to fly at the throat of the young
Republic. Something in Europe much vaster
and vaguer had from the first stirred against
it. What was it then that first made war —
and made Napoleon ? There is only one pos
sible answer : the Germans.

The Enigma of Waterloo 47
This is the second act of our drama of the
degradation of England to the level of Ger
many. And it has this very important de
velopment; that Germany means by this
time all the Germans, just as it does to-day.
The savagery of Prussia and the stupidity
of Austria are now combined. Mercilessness
and muddleheadedness are met together;
unrighteousness and unreasonableness have
kissed each other; and the tempter and the
tempted are agreed. The great and good
Maria Theresa was already old. She had a
son who was a philosopher of the school of
Frederick; also a daughter who was more
fortunate, for she was guillotined. It was
natural, no doubt, that her brother and rela
tives should disapprove of the incident; but
it occurred long after the whole Germanic
power had been hurled against the new Re
public. Louis XVI. himself was still alive
and nominally ruling when the first pres
sure came from Prussia and Austria, de
manding that the trend of the French eman
cipation should be reversed. It is impossi
ble to deny, therefore, that what the united
Germanies were resolved to destroy was the
reform and not even the Revolution. The

48 The Crimes of England
part which Joseph of Austria played in the
matter is symbolic. For he was what is called
an enlightened despot, which is the worst
kind of despot. He was as irreligious as
Frederick the Great, but not so disgusting
or amusing. The old and kindly Austrian
family, of which Maria Theresa was the af
fectionate mother, and Marie Antoinette the
rather uneducated daughter, was already su
perseded and summed up by a rather dried-
up young man self-schooled to a Prussian
efficiency. The needle is already veering
northward. Prussia is already beginning to
be the captain of the Germanies "in shining
armour." Austria is already becoming a
loyal sekundant.
But there still remains one great difference
between Austria and Prussia which de
veloped more and more as the energy of the
young Napoleon was driven like a wedge be
tween them. The difference can be most
shortly stated by saying that Austria did, in
some blundering and barbaric way, care for
Europe; but Prussia cared for nothing but
Prussia. Austria is not a nation; you can
not really find Austria on the map. But
Austria is a kind of Empire; a Holy Roraan

The Enigma of Waterloo 49
Empire that never came, an expanding and
contracting dream. It does feel itself, in a
vague patriarchal way, the leader, not of a
nation, but of nations. It is like some dying
Emperor of Rome in the decline ; who should
admit that the legions had been withdrawn
from Britain or from Parthia, but would
feel it as fundamentally natural that they
should have been there, as in Sicily or South
ern Gaul. I would not assert that the aged
Francis Joseph imagines that he is Emperor
of Scotland or of Denmark; but I should
guess that he retains some notion that if
he did rule both the Scots and the Danes, it
would not be more incongruous than his rul
ing both the Hungarians and the Poles.
This cosmopolitanism of Austria has in it a
kind of shadow of responsibility for Chris
tendom. And it was this that made the dif
ference between its proceedings and those of
the purely selfish adventurer from the north,
the wild dog of Pomerania.
It may be believed, as Fox himself came
at last to believe, that Napoleon in his latest
years was really an enemy to freedom, in
the sense that he was an enemy to that very
special and occidental form of freedom

50 The Crimes of England
which we call Nationalism. The resistance
of the Spaniards, for instance, was certainly
a popular resistance. It had that peculiar,
belated, almost secretive strength with
which war is made by the people. It was
quite easy for a conqueror to get into Spain ;
his great difficulty was to get out again. It
was one of the paradoxes of history that he
who had turned the mob into an army, in
defence of its rights against the princes,
should at last have his army worn down, not
by princes but by mobs. It is equally cer
tain that at the other end of Europe, in burn
ing Moscow and on the bridge of the Bere-
sina, he had found the common soul, even as
he had found the common sky, his enemy.
But all this does not affect the first great
lines of the quarrel, which had begun before
horsemen in Germanic uniform had waited
vainly upon the road to Varennes or had
failed upon the miry slope up to the windmill
of Valmy. And that duel, on which de
pended all that our Europe has since become,
had great Russia and gallant Spain and our
own glorious island only as subordinates or
seconds. That duel, first, last, and for ever,
was a duel between the Frenchman and the

The Enigma of Waterloo 51
German; that is, between the citizen and the
barbarian. It is not necessary nowadays to defend
the French Revolution, it is not necessary to
defend even Napoleon, its child and cham
pion, from criticisms in the style of Southey
and Alison, which even at the time had more
of the atmosphere of Bath and Cheltenham
than of Turcoing and Talavera. The French
Revolution was attacked because it was
democratic and defended because it was
democratic ; and Napoleon was not feared as
the last of the iron despots, but as the first
of the iron democrats. What France set out
to prove France has proved ; not that common
men are all angels, or all diplomatists, or all
gentlemen (for these inane aristocratic il
lusions were no part of the Jacobin theory),
but that common men can all be citizens and
can all be soldiers; that common men can
fight and can rule. There is no need to con
fuse the question with any of those esca
pades of a floundering modernism which
have made nonsense of this civic common-
sense. Some Free Traders have seemed to
leave a man no country to fight for; some
Free Lovers seem to leave a man no house-

62 The Crimes of England
hold to rule. But these things have not
established themselves either in France or
anywhere else. What has been established
is not Free Trade or Free Love, but Free
dom ; and it is nowhere so patriotic or so do
mestic as in the country from which it came.
The poor men of France have not loved the
land less because they have shared it. Even
the patricians are patriots ; and if some hon
est Royalists or aristocrats are still saying
that democracy cannot organise and cannot
obey, they are none the less organised by it
and obeying it, nobly living or splendidly
dead for it, along the line from Switzerland
to the sea.
But for Austria, and even more for Rus
sia, there was this to be said ; that the French
Republican ideal was incomplete, and that
they possessed, in a corrupt but still positive
and often popular sense, what was needed
to complete it. The Czar was not demo
cratic, but he was humanitarian. He was a
Christian Pacifist ; there is something of the
Tolstoyan in every Russian. It is not wholly
fanciful to talk of the White Czar: for Rus
sia even destruction has a deathly softness
as of snow. Her ideas are often innocent

The Enigma of Waterloo S3
and even childish; like the idea of Peace.
The phrase Holy Alliance was a beautiful
truth for the Czar, though only a blasphe
mous jest for his rascally allies, Metternich
and Castlereagh. Austria, though she had
lately fallen to a somewhat treasonable toy
ing with heathens and heretics of Turkey and
Prussia, still retained something of the old
Catholic comfort for the soul. Priests still
bore witness to that mighty mediaeval insti
tution which even its enemies concede to be a
noble nightmare. All their hoary political
iniquities had not deprived them of that dig
nity. If they darkened the sun in heaven,
they clothed it with the strong colours of sun
rise in garment or gloriole ; if they had given
men stones for bread, the stones were carved
with kindly faces and fascinating tales. If
justice counted on their shameful gibbets
hundreds of the innocent dead, they could
still say that for them death was more hope
ful than life for the heathen. If the new
.daylight discovered their vile tortures, there
had lingered in the darkness some dim mem
ory that they were tortures of Purgatory and
not, like those which Parisian and Prussian
diabolists showed shameless in the sunshine.

64 The Crimes of England
of naked hell. They claimed a truth not yet
disentangled from human nature ; for indeed
earth is not even earth without heaven, as a
landscape is not a landscape without the sky.
And in a universe without God there is not
room enough for a man.
It may be held, therefore, that there must
in any case have come a conflict between the
old world and the new ; if only because the
old are often broad, while the young are al
ways narrow. The Church had learnt, not
at the end but at the beginning of her cen
turies, that the funeral of God is always a
premature burial. If the bugles of Bona
parte raised the living populace of the pass
ing hour, she could blow that yet more revo
lutionary trumpet that shall raise all the
democracy of the dead. But if we concede
that collision was inevitable between the new
Republic on the one hand and Holy Russia
and the Holy Roman Empire on the other,
there remain two great European forces
which, in different attitudes and from very
different motives, determined the ultimate
combination. Neither of them had any tinc
ture of Catholic mysticism. Neither of them
had any tincture of Jacobin idealism. Neither

The Enigma of Waterloo 55
of them, therefore, had any real moral reason
for being in the war at all. The first was
England, and the second was Prussia.
It is very arguable that England must, in
any case, have fought to keep her influence
on the ports of the North Sea. It is quite
equally arguable that if she had been as
heartily on the side of the French Revolu
tion as she was at last against it, she could
have claimed the same concessions from the
other side. It is certain that England had
no necessary communion with the arms and
tortures of the Continental tyrannies, and
that she stood at the parting of the ways.
England was indeed an aristocracy, but a lib
eral one ; and the ideas growing in the mid
dle classes were those which had already
made America, and were remaking France.
The fiercest Jacobins, such as Danton, were
deep in the liberal literature of England.
The people had no religion to fight for, as in
Russia or La Vendee. The parson was no
longer a priest, and had long been a small
squire. Already that one great blank in our
land had made snobbishness the only religion
of South England; and turned rich men into
a mythology. The effect can be well summed

56 The Crimes of England
up in that decorous abbreviation by which
our rustics speak of "Lady's Bedstraw,"
where they once spoke of "Our Lady's Bed-
straw." We have dropped the comparatively
democratic adjective, and kept the aristo
cratic noun. South England is still, as it was
called in the Middle Ages, a garden ; but it
is the kind where grow the plants called
"lords and ladies."
We became more and more insular even
about our continental conquests; we stood
upon our island as if on an anchored ship.
We never thought of Nelson at Naples, but
only eternally at Trafalgar; and even that
Spanish name we managed to pronounce
wrong. But even if we regard the first at
tack upon Napoleon as a national necessity,
the general trend remains true. It only
changes the tale from a tragedy of choice to
a tragedy of chance. And the tragedy was
that, for a second time, we were at one with
the Germans.
But if England had nothing to fight for
but a compromise, Prussia had nothing to
fight for but a negation. She was and is,
in the supreme sense, the spirit that denies.
It is as certain that she was fighting against

The Enigma of Waterloo 57
liberty in Napoleon as it is that she was fight
ing against religion in Maria Theresa. What
she was fighting for she would have found
it quite impossible to tell you. At the best,
it was for Prussia ; if it was anything else,
it was tyranny. She cringed to Napoleon
when he beat her, and only joined in the
chase when braver people had beaten him.
She professed to restore the Bourbons, and
tried to rob them while she was restoring
them. For her own hand she would have
wrecked the Restoration with the Revolu
tion. Alone in all that agony of peoples, she
had not the star of one solitary ideal to light
the night of her nihilism.
The French Revolution has a quality
which all men feel ; and which may be called
a sudden antiquity. Its classicalism was not
altogether a cant. When it had happened it
seemed to have happened thousands of years
ago. It spoke in parables ; in the hammer
ing of spears and the awful cap of Phrygia.
To some it seemed to pass like a vision ; and
yet it seemed eternal as a group of statuary.
One almost thought of its most strenuous
figures as naked. It is always with a shock
of comicality that we remember that its date

58 The Crimes of England
was so recent that umbrellas were fashion
able and top-hats beginning to be tried. And
it is a curious fact, giving a kind of complete
ness to this sense of the thing as something
that happened outside the world, that its first
great act of arms and also its last were both
primarily symbols; and but for this vision
ary character, were in a manner vain. It
began with the taking of the old and almost
empty prison called the Bastille ; and we al
ways think of it as the beginning of the
Revolution, though the real Revolution did
not come till some time after. And it ended
when Wellington and Blucher met in 1815;
and we always think of it as the end of Na
poleon; though Napoleon had really fallen
before. And the popular imagery is right,
as it generally is in such things : for the mob
is an artist, though not a man of science. The
riot of the 14th of July did not specially
deliver prisoners inside the Bastille, but it
did deliver the prisoners outside. Napoleon
when he returned was indeed a revenant,
that is, a ghost. But Waterloo was all the
more final in that it was a spectral resurrec
tion and a second death. And in this second
case there were other elements that were yet

The Enigma of Waterloo 59

more strangely symbolic. That doubtful and
double battle before Waterloo was like the
dual personality in a dream. It corresponded
curiously to the double mind of the English
man. We connect Quatre Bras with things
romantically English to the verge of sen-
timentalism, with Byron and "The Black
Brunswicker." We naturally sympathise
with Wellington against Ney. We do not
sympathise, and even then we did not really
sympathise, with Blucher against Napoleon.
Germany has complained that we passed over
lightly the presence of Prussians at the de
cisive action. And well we might. Even
at the time our sentiment was not solely
jealousy, but very largely shame. Welling
ton, the grimmest and even the most unami-
able of Tories, with no French sympathies
and not enough human ones, has recorded his
opinion of his Prussian allies in terms of
curt disgust. Peel, the primmest and most
snobbish Tory that ever praised "our gallant
Allies" in a frigid official speech, could not
contain himself about the conduct of Blu
cher's men. Our middle classes did well to
adorn their parlours with the picture of the
"Meeting of Wellington and Blucher."

60 The Crimes of England
They should have hung up a companion
piece of Pilate and Herod shaking hands.
Then, after that meeting amid the ashes of
Hougomont, where they dreamed they had
trodden out the embers of all democracy, the
Prussians rode on before, doing after their
kind. After them went that ironical aristo
crat out of embittered Ireland, with what
thoughts we know; and Blucher, with what
thoughts we care not; and his soldiers en
tered Paris, and stole the sword of Joan of
Arc.

IV — The Coming of the Janissaries
THE late Lord Salisbury, a sad and
humorous man, made many pub
lic and serious remarks that have
been proved false and perilous,
and many private and frivolous remarks
which were valuable and ought to be im
mortal. He struck dead the stiff and false
psychology of "social reform," with its sug
gestion that the number of public-houses
made people drunk, by saying that there
were a number of bedrooms at Hatfield, but
they never made him sleepy. Because of this
it is possible to forgive him for having talked
about "living and dying nations" : though it
is of such sayings that living nations die. In
the same spirit he included the nation of
Ireland in lie "Celtic fringe" upon the west
of England. It seems sufficient to remark
that the fringe is considerably broader than
the garment. But the fearful satire of time
has very sufficiently avenged the Irish nation
upon him, largely by the instrumentality of
another fragment of the British robe which
6l

62 The Crimes of England
he cast away almost contemptuously in the
North Sea. The name of it is Heligoland;
and he gave it to the Germans.
The subsequent history of the two islands
on either side of England has been suffi
ciently ironical. If Lord Salisbury had fore
seen exactly what would happen to Heligo
land, as well as to Ireland, he might well
have found no sleep at Hatfield in one bed
room or a hundred. In the eastern isle he
was strengthening a fortress that would one
day be called upon to destroy us. In the
western isle he was weakening a fortress that
would one day be called upon to save us. In
that day his trusted ally, William Hohen
zollern, was to batter our ships and boats
from the Bight of Heligoland; and in that
day his old and once-imprisoned enemy, John
Redmond, was to rise in the hour of English
jeopardy, and be thanked in thunder for the
free offer of the Irish sword. All that Rob
ert Cecil thought valueless has been our loss,
and all that he thought feeble our stay.
Among those of his political class or creed
who accepted and welcomed the Irish lead
er's alliance, there were some who knew the
real past relations between England and

The Coming of the Janissaries 63
Ireland, and some who first felt them in
that hour. All knew that England could no
longer be a mere mistress ; many knew that
she was now in some sense a suppliant. Some
knew that she deserved to be a suppliant.
These were they who knew a little of the
thing called history ; and if they thought at
all of such dead catchwords as the "Celtic
fringe" for a description of Ireland, it was
to doubt whether we were worthy to kiss the
hem of her garment. If there be still any
Englishman who thinks such language ex
travagant, this chapter is written to en
lighten him.
In the last two chapters I have sketched
in outline the way in which England, partly
by historical accident, but partly also by
false philosophy, was drawn into the orbit
of Germany, the centre of whose circle was
already at Berlin. I need not recapitulate the
causes at all fully here. Luther was hardly
a heresiarch for England, though a hobby
for Henry VIII. But the negative German
ism of the Reformation, its drag towards
the north, its quarantine against Latin cul
ture, was in a sense the beginning of the
business. It is well represented in two facts ;

64 The Crimes of England
the barbaric refusal of the new astronomical
calendar merely because it was invented by
a Pope, and the singular decision to pro
nounce Latin as if it were something else,
making it not a dead language but a new lan
guage. Later, the part played by particular
royalties is complex and accidental; "the
furious German" came and passed; the
much less interesting Germans came and
stayed. Their influence was negative but
not negligible; they kept England out of that
current of European life into which the Gal
lophil Stuarts might have carried her. Only
one of the Hanoverians was actively Ger
man ; so German that he actually gloried in
the name of Briton, and spelt it wrong. In
cidentally, he lost America. It is notable
that all those eminent among the real
Britons, who spelt it right, respected and
would parley with the American Revolution,
however jingo or legitimist they were; the
romantic conservative Burke, the earth-
devouring Imperialist Chatham, even, in
reality, the jog-trot Tory North. The in
tractability was in the Elector of Hanover
more than in the King of England; in the
narrow and petty German prince who was

The Coming of the Janissaries 65

bored by Shakespeare and approximately in
spired by Handel. What really clinched the
unlucky companionship of England and
Germany was the first and second alliance
with Prussia; the first in which we prevented
the hardening tradition of Frederick the
Great being broken up by the Seven Years'
War; the second in which we prevented it
being broken up by the French Revolution
and Napoleon. In the first we helped Prus
sia to escape like a young brigand; in the
second we helped the brigand to adjudicate
as a respectable magistrate. Having aided
his lawlessness, we defended his legitimacy.
We helped to give the Bourbon prince his
crown, though our allies the Prussians (in
their cheery way) tried to pick a few jewels
out of it before he got it. Through the
whole of that period, so important in history,
it must be said that we were to be reckoned
on for the support of unreformed laws and
the rule of unwilling subjects. There is, as
it were, an ugly echo even to the name of
Nelson in the name of Naples. But whatever
is to be said of the cause, the work which we
did in it, with steel and gold, was so able and
strenuous that an Englishman can still be

66 The Crimes of England
proud of it. We never performed a greater
task than that in which we, in a sense, saved
Germany, save that in which a hundred years
later, we have now, in a sense, to destroy
her. History tends to be a facade of faded
picturesqueness for most of those who have
not specially studied it : a more or less mono
chrome background for the drama of their
own day. To these it may well seem that it
matters little whether we were on one side
or the other in a fight in which all the
figures are antiquated; Bonaparte and
Blucher are both in old cocked hats ; French
kings and French regicides are both not
only dead men but dead foreigners; the
whole is a tapestry as decorative and as
arbitrary as the Wars of the Roses. It was
not so: we fought for something real when
we fought for the old world against the new.
If we want to know painfully and precisely
what it was, we must open an old and sealed
and very awful door, on a scene which was
called Ireland, but which then might well
have been called hell.
Having chosen our part and made war
upon the new world, we were soon made to
understand what such spiritual infanticide

The Coming of the Janissaries 67
involved; and were committed to a kind of
Massacre of the Innocents. In Ireland the
young world was represented by young men,
who shared the democratic dream of the
Continent, and were resolved to foil the plot
of Pitt; who was working a huge machine
of corruption to its utmost to absorb Ireland
into the Anti- Jacobin scheme of England.
There was present every coincidence that
could make the British rulers feel they were
mere abbots of misrule. The stiff and self-
conscious figure of Pitt has remained stand
ing incongruously purse in hand; while his
manlier rivals were stretching out their
hands for the sword, the only possible resort
of men who cannot be bought and refuse to
be sold. A rebellion broke out and was re
pressed; and the government that repressed
it was ten times more lawless than the rebel
lion. Fate for once seemed to pick out a
situation in plain black and white like an
allegory; a tragedy of appalling platitudes.
The heroes were really heroes ; and the vil
lains were nothing but villains. The com
mon tangle of life, in which good men do
evil by mistake and bad men do good by ac
cident, seemed suspended for us as for a

68 The Crimes of England
judgment. We had to do things that not
only were vile, but felt vile. We had to de
stroy men who not only were noble, but
looked noble. They were men like Wolfe
Tone, a statesman in the grand style who
was not suffered to found a state; and Rob
ert Emmet, lover of his land and of a woman,
in whose very appearance men saw some
thing of the eagle grace of the young Na
poleon. But he was luckier than the young
Napoleon ; for he has remained young. He
was hanged ; not before he had uttered one of
those phrases that are the hinges of history.
He made an epitaph of the refusal of an
epitaph: and with a gesture has hung his
tomb in heaven like Mahomet's coffin.
Against such Irishmen we could only pro
duce Castlereagh; one of the few men in
human records who seem to have been made
famous solely that they might be infamous.
He sold his own country, he oppressed ours ;
for the rest he mixed his metaphors, and has
saddled two separate and sensible nations
with the horrible mixed metaphor called the
Union. Here there is no possible see-saw of
sympathies as there can be between Brutus
and Caesar or between Cromwell and Charles

The Coming of the Janissaries 69
I. : there is simply nobody who supposes that
Emmet was out for worldly gain, or that
Castlereagh was out for anything else. Even
the incidental resemblances between the two
sides only served to sharpen the contrast and
the complete superiority of the nationalists.
Thus, Castlereagh and Lord Edward Fitz
gerald were both aristocrats. But Castle
reagh was the corrupt gentleman at the
Court, Fitzgerald the generous gentleman
upon the land; some portion of whose blood,
along with some portion of his spirit, de
scended to that great gentleman, who — in the
midst of the emetic immoralism of our mod
ern politics — gave back that land to the Irish
peasantry. Thus again, all such eighteenth-
century aristocrats (like aristocrats almost
anywhere) stood apart from the popular
mysticism and the shrines of the poor ; they
were theoretically Protestants, but practical
ly pagans. But Tone was the type of pagan
who refuses to persecute, like Gallio: Pitt
was the type of pagan who consents to perse
cute; and his place is with Pilate. He was
an intolerant indiff erentist ; ready to enfran
chise the Papists, but more ready to massa
cre them. Thus, once more, the two pagans,

70 The Crimes of England
Tone and Castlereagh, found a pagan end
in suicide. But the circumstances were such
that any man, of any party, felt that Tone
had died like Cato and Castlereagh had died
like Judas.
The march of Pitt's policy went on; and
the chasm between light and darkness deep
ened. Order was restored; and wherever
order spread, there spread an anarchy more
awful than the sun has ever looked on. Tor
ture came out of the crypts of the Inquisi
tion and walked in the sunlight of the streets
and fields. A village vicar was slain with
inconceivable stripes, and his corpse set on
fire with frightful jests about a roasted
priest. Rape became a mode of govemment
The violation of virgins became a standing
order of police. Stamped still with the same
terrible symbolism, the work of the English
Government and the English settlers seemed
to resolve itself into animal atrocities against
the wives and daughters of a race distin
guished for a rare and detached purity, and
of a religion which makes of innocence the
Mother of God. In its bodily aspects it
became like a war of devils upon angels; as
if England could produce nothing but tor-

The Coming of the Janissaries 71
turers, and Irdand nothing but martyrs.
Such was a part of the price paid by the
Irish body and the English soul, for the privi
lege of patching up a Prussian after the
sabre-stroke of Jena.
But Germany was not merely present in
the spirit : Germany was present in the flesh.
Without any desire to underrate the exploits
of the English or the Orangemen, I can
safely say that the finest touches were added
by soldiers trained in a tradition inherited
from the horrors of the Thirty Years' War,
and of what the old ballad called "the cruel
wars of High Germanic." An Irishman I
know, whose brother is a soldier, and who
has relatives in many distinguished posts of
the British army, told me that in his child
hood the legend (or rather the truth) of '98
was so frightfully alive that his own mother
would not have the word "soldier" spoken in
her house. Wherever we thus find the tra
dition alive we find that the hateful soldier
means especially the German soldier. When
the Irish say, as some of them do say, that
the German mercenary was worse than the
Orangemen, they say as much as human
mouth can utter. Beyond that there is noth-

72 The Crimes of England
ing but the curse of God, which shall be ut
tered in an unknown tongue.
The practice of using German soldiers,
and even whole German regiments, in the
make-up of the British army, came in with
our German princes, and reappeared on
many important occasions in our eighteenth-
century history. They were probably among
those who encamped triumphantly upon
Drumossie Moor, and also (which is a more
gratifying thought) among those who ran
away with great rapidity at Prestonpans.
When that very typical German, George III.,
narrow, serious, of a stunted culture and
coarse in his very domesticity, quarrelled
with all that was spirited, not only in the
democracy of America but in the aristocracy
of England, German troops were very fitted
to be his ambassadors beyond the Atlantic.
With their well-drilled formations they fol
lowed Burgoyne in that woodland march that
failed at Saratoga; and with their wooden
faces beheld our downfall. Their presence
had long had its effect in various ways. In
one way, curiously enough, their very mili
tarism helped England to be less military;
and especially to be more mercantile. It be-

The Coming of the Janissaries 73
gan to be felt, faintly of course iand never
consciously, that fighting was a thing that
foreigners had to do. It vaguely increased
the prestige of the Germans as the military
people, to the disadvantage of the French,
whom it was the interest of our vanity to
underrate. The mere mixture of their uni
forms with ours made a background of pa
geantry in which it seemed more and more
natural that English and German potentates
should salute each other like cousins, and,
in a sense, live in each other's countries.
Thus in 1908 the German Emperor was al
ready regarded as something of a menace by
the English politicians, and as nothing but a
madman by the English people. Yet it did
not seem in any way disgusting or dangerous
that Edward VII. should appear upon occa
sion in a Prussian uniform. Edward VII.
was himself a friend to France, and worked
for the French Alliance. Yet his appearance
in the red trousers of a French soldier would
have struck many people as funny ; as funny
as if he had dressed up as a Chinaman.
But the German hirelings or allies had
another character which (by that same strain
of evil coincidence which we are tracing in

74 The Crimes of England
this book) encouraged all thaf was worsS
in the English conservatism and inequality,
while discouraging all that was best in it. It
is true that the ideal Englishman was too
much of a squire; but it is just to add thai
the ideal squire was a good squire. The bes8
squire I know in fiction is Duke Theseus in
"The Midsummer Night's Dream," who is
kind to his people and proud of his dogs ; and
would be a perfect human being if he were
not just a little bit prone to be kind to both
of them in the same way. But such natural
and even pagan good-nature is consonant
with the warm wet woods and comfortable
clouds of South England; it never had any
place among the harsh and thrifty squires in
the plains of East Prussia, the land of the
East Wind. They were peevish as well as
proud, and everything they created, but espe
cially their army, was made coherent by
sheer brutality. Discipline was cruel enough
in all the eighteenth-century armies, created
long after the decay of any faith or hope
that could hold men together. But the state
that was first in Germany was first in feroc
ity. Frederick the Great had to forbid his
English admirers to follow his regiments

The Coming of the Janissaries 75
during the campaign, lest they should dis
cover that the most enlightened of kings had
only excluded torture from law to impose it
without law. This influence, as we have
seen, left on Ireland a fearful mark which
will never be effaced. English rule in Ire
land had been bad before ; but in the broaden
ing light of the revolutionary century I doubt
whether it could have continued as bad, if we
had not taken a side that forced us to flatter
barbarian tyranny in Europe. We should
hardly have seen such a nightmare as the
Anglicising of Ireland if we had not already
seen the Germanising of England. But even
in England it was not without its effects;
and one of its effects was to rouse a man who
is, perhaps, the best English witness to the
effect on the England of that time of the
Alliance with Germany. With that man I
shall deal in the chapter that follows.

V — The Lost England

TELLING the truth about Ireland
is not very pleasant to a patriotic
Englishman; but it is very pa
triotic. It is the truth and noth
ing but the truth which I have but touched
on in the last chapter. Several times, and
especially at the beginning of this war, we
narrowly escaped ruin because we neglected
that truth, and would insist on treating our
crimes of the '98 and after as very distant;
while in Irish feeling, and in fact, they are
very near. Repentance of this remote sort
is not at all appropriate to the case, and will
not do. It may be a good thing to forget and
forgive ; but it is altogether too easy a trick
to forget and be forgiven.
The truth about Ireland is simply this:
that the relations between England and Ire
land are the relations between two men who
have to travel together, one of whom tried to
stab the other at the last stopping-place or
to poison the other at the last inn. Conversa
tion may be courteous, but it will be occa-
77

78 The 'Crimes of England
sionally forced. The topic of attempted
murder, its examples in history and fiction,
may be tactfully avoided in the sallies ; but it
will be occasionally present in the thoughts.
Silences, not devoid of strain, will fall from
time to time. The partially murdered per
son may even think an assault unlikely to
recur ; but it is asking too much, perhaps, to
expect him to find it impossible to imagine.
And even if, as God grant, the predominant
partner is really sorry for his former man
ner, of predominating, and proves it in some
unmistakable manner — as by saving the
other from robbers at great personal risk —
the victim may still be unable to repress an
abstract psychological wonder about when
his companion first began to feel like that
Now this is not in the least an exaggerated
parable of the position of England towards
Ireland, not only in '98, but far back from
the treason that broke the Treaty of Lim
erick and far onwards through the Great
Famine and after. The conduct of the
English towards the Irish after the Rebel
lion was quite simply the conduct of one man
who traps and binds another, and then calmly
cuts him about with a knife. The conduct

The Lost England 79
during the Famine was quite simply the con
duct of the first man if he entertained the
later moments of the second man, by remark
ing in a chatty manner on the very hopeful
chances of his bleeding to death. The Brit
ish Prime Minister publicly refused to stop
the Famine by the use of English ships. The
British Prime Minister positively spread the
Famine, by making the half -starved popula
tions of Ireland pay for the starved ones.
The common verdict of a coroner's jury upon
some emaciated wretch was "Wilful murder
by Lord John RusseU" : and that verdict was
not only the verdict of Irish public opinion,
but is the verdict of history. But there were
those in influential positions in England who
were not content with publicly approving the
act, but publicly proclaimed the motive. The
Times, which had then a national authority
and respectability which gave its words a
weight unknown in modern journalism,
openly exulted in the prospect of a Golden
Age when the kind of Irishman native to
Ireland would be "as rare on the banks of the
Liffey as a red man on the banks of the Man
hattan." It seems sufficiently frantic that,
such a thing should have been said by one

80 The Crimes of England
European of another, or even of a Red In
dian, if Red Indians had occupied anything
like the place of the Irish then and since; if
there were to be a Red Indian Lord Chief
Justice and a Red Indian Commander-in-
Chief, if the Red Indian Party in Congress,
containing first-rate orators and fashionable
novelists, could have turned Presidents in
and out ; if half the best troops of the country
were trained with the tomahawk and half
the best journalism of the capital written in
picture-writing, if later, by general consent,
the Chief known as Pine in the Twilight,
was the best living poet, or the Chief Thin
Red Fox, the ablest living dramatist. If that
were realised, the English critic probably
would not say anything scornful of red men;
or certainly would be sorry he said it. But
the extraordinary avowal does mark what
was most peculiar in the position. This has
not been the common case of misgovemment.
It is not merely that the institutions we set
up were indefensible; though the curious
mark of them is that they were literally in
defensible; from Wood's Halfpence to the
Irish Church Establishment. There can be
no more excuse for the method used by Pitt

The Lost England 81
than for the method used by Pigott. But it
differs further from ordinary misrule in the
vital matter of its object. The coercion was
not imposed that the people might live
quietly, but that the people might die quietly.
And then we sit in an owlish innocence of
our sin, and debate whether the Irish might
conceivably succeed in saving Ireland. We,
as a matter of fact, have not even failed to
save Ireland. We have simply failed to de
stroy her.
It is not possible to reverse this judgment
or to take away a single count from it. Is
there, then, anything whatever to be said for
the English in the matter ? There is : though
the English never by any chance say it. Nor
do the Irish say it ; though it is in a sense a
weakness as well as a defence. One would
think the Irish had reason to say anything
that can be said against the English ruling
class, but they have not said, indeed they
have hardly discovered, one quite simple fact
— that it rules England. They are right in
asking that the Irish should have a say in the
Irish government, but they are quite wrong
in supposing that the English have any par
ticular say in English government. And I

82 The Crimes of England
seriously believe I am not deceived by any
national bias, when I say that the common
Englishman would be quite incapable of the
cruelties that were committed in his name.
But, most important of aU, it is the histori
cal fact that there was another England, an
England consisting of common Englishmen,
which not only certainly would have done
better, but actually did make some consid
erable attempt to do better. If anyone asks
for the evidence, the answer is that the evi
dence has been destroyed, or at least delib
erately boycotted: but can be found in the
unfashionable comers of literature; and,
when found, is final. If anyone asks for the
great men of such a potential democratic
England, the answer is that the great men
are labelled small men, or not labelled at all ;
have been successfully belittled as the eman
cipation of which they dreamed has dwin
dled. The greatest of them is now little more
than a name; he is criticised to be under
rated and not to be understood ; but he pre
sented all that alternative and more liberal
Englishry ; and was enormously popular be
cause he presented it. In taking him as the
type of it we may tell most shortly the whole

The Lost England 83
of this forgotten tale. And, even when I
begin to tell it, I find myself in the presence
of that ubiquitous evil which is the subject
of this book. It is a fact, and I think it is not
a coincidence, that in standing for a moment
where this Englishman stood, I again find
myself confronted by the German soldier.
The son of a small Surrey farmer, a re
spectable Tory and churchman, ventured to
plead against certain extraordinary cruelties
being inflicted on Englishmen whose hands
were tied, by the whips of German superiors ;
who were then parading in English fields
their stiff foreign uniforms and their san
guinary foreign discipline. In the countries
from which they came, of course, such tor
ments were the one monotonous means of
driving men on to perish in the dead dynas
tic quarrels of the north; but to poor Will
Cobbett, in his provincial island, knowing
little but the low hills and hedges around the
little church where he now lies buried, the
incident seemed odd — ^nay, unpleasing. He
knew, of course, that there was then flogging
in the British army also; but the German
standard was notoriously severe in such
things, and was something of an acquired

84 The Crimes of England
taste. Added to which he had all sorts of
old grandmotherly prejudices about English
men being punished by Englishmen, and no
tions of that sort He protested, not only
in speech, but actually in print. He was soon
made to learn the perils of meddling in the
high politics of the High Dutch militarists.
The fine feelings of the foreign mercenaries
were soothed by Cobbett being flung into
Newgate for two years and beggared by a
fine of £1000. That small incident is a small
transparent picture of the Holy AUiance; of
what was really meant by a country, once
half liberalised, taking up the cause of the
foreign kings. This, and not "The Meeting
of Wellington and Blucher," should be en
graved as the great scene of the war. From
this intemperate Fenians should leam that
the Teutonic mercenaries did not confine
themselves solely to torturing Irishmen.-
They were equally ready to torture English
men: for mercenaries are mostly unpreju
diced. To Cobbett's eye we were suffering
from allies exactly as we should suffer from
invaders. Boney was a bogey; but the Ger
man was a nightmare, a thing actually sitting
on top of us. In Ireland the Alliance meant

The Lost England 85
the ruin of anything and everything Irish,
from the creed of St. Patrick to the mere
colour green. But in England also it meant
the ruin of anything and everything Eng
lish, from the Habeas Corpus Act to Cob
bett. After this affair of the scourging, he
wielded his pen like a scourge until he died.
This terrible pamphleteer was one of those
men who exist to prove the distinction be
tween a biography and a life. From his
biographies you will learn that he was a
Radical who had once been a Tory. From
his life, if there were one, you would learn
that he was always a Radical because he was
always a Tory. Few men changed less; it
was round him that the politicians like Pitt
chopped and changed, like fakirs dancing
round a sacred rock. His secret is buried
with him ; it is that he really cared about the
English people. He was conservative be
cause he cared for their past, and liberal be
cause he cared for their future. But he was
much more than this. He had two forms of
moral manhood very rare in our time: he
was ready to uproot ancient successes, and
he was ready to defy oncoming doom. Burke

86 The Crimes of England
II,., I ¦-
said that few are the partisans of a tyranny
that has departed : he might have added that
fewer still are the critics of a tyranny that
has remained. Burke certainly was not one
of them. While lashing himself into a
lunacy against the French Revolution, which
only very incidentally destroyed the property
of the rich, he never criticised (to do him
justice, perhaps never saw) the English
Revolution, which began with the sack of
convents, and ended with the fencing in of
enclosures; a revolution which sweepingly
and systematically destroyed the property of
the poor. While rhetorically putting the
Englishman in a castle, politically he would
not allow him on a common. Cobbett, a much
more historical thinker, saw the beginning
of Capitalism in the Tudor pillage and de
plored it ; he saw the triumph of Capitalism
in the industrial cities and defied it. The
paradox he was maintaining really amounted
to the assertion that Westminster Abbey is
rather more national than Welbeck Abbey.
The same paradox would have led him to
maintain that a Warwickshire man had more
reason to be proud of Stratford-on-Avon
than of Birmingham. He would no more

The Lost England 87
have thought of looking for England in
Birmingham than of looking for Ireland in
Belfast. The prestige of Cobbett's excellent literary
style has survived the persecution of his
equaUy excellent opinions. But that style
also is underrated through the loss of the
real English tradition. More cautious
schools have missed the fact that the very
genius of the English tongue tends not only
to vigour, but specially to violence. The
Englishman of the leading articles is calm,
moderate, and restrained ; but then the Eng
lishman of the leading articles is a Prussian.
The mere English consonants are full of
Cobbett. Dr. Johnson was our great man of
letters when he said "stinks," not when he
said "putrefaction." Take some common
phrase like "raining cats and dogs," and note
not only the extravagance of imagery
(though that is very Shakespearean), but
a jagged energy in the very spelling. Say
"chats" and "chiens" and it is not the same.
Perhaps the old national genius has survived
the urban enslavement most spiritedly in our
comic songs, admired by all men of travel
and continental culture, by Mr. George

88 The Crimes of England
Moore as by Mr. Belloc. One (to which I
am much attached) had a chorus —
"O wind from the South
Blow mud in the mouth
Of Jane, Jane, Jane."
Note, again, not only the tremendous vision
of clinging soils carried skywards in the tor
nado, but also the suitability of the mere
sounds. Say "boue" and "bouche" for mud
and mouth and it is not the same. Cobbett
was a wind from the South ; and if he occa
sionally seemed to stop his enemies' mouths
with mud, it was the real soil of South Eng
land. And as his seemingly mad language is
very literary, so his seemingly mad meaning
is very historical. Modem people do not
understand him because they do not under
stand the difference between exaggerating
a truth and exaggerating a lie. He did ex
aggerate, but what he knew, not what he did
not know. He only appears paradoxical be
cause he upheld tradition against fashion. A
paradox is a fantastic thing that is said once :
a fashion is a more fantastic thing that is

The Lost England 89
said a sufficient number of times. I could
give numberless examples in Cobbett's case,
but I will give only one. Anyone who finds
himself full in the central path of Cobbett's
fury sometimes has something like a physical
shock. No one who has read "The History
of the Reformation" will ever forget the
passage (I forget the precise words) in
which he says the mere thought of such a
person as Cranmer makes the brain reel, and,
for an instant, doubt the goodness of God;
but that peace and faith flow back into the
soul when we remember that he was burned
alive. Now this is extravagant. It takes
the breath away ; and it was meant to. But
what I wish to point out is that a much more
extravagant view of Cranmer was, in Cob
bett's day, the accepted view of Cranmer;
not as a momentary image, but as an im
movable historical monument. Thousands
of parsons and penmen dutifully set down
Cranmer among the saints and martyrs ; and
there are many respectable people who would
do so still. This is not an exaggerated truth,
but an established lie. Cranmer was not
such a monstrosity of meanness as Cobbett
implies; but he was mean. But there is no

90 The Crimes of England
question of his being less saintly than the
parsonages believed; he was not a saint iat
all ; and not very attractive even as a sinner.
He was no more a martyr for being burned
than Crippen for being hanged.
Cobbett was defeated because the English
people was defeated. After the frame-break
ing riots, men, as men, were beaten: and
machines, as machines, had beaten them.
Peterloo was as much the defeat of the Eng
lish as Waterloo was the defeat of the
French. Ireland did not get Home Rule
because England did not get it. Cobbett
would not forcibly incorporate Ireland, least
of all the corpse of Ireland. But before his
defeat Cobbett had an enormous following;
his "Register" was what the serial novels of
Dickens were afterwards to be. Dickens,
by the way, inherited the same instinct for
abrupt diction, and probably enjoyed writing
"gas and gaiters" more than any two other
words in his works. But Dickens was nar
rower than Cobbett, not by any fault of his
own, but because in the intervening epoch of
the triumph of Scrooge and Gradgrind the
link with our Christian past had been lost,

The Lost England 91
save in the single matter of Christmas, which
Dickens rescued romantically and by a
hair's-breadth escape. Cobbett was a yeo
man ; that is, a man free and farming a small
estate. By Dickens's time, yeomen seemed
as antiquated as bowmen. Cobbett was
mediaeval; that is, he was in almost every
way the opposite of what that word means
to-day. He was as egalitarian as St. Francis,
and as independent as Robin Hood. Like
that other yeoman in the ballad, he bore in
hand a mighty bow; what some of his ene
mies would have called a long bow. But
though he sometimes overshot the mark of
truth, he never shot away from it, like
Froude. His account of that sixteenth cen
tury in which the mediaeval civilisation ended,
is not more and not less picturesque than
Froude's : the difference is in the dull detail
of truth. That crisis was not the foundling
of a strong Tudor monarchy, for the mon
archy almost immediately perished; it was
the founding of a strong class holding all
the capital and land, for it holds them to this
day. Cobbett would have asked nothing bet
ter than to bend his mediaeval bow to the
cry of "St George for Merry England," for

92 The Crimes of England
though he pointed to the other and uglier
side of the Waterloo medal, he was patriotic;
and his premonitions were rather against
Blucher than Wellington. But if we take
that old war-cry as his final word (and he
would have accepted it) we must note how
every term in it points away from what the
modern plutocrats call either progress or
empire. It involves the invocation of saints,
the most popular and the most forbidden
form of mediaevalism. The modern Imperi
alist no more thinks of St. George in Eng
land than he thinks of St John in St. John's
Wood. It is nationalist in the narrowest
sense ; and no one knows the beauty and sim
plicity of the Middle Ages who has not seen
St. George's Cross separate, as it was at
Cregy or Flodden, and noticed how much
finer a flag it is than the Union Jack. And
the word "merry" bears witness to an Eng
land famous for its music and dancing be
fore the coming of the Puritans, the last
traces of which have been stamped out by a
social discipline utterly un-English. Not
for two years, but for ten decades Cobbett
has been in prison ; and his enemy, the "effi
cient" foreigner, has waUced about in the

The Lost England 93
sunlight, magnificent, and a model for men.
I do not think that even the Prussians ever
boasted about "Merry Prussia."

VI — Hamlet and the Danes
IN the one classic and perfect literary
product that ever came out of Ger
many — I do not mean "Faust," but
Grimm's Fairy Tales — there is a
gorgeous story about a boy who went
through a number of experiences without
learning how to shudder. In one of them, I
remember, he was sitting by the fireside and
a pair of live legs fell down the chimney and
walked about the room by themselves. After
wards the rest fell down and joined up ; but
this was almost an anti-climax. Now that is
very charming, and full of the best German
domesticity. It suggests truly what wild
adventures the traveller can find by stopping
at home. But it also illustrates in various
ways how that great German influence on
England, which is the matter of these essays,
began in good things and gradually turned
to bad. It began as a literary influence, in
the lurid tales of Hoffmann, the tale of "Sin-
tram," and so on; the revisualising of the
dark background of forest behind our Euro-
95

96 The Crimes of England
pean cities. That old German darkness was
immeasurably livelier than the new German
light. The devils of Germany were much
better than the angels. Look at the Teutonic
pictures of "The Three Huntsmen" and ob
serve that while the wicked huntsman is ef
fective in his own way, the good huntsman is
weak in every way, a sort of sexless woman
with a face like a teaspoon. But there is
more in these first forest tales, these homely
horrors. In the earlier stages they have
exactly this salt of salvation, that the boy
does not shudder. They are made fearful
that he may be fearless, not that he may fear.
As long as that limit is kept, the barbaric
dreamland is decent ; and though individuals
like Coleridge and De Quincey mixed it
with worse things (such as opium), they
kept that romantic rudiment upon the whole.
But the one disadvantage of a forest is that
one may lose one's way in it. And the one
danger is not that we may meet devils, but
that we may worship them. In other words,
the danger is one always associated, by the
instinct of folk-lore, with forests; it is en
chantment, or the fixed loss of oneself in
some unnatural captivity or spiritual servi-

Hamlet and the Danes 97
tude. And in the evolution of Germanism,
from Hoffmann to Hauptmann, we do see
this growing tendency to take horror seri
ously, which is diabolism. The German be
gins to have an eerie abstract sympathy with
the force and fear he describes, as distinct
from their objective. The German is no lon
ger sympathising with the boy against the
goblin, but rather with the goblin against the
boy. There goes with it, as always goes with
idolatry, a dehumanised seriousness ; the men
of the forest are already building upon a
mountain the empty throne of the Super
man. Now it is just at this point that I for
one, and most men who love truth as well as
tales, begin to lose interest. I am all for
"going out into the world to seek my for
tune," but I do not want to find it — and find
it is only being chained for ever among the
frozen figures of the Sieges AUees. I do not
want to be an idolater, still less an idol. I
am all for going to fairyland, but I am also
all for coming back. That is, I will admire,
but I will not be magnetised, either by mysti
cism or mUitarism. I am all for German
fantasy, but I wiU resist German earnestness
till I die. I am all for Grimm's Fairy Tales ;

98 The Crimes of England
but if there is such a thing as Grimm's Law,
I would break it, if I knew what it was. I
like the Prussian's legs (in their beautiful
boots) to fall down the chimney and walk
about my room. But when he procures a
head and begins to talk, I feel a little bored.
The Germans cannot really be deep be
cause they will not consent to be superficial.
They are bewitched by art, and stare at it,
and cannot see round it. They wUl not be
lieve that art is a light and slight thing — a
feather, even if it be from an angelic wing.
Only the slime is at the bottom ofa pool ; the
sky is on the surface. We see this in that
very typical process, the Germanising of
Shakespeare. I do not complain of the Ger
mans forgetting that Shakespeare was an
Englishman. I complain of their forgetting
that Shakespeare was a man; that he had
moods, that he made mistakes, and, above
all, that he knew his art was an art and not
an attribute of deity. That is what is the
matter with the Germans ; they cannot "ring
fancy's knell"; their kneUs have no gaiety.
The phrase of Hamlet about "holding the
mirror up to nature" is always quoted by
such earnest critics as meaning that art is

Hamlet and the Danes 99
nothing if not realistic. But it really means
(or at least its author really thought) that
art is nothing if not artificial. Realists, like
other barbarians, really believe the mirror;
and therefore break the mirror. Also they
leave out the phrase "as 'twere," which must
be read into every remark of Shakespeare,
and especially every remark of Hamlet.
What I mean by believing the mirror, and
breaking it, can be recorded in one case I re
member; in which a realistic critic quoted
German authorities to prove that Hamlet had
a particular psycho-pathological abnor
mality, which is admittedly nowhere men
tioned in the play. The critic was bewitched ;
he was thinking of Hamlet as a real man,
with a background behind him three dimen
sions deep — which does not exist in a look
ing-glass. "The best in this kind are but
shadows." No German commentator has
ever made an adequate note on that. Never
theless, Shakespeare was an Englishman;
he was nowhere more English than in his
blunders ; but he was nowhere more success
ful than in the description of very English
tjrpes of character. And if anything is to
be said about Hamlet, beyond what Shake-

100 The Crimes of England
speare has said about him, I should say that
Hamlet was an Englishman too. He was as
much an Englishman as he was a gentleman,
and he had the very grave weaknesses of
both characters. The chief English fault,
especially in the nineteenth century, has been
lack of decision, not only lack of decision in
action, but lack of the equally essential de
cision in thought — which some caU dogma.
And in the politics of the last century, this
English Hamlet, as we shall see, played a
great part, or rather refused to play it
There were, then, two elements in the Ger
man influence ; a sort of pretty playing with
terror and a solemn recognition of terrorism.
The first pointed to elfland, and the second to
— shall we say, Prussia. And by that uncon
scious symbolism with which all this story
develops, it was soon to be dramatically
tested, by a definite political query, whether
what we really respected was the Teutonic
fantasy or the Teutonic fear.
The Germanisation of England, its tran
sition and turning-point, was well typified by
the genius of Carlyle. The original charm
of Germany had been the charm of the chUd.
The Teutons were never so great as when

Hamlet and the Danes 101
they were chUdish ; in their religious art and
popular imagery the Christ-Child is really a
child, though the Christ is hardly a man.
The self-conscious fuss of their pedagogy is
half -redeemed by the unconscious grace
which called a school not a seed-plot of citi
zens, but merely a garden of children. All
the first and best forest-spirit is infancy, its
wonder, its wilfulness, even its still innocent
fear. Carlyle marks exactly the moment
when the German child becomes the spoilt
chUd. The wonder turns to mere mysticism ;
and mere mysticism always turns to mere
immoralism. The wUfulness is no longer
liked, but is actually obeyed. The fear be
comes a philosophy. Panic hardens into
pessimism ; or else, what is often equaUy de
pressing, optimism.
Carlyle, the most influential English writer
of that time, marks all this by the mental
interval between his "French Revolution"
and his "Frederick the Great." In both he
was Germanic. Carlyle was really as senti
mental as Goethe ; and Goethe was really as
sentimental as Werther. Carlyle understood
everything about the French Revolution, ex
cept that it was a French revolution. He

102 The Crimes of England
could not conceive that cold anger that comes
from a love of insulted truth. It seemed to
him absurd that a man should die, or do
murder, for the First Proposition of Euclid ;
should relish an egalitarian state like an equi
lateral triangle; or should defend the Pons
Asinorum as Codes defended the Tiber
bridge. But anyone who does not under
stand that does not understand the French
Revolution — nor, for that matter, the Ameri
can Revolution. "We hold these truths to
be self-evident": it was the fanaticism of
truism. But though Carlyle had no real re
spect for liberty, he had a real reverence for
anarchy. He admired elemental energy.
The violence which repelled most men from
the Revolution was the one thing that at
tracted him to it. WhUe a Whig like Macau
lay respected the Girondists but deplored the
Mountain, a Tory like Carlyle rather liked
the Mountain and quite unduly despised the
Girondists. This appetite for formless force
belongs, of course, to the forests, to Ger
many. But when Carlyle got there, there
fell upon him a sort of spell which is his
tragedy and the English tragedy, and, in no
small degree, the German tragedy too. The

Hamlet and the Danes 103
real romance of the Teutons was largely a
romance of the Southern Teutons, with their
castles, which are almost literally castles in
the air, and their river which is walled with
vineyards and rhymes so naturally to wine.
But as Carlyle's was rootedly a romance of
conquest, he had to prove that the thing
which conquered in Germany was really
more poetical than anything else in Germany.
Now the thing that conquered in Germany
was about the most prosaic thing of which
the world ever grew weary. There is a
great deal more poetry in Brixton than in
Berlin. SteUa said that Swift could write
charmingly about a broom-stick; and poor
Carlyle had to write romantically about a
ramrod. Compare him with Heine, who
had also a detached taste in the mystical
grotesques of Germany, but who saw what
was their enemy : and offered to nail up the
Prussian eagle like an old crow as a target
for the archers of the Rhine. Its prosaic
essence is not proved by the fact that it did
not produce poets : it is proved by the more
deadly fact that it did. The actual written
poetry of Frederick the Great, for instance,
was not even German or barbaric, but sim-

104 The Crimes of England
ply feeble — and French. Thus Carlyle be
came continually gloomier as his fit of the
blues deepened into Prussian blues ; nor can
there be any wonder. His philosophy had
brought out the result that the Prussian was
the first of Germans, and, therefore, the first
of men. No wonder he looked at the rest
of us with little hope.
But a stronger test was coming both for
Carlyle and England. Prussia, plodding,
policing, as materialist as mud, went on
solidifying and strengthening after uncon
quered Russia and unconquered England
had rescued her where she lay prostrate un
der Napoleon. In this interval the two most
important events were the Polish national
revival, with which Russia was half inclined
to be sympathetic, but Prussia was im
placably coercionist; and the positive re
fusal of the crown of a united Germany by
the King of Prussia, simply because it was
constitutionally offered by a free German
Convention. Prussia did not want to lead
the Germans : she wanted to conquer the Ger
mans. And she wanted to conquer other
people first. She had already found her bru
tal, if humorous, embodiment in Bismarck;

Hamlet and the Danes 105
and he began with a scheme full of brutality
and not without humour. He took up, or
rather pretended to take up, the claim of
the Prince of Augustenberg to duchies which
were a quite lawful part of the land of Den
mark. In support of this small pretender he
enlisted two large things, the Germanic
body called the Bund and the Austrian Em
pire. It is possibly needless to say that after
he had seized the disputed provinces by pure
Prussian violence, he kicked out the Prince
of Augustenberg, kicked out the German
Bund, and finally kicked out the Austrian
Empire too, in the sudden campaign of
Sadowa. He was a good husband and a
good father; he did not paint in water col
ours ; and of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.
But the symbolic intensity of the incident
was this. The Danes expected protection
from England; and if there had been any
sincerity in the ideal side of our Teutonism
they ought to have had it. They ought to
have had it even by the pedantries of the
time, which already talked of Latin inferior
ity : and were never weary of explaining that
the country of Richelieu could not rule and
the country of Napoleon could not fight.

106 The Crimes of England
But if it was necessary for whosoever would
be saved to be a Teuton, the Danes were
more Teuton than the Prussians, If it be a
matter of vital importance to be descended
from Vikings, the Danes really were de
scended from Vikings, while the Prussians
were descended from mongrel Slavonic sav
ages. If Protestantism be progress, the
Danes were Protestant; while they had at
tained quite peculiar success and wealth in
that small ownership and intensive cultiva
tion which is very commonly a boast of
Catholic lands. They had in a quite arresting
degree what was claimed for the Germanies
as against Latin revolutionism: quiet free
dom, quiet prosperity, a simple love of fields
and of the sea. But, moreover, by that co
incidence which dogs this drama, the English
of that Victorian epoch had found their
freshest impression of the northern spirit of
infancy and wonder in the works of a Dan
ish man of genius, whose stories and sketches
were so popular in England as almost to have
become English. Good as Grimm's Fairy
Tales were, they had been collected and not
created by the modern German ; they were a
museum of things older than any nation, of

Hamlet and the Danes 107
the dateless age of once-upon-a-time. When
the English romantics wanted to find the
folk-tale spirit still alive, they found it in
the small country of one of those small kings,
with whom the folk-tales are almost comi
cally crowded. There they found what we
call an original writer, who was nevertheless
the image of the origins. They found a
whole fairyland in one head and under one
nineteenth-century top hat. Those of the
English who were then children owe to
Hans Andersen more than to any of their
own writers, that essential educational emo
tion which feels that domesticity is not dull
but rather fantastic ; that sense of the fairy
land of furniture, and the travel and adven
ture of the farmyard. His treatment of in
animate things as animate was not a cold
and awkward allegory: it was a true sense
of a dumb divinity in things that are.
Through him a child did feel that the chair
he sat on was something like a wooden horse.
Through him children and the happier kind
of men did feel themselves covered by a roof
as by the folded wings of some vast domes
tic fowl; and feel common doors like great
mouths that opened to utter welcome. In

108 The Crimes of England
the story of "The Fir Tree" he transplanted
to England a living bush that can stUl blos
som into candles. And in his tale of "The
Tin Soldier" he uttered the true defence of
romantic mUitarism against the prigs who
would forbid it even as a toy for the nursery.
He suggested, in the true tradition of the
folk-tales, that the dignity of the fighter is
not in his largeness but rather in his small
ness, in his stiff loyalty and heroic helpless
ness in the hands of larger and lower things.
These things, alas, were an allegory. When
Prussia, finding her crimes unpunished, af
terwards carried them into France as well as
Denmark, Carlyle and his school made some
effort to justify their Germanism, by pit
ting what they called the piety and simplicity
of Germany against what they called the
cynicism and ribaldry of France. But no
body could possibly pretend that Bishiarck
was more pious and simple than Hans An
dersen; yet the Carlyleans looked on with
silence or approval while the innocent toy
kingdom was broken like a toy. Here again,
it is enormously probable that England
would have struck upon the right side, if the
English people had been the English Gov-

Hamlet and the Danes 109
ernment. Among other coincidences, the
Danish princess who had married the Eng
lish heir was something very like a fairy
princess to the English crowd. The national
poet had haUed her as a daughter of the sea-
kings; and she was, and indeed still is, the
most popular royal figure in England, But
whatever our people may have been like, our
politicians were on the very tamest level of
timidity and the fear of force to which they
have ever sunk. The Tin Soldier of the
Danish army and the paper boat of the Dan
ish navy, as in the story, were swept away
down the great gutter, down that colossal
cloaca that leads to the vast cesspool of Ber
lin. Why, as a fact, did not England inter
pose? There were a great many reasons
given, but I think they were all various in
ferences from one reason; indirect results
and sometimes quite illogical results, of
what we have called the Germanisation of
England, First, the very insularity on which
we insisted was barbaric, in its refusal of a
seat in the central* senate of the nations.
What we caUed our splendid isolation be
came a rather ignominious sleeping-partner--

110 The Crimes of England
ship with Prussia. Next, we were largely
trained in irresponsibility by our contempo
rary historians. Freeman and Green, teach
ing us to be proud of a possible descent from
King Arthur's nameless enemies and not
from King Arthur. King Arthur might not
be historical, but at least he was legendary.
Hengist and Horsa were not even legendary,
for they left no legend. Anybody could see
what was obligatory on the representative
of Arthur; he was bound to be chivalrous,
that is, to be European. But nobody could
imagine what was obligatory on the repre
sentative of Horsa, unless it were to be
horsy. That was perhaps the only part of
the Anglo-Saxon programme that the con
temporary English really carried out. Then,
in the very real decline from Cobbett to Cob
den (that is, from a broad to a narrow man
liness and good sense) there had grown up
the cult of a very curious kind of peace, to
be spread all over the world not by pilgrims,
but by pedlars. Mystics from the beginning
had made vows of peace — ^but they added to
them vows of poverty. Vows of poverty
were not in the Cobdenite's line. Then,
again, there was the positive praise of Prus-

Hamlet and the Danes 111
sia, to which steadily worsening case the
Carlyleans were already committed. But
beyond these, there was something else, a
spirit which had more infected us as a whole.
That spirit was the spirit of Hamlet. We
gave the grand name of "evolution" to a no
tion that things do themselves. Our wealth,
our insularity, our gradual loss of faith, had
so dazed us that the old Christian England
haunted us like a ghost in whom we could
not quite believe. An aristocrat like Palm
erston, loving freedom and hating the up
start despotism, must have looked on at its
cold brutality not without that ugly ques
tion which Hamlet asked himself — am I a
coward ? It cannot be
But I am pigeon-livered and lack gall
To make oppression bitter ; or 'ere this
I should have fatted all the region kites
With this slave's offal.
We made dumb our anger and our honour;
but it has not brought us peace.

VII — The Midnight of Europe
AMONG the minor crimes of Eng
land may be classed the shallow
criticism and easy abandonment
of Napoleon III, The Victorian
English had a very bad habit of being in
fluenced by words and at the same time pre
tending to despise them. They would build
their whole historical philosophy upon two
or three titles, and then refuse to get even
the titles right. The solid Victorian Eng
lishman, with his whiskers and his Parlia
mentary vote, was quite content to say that
Louis Napoleon and WUliam of Prussia both
became Emperors — by which he meant auto
crats. His whiskers would have bristled
with rage and he would have stormed at you
for hair-splitting and "lingo," if you had
answered that William was German Em
peror, while Napoleon was not French Em
peror, but only Emperor of the French.
What could such mere order of the words
matter ? Yet the same Victorian would have
been even more indignant if he had been
"3

114 The Crimes of England
asked to be satisfied with an Art Master,
when he had advertised for a Master of Arts.
His irritation would have increased if the
Art Master had promised him a sea-piece
and had brought him a piece of the sea ; or if,
during the decoration of his house, the same
aesthetic humourist had undertaken to pro
cure some Indian Red and had produced a
Red Indian.
The Englishman would not see that if
there was only a verbal difference between
the French Emperor and the Emperor of the
French, so, if it came to that, it was a verbal
difference between the Emperor and the Re
public, or even between a Parliament and no
Parliament. For him an Emperor meant
merely despotism; he had not yet learned
that a Parliament may mean merely oligar
chy. He did not know that the English
people would soon be made impotent, not by
the disfranchising of their constituents, but
simply by the sUencing of their members;
and that the governing class of England did
not now depend upon rotten boroughs, but
upon rotten representatives. Therefore he
did not understand Bonapartism. He did
not understand that French democracy be-

The Midnight of Europe 115
came more democratic, not less, when it
turned all France into one constituency
which elected one member. He did not un
derstand that many dragged down the Re
public because it was not republican, but
purely senatorial. He was yet to learn how
quite corruptly senatorial a great represen
tative assembly can become. Yet in Eng
land to-day we hear "the decline of Parlia
ment" talked about and taken for granted
by the best Parliamentarians — Mr. Balfour,
for instance — and we hear the one partly
French and wholly Jacobin historian of the
French Revolution recommending for the
English evil a revival of the power of the
Crown. It seems that so far from having
left Louis Napoleon far behind in the grey
dust of the dead despotisms, it is not at all
improbable that our most extreme revolu
tionary developments may end where Louis
Napoleon began.
In other words, the Victorian Englishman
did not understand the words "Emperor of
the French." The type of title was deliber
ately chosen to express the idea of an elec
tive and popular origin; as against such a
phrase as "the German Emperor," which ex-

116 The Crimes of England
presses an almost transcendental tribal pa
triarchate, or such a phrase as "King of
Prussia," which suggests personal owner
ship of a whole territory. To treat the Coup
d'etat as unpardonable is to justify riot
against despotism, but forbid any riot
against aristocracy. Yet the idea expressed
in "The Emperor of the French" is not dead,
but rather risen from the dead. It is the
idea that while a government may pretend
to be a popular government, only a person
can be really popular. Indeed, the idea is
still the crown of American democracy, as
it was for a time the crown of French de
mocracy. The very powerful official who
makes the choice of that great people for
peace or war, might very well be called, not
the President of the United States, but the
President of the Americans. In Italy we
have seen the King and the mob prevail over
the conservatism of the Parliament, and in
Russia the new popular policy sacramentally
symbolised by the Czar riding at the head of
the new armies. But in one place, at least
the actual form of words exists; and the
actual form of words has been splendidly
justified. One man among the sons of men

The Midnight of Europe 117
has been permitted to fulfil a courtly formula
with awful and disastrous fidelity. Political
and geographical ruin have written one last
royal title across the sky ; the loss of palace
and capital and territory have but isolated
and made evident the people that has not
been lost ; not laws but the love of exiles, not
soil but the souls of men, still make certain
that five true words shall yet be written in
the corrupt and fanciful chronicles of man
kind: "The King of the Belgians."
It is a common phrase, recurring con
stantly in the real if rabid eloquence of Vic
tor Hugo, that Napoleon III, was a mere ape
of Napoleon I. That is, that he had, as the
politician says, in "L'Aiglon," "le petit cha-
peau, mais pas la tete" ; that he was merely
a bad imitation. This is extravagantly ex
aggerative ; and those who say it, moreover,
often miss the two or three points of re
semblance which really exist in the exagger
ation. One resemblance there certainly was.
In both Napoleons it has been suggested that
the glory was not so great as it seemed ; but
in both it can be emphatically added that the
eclipse was not so great as it seemed either.
Both succeeded at first and faUed at last.

118 The Crimes of England
But both succeeded at last, even after the
failure. If at this moment we owe thanks to
Napoleon Bonaparte for the armies of
united France, we also owe some thanks to
Louis Bonaparte for the armies of united
Italy. That great movement to a freer and
more chivalrous Europe which we call to
day the Cause of the Allies, had its forerun
ners and first victories before our time ; and
it not only won at Areola, but also at Sol
ferino. Men who remembered Louis Na
poleon when he mooned about the Blessing-
ton salon, and was supposed to be almost
mentally deficient, used to say he deceived
Europe twice ; once when he made men think
him an imbecile, and once when he made
them think him a statesman. But he de
ceived them a third time; when he made
them think he was dead ; and had done noth
ing. In spite of the unbridled verse of Hugo
and the even more unbridled prose of King-^
lake, Napoleon III. is really and solely dis
credited in history because of the catastro
phe of 1870. Hugo hurled any amount of
lightning on Louis Napoleon ; but he threw
very little light on him. Some passages in

The Midnight of Europe 119
the "Chatiments" are really caricatures
carved in eternal marble. They will always
be valuable in reminding generations too
vague and soft, as were the Victorians, of
the great truth that hatred is beautiful, when
it is hatred of the ugliness of the soul. But
most of them could have been written about
Haman, or Heliogabalus, or King John, or
Queen Elizabeth, as much as about poor
Louis Napoleon; they bear no trace of any
comprehension of his quite interesting aims,
and his quite comprehensible contempt for
the fat-souled senatorial politicians. And if
a real revolutionist like Hugo did not do
justice to the revolutionary element in
Caesarism, it need hardly be said that a
rather Primrose League Tory lU<e Tennyson
did not. Kinglake's curiously acrid insist
ence upon the Coup d'etat is, I fear, only an
indulgence in one of the least pleasing pleas
ures of our national pen and press, and one
which afterwards altogether ran away with
us over the Dreyfus case. It is an unfor
tunate habit of publicly repenting for other
people's sins. If this came easy to an Eng
lishman like Kinglake, it came, of course,
still easier to a German like Queen Victoria's

120 The Crimes of England
husband and even to Queen Victoria herself,
who was naturally influenced by him. But
in so far as the sensible masses of the Eng
lish nation took any interest in the matter, it
is probable that they sympathised with Palm
erston, who was as popular as the Prince
Consort was unpopular. The black mark
against Louis Napoleon's name until now,
has simply been Sedan ; and it is our whole
purpose to-day to turn Sedan into an inter
lude. If it is not an interlude, it wiU be the
end of the world. But we have sworn to
make an end of that ending: warring on
until, if only by a purgatory of the nations
and the mountainous annihUation of men,
the story of the world ends well.
There are, as it were, valleys of history
quite close to us, but hidden by the closer
hills. One, as we have seen, is that fold
in the soft Surrey hills where Cobbett sleeps
with his still-born English Revolution. An
other is under that height called The Spy of
Italy, where a new Napoleon brought back
the golden eagles against the black eagles of
Austria. Yet that French adventure in sup
port of the Italian insurrection was very im
portant; we are only beginning to under-

The Midnight of Europe 121
stand its importance. It was a defiance to
the German Reaction and 1870 was a sort
of revenge for it, just as the Balkan victory
was a defiance to the German Reaction and
1914 was the attempted revenge for it. It is
true that the French liberation of Italy was
incomplete, the problem of the Papal States,
for instance, being untouched by the Peace
of Villafranca. The volcanic but fruitful
spirit of Italy had already produced that
wonderful, wandering, and almost omnipres
ent personality whose red shirt was to be a
walking flag : Garibaldi, And many English
Liberals sympathised with him and his ex
tremists as against the peace, Palmerston
called it "the peace that passeth all under
standing" : but the profanity of that hilari
ous old heathen was nearer the mark than he
knew: there were really present some of
those deep things which he did not under
stand. To quarrel with the Pope, but to
compromise with him, was an instinct with
the Bonapartes ; an instinct no Anglo-Saxon
could be expected to understand. They knew
the truth; that Anti-Clericalism is not a
Protestant movement, but a Catholic mood.
And after all the English Liberals could not

122 The Crimes of England
get their own Government to risk what the
French Government had risked; and Napo
leon III. might well have retorted on Palm
erston, his rival in international Liberalism,
that half a war was better than no fighting.
Swinburne called Villafranca "The Halt
before Rome," and expressed a rhythmic im
patience for the time when the world
"Shall ring to the roar of the lion
Proclaiming Republican Rome."
But he might have remembered, after all,
that it was not the British lion, that a Brit
ish poet should have the right to say so im
periously, "Let him roar again. Let him
roar again,"
It is true that there was no clear call to
England from Italy, as there certainly was
from Denmark, The great powers were not
bound to help Italy to become a nation, as
they were bound to support the unquestioned
fact that Denmark was one. Indeed the
great Italian patriot was to experience both
extremes of the English paradox, and, curi
ously enough, in connection with both the
two national and anti-German causes. For

The Midnight of Europe 128
Italy he gained the support of the English,
but not the support of England. Not a few
of our countrymen followed the red shirt;
but not in the red coat. And when he came
to England, not to plead the cause of Italy
but the cause of Denmark, the Italian found
he was more popular with the English than
any Englishman. He made his way through
a forest of salutations, which would will
ingly have turned itself into a forest of
swords. But those who kept the sword kept
it sheathed. For the ruling class the val
our of the Italian hero, like the beauty of
the Danish Princess, was a thing to be ad
mired, that is enjoyed, like a novel — or a
newspaper, Palmerston was the very type
of Pacifism, because he was the very type of
Jingoism, In spirit as restless as Garibaldi,
he was in practice as cautious as Cobden.
England had the most prudent aristocracy,
but the most reckless democracy in the
world. It was, and is, the English contra
diction, which has so much misrepresented
us, especially to the Irish, Our national cap
tains were carpet knights; our knights er
rant were among the dismounted rabble.
When an Austrian general who had flogged

124 The Crimes of England
women in the conquered provinces appeared
in the London streets, some common dray
men off a cart behaved with the direct quix
otry of Sir Lancelot or Sir Galahad, He
had beaten women and they beat him. They
regarded themselves simply as avengers of
ladies in distress, breaking the bloody whip
of a German bully; just as Cobbett had
sought to break it when it was wielded over
the men of England, The boorishness was
in the Germanic or half -Germanic rulers
who wore crosses and spurs: the gallantry
was in the gutter, English draymen had
more chivalry than Teuton aristocrats — or
English ones,
I have dwelt a little on this Italian experi
ment because it lights up Louis Napoleon as
what he really was before the eclipse, a poli
tician — perhaps an unscrupulous politician
— ^but certainly a democratic politician. A
power seldom falls being wholly faultless;
and it is true that the Second Empire became
contaminated with cosmopolitan spies and
swindlers, justly reviled by such democrats
as Rochefort as well as Hugo. But there
was no French inefficiency that weighed a
hair in the balance compared with the huge

The Midnight of Europe 125
and hostile efficiency of Prussia ; the tall ma
chine that had struck down Denmark and
Austria, and now stood ready to strike
again, extinguishing the lamp of the world.
There was a hitch before the hammer stroke,
and Bismarck adjusted it, as with his finger,
by a forgery — for he had many minor ac
complishments. France fell: and what fell
with her was freedom, and what reigned in
her stead only tyrants and the ancient terror.
The crowning of the first modern Kaiser in
the very palace of the old French kings was
an allegory; like an allegory on those Ver
sailles walls. For it was at once the lifting
of the old despotic diadem and its descent
on the low brow of a barbarian. Louis XI.
had returned, and not Louis IX.; and
Europe was to know that sceptre on which
there is no dove.
The instant evidence that Europe was in
the grip of the savage was as simple as it
was sinister. The invaders behaved with an
innocent impiety and bestiality that had
never been known in those lands since Clovis
was signed with the cross. To the naked
pride of the new men nations simply were
not. The struggling populations of two vast

126 The Crimes of England
provinces were simply carried away like
slaves into captivity, as after the sacking of
some prehistoric town. France was fined
for having pretended to be a nation; and
the fine was planned to ruin her forever.
Under the pressure of such impossible injus
tice France cried out to the Christian na
tions, one after another, and by name. Her
last cry ended in a stillness like that which
had encircled Denmark.
One man answered; one who had quar
relled with the French and their Emperor;
but who knew it was not an emperor that
had fallen. Garibaldi, not always wise but
to his end a hero, took his station, sword in
hand, under the darkening sky of Christen
dom, and shared the last fate of France.
A curious record remains, in which a Ger
man commander testifies to the energy and
effect of the last strokes of the wounded
lion of Aspromonte. But England went
away sorrowful, for she had great posses
sions.

VIII — The Wrong Horse

IN another chapter I mentioned some of
the late Lord Salisbury's remarks with
regret, but I trust with respect; for
in certain matters he deserved all the
respect that can be given to him. His crit
ics said that he "thought aloud"; which is
perhaps the noblest thing that can be said of
a man. He was jeered at for it by journal
ists and politicians who had not the capacity
to think or the courage to tell their thoughts.
And he had one yet finer quality which re
deems a hundred lapses of anarchic cyni
cism. He could change his mind upon the
platform: he could repent in public. He
could not only think aloud; he could "think
better" aloud. And one of the turning-
points of Europe had come in the hour when
he avowed his conversion from the un-Chris-
tian and un-European policy into which his
dexterous Oriental master, Disraeli, had
dragged him ; and declared that England had
"put her money on the wrong horse." When
he said it, he referred to the backing we gave
127

128 TKe Crimes of England
to the Turk under a fallacious fear of Rus
sia. But I cannot but think that if he had
lived much longer, he would have come to
feel the same disgust for his long diplomatic
support of the Turk's great ally in the North.
He did not live, as we have lived, to feel that
horse run away with us, and rush on
through wilder and wilder places, until we
knew that we were riding on the nightmare.
What was this thing to which we trusted?
And how may we most quickly explain its de
velopment from a dream to a nightmare, and
the hair's-breadth escape by which it did not
hurl us to destruction, as it seems to be hurl
ing the Turk? It is a certain spirit; and
we must not ask for too logical a definition
of it, for the people whom it possesses dis
own logic; and the whole thing is not so
much a theory as a confusion of thought.
Its widest and most elementary character is
adumbrated in the word Teutonism or Pan-
Germanism; and with this (which was what
appeared to win in 1870) we had better be
gin. The nature of Pan-Germanism may
be allegorised and abbreviated somewhat
thus: The horse asserts that all other creatures

The Wrong Horse 129
are morally bound to sacrifice their inter
ests to his, on the specific ground that he pos
sesses all noble and necessary qualities, and
is an end in himself. It is pointed out in an
swer that when climbing a tree the horse is
less graceful than the cat; that lovers and
poets seldom urge the horse to make a noise
all night like the nightingale ; that when sub
merged for some long time under water, he
is less happy than the haddock; and that
when he is cut open pearls are less often
found in him than in an oyster. He is not
content to answer (though, being a muddle-
headed horse, he does use this answer also)
that having an undivided hoof is more than
pearls or oceans or all ascension or song.
He reflects for a few years on the subject
of cats; and at last discovers in the cat "the
characteristic equine quality of caudality, or
a tail" ; so that cats are horses, and wave on
every tree-top the tail which is the equine
banner. Nightingales are found to have
legs, which explains their power of song.
Haddocks are vertebrates ; and therefore are
sea-horses. And though the oyster out
wardly presents dissimilarities which seem
to divide him from the horse, he is by the

130 The Crimes of England
all-filling nature-might of the same horse-
moving energy sustained.
Now this horse is intellectually the wrong
horse. It is not perhaps going too far to say
that this horse is a donkey. For it is ob
viously within even the intellectual resources
of a haddock to answer, "But if a haddock
is a horse, why should I yield to you any
more than you to me? Why should that
singing horse commonly called the nightin
gale, or that climbing horse hitherto known
as the cat, fall down and worship you be
cause of your horsehood? If all our native
faculties are the accomplishments of a horse
— ^why then you are only another horse with
out any accomplishments." When thus
gently reasoned with, the horse flings up his
heels, kicks the cat, crushes the oyster, eats
the haddock and pursues the nightingale, and
that is how the war began.
This apologue is not in the least more
fantastic than the facts of the Teutonic
claim. The Germans do really say that Eng
lishmen are only Sea-Germans, as our had
docks were only sea-horses. They do reaUy
say that the nightingales of Tuscany or the
pearls of Hellas must somehow be German

The Wrong Horse 131
birds or German jewels. They do maintain
that the Italian Renaissance was really the
German Renaissance, pure Germans having
Italian names when they were painters, as
cockneys sometimes have when they are
hair-dressers. They suggest that Jesus and
the great Jews were Teutonic. One Teuton-
ist I read actually explained the fresh en
ergy of the French Revolution and the stale
privileges of its German enemies by saying
that the Germanic soul awoke in France and
attacked the Latin influence in Germany.
On the advantages of this method I need not
dwell: if you are annoyed at Jack Johnson
knocking out an English prize-fighter, you
have only to say that it was the whiteness of
the black man that won and the blackness of
the white man that was beaten. But about
the Italian Renaissance they are less general
and will go into detail. They will discover
(in their researches into 'istry, as Mr. Gan-
dish said) that Michael Angelo's surname
was Buonarotti ; and they will point out that
the word "roth" is very like the word "rot,"
Which, in one sense, is true enough. Most
Englishmen will be content to say it is all
rot and pass on. It is all of a piece with

132 The Crimes of England
the preposterous Prussian history, which
talks, for instance, about the "perfect re
ligious tolerance of the Goths" ; which is like
talking about the legal impartiality of chick
en-pox. He wUl decline to believe that the
Jews were Germans ; though he may perhaps
have met some Germans who were Jews.
But deeper than any such practical reply, lies
the deep inconsistency of the parable. It is
simply this; that if Teutonism be used for
comprehension it cannot be usefi for con
quest. If all intelligent peoples are Ger
mans, then Prussians are only the least in
telligent Germans. If the men of Flanders
are as German as the men of Frankfort, we
can only say that in saving Belgium we are
helping the Germans who are in the right
against the Germans who are in the wrong.
Thus in Alsace the conquerors are forced
into the comic posture of annexing the peo
ple for being German and then persecuting
them for being French. The French Teu
tons who built Rheims must surrender it to
the South German Teutons who have partly
built Cologne; and these in turn surrender
Cologne to the North German Teutons, who
never built anything, except the wooden

The Wrong Horse 133
Aunt SaUy of old Hindenburg. Every Teu
ton must fall on his face before an inferior
Teuton; until they all find, in the foul
marshes towards the Baltic, the very lowest
of all possible Teutons, and worship him —
and find he is a Slav. So much for Pan-
Germanism. But though Teutonism is indefinable, or
at least is by the Teutons undefined, it is not
unreal. A vague but genuine soul does pos
sess all peoples who boast of Teutonism;
and has possessed ourselves, in so far as we
have been touched by that foUy. Not a race,
but rather a religion, the thing exists; and
in 1870 its sun was at noon. We can most
briefly describe it under three heads.
The victory of the German arms meant
before Leipzic, and means now, the over
throw of a certain idea. That idea is the
idea of the Citizen. This is true in a quite
abstract and courteous sense; and is not
meant as a loose charge of oppression. Its
truth is quite compatible with a view that
the Germans are better governed than the
French. In many ways the Germans are
very well governed. But they might be gov
erned ten thousand times better than they

134 The Crimes of England
are, or than anybody ever can be, and stUl
be as far as ever from governing. The idea
of the Citizen is that his individual human
nature shall be constantly and creatively ac
tive in altering the State. The Germans are
right in regarding the idea as dangerously
revolutionary. Every Citizen is a revolu
tion. That is, he destroys, devours and
adapts his environment to the extent of his
own thought and conscience. This is what
separates the human social effort from the
non-human ; the bee creates the honey-comb,
but he does not criticise it. The German
ruler really does feed and train the Ger
man as carefully as a gardener waters a
flower. But if the flower suddenly began to
water the gardener, he would be much sur
prised. So in Germany the people really are
educated ; but in France the people educates.
The French not only make up the State, but
make the State; not only make it, but re
make it. In Germany the ruler is the artist,
always painting the happy German like a
portrait ; in France the Frenchman is the ar
tist, always painting and repainting France
like a house. No state of social good that
does not mean the Citizen choosing good, as

The Wrong Horse 135
well as getting it, has the idea of the Citizen
at all. To say the Germanies are naturaUy
at war with this idea is merely to respect
them and take them seriously: otherwise
their war on the French Revolution would
be only an ignorant feud. It is this, to them,
risky and fanciful notion of the critical and
creative Citizen, which in 1870 lay prostrate
under United Germany — under the undi
vided hoof.
Nevertheless, when the German says he
has or loves freedom, what he says is not
false. He means something; and what
he means is the second principle, which I
may summarise as the IrresponsibUity of
Thought, Within the iron framework of
the fixed State, the German has not only lib
erty but anarchy. Anything can be said al
though, or rather because, nothing can be
done. Philosophy is really free. But this
practically means only that the prisoner's cell
has become the madman's cell: that it is
scrawled all over inside with stars and sys
tems, so that it looks like eternity. This is
the contradiction remarked by Dr. Sarolea,
in his brilliant book, between the wildness of
German theory and the tameness of German

136 The Crimes of England
practice. The Germans sterilise thought,
making it active with a wild virginity ; which
can bear no fruit.
But though there are so many mad theo
ries, most of them have one root; and de
pend upon one assumption. It matters little
whether we call it, with the German Social
ists, "the Materialist Theory of History";
or, with Bismarck, "blood and iron." It can
be put most fairly thus: that all important
events of history are biological, like a change
of pasture or the communism of a pack of
wolves. Professors are stiU tearing their
hair in the effort to prove somehow that the
Crusaders were migrating for food like
swallows ; or that the French Revolutionists
were somehow only swarming like bees.
This works in two ways often accounted op
posite ; and explains both the German Social
ist and the Junker. For, first, it fits in with
Teutonic Imperialism; making the "blonde
beasts" of Germania into lions whose nature
it is to eat such lambs as the French. The
highest success of this notion in Europe is
marked by praise given to a race famous for
its physical firmness and fighting breed, but
which has frankly pillaged and scarcely pre-

The Wrong Horse 137
tended to rule ; the Turk, whom some Tories
called "the gentleman of Europe." The
Kaiser paused to adore the Crescent on his
way to patronise the Cross. It was corpor
ately embodied when Greece attempted a
solitary adventure against Turkey and was
quickly crushed. That English guns helped
to impose the mainly Germanic policy of the
Concert upon Crete, cannot be left out of
mind whUe we are making appeals to Greece
— or considering the crimes of England.
But the same principle serves to keep the
internal politics of the Germans quiet, and
prevent Socialism being the practical hope or
peril it has been in so many other countries.
It operates in two ways; first, by a curious
fallacy about "the time not being ripe" — as
if time could ever be ripe. The same sav
age superstition from the forests had in
fected Matthew Arnold pretty badly when
he made a personality out of the Zeitgeist —
perhaps the only ghost that was ever entirely
fabulous. It is tricked by a biological paral
lel, by which the chicken always comes out
of the egg "at the right time." He does not ;
he comes out when he comes out. The
Marxian Socialist will not strike till the

138 The Crimes of England
clock strikes ; and the clock is made in Ger
many, and never strikes. Moreover, the
theory of all history as a search for food
makes the masses content with having food
and physic, but not freedom. The best
working model in the matter is the system
of Compulsory Insurance; which was a total
failure and dead letter in France but has
been, in the German sense, a great success
in Germany. It treats employed persons as
a fixed, separate, and lower caste, who must
not themselves dispose of the margin of their
small wages. In 191 1 it was introduced into
England by Mr. Lloyd George, who had
studied its operations in Germany, and, by
the Prussian prestige in "social reform,"
was passed.
These three tendencies cohere, or are co
hering, in an institution which is not with
out a great historical basis and not without
great modern conveniences. And as France
was the standard-bearer of citizenship in
1798, Germany is the standard-bearer of this
alternative solution in 1915. The institution
which our fathers called Slavery fits in with,
or rather logically flows from, all the three
spirits of which I have spoken, and prom-

The Wrong Horse 139
ises great advantages to each of them. It
can give the individual worker everything
except the power to alter the State — ^that is,
his own status. Finality (or what certain
eleutheromaniacs would call hopelessness)
of status is the soul of Slavery — and of
Compulsory Insurance. Then again, Ger
many gives the individual exactly the liberty
that has always been given to a slave — ^the
liberty to think, the liberty to dream, the lib
erty to rage; the liberty to indulge in any
intellectual hypotheses about the unalterable
world and state — such as have always been
free to slaves, from the stoical maxims of
Epictetus to the skylarking fairy tales of
Uncle Remus. And it has been truly urged
by aU defenders of slavery that, if history
has merely a material test, the material con
dition of the subordinate under slavery
tends to be good rather than bad. When I
once pointed out how precisely the "model
village" of a great employer reproduces the
safety and seclusion of an old slave estate,
the employer thought it quite enough to an
swer indignantly that he had provided baths,
playing-grounds, a theatre, etc., for his
workers. He would probably have thought

140 The Crimes of England
it odd to hear a planter in South Carolina
boast that he had provided banjos, hymn-
books, and places suitable for the cake-walk.
Yet the planter must have provided the ban
jos, for a slave cannot own property. And if
this Germanic sociology is indeed to prevail
among us, I think some of the broad-minded
thinkers who concur in its prevalence owe
something like an apology to many gallant
gentlemen whose graves lie where the last
battle was fought in the Wilderness; men
who had the courage to fight for it, the cour
age to die for it and, above all, the courage
to caU it by its name.
With the acceptance by England of the
German Insurance Act, I bring this sketch
of the past relations of the two countries to
an end. I have written this book because I
wish, once and for all, to be done with my
friend Professor Whirlwind of Prussia, who
has long despaired of really defending his
own country, and has fallen back upon abus
ing mine. He has dropped, amid general
derision, his attempt to caU a thing right
when even the Chancellor who did it .called
it wrong. But he has an idea that if he can
show that somebody from England some-

The Wrong Horse 141
where did another wrong, the two wrongs
may make a right. Against the cry of the
Roman Catholic Poles the Prussian has
never done, or even pretended to do, any
thing but harden his heart ; but he has (such
are the lovable inconsistencies of human na
ture) a warm corner in his heart for the
Roman Catholic Irish. He has not a word
to say for himself about the campaign in
Belgium, but he still has many wise, re
proachful words to utter about the campaign
in South Africa. I propose to take those
words out of his mouth. I will have nothing
to do with the fatuous front-bench preten
sions that our governors always govern well,
that our statesmen are never whitewashed
and never in need of whitewash. The only
moral superiority I claim is that of not de
fending the indefensible. I most earnestly
urge my countrymen not to hide behind thin
official excuses, which the sister kingdoms
and the subject races can easily see through.
We can confess that our crimes have been as
mountains, and still not be afraid of the
present comparison. There may be, in the
eyes of some, a risk in dwelling in this dark
hour on our failures in the past: I believe

142 The Crimes of England
profoundly that the risk is all the other way,
I believe that the most deadly danger to our
arms to-day lies in any whiff of that self-
praise, any flavour of that moral cowardice,
any glimpse of that impudent and ultimate
impenitence, that may make one Boer or
Scot or Welshman or Irishman or Indian
feel that he is only smoothing the path for
a second Prussia. I have passed the great
part of my life in criticising and condemning
the existing rulers and institutions of my
country : I think it is infinitely the most pa
triotic thing that a man can do. I have no il
lusions either about our past or our pres
ent. I think our whole history in Ireland has
been a vulgar and ignorant hatred of the
crucifix, expressed by a crucifixion. I think
the South African War was a dirty work
which we did under the whips of money
lenders. I think Mitchelstown was a dis
grace ; I think Denshawi was a devilry.
Yet there is one part of life and history in
which I would assert the absolute spotless-
ness of England. In one department we
wear a robe of white and a halo of inno
cence. Long and weary as may be the rec
ords of our wickedness, in one direction we

The Wrong Horse 143
have done nothing but good. Whoever we
may have wronged, we have never wronged
Germany. Again and again we have
dragged her from under the just vengeance
of her enemies, from the holy anger of Ma
ria Teresa, from the impatient and con
temptuous common sense of Napoleon. We
have kept a ring fence around the Germans
while they sacked Denmark and dismem
bered France, And if we had served our
God as we have served their kings, there
would not be to-day one remnant of them in
our path, either to slander or to slay us.

IX — The Awakening of England
IN October 19 12 silent and seemingly
uninhabited crags and chasms in the
high western region of the Balkans
echoed and re-echoed with a single
shot. It was fired by the hand of a king —
a real king, who sat listening to his people in
front of his own house ( for it was hardly a
palace), and who, in consequence of his lis
tening to the people, not unfrequently im
prisoned the politicians. It is said of him
that his great respect for Gladstone as the
western advocate of Balkan freedom was
slightly shadowed by the fact that Gladstone
did not succeed in effecting the bodily cap
ture of Jack the Ripper. This simple mon
arch knew that if a malefactor were the ter
ror of the mountain hamlets, his subjects
would expect him personally to take arms
and pursue the ruffian ; and if he refused to
do so, would very probably experiment with
another king. And the same primitive con
ception of a king being kept for some kind
of purpose, led them also to expect him to
145

146 The Crimes of England
lead in a foreign campaign, and it was with
his own hand that he fired the first shot of
the war which brought down into the dust
the ancient empire of the Grand Turk,
His kingdom was little more than the
black mountain after which it was named:
we commonly refer to it under its Italian
translation of Montenegro. It is worth
while to pause for a moment upon his pic
turesque and peculiar community, because it
is perhaps the simplest working model of
all that stood in the path of the great Ger
manic social machine I have described in the
last chapter — stood in its path and was soon
to be very nearly destroyed by its onset. It
was a branch of the Serbian stock which had
climbed into this almost inaccessible eyrie,
and thence, for many hundred years, had
mocked at the predatory empire of the
Turks. The Serbians in their turn were but
one branch of the peasant Slavs, millions of
whom are spread over Russia and subject on
many sides to empires with which they have
less sympathy; and the Slavs again, in the
broad features which are important here,
are not merely Slavonic but simply Euro
pean. But a particular picture is generally

The Awakening of England 147
more pointed and intelligible than tenden
cies which elsewhere are mingled with sub
tler tendencies; and of this unmixed Euro
pean simplicity Montenegro is an excellent
model. Moreover, the instance of one small Chris
tian State will serve to emphasise that this
is not a quarrel between England and Ger
many, but between Europe and Germany.
It is my whole purpose in these pages not
to spare my own country where it is open to
criticism; and I freely admit that Montene
gro, morally and politically speaking, is al
most as much in advance of England as it is
of Germany. In Montenegro there are no
miUionaires — and therefore next to no So
cialists, As to why there are no million
aires, it is a mystery, and best studied
among the mysteries of the Middle Ages.
By some of the dark ingenuities of that age
of priestcraft a curious thing was discov
ered — ^that if you kill every usurer, every
forestaller, every adulterater, every user of
false weights, every fixer of false bound
aries, every land-thief, every water-thief,
you afterwards discover by a strange indi
rect miracle, or disconnected truth from

148 The Crimes of England
heaven, that you have no millionaires.
Without dwelling further on this dark mat
ter, we may say that this great gap in the
Montenegrin experience explains the other
great gap — the lack of Socialists, The
Class-conscious Proletarian of All Lands is
curiously absent from this land. The reason
(I have sometimes fancied) is that the Pro
letarian is class-conscious, not because he is
a Proletarian of All Lands, but because he
is a Proletarian with no lands. The poor
people in Montenegro have lands — ^not land
lords. They have roots; for the peasant is
the root of the priest, the poet, and the war
rior. And this, and not a mere recrimina
tion about acts of violence, is the ground of
the age-long Balkan bitterness against the
Turkish conqueror. Montenegrins are pa
triotic for Montenegro; but Turks are not
patriotic for Turkey. They never heard of
it, in fact. They are Bgdoi^s, as homeless
as the desert. The "wrong horse" of Lord
Salisbury was an Arab steed, only stabled
in Byzantium, It is hard enough to rule
vagabond people, like the gypsies. To be
ruled by them is impossible.
Nevertheless what was called the nine-

The Awakening of England 149
teenth century, and named with a sort of
transcendental faith (as in a Pythagorean
worship of number), was wearing to its
close with reaction everywhere, and the
Turk, the great type of reaction, stronger
than ever in the saddle. The most civilised
of the Christian nations overshadowed by
the Crescent dared to attack it and was over
whelmed in a catastrophe that seemed as un
answerable as Hittin. In England Glad
stone and Gladstonism were dead; and Mr.
Kipling, a less mystical Carlyle, was expend
ing a type of praise upon the British Army
which would have been even more appropri
ate to the Prussian Army, The Prussian
Army ruled Prussia; Prussia ruled Ger
many; Germany ruled the Concert of
Europe. She was planting everywhere the
appliances of that new servUe machinery
which was her secret; the absolute identifi
cation of national subordination with busi
ness employment ; so that Krupp could count
on Kaiser and Kaiser on Krupp. Every
other commercial traveller was pathetically
proud of being both a slave and a spy. The
old and the new tyrants had taken hands.
The "sack" of the boss was as sUent and

150 The Crimes of England
fatal as the sack of the Bosphorus. And the
dream of the citizen was at an end.
It was under a sky so leaden and on a
road so strewn with bones that the little
mountain democracy with its patriarchal
prince went out, first and before aU its
friends, on the last and seemingly the most
hopeless of the rebellions against the Otto
man Empire, Only one of the omens seemed
other than disastrous; and even that was
doubtful. For the successful Mediterranean
attack on Tripoli while proving the gallan
try of the Italians (if that ever needed prov
ing) could be taken in two ways, and was
seen by many, and probably most, sincere
liberals as a mere extension of the Imperial
ist reaction of Bosnia and Paardeberg, and
not as the promise of newer things. Italy,
it must be remembered, was still supposed to
be the partner of Prussia and the Haps-
burgs. For days that seemed like months
the microscopic state seemed to be attempt
ing alone what the Crusades had faUed to
accomplish. And for days Europe and the
great powers were thunderstruck, again and
yet again, by the news of Turkish forts fall
ing, Turkish cohorts collapsing, the uncon-

The Awakening of England 151
querable Crescent going down in blood. The
Serbians, the Bulgarians, the Greeks had
gathered and risen from their lairs ; and men
knew that these peasants had done what all
the politicians had long despaired of doing,
and that the spirit of the first Christian Em
peror was already standing over the city that
is named after his name.
For Germany this quite unexpected rush
was a reversal of the whole tide of the world.
It was as if the Rhine itself had returned
from the ocean and retired into the Alps.
For a long time past every important polit
ical process in Europe had been produced
or permitted by Prussia. She had puUed
down ministers in France and arrested re
forms in Russia. Her ruler was acclaimed
by Englishmen like Rhodes, and Americans
like Roosevelt, as the great prince of the age.
One of the most famous and briUiant of our
journalists caUed him "the Lord Chief Jus
tice of Europe." He was the strongest man
in Christendom; and he had confirmed and
consecrated the Crescent. And when he had
consecrated it a few hiU tribes had risen and
trampled it like mire. One or two other
things about the same time, less important in

152 The Crimes of England
themselves, struck in the Prussian's ear the
same new note of warning and doubt. He
sought to obtain a small advantage on the
north-west coast of Africa; and England
seemed to show a certain strange stiffness in
insisting on its abandonment. In the coun
cils over Morocco, England agreed with
France with what did not seem altogether an
accidental agreement. But we shall not be
wrong if we put the crucial point of the Ger
man surprise and anger at the attack from
the Balkans and the fall of Adrianople. Not
only did it menace the key of Asia and the
whole Eastern dream of German commerce ;
not only did it offer the picture of one array
trained by France and victorious, and an
other army trained by Germany and beaten.
There was more than the material victory of
the Creusot over the Krupp gun. It was
also the victory of the peasant's field over
the Krupp factory. By this time there was
in the North German brain an awful inver
sion of all the legends and heroic lives that
the human race has loved. Prussia hated
romance. Chivalry was not a thing she neg
lected ; it was a thing that tormented her as
any bully is tormented by an unanswered

The Awakening of England 153
challenge. That weird process was com
pleted of which I have spoken on an earlier
page, whereby the soul of this strange peo
ple was everywhere on the side of the dragon
against the knight, of the giant against the
hero. Anything unexpected — the forlorn
hopes, the eleventh-hour inspirations, by
which the weak can elude the strong, and
which take the hearts of happier men like
trumpets — fiUed the Prussian with a cold
fury, as of a frustrated fate. The Prussian
felt as a Chicago pork butcher would feel if
the pigs not only refusedto pass through his
machine, but turned into romantic wild
boars, raging and rending, calling for the
old hunting of princes and fit to be the crests
of kings.
The Prussian saw these things and his
mind was made up. He was sUent; but he
laboured: laboured for three long years
without intermission at the making of a mili
tary machine that should cut out of the
world for ever such romantic accident or
random adventure; a machine that should
cure the human pigs for ever of any illusion
that they had wings. That he did so plot
and prepare for an attack that should come

154 The Crimes of England
from him, anticipating and overwhdming
any resistance, is now, even in the documents
he has himself published, a fact of common
sense. Suppose a man sells all his lands ex
cept a small yard containing a well ; suppose
in the division of the effects of an old friend
he particularly asks for his razors; suppose
when a corded trunk is sent him he sends
back the trunk, but keeps the cord. And then
suppose we hear that a rival of his has been
lassoed with a rope, his throat then cut, ap
parently with a razor, and his body hidden
in a well, we do not call in Sherlock Holmes
to project a preliminary suspicion about the
guilty party. In the discussions held by the
Prussian Government with Lord Haldane
and Sir Edward Grey we can now see quite
as plainly the meaning of the things that
were granted and the things that were with
held, the things that would have satisfied the
Prussian plotter and the things that did not
satisfy him. The German Chancellor re
fused an English promise not to be aggres
sive and asked instead for an English prom
ise to be neutral. There is no meaning in
the distinction, except in the mind of an ag
gressor. Germany proposed a pacific ar-

The Awakening of England 155
rangement which forbade England to form
a fighting alliance with France, but permit
ted Germany to retain her old fighting alli
ance with Austria. When the hour of war
came she used Austria, used the old fighting
alliance and tried to use the new idea of
English neutrality. That is to say, she used
the rope, the razor, and the well.
But it was either by accident or by indi
vidual diplomatic skill that England at the
end of the three years even had her own
hands free to help in frustrating the Ger
man plot. The mass of the English people
had no notion of such a plot; and indeed re
garded the occasional suggestion of it as
absurd. Nor did even the people who knew
best know very much better. Thanks and
even apologies are doubtless due to those
who in the deepest lull of our sleeping part
nership with Prussia saw her not as a part
ner but a potential enemy; such men as Mr.
Blatchford, Mr. Bart Kennedy, or the late
EmU Reich. But there is a distinction to be
made. Few even of these, with the admir
able and indeed almost magical exception of
Dr. Sarolea, saw Germany as she was; oc
cupied mainly with Europe and only inci-

156 The Crimes of England
dentally with England; indeed, in the first
stages, not occupied with England at aU.
Even the Anti-Germans were too insular.
Even those who saw most of Germany's plan
saw too much of England's part in it. They
saw it almost wholly as a commercial and
colonial quarrel ; and saw its issue under the
image of an invasion of England, which is
even now not very probable. This fear of
Germany was indeed a very German fear of
Germany. This also conceived the English
as Sea-Germans. It conceived Germany as
at war with something like itself — ^practical,
prosaic, capitalist, competitive Germany,
prepared to cut us up in battle as she cut us
out in business. The time of our larger vi
sion was not yet, when we should realise
that Germany was more deeply at war with
things quite unlike herself, things from
which we also had sadly strayed. Then we
should remember what we were and see
whence we also had come ; and far and high
upon that mountain from which the Crescent
was cast down, behold what was everywhere
the real enemy of the Iron Cross — the peas
ant's cross, which is of wood.
Even our very slight ripplesi of panic,

The Awakening of England 157
therefore, were provincial, and even shal
low; and for the most part we were pos
sessed and convinced of peace. That peace
was not a noble one. We had indeed
reached one of the lowest and flattest levels
of all our undulating history; and it must
be admitted that the contemptuous calcula
tion with which Germany counted on our
submission and abstention was not alto
gether unfounded, though it was, thank God,
unfulfilled. The fuU fruition of our alli
ances against freedom had come. The meek
acceptance of Kultur in our books and
schools had stiffened what was once a free
country with a German formalism and a
German fear. By a queer irony, even the
same popular writer who had already
warned us against the Prussians, had sought
to preach among the populace a very Prus
sian fatalism, pivoted upon the importance
of the charlatan Haeckel, The wrestle of
the two great parties had long slackened into
an embrace. The fact was faintly denied,
and a pretence was still made that no pact
existed beyond a common patriotism. But
the pretence failed altogether; for it was evi
dent that the leaders on either side, so far

158 The Crimes of England
from leading in divergent directions, were
much closer to each other than to their own
followers. The power of these leaders had
enormously increased; but the distance be
tween them had diminished, or, rather, dis
appeared. It was said about 1800, in deri
sion of the Foxite rump, that the Whig
Party came down to Parliament in a four-
wheeler. It might literally be said in 1900
that the Whig Party and the Tory Party
came to Parliament in a hansom cab. It
was not a case of two towers rising into dif
ferent roofs or spires, but founded in the
same soil. It was rather the case of an arch,
of which the foundation-stones on either
side might fancy they were two buUdings;
but the stones nearest the keystone would
know there was only one. This "two-handed
engine" still stood ready to strike, not, in
deed, the other part of itself, but anyone
who ventured to deny that it was doing so.
We were ruled, as it were, by a Wonderland
king and queen, who cut off our heads, not
for saying they quarrelled but for saying
they didn't. The libel law was now used, not
to crush lies about private life, but to crush
truths about public life. Representation had

The Awakening of England 159
become mere misrepresentation; a maze of
loopholes. This was mainly due to the mon
strous presence of certain secret moneys, on
which alone many men could win the ruinous
elections of the age, and which were con
tributed and distributed with less check or
record than is tolerated in the lowest trade
or club. Only one or two people attacked
these funds; nobody defended them.
Through them the great capitalists had the
handle of politics, as of everything else. The
poor were struggling hopelessly against ris
ing prices; and their attempts at collective
bargaining, by the collective refusal of bad
ly-paid work, were discussed in the press.
Liberal and Tory, as attacks upon the State.
And so they were ; upon the ServUe State.
Such was the condition of England in
1914, when Prussia, now at last armed to the
teeth and secure of triumph, stood up before
the world, and solemnly, like one taking a
sacrament, consecrated her campaign with a
crime. She entered by a forbidden door, one
which she had herself forbidden — marching
upon France through neutralised Belgium,
where every step was on her broken word.
Her neutralised neighbours resisted, as in-

160 The Crimes of England
deed they, like ourselves, were pledged to do.
Instantly the whole invasion was lit up with
a flame of moral lunacy, that turned the
watching nations white who had never
known the Prussian. The statistics of non-
combatants killed and tortured by this time
only stun the imagination. But two friends
of my own have been in villages sacked by
the Prussian march. One saw a tabernacle
containing the Sacrament patiently picked
out in pattern by shot after shot. The other
saw a rocking-horse and the wooden toys in
a nursery laboriously hacked to pieces.
Those two facts together will be enough to
satisfy some of us of the name of the Spirit
that had passed.
And then a strange thing happened. Eng
land, that had not in the modern sense any
army at aU, was justified of all her children.
Respected institutions and reputations did
indeed waver and collapse on many sides:
though the chief of the states replied worth
ily to a bribe from the foreign bully, many
other politicians were sufficiently wUd and
weak, though doubtless patriotic in inten
tion. One was set to restrain the journal
ists, and had to be restrained himself, for

The Awakening of England 161
being more sensational than any of them.
Another scolded the working-classes in the
style of an intoxicated temperance lecturer.
But England was saved by a forgotten thing
— the English. Simple men with simple mo
tives, the chief one a hate of injustice which'
grows simpler the longer we stare at it, came
out of their dreary tenements and their tidy
shops, their fields and their suburbs and
their factories and their rookeries, and asked
for the arms of men. In a throng that was
at last three miUion men, the islanders went
forth from their island, as simply as the
mountaineers had gone forth from their
mountain, with their faces to llie dawn.

X — The Battle of the Marne
THE impression produced by the
first week of war was that the
British contingent had come just
in time for the end of the world.
Or rather, for any sensitive and civilised
man, touched by the modern doubt but by the
equally modern mysticism, that old theo
cratic vision fell far short of the sickening
terror of the time. For it was a day of
judgptnent in which upon the throne in heaven
and above the cherubim, sat not God, but
another. The British had been posted at the ex
treme western end of the allied line in the
north. The other end rested on the secure
city and fortress of Namur; their end rested
upon nothing. It is not wholly a sentimental
fancy to say that there was something for
lorn in the position of that loose end in a
strange land, with only the sad fields of
Northern France between them and the sea.
Eor it was really round that loose end that
the foe would probably fling the lasso pf his
163

164 The Crimes of England
charge; it wias here that death might soon
be present upon every side. It must be re
membered that many critics, including many
Englishmen, doubted whether a rust had not
eaten into this as into other parts of the na
tional life, feared that England had too long
neglected both the ethic and the technique
of war, and would prove a weak link in the
chain. The enemy was absolutely certain
that it was so. To these men, standing dis
consolately amid the hedgdess plains and
poplars, came the news that Namur was
gone, which was to their captains one of
the iFour corners of the earth. The two
armies had touched; and instantly the
weaker took an electric shock which told of
electric energy, deep into deep Germany, bat
tery behind battery of abysmal force. In the
instant it was discovered that the enemy was
more numerous than they had dreamed. He
was actually more numerous even than they
discovered. Every oncoming horseman
doubled as in a drunkard's vision ; and they
were soon striving without speech in a night
mare of numbers. Then all the aUied forces
at the front were overthrown in the tragic
battle of Mons ; and began that black retreat.

TK^ Battle of the Marne 165
in which so many of our young men knew
war first and at its worst in this terrible
world ; and so many never returned.
In that blackness began to grow strange
emotions, long unfamUiar to our blood.
Those six dark days are as full of legends as
the six centuries of the Dark Ages. Many
of these may be exaggerated fancies, one
was certainly an avowed fiction, others are
quite different from it and more difficult to
dissipate into the daylight. But one curious
fact remains about them if they were all lies,
or even if they were all deliberate works of
art. Not one of them referred to those close,
crowded, and stirring three centuries which
are nearest to us, and which alone are cov
ered in this sketch, the centuries during
which the Teutonic influence had expanded
itself over our islands. Ghosts were there
perhaps, but they were the ghosts of forgot
ten ancestors. Nobody saw CromweU or
even Wellington ; nobody so much as thought
about CecU Rhodes. Things were either
seen or said among the British which linked
them up, in matters deeper than any alliance,
with the French, who spoke of Joan of Arc
in heaven above the fated city; or the Rus-

166 The Crimes of England
sians who dreamed of the Mother of God
with her hand pointing to the west They
were the visions or the inventions of a me
diaeval army; and a prose poet was in line
with many popular rumours when he told of
ghostly archers crying "Array, Array," as in
that long-disbanded yeomanry in which I
have fancied Cobbett as carrying a bow.
Other tales, true or only symptomatic, told
of one on a great white horse who was not
the victor of Blenheim or even the Black
Prince, but a faint figure out of far-off mar-
tyrologies — St. George. One soldier is as
serted to have claimed to identify the saint
because he was "on every quid." On the
coins, St. George is a Roman soldier.
But these fancies, if they were fancies,
might well seem the last sickly flickerings
of an old-world order now finally wounded
to the death. That which was coming on,
with the whole weight of a new world, was
something that had never been numbered
among the Seven Champions of Christen
dom. Now, in more doubtful and more hope
ful days, it is almost impossible to repicture
what was, for those who understood, the gi
gantic finaUty of the first German strides.

The. Battle of the Marne 167
It seemed as if the forces of the ancient val
our fell away to right and left; and there
opened a grand, smooth granite road right
to the gate of Paris, down which the great
Germania moved like a tall, unanswerable
sphinx, whose pride could destroy all things
and survive them. In her train moved, like
moving mountains, Cyclopean guns that had
never been seen among men, before which
walled cities melted like wax, their mouths
set insolently upwards as if threatening to
besiege the sun. Nor is it fantastic to speak
so of the new and abnormal armaments; for
the soul of Germany was really expressed
in colossal wheels and cylinders; and her
guns were more symbolic than her flags.
Then and now, and in every place and time,
it is to be noted that the German superiority
has been in a certain thing and of a certain
kind. It is not unity; it is not, in the moral
sense, discipline. Nothing can be more
united in a moral sense than a French, Brit
ish, or Russian regiment. Nothing, for that
matter, could be more united than a High
land clan at Killiecrankie or a rush of relig
ious fanatics in the Soudan, What such en
gines, in such size and multiplicity, really

168 The Crimes of England
meant was this: they meant a type of life
naturally intolerable to happier and more
healthy-minded men, conducted on a larger
scale and consuming larger populations than
had ever been known before. They meant
cities growing larger than provinces, fac
tories growing larger than cities ; they meant
the empire of the slum. They meant a de
gree of detailed repetition and dehumanised
division of labour, to which no man born
would surrender his brief span in the sun
shine, if he could hope to beat his plough
share into a sword. The nations of the
earth were not to surrender to the Kaiser;
they were to surrender to Krupp, his master
and theirs ; the French, the British, the Rus
sians were to surrender to Krupp as the
Germans themselves, after a few swiftly
broken strikes, had already surrendered to
Krupp. Through every cogwheel in that
incomparable machinery, through every link
in that iron and unending chain, ran the
mastery and the skill of a certain kind of
artist; an artist whose hands are never idle
through dreaming or drawn back in disgust
or lifted in wonder or in wrath ; but sure and
tireless in their touch upon the thousand

The. Battle of the Marne 169
little things that make the invisible machin
ery of life. That artist was there in tri
umph; but he had no name. The ancient
world called him the Slave.
From this advancing machine of miUions,
the slighter array of the Allies, and espe
cially the British at their ultimate outpost,
saved themselves by a succession of hair's-
breadth escapes and what must have seemed
to the soldiers the heartrending luck of a
mouse before a cat. Again and again Von
Kluck's cavalry, supported by artillery and
infantry, clawed round the end of the Brit
ish force, which eluded it as by leaping back
again and again. Sometimes the pursuer
was, so to speak, so much on top of his prey
that it could not even give way to him ; but
had to hit such blows as it could in the hope
of checking him for the instant needed for
escape. Sometimes the oncoming wave was
so close that a small individual accident, the
capture of one man, would mean the wash
ing out of a whole battalion. For day after
day this living death endured. And day af
ter day a certain dark truth began to be re
vealed, bit by bit, certainly to the incredu
lous wonder of the Prussians, quite possibly

170 The Crimes of England
to the surprise of the French, and quite as
possibly to the surprise of themselves; that
there was something singular about the
British soldiers. That singular thing may
be expressed in a variety of ways; but it
would be almost certainly expressed insuffi
ciently by anyone who had not had the moral
courage to face the facts about his country
in the last decades before the war. It may
perhaps be best expressed by saying that
some thousands of Englishmen were dead:
and that England was not.
The fortress of Maubeuge had gaped, so
to speak, offering a refuge for the unresting
and tormented retreat; the British Generals
had refused it and continued to fight a losing
fight in the open for the sake of the common
plan. At night an enormous multitude of
Germans had come unexpectedly through
the forest and caught a smaller body of the
British in Landrecies; failed to dislodge
them and lost a whole battalion in that battle
of the darkness. At the extreme end of the
line Smith-Dorrien's division, who seemed
to be nearly caught or cut off, had fought
with one gun against four, and so hammered
the Germans that they were forced to let go

The Battle of the Marne 171
their hold ; and the British were again free.
When the blowing up of a bridge announced
that they had crossed the last river, some
thing other than that battered remnant was
saved; it was the honour of the thing by
which we live.
The driven and defeated line stood at last
almost under the walls of Paris; and the
world waited for the doom of the city. The
gates seemed to stand open; and the Prus
sian was to ride into it for the third and the
last time : for the end of its long epic of lib
erty and equality was come. And still the
very able and very French individual on
whom rested the last hope of the seemingly
hopeless Alliance stood unruffled as a rock,
in every angle of his sky-blue jacket and his
buUdog figure. He had called his bewildered
soldiers back when they had broken the inva
sion at Guise ; he had silently digested the re
sponsibility of dragging on the retreat, as in
despair, to the last desperate leagues before
the capital ; and he stood and watched. And
even as he watched the whole huge invasion
swerved. Out through Paris and out and around be
yond Paris, other men in dim blue coats

172 The Crimes of England
swung out in long lines upon the plain,
slowly folding upon Von Kluck like blue
wings. Von Kluck stood an instant; and
then, flinging a few secondary forces to de
lay the wing that was swinging round on
him, dashed across the Allies' line at a des
perate angle, to smash it in the centre as with
a hammer. It was less desperate than it
seemed; for he cotmted, and might well
count, on the moral and physical bankruptcy
of the British line and the end of the French
line immediately in front of him, which for
six days and nights he had chased before
him like autumn leaves before a whirlwind.
Not unlike autumn leaves, red-stained, dust-
hued, and tattered, they lay there as if swept
into a corner. But even as their conquerors
wheeled eastwards, their bugles blew the
charge; and the English went forward
through the wood that is called Cregy, and
stamped it with their seal for the second
time, in the highest moment of all the secu
lar history of man.
But it was not now the Cregy in which
English and French knights had met in a
more coloured age, in a battle that was
rather a tournament. It was a league of all

The Battle of the Marne 173
knights for the remains of all knighthood,
of all brotherhood in arms or in arts, against
that which is and has been radically un-
knightly and radically unbrotherly from the
beginning. Much was to happen after —
murder and flaming folly and madness in
earth and sea and sky; but all men knew
in their hearts that the third Prussian thrust
had failed, and Christendom was delivered
once more. The empire of blood and iron
rolled slowly back towards the darkness of
the northern forests; and the great nations
of the West went forward; where side by
side as after a long lover's quarrel, went the
ensigns of St Denys and St. George.

NOTE ON THE WORD "ENGLISH"
The words "England" and "English" as used here
require a word of explanation, if only to anticipate
the ire of the inevitable Scot. To begin with, the
word "British" involves a similar awkwardness. I
have tried to use it in the one or two cases that re
ferred to such things as military glory and unity:
though I am sure I have failed of full consistency
in so complex a matter. The difficulty is that this
sense of glory and unity, which should certainly
cover the Scotch, should also cover the Irish. And
while it is fairly safe to call a Scotsman a North
Briton {despite the just protest of Stevenson) , it is
very unsafe indeed to call an Irishman a West
Briton. But there is a deeper difficulty. I can as
sure the Scot that I say "England," not because I
deny Scottish nationality, but because I affirm it.
And I can say, further, that I could not here include
Scots in the thesis, simply because I could not in
clude them in the condemnation. This book is a
study, not of a disease but rather of a weakness,
which has only been predominant in the predominant
pa/rtnef. It would not be true, for instance, to say
either of Ireland or Scotland that the populace
lacked a religion; but I do think that British policy
as a whole has suffered from the English lack of
one, with its inevitable result of plutocracy and
class contempt.

YALE UNIVERSITY

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