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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE

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THE

SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE

AN ANALYSIS OF THE ENGLISH MIND

BY

FORD MADOX HUEFFER

Omnes ordines sub signis ducam, legiones meas,
Avi sinistra, ausplcio liquido, atque ex sententia.
Confidentia est inimlcos meas me posse perdere.
Pseudolus, Act ii. Scene 4.

LONDON: ALSTON RIVERS, LIMITED
BROOKE STREET, HOLBORN BARS, E.C.
MCMVII

BRADBURY, AGNEW AND CO., LTD.
LONDON AND TONBRIDGE.

[All Rights Reserved."]

V 1-^

¦aonfc

TO THE MOST ENGLISH
OF ALL

CONTENTS
AUTHOR'S ADVERTISEMENT . Page xi
Chapter I. THE PEOPLE FROM THE
OUTSIDE.
The professor of history.— The Spirit of the People blood
thirsty,— The siege of Miinster,— Qualifications,— The moral of
English history.— The death of kings, — Executions.— The romantic
movement. — The humane crowd. — The dog. — The sheep, — Foreign
views,— Sentimentality,— -The Englishman and animals.— Natur-
Schwarmerei. — An ancient characteristic. — Anthropomorphism. —
The German view of nature, — The Latin. — Shooting women.— The
Boer war. — A lack of ferocity, — Police and hooligans, — The special
province of the race. — Living comfortably together . , Page 3
CHAPTER II, THE ROAD TO THE WEST.
The conquests of England. — " All these fellows are ourselves," —
Foreign leaders, — The African Englishman,— Cricket. — Schoolboy
history. — 1066, — The Normans were the first Anglo-Saxons, — The
Anglo-Saxons not English, — Julius Caesar an EngUshman. — The
fight. — The foreign English, — The Americans not English, — The
railway journey, — A foreigner hardly a man, — Why this is so. —
The American view of history. — Insularity. — Cathedrals and rose-
gardens. — The English not a race, — A colony of bad eggs. — "Whose
foot spurns back the ocean's rolling tide." — Wanderers , Page 31
vii

CONTENTS

CHAPTER III. THE MELTING POT.
The town.— The country.— Their lessons.— Rural depopulation,
—The traveller in baby-hnen. — Psychological ages, — The ice age.
— A fanciful projection, — The beginning of the modem world. —
Henry 'VIII.'s Spanish expedition.— Dr. W. G, Grace.— Thomas
Cromwell, — Machiavelli. — Dominant types, — My grandfather's
diary, — "I love Dutch William," — Victorian ideals,— The history
class, — The short history. — Mr, E,— Why he resigned, — Puritanism
— A liberal relative. — The abolition of the monasteries, — The great
rebellion. — The revolution. — Germanising. — 'Various speculations.
— Odessa Jews. — The land of freedom .... Page ^q

CHAPTER IV. FAITHS.
A book to read, — The English Bible horrible, — Church service.
— The British Deity, — Jehovah. — The lack of Purgatory. — Protest
antism. — The Methodist revival. — The coronation of the Virgin. —
Currents. — The decadence of theology. — The Athanasian Creed. —
The immortality of the soul. — Sustained discussion. — Vague faith. —
Japanese not Methodists. — The Indian prince. — Where God comes
in. — Taceat mulier in ecclesia. — The first church of Christian
Science. — The odd colony. — Vocal women and silent men. — The
ladies' paper. — Women and the Press. — Women and the Arts. —
Women and Religion. — Women and Catholicism. — How God
suffered. — Jesus and the modern Englishman. — Christism. — The
Englishman's code. — Do as you would be done by . . Page 87

CHAPTER V. CONDUCT.
The function of the law. — Not to avenge but to restore. — The
sheepshearer. — " Oh, well, it is the law." — Mr. Justice  . — His
psychology. — The English lawyer. — The difference between
viii

CONTENTS
English law and French justice.— The Strand and a verdict. — The
benefit of the doubt. — The Hanover Jack. — The struggle between
legislators and lawyers. — Benefit of clergy. — The flaw in the
indictment. — English optimism. — A railway station scene. —
Leopold II. — Want of imagination. — Dread of emotion, —
" Things," — Delicacy. — Two illustrations. — A parting. — Good
manners. — The secret of living. — " You will play the game.'' Page 123
L'ENVOL
The doctor at the play. — The actress. — " Think of her tempta
tions." — The Englishman a poet. — What a poet is, — Other views
of life. — The Englishman's fanatical regard for truth, — The child's
first lie. — The defects of the Enghsh system. — The difference
between honour and probity. — The Englishman and the sun-dial.
— " Magna est Veritas." — Practical mysticism. — Cleanliness a
mystical virtue. — Sportsmanship a mystical virtue, — The English
man the type of the future, — The rules of bridge, — The English
language. — Its adaptability. — Foreign strains in England, — The
Englishman's want of imaginative sympathy, — The cook and th.e
birds. — Exports to Canada. — The Englishman and subject races
— His love for settled ideas, — His reputation for hypocrisy. — His
childishness. — Nostalgia. — My country, right or wrong. Page 157

IX

AUTHOR'S ADVERTISEMENT.
This is the final instalment of a book which the
author began to publish three years ago. It
occurred to him very much earlier that to attempt
to realise for himself these prolific, fertile, and
populous islands would be a pleasurable task — to
realise them, that is to say, in so far as they had
presented themselves to himself and to no other
person. It has been a pleasurable task, and inas
much as, in the form of books, the results attained
appear to have given pleasure to quite a number of
people, it would be false modesty to pretend to
apologise for publishing these results of pleasurable
moments. The author has put into them no kind of study
of documents ; they are as purely autobiographical
products as are the work of Pepys or Montaigne.
Setting for himself certain limits — as one might
say, certain rules of the game — he very definitely
observed those rules and set out — to play.
England rather more than any other land divides
xi

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
itself into two portions — the Town and Country ;
for, roughly speaking, no other land has towns so
crowded or countrysides so sparsely populated; no
other nation has a country type of life so well
organised or so characteristic ; few peoples have
towns so loosely planned or so wanting in self-
consciousness. It is human to think first of the body and then of
the soul. And, since Town and Country form
together as it were the body of a nation, so the
People is the soul inhabiting them. Hence the plan
of this book in three volumes, to which — having
evolved it several years ago, and observed it as the
rule of his particular game — the author has rigidly
adhered. In the first place he gave to his readers a projec
tion of a great English town as he had known it ; in
the second he provided his personal image of the
English countryside. The one volume was The
Soul of London, the other, The Heart of the
Country. In The Spirit of the People an attack is made
on a rendering of the peculiar psychology ot the
Englishman — on that odd mixture of every kind of
foreigner that is called the Anglo-Saxon race.
The reader is probably familiar with what is called
a composite photograph. A great number of photo
graphs of individuals is taken, and one image being
xii

AUTHOR'S ADVERTISEMENT
set upon another, a sort of common denominator
results, one face blending into another, lending
salient points, toning down exaggerations. And,
when one speaks of the " Englishman " or the
" Frenchman," one refers to a mental composite
photograph of all the thousands and thousands of
English or French that one has met, seen, con
versed with, liked, disliked, ill-used, or beaten at
chess. It is this image as it remains in his own mind — it
is this particular " Englishman " — that the author
analyses in the present volume. If he differs — this
Englishman — from the Englishmen rendered by or
known to others, that is only because the author's
experience has differed from the experience of others.
For the author has, for the purposes of this book,
read no other books and studied no statistics. He
has lived such a life as he chose or as Fate directed,
and has noted such things as accident has brought
in his way in the streets or between the hedgerows.
He has dwelt, for instance, very much on the fact
that his " Englishman " has appeared to have the
characteristics of a poet ; he has not dwelt at all on
the Englishman as, say, a drinker of strong liquors.
That may be because he has been attracted to the
contemplative, pleasant, kindly, romantic, active —
but quite unreflective — individuals of this nation.
And probably he has given drunkards a wide berth.
xiii

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
Both these things he has done unconsciously, if he
has done so at all ; but the fact remains that he has
met thousands of Englishmen who appeared to him
to be poets, and hardly tens who have been drunk.
Celts who claim to be the only poets, or temperance
reformers who wish to see a world reeling towards
hugely-crammed workhouses, will have a different
vision. The author can only claim to be a quite
ordinary man, with the common tastes and that
mixture in about equal parts of English, Celtic, and
Teutonic bloods that goes to make up the usual
Anglo-Saxon of these islands.
The author's original plan — and he has adhered to
it rigidly, sternly, and in spite of many tempta
tions — was to write about only such things as inte
rested him. He might, that is to say, have aimed at
producing a work of reference. He might have
written of the influence on the Englishman of, say,
the motor-car, the Greek drama, vegetarianism, or
Marxian Socialism. But he has left out these and
many other subjects. Distrusting his powers, he
has limited himself to attempting to produce an
image of the world he has lived in, reflected in
his own personality. He has tried, in short, to
produce a work of art.
It would, however, be too great insincerity in the
author to say that he does not regard a work of art
as of as great a usefulness to the republic as a work
xiv

AUTHOR'S ADVERTISEMENT
of reference. Primarily it should give enjoyment.
Secondarily — and that is its social value — it should
awaken thought. This a work of reference — a
serious, statistical. Blue, or unimaginative work — will
seldom do. The artist, however, should be an exact
scientist. (This is not a paradox.) His province is
to render things exactly as he sees them in such a
way that his rendering will strike the imagination of
the reader, and induce him to continue an awakened
train of thought.
It is all one whether the artist be right or wrong
as to his facts ; his business is to render rightly the
appearance of things. It is all one whether he
convince his reader or cause to arise a violent oppo
sition. For the artist's views are of no importance
whatever. Who cares whether Dante believed the
Guelphs to be villains or saviours ? Who cares
whether Aristophanes believed that the temple of
Asclepius at Tricca was a better sort of Lourdes than
that at Epidaurus ? The point is that one and the
other have given us things to enjoy and things to
think about.
Perhaps it is, or perhaps it is not, good that we
should enjoy ourselves : that will always remain an
open question in a nation where joy is almost
invariably regarded as a waste of time and very
frequently as a vulgarity. So that it is better, no
doubt, to fall back upon that secondary province of
XV

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
the work of art — the awakening of thought, the
promotion of discussion 
This, however, is not a defence of the present book,
but a defence of all books that aim at renderings
rather than statements ; for that, in essence, is the
difference between the work of art and the work of
reference. Is not it Machiavelli who says, " It is
not in my power to offer you a greater gift than
that of enabling you to understand in the shortest
possible time all those things which in the course of
many years I have learned through danger and
suffering" ? And if the author has not passed
through so many years or dangers as the author of
// Principe, neither, presumably, has any reader
to-day as much need of instruction as Lorenzo the
Magnificent.
F. M. H.
WiNCHELSEA,
January 21th, 1906 — August ird, 1907.

XVI

THE PEOPLE FROM THE
OUTSIDE.

B

THE
SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
CHAPTER I.
THE PEOPLE FROM THE OUTSIDE.
THREE years ago I was talking to a Professor of
literature near the city of Miinster, which is
in Westphalia. At a certain point in our
discussion my interlocutor said : " But then, the
Spirit of your People has always been so blood
thirsty. One becomes almost ill in reading your
history, with its records of murders and beheadings."
That this should have been uttered where it was
rendered it the more bewildering to one prone to
form impressionists' views upon general subjects.
For the remark was made upon a level plain, within
sight of a city whose every ancient stone must once
at least have been bathed in blood. Those levels,
vast and sandy or vast and green, stretching out
towards the Low Countries, must in the secular wars
of Europe have been traversed again and again by the
feet of those licensed murderers that are soldiery. The
3 B 2

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
very church towers of Miinster are pointed out to the
tourist as characteristic : they are square, because the
spires that once crowned them were overturned by
Anabaptists in their last desperate stand against the
Prince Bishop — a last desperate stand after a siege
in which fire, famine, cannibalism and rapine played
a part unparalleled in the history of the world. The
arcades of Miinster witnessed murders of the most
terrible: the church towers of Miinster are square
because, so the legend has it, the Anabaptists set
their cannon upon the platforms left after the spires
had fallen. And the very outline of the city is
dominated still by the pinnacles of the Friedensaal —
or hall erected to commemorate the Treaty of
Miinster, — to commemorate that Peace of Westphalia
ending a war that had outlasted generations. Yet,
with the glittering city beneath his eyes, with all
these reminders of ancient bloodshed plain to the
view in the clear air, in the peaceful summer weather,
this student of literature could give it, as his parti
cular impression of the English race, that its history
in the reading made him ill.
This remark impressed me so singularly that ever
since that day, three years ago, I have hardly passed
any single twenty-four hours without giving at least
some speculation to the psychology of the curiously
mixed and mingled populations of the partner pre
dominant in the history and fortunes of these
islands. Incidentally, of course, I have speculated
upon the history of that other, still more curiously
4

THE PEOPLE FROM THE OUTSIDE
mingled, and still more predominant, branch of the
race that inhabits a western half-continent. As the
result of these speculations I have offered to the
world two volumes of impressions — the one of this
people very much compressed into a great town, the
other of this same people amidst the green acres of
a restricted island. In the present volume I propose
to myself to record a view of this people's corporate
activities, of its manifestations as a nation. With
the completion of this volume I shall have achieved
the task that set itself to me during" the night after
the afore-mentioned student of literature made his
singular remark.
The person who sets himself such a task should, if
he is to perform it at all ideally, possess certain quali
ties and the negation of certain qualities. He should
be attached by very strong ties to the race of which
he writes, or he will write without sympathy. He
should, if possible, be attached to as many other
races as may be by ties equally strong, or he will,
lacking comprehension of other national manifesta
tions, be unable to draw impartial comparisons. He
must be possessed of a mind of some aptness to
interest itself in almost every department of human
thought, or his view will be tinged with that saddest
of all human wrong-headedness — specialisation. He
must look upon the world with the eyes neither of a
social reformer nor of an engineer, neither with the
eyes of a composer of operas nor of a carpenter.
He must, as well as it is possible for a single man to
5

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
compass it, be an all-round man. He must, in fact,
be an amateur — a lover of his kind and all its works.
At the same time he must be sufficiently a literary
artist to be able to draw moving pictures; for his
work, if it fails to interest, loses its very cause for
existence. To what extent I who write these words
possess these qualifications, I must leave to my
biographers to decide.
? *¦»**
Let me now attempt to put before the reader the
reasons for the frame of mind of my excellent friend,
the student of literature. It must be remembered
that he is not English : he has not the reasons that
the Englishman has for drawing morals from, or for
accepting, our historic sequences. He is aware that
his own land is steeped, is rendered fertile, by the
blood of man in ages past. He sees however in
these matters, domestic to him, the pressure of
immense necessities, the hand of an august if
inscrutable Providence. But, never having been so
much as momentarily moved by our national middle-
class poet's dogma that English history is a matter of
precedent broadening down to precedent, he cannot see
that English state executions are part of an immense
design. He sees instead a succession of sanguinary
incidents. For let it be remembered that of the first
twenty-six sovereigns who reigned in England since
the Conquest no less than ten died deaths of violence ;
that, in addition to this, several Queens Consort, one
Queen of Scotland, many rightful heirs to the throne,
6

THE PEOPLE FROM THE OUTSIDE
and innumerable statesmen of prominence died by
the hands of the headsman or the secret murderer.
And what great names, what picturesque and
romantic figures has that roll not included !
There is a vivid French historical monograph that
puts all history as a matter of catchwords, as mis
leading as you will — so that Henri IV. and his period
are typified by the ''poule au pot," the Second Empire
by " r Empire c'est la paix." And there are millions
of observers of our present epoch who see the whole
world of to-day menaced by a cloud bearing the
ominous words " I'ennemi c'est le Prussien ! " In a
similar way the Romantic movement, still dominat
ing Europe in a manner extraordinary enough, has
made, for continental eyes, the whole of English
history appear to be one vast, brown canvas, in
which, out of the shadows, appears the block.
Shadowy executioners hover in the half-lights behind
brilliant queens or dark and melancholy kings —
queens Flemish in looks, queens French, queens
Spanish — but queens that are generally Mary
Stuarts, or kings that are always Charles Stuarts,
or children that are always the Princes in the Tower.
It is perhaps prfecisely because these dead kings ot
England do represent principles that they stand out
so clearly in the historical imaginings of Europe, and
it is perhaps because they themselves stand out so
clearly, that the principles they merely represented
are lost in the light of their brilliant fates. Speaking
generally, we may say that in the large scheme of
7

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
things the fall of Mary Stuart was a mere episode in
the great downward trend of revealed religion ; that
in the large scheme of things the fall of Charles
Stuart was but an episode in the great rise of popular
dominion, or that the murder of the princes in the
Tower represented a step forward in the great theory
of the English kingly history — that theory that still
makes the English kingship elective. But, just
because these episodes were so admirably adapted
for the handling of the Humanists, who were the
romantic artists and poets — for that reason the
executions were the things that counted. The doomed
principles that Mary or Charles or the infant Edward
so picturesquely "died for" — those doomed principles
of Catholicism, aristocracy or "tail male" — served to
make Charles, Mary and the infant Edward sympa
thetic figures in the eyes of a sentimentalising
Europe. For, if you die for a principle you will
become an attractive figure ; what the principle may
be does not very much matter.
But England has very largely outgrown the in
fluence of the Romantic movement, and, living in the
centre of a crowd that is generally humane beyond
belief, the Englishman sees his history as a matter of
a good-humoured broadening down of precedent to
precedent, a broad and tranquil stream of popular
advance to power in which a few negligible individuals
have lost upon the block their forgotten heads. Who
in England remembers that more than one in three of
England's earlier kings died deaths of violence ?
8

THE PEOPLE FROM THE OUTSIDE
For, upon the whole the English crowd has grown
humane beyond belief.* The other day a large dog
took it into its head to lie down and fall asleep in the
centre of the roadway in one of our largest and
busiest thoroughfares. And it effectually blocked the
way. Cabs avoided it : large motor omnibuses drove
carefully round it : a great block was caused by the
deflected traffic, and a great deal of time was lost-
Yet the dog itself was absolutely valueless and un
presentable. And, curiously enough, I happened on
the next day to witness in South London an episode
almost exactly similar. A sheep, one of a flock on
the way to Smithfield, had wedged itself firmly into
the mechanism of an electric tram. It remained there
for three-quarters of an hour, and I counted twenty-
two trams all kept waiting whilst the officials of the
first car endeavoured to save the life of an animal that
in any case was doomed to death within the day.
These seemed to me to be singular instances of
humanity on the part of a race that, at any rate in
that part of its land, is remarkably in a hurry. They
effaced for me much of the impression of underlying
ferocity in the people — the impression that had been
caused by some small sufferings at the hands of
hostile mobs during a period of strife some years ago.
For, upon the whole, the ferocities and barbarities of
¦* I do not wish to be taken as implying that the English crowd
is polished, or gentle, or considerate. I have before me a news
paper article which enumerates twenty-nine distinct causes for
offence given by one Bank Holiday crowd to one individual. And
the estimate does not appear to be excessive.
9

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
the English crowds during the Boer war might have
been matched in any part of Europe. One suffered
as much, being English upon the Continent, as one
suffered for being pro-Boer in this country. But I
cannot well imagine in any continental city a crowd
of a couple of thousand people watching with intense
sympathy (or even suffering with good humour con
siderable inconvenience for the sake of) a sheep that
was shortly to die. It is true that in any English
street one may see a broken-legged horse stand for
hours waiting to be put out of its agony. But that is
a manifestation of official stupidity, and is upon the
whole a spectacle repugnant to the feelings of the
onlookers, any one of whom would approve or
applaud the instant slaughtering of a poor animal.
I do not assume that these instances of humanity
in English crowds distinguish the Anglo-Saxon from
all his human brothers. But just because almost
every Englishman will recognise the truth in them,
and just because almost every Englishman will
applaud the action of these tram -conductors or
cab-drivers, it does seem to me to be arguable that,
upon the whole, much of the ferocity that was a part
of the spirit of the people has died out.
Since witnessing these two events, I have " put "
them to several foreigners. It has been noticeable
to me that each of these foreigners has taken the
humanitarian standard of his own country to be, as
it were, the normal and proper level from which to
regard the brute creation — this although practically
lO

THE PEOPLE FROM THE OUTSIDE
none of them was what we should call patriotic. But
each of them agreed that the instance of the sheep
betrayed what they called " sentimentality ; " each of
them, indeed, used this very word. Even a Hindoo
said that if the sheep were to be slaughtered within
the hour it mattered very little whether its end came
at the hands of a butcher or beneath the wheels of a
tramcar ; and a Frenchman, a German, and a Russian
lady agreed in saying that it was absurd that so
much inconvenience to human beings should have
been incurred merely to save the life of a dog. No
doubt, if he were asked to judge the matter in the
light of pure reason, every Englishman would have
agreed with them ; but I think that there is little
doubt that such an Englishman, if he had stood upon
the kerb-stone and watched these two small dramas,
would have voted life to the dog and the sheep, or
would at least have applauded these forbearances.
It happened that one of the persons to whom I put
these cases was the very German student of literature
to whom I referred in my first words. He, for his
part, was by no means ready to admit that the
English were more the friends of beasts than the
inhabitants of Westphalia. He cited, for instance,
the case of his brother, a landowner who possessed a
favourite but very troublesome horse. This animal
refused to stand in harness, with the result that every
member of his brother's family who desired to take a
drive was forced to spring into the cart whilst the
animal was going at a sharp trot. This they had
II

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
borne with for many years. And, indeed, I myself
have met with instances of foreign family coachmen
who resented as autocratically as any Englishman
the keeping waiting of their horses. But my German
friend, whilst unwilling to admit that his compatriots
fell behind our own in reasonable humanity, stigma
tised the sparing of the dog and the sheep as part of
the quite unreasonable " sentimentality " with which
he credited the Anglo-Saxon race. He is my friend,
by way of being Professor of English literature in a
German University, and as such he is at present
engaged in writing a history of Sentimentality in
England. This, he seems to see, begins (at least as
far as the sentimental attitude towards the brute
creation is concerned) with the " Sentimental Journey "
of Laurence Sterne. In this will be found the cele
brated sentimentalising over the dead ass, or the still
more flagrant instance of the caged starling that cried
incessantly, " I can't get out ! " Bishop Law, the
author of the " Devout Call," was another of these
sentimentalisers, inasmuch as he was unable to pass
a caged bird without an attempt to purchase it and to
set it at liberty.
Nothing, indeed, could be more interesting than to
discover just when this humanitarian movement did
really originate in the English people. For however
right my German friend may be in dating the com
mencement of the sentimental movement in its other
aspects he has certainly very much post-dated this
particular strain in its birth. For Sterne, it must be
12

THE PEOPLE FROM THE OUTSIDE
remembered, called himself Yorick. And if he had a
sentimental attitude, he got it by imitation very
largely of another creature of the creator of the Prince
of Denmark. For most of the meditations of the
" Sentimental Journey " are in the " vein " of the
melancholy Jacques, and if we read through the rdle
of that character it is not long before we come upon
the tale of the Poor sequestered stag
That from the hunter's aim had taken a hurt
And came to languish . . .
Thus the hairy fool,
Much marked of the melancholy Jacques,
Stood on the extremest verge of the swift brook
Augmenting it with tears. . . .
" Poor deer," quoth he, " thou mak'st a testament
As worldlings do, giving thy sum of more
To that which hath too much."
" Tis right," quoth he, " thus misery doth part
The flux of company."
" Sweep on, ye fat and greasy citizens ;
'Tis just the fashion ; wherefore do ye look
Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there ? "
Here is, indeed, the " note " of that sentimentalism
which Sterne afterwards and so ably exploited.
Another department of English sentimentalism — that
which the German, with some wonder and some
contempt, is apt to call the Englishman's Natur-
Schwaermerei,h.is mad infatuation for nature — my firiend
was equally prone to find in eighteenth-century English
poets. Gray's letters from Switzerland are, for
instance, distinguished by rhapsodical passages of
veneration for the spirit of the Alps. He finds, too, in
13

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
Horace Walpole's coquettings with the Gothic on
Strawberry Hill the first indications of the modern
Englishman's veneration for tradition in writings and
in tone of mind. He finds, in fact, in that remark
able and only half appreciated eighteenth century of
ours the first shoots of nearly all our present-day
failings. But, to anyone in touch with these tendencies, to
anyone who has felt the almost sublime forgetful-
ness of self that the Anglo-Saxon will feel when
looking at animals, at flower-filled woods, or even at
old buildings or ancient ceremonials, — any English
man, looking back through his literature will find
himself stirred by echoes of the things that now stir
him. He will feel that curious and indefinable flutter
of sentimentalism in reading the balladists, in Herrick,
in Shakespeare, in Chaucer, or right back in Orme,
who wrote a Bestiary in the twelfth century.
And, indeed, I am inclined to see that these things
are inherent to the British Isles ; that, born of the
climate, the soil, and the creatures of the earth, they
have arisen sooner or later in each of the races which
have come to be dominant in these islands of con
tinually changing masters.
One theory is, of course, little better than another ;
but for me, my private and particular image of the
course of English history in these matters is one of
waving lines. I see tendencies rise to the surface of
the people, I see them fall again and rise again. The
particular love for beasts, flowers, and even for old
14

THE PEOPLE FROM THE OUTSIDE
buildings that the German calls in the Englishman
sentimentality, appears to me to be part of an
anthropomorphism, that has always been particularly
characteristic, at sufficiently separated intervals, of
the English inhabitant.
If the Englishman to-day loves animals it is because
he sees, to some extent, in every beast a little replica
of himself. Other peoples may see in a field-mouse a
scientific phenomenon, or in a horse an implement
meant to be used. But the Englishman sees in the
little creature with beady eyes a tiny replica of him
self ; he " subjectivises " the field-mouse ; he imagines
himself tiny, filled with fears, confronted by a giant.
In flowers even, to some extent, he sees symbols of
his own, or his womenfolk's, chastity, boldness, and en
durance, and in old buildings he recognises a quality
of faithfulness, old service, and stability that he him
self aspires to possess. On this account the modem
Englishman feels towards these things very definite
and quite real affections.
Of all this we are sensible in English expressions
of thought as they crop up down the ages. Robert
Burns "subjectivised " precisely field - mice and
daisies. Herrick wrote " To Daffodils " and " To
Meadows," attributing to them a share of his own
feelings. Shakespeare wrote of the deer what I
have quoted, and he wrote :
" The moon, methinks, looks with a watery eye,
And when she weeps, weeps every little flower
Lamenting an enforced chastity,"

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
And a similar anthropomorphism may be found,
peering up, like the crests of waves at various periods
right back into the days of Beowulf and the early
Anglo-Saxon poets.
I am far indeed from saying that no other poets
than the English ever loved nature. The German
minnesingers came as near the spirit of ecstatic
delight in a life out of doors as did even Chaucer or
the man who wrote " As you Like It." But in essence,
although Walther von der Vogelweide could write
such a ballad as Tandaradei, even the minnesingers
treated of nature as a collection of things that they
observed — as phenomena in fact, not as part of
themselves. If the effect of a green world is con
veyed, the spirit which is supposed to inhabit leaves,
fowls and fishes is a different one. And, roughly
speaking, even this measure of delight in nature
seems to have deserted the spirit of the other Ger
manic peoples with the minnesingers' disappear
ance. Nothing indeed is more interesting than to
travel across a really typical English countryside
in spring, with really typical German and really
typical English companions. The shorn woodlands
are decked with improbable bouquets of primroses ; in
the fields amongst the young lambs the daffodils
shake in the young winds ; along the moist roadsides,
beneath the quicken hedges, there -will be a dia
phanous shimmer of cuckoo-flowers. And, as the
coach rolls along there will be fi-om the English little
outcries of delight. They cast off even their man-
16

THE PEOPLE FROM THE OUTSIDE
ners : they say : " Oh, look ! " The Germans in the
meantime stiffen a little with astonishment, a little
with contempt. For the Englishmen a thousand
words are singing in their ears. They are in the
presence of things that really matter : in presence of
some of the few things in which it is really legitimate
to be sensuously and entirely delighted. All the
warrants of all their poets are on their side. Words,
words, words, tingle in their ears. All sorts of
phrases — from the Bible, from Shakespeare, from
Wordsworth, from Herrick — " The flowers appear on
the earth ; the time of the singing of birds is come " ;
" They flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of
solitude" ; " When lady smocks all silver white do tint
the meadows with delight." A thousand quotations —
and the Englishman is the man in the world who
knows his poets, the man of this world who is com
pact of quotations — a thousand quotations are implied
in his " Oh, look ! " The Germans in the meanwhile
sit a little stolid, a little sardonic, a little uncomfort
able even, as I myself have felt when I have driven
with Germans along a broad chaussde and they have
burst into some folk-song. For the German has not
any German quotations behind him ; he hardly knows
the German for daffodil, since the daffodil in German
is confounded with all the other narcissi: he only
knows that he is confronted with a foreign manifes
tation : with a manifestation of that Natur-Schwaer-
m^rei which to a German is as odd and conflising a
thing as to an Englishman is the Teutonic habit of
17 C

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
bursting into part-songs, or the Latin foolishness of
male embraces.
The Latins themselves face this particular English
emotionalism with a different complexion. If they
have not the English quotations to help them they
have not the German's self-consciousness to hinder
them. Emotional themselves, they are pleased to
witness emotions, they are even anxious to under
stand the nature of this new emotional resource, since
here is perhaps a new emotion in which they them
selves may revel — so that I have myself had my own
quotation caught up and repeated by a gentleman of
Latin origin. He eyed my daffodils — they grew in a
green bank given over to poultry, and had in con
sequence been fenced round with wire netting for
protection — he eyed my daffodils with some non-
comprehension, and then, catching my words, echoed
quite enthusiastically :
" Oh ! yes ; yes  that come ' before the swal
low dares, and take the winds of March with
beauty.' "
We may, indeed, take it that the English and the
German are akin in their respect for authority. If it
were possible to imagine a German scientific pro
nouncement in favour of daffodils, considered, say,
from a military or a commercial point, of view — if it
were theoretically possible to imagine so improbable
a thing — ^we might well see the German, too, burst
out enthusiastically over the grey-green clumps with
their golden, dancing fountains of flowers. But,
i8

THE PEOPLE FROM THE OUTSIDE
whilst the German calls out for an authoritative or a
scientific pronouncement, the Englishman craves a
weighty phrase, a Biblical line, a something suited
for " treatment " in the noble blank verse of his
romantic and singular, poetic dialect. For the
Englishman is very wonderfully under the domina
tion of the " mighty line." The German might
quite conceivably rhapsodise over a factory chimney :
the Englishman will never see its wonderful poetic
value until some poet has died after having put
factory life into a new epic glorious in sound. That
day may, however, never come — for who, nowadays,
can hope really to compete with the English Bible,
or the lyrics of Suckling .? — and until something can
be "quoted" in favour of the factory chimney, it is
likely that the factory chimney will remain despised
or openheartedly ignored. The subjection of the
Englishman to the spoken word is indeed very
remarkable. The German, speaking of an opponent,
will use language very terrible; but once he comes
to action his deeds will fall short, upon the whole, on
the side of humanity. The Frenchman, on the other
hand, adjusts his actions to his threats with some
nicety. With the Englishman his deeds are apt to
be more weighty than his words. Thus, I remember
lying, on a hot and sultry day, upon a beach beside
three very excellent and humane City merchants.
The sea lapped the strand, the sky was very blue, and
one of them (it was during the South African war)
read out from his paper the announcement that the
19 C 2

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
Boer women were arriving to fight beside their
husbands. The second commented, almost beneath
his breath, as if it were a dismal and obscene secret :
" Oh ! well ; if they do that we shall have to shoot
back at them."
The third said :
" Oh ! yes ; we shall have to treat them like the
men : but we mustn't say so I " And all three
agreed that we must not say so.
I return to the subject of the late war because it is
the last evidence that we have of any really public
ferocity latent in the English people. During that
rather disagreeable period I made one or two
speeches in the interests neither of Boer nor of
Englishman, but of the African natives. To them
it seemed to me — and it still seems so — the Afi-ican
continent belongs. I received on that account a
certain amount of mishandling from either party.
By the pro-Boers I was contemptuously silenced
as an impracticable sentimentalist ; by the Im
perialists my clothes were torn. I witnessed, too,
on the occasion of the Queen's Hall pro-Boer
meeting, a certain amount of mob violence. The
attitude of the crowd appeared, upon the whole, to
be expressed somewhat as follows : — " Here are a
lot of foreigners conspiring in our very midst to do
something against our Queen and country. Here
are policemen protecting them. It's a very
mysterious business. Let's knock down any person
in a soft hat." And they did so.
20

THE PEOPLE FROM THE OUTSIDE
But it must be remembered that here were people
acting in a great crowd, and it must be remembered
that great crowds are liable to contagious madnesses.
And, indeed, abroad, where I passed for an English
man, I witnessed and suffered from more ferocity
during that period than I did in England, where I
passed for a pro-Boer. And upon the whole, lament
able as the patriotic excesses of crowds during that
time appear nowadays to every Englishman, I am
inclined to think that, by comparison with the actions
of foreign crowds during similar periods, the English
crowd may be called singularly lacking in ferocity.
I am anxious to guard myself from appearing to
write with too great a complacency of a nationality
that is more or less my own ; therefore I use the
words " lacking in ferocity " after having pondered
over them for some time. For, from one very tenable
point of view, ferocity is an attribute very proper to
a crowd, since in a crowd all the human attributes,
whether of humanity or of cruelty, are wrought up to
their highest expression. A crowd ought to express
itself by means of excesses ; it turns its thumbs either
up or down ; it does not stay to reflect. Therefore
we may say that a crowd of only moderate ferocity
must be made up of individuals each of whom is
relatively emasculated.
I am inclined therefore to think that the idea of a
resort to physical violence in any extreme whatever
has almost died out of the English race in the large.
For, supposing that the British peoples really did
21

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
believe in the justice of their cause, the pro-Boers,
the foreign, uncouth, un-English traitors to the nation,
ought, in the general scale of these things, to have
been visited with extreme punishment. Yet I hardly
think that one organ of opinion seriously proposed
that even Colonel Lynch — who was actually and in
sober earnest a traitor — that even this notable rebel
should be put to death. It is true that a number of
British traitors, taken with arms in their hands
amongst the Boer prisoners, were summarily shot in
South Africa. But these episodes passed almost in
secret : I imagine that the fact is hardly known even
now to the majority of Englishmen ; and I imagine
that even during the war hardly a single Englishman
would in cold blood have sanctioned those military
executions. Upon the whole, then, I should be inclined to repeat
that ferocity may have passed away from the spirit
of the people. We cannot, I should say, any longer
seriously imagine the British people condemning its
ruler to death : we cannot well picture it clamouring
for the death of an unpopular Minister of the Crown.
We cannot imagine these things in England, whereas
in almost every continental nation some sort of
physical violence is a quite conceivable resort in
political differences, either on the part of peoples or
of rulers. Of rulers on the Continent almost with
out exception, it is to be said that they will use
the drawn sword to repress trifling disorders. I
have myself twice seen the sword used in France and
22

THE PEOPLE FROM THE OUTSIDE
once in Germany for the mere clearing of a public
place. Upon to how great an extent lethal weapons
are the instruments of government in Russia it is
hardly necessary to dilate.
It is in fact, for any one really acquainted with the
temper of the English crowd, difficult to imagine it
really violent in action, and it is almost equally diffi
cult to imagine its rulers violent in repression. One
can, of course, never be certain that circumstances
may not to-morrow arise in which over some perfectly
trivial cause blood may be shed in the streets ot
London. But that at least is the "impression" that
is left upon me after much mixing with English
crowds. That a residuum of brutish violence may
remain, in pockets as it were, in crannies of the slums
or in police barracks, no one will care to deny who
has seen London policemen make some arrests, or
who has seen that most disagreeable of all sights, a
South or East London crowd attempting to rescue a
prisoner from the police. Nothing, indeed, can be
more disagreeable to witness than either of these
manifestations of street violence. The kick on the
shins or the hard nudge in the ribs that a tall police
man will give to some wretched loafer seems to be
skilfully and impassively designed to inflict more pain
than almost any human action that one cares to
figure to oneself; whilst the spectacle of the blue figure
with its intent face, hemmed in shoulder high in a
knot, in a drab, straight street, is, in its own particular
way, as hideous and suggestive a nightmare as one
23

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
cares to figure for one's unpleasant imaginings. But
in a sense both these things are excusable. Who gave
the first blow in the miserable struggle that always
wages between the police and the unhappy poor, it is
impossible to determine. The original contest or its
rights and wrongs are hidden in the impenetrable mists
of an unchronicled history. Perhaps it was the first
guardian of the peace who gave the first unnecessary
nudge in the ribs to the first loafer ; or perhaps in the
first built of London courts the first loafer slipped be
neath a glimmering lamp round a corner to bonnet the
first policeman. Be that as it may the obscure blood
feud remains — the blood feud between these lowest
fringes of the public and its controllers. Probably
this, too, will die away. Occasionally, as things are
at present constituted, for some obscure reason, having
its rise in some too virile tradition, a wave of senseless
violence will rise from these depths ; will rise to
be called Hooliganism, or something of the sort.
That the great public will hear of and will fight
with as best it may, till it dies as mysteriously as
it arose. Occasionally, too, some inspector will set
a tradition, a standard, of brutality to the men under
his charge. Of that, as a rule, the great public
will never hear, but the groans that arise fi'om the
crowded and narrow courts will eventually reach the
ears of the higher authorities, and the evil be mitigated
by a removal or a promotion.*
-* I am aware that my remarks upon the police force may be open
to misinterpretation because I have had occasion to dwell upon
24

THE PEOPLE FROM THE OUTSIDE
And indeed these things, regarded from the broad
point of view of national manifestations, matter very
little. For it is just in the organised forces of authority
that traditions of violence must necessarily be longest
preserved ; and it is just to the poorest, least fed, and
worst housed of the community, it is just into the
darkest and deepest crannies of the body politic that
the light of humanitarianism will last penetrate. Even
as one can hardly imagine that the British soldiery
will ever use their lethal weapons against an English
crowd, so one imagines that hardly any English
criminal would nowadays do anj^hing more than say
to an arresting policeman : " Oh, I'll come quietly ! "
One imagines, I mean, that any British Ministry
would give in its demission rather than incur the
responsibility of ordering soldiery to fire into an
English crowd, just as one imagines that almost every
English criminal is sufficiently educated to refrain
from vindictively attempting — without chance of
escape — to mutilate the mere instrument of justice.

brutalities. I may state that in the course of my ordinary vocations
I have five times witnessed acts of what appeared to me unneces
sary violence on the part of policemen. One of these latter I
subsequently questioned, and he assured me that his violence was
not unnecessary, and I believe he was right, I have twice seen
policemen rather seriously mishandled by small crowds, and I
have known rather well at least one quite decent "rough" whose
icUe fixe was to murder a certain member of the T division.
These facts appear to me to constitute a reasonably intelligible
casus belli, a sufficient complement and supplement,
25

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
It would be a silly performance : it would be like
biting the handcuffs,
I have pursued this train of thought with some
tenacity, not because it was accidentally suggested to
me by my friend the German student of literature,
but because it seems to me to be the most important
aspect of English national life. For it must be
remembered that what humanity has most to thank
the English race for is not the foundation of a
vast empire ; the establishment of a tradition of
seamanship ; the leading the way into the realms of
mechanical advance. It is not even for its poets that
England must be thanked ; it is certainly not for its
love of the fine arts or its philosophies. It is for its
evolution of a rule of thumb system by which men
may live together in large masses. It has shown to
all the world how great and teeming populations may
inhabit a small island with a minimum of discomfort,
a minimum of friction, preserving a decent measure of
individual independence of thought and character,
and enjoying a comparatively level standard of
material comfort and sanitary precaution. There
have been empires as great as the British ; there have
perhaps been naval captains as great as Nelson —
though this I am inclined to doubt, since as a private
confession I may set it down that for me Nelson is the
one artist that England has produced. There have
certainly been writers as great as Shakespeare, and
musicians, painters, architects, generals, ironworkers,
chemists, and even possibly mathematicians, galore
26

THE PEOPLE FROM THE OUTSIDE
greater than any that have been produced within our
Seven Seas. A nation each of whose individuals is
apt to be brought to a standstill in any train of
thought by the magic of a "quotation" can hardly
hope to be a nation of artists, since, in the great sense,
the supreme art is the supreme expression of common
sense. But — in the great sense, too — life is a thing
so abounding in contradictions and bewilderments
that a great sense of logic is of little service to a
nation whose main problem is how to live. For that
purpose a mind well stored with quotations is a much
better tool, and the more sounding and the more self-
contradictory those quotations may be the better will
be the tool.
For, upon the whole we may say that a universally
used "quotation" has the weight of a proverb, and if a
proverbial philosophy have little in its favour as an
instrument of intellectual investigation, it is yet a
very excellent aid to bearing with patience the
eccentricities of our neighbours, the trials of the
weather, and the tricks of fate. In dealing with his
neighbour, in fact, the Englishman is singularly apt
to be lacking in that imagination which is insight —
and I can imagine few worse places than England in
which to suffer from any mental distress, since, with
the best will in the world, the Englishman is curiously
unable to deal with individual cases, and every case
of mental distress differs from every other. On the
other hand, there are few better places in which to
suffer from financial or material troubles. These the
27

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
Englishman can deal with, since they are subject, as
a rule, to one or other of his maxims. He will say :
" Bis dat qui cito dat : Heaven loves a cheerful giver;"
or, " Better love can no man show than that he lay
down his life for his fi-iend." And he will do it. But
for mental distress he has only : " Therein the patient
must ministerto himself; " or that most soul-wounding
of all maxims : " There are hundreds worse off than
you, my friend ! "
In a sort of mathematical progression this almost
ferocious lack of imagination has made, in the
English race, for an almost imaginative lack of
ferocity. You may set down the formula as this : —
i. I do not enquire into my neighbour's psychology ;
ii. I do not know my neighbour's opinions ; iii. I
give him credit for having much such opinions as
my own; iv. I tolerate myself; v. I tolerate him.
And so, in these fortunate islands we all live very
comfortably together.

28

THE ROAD TO THE WEST.

CHAPTER II.
THE ROAD TO THE WEST.
ENGLAND, almost more than any other, is the
land that has been ruled by foreigners, yet the
Englishman, almost more than any other man,
will resent or will ignore the fact that his country has
ever been subjected. Confronted with this proposition,
he will at once produce his quotation from Shake
speare : " This England never did nor never shall
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror , , ,"
And he will believe it ; and in the fact, and in its
being ignored, may be found the true sources of English
greatness. Almost every continental race — and at
least one Asiatic race — can take a kindly interest in
English territory, because almost every continental
race of importance can say : " At one time we
conquered England." French, Latin, German, Dutch,
Scot, Welshman — all can say it. Even the Spaniards
can say, " Once a King of Spain was King of England."
But if you put these facts to an Englishman, he may
confess to their truth in the letter. Nevertheless, he
31

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
will say that, in the spirit, these allegations are untrue,
unfair, un-English, in short ; and " the letter," he 'will
quote, "killeth." Approaching the matter more
nearly he will say : " All these fellows are ' ourselves.'
We, being English, have swallowed them up. We
have digested them. It is, as it were, true that they
conquered us ; but they conquered us not because
they were foreigners, but because they were pre
destined to become Englishmen." The facts concern
ing the component factors of the Englishman's
greatness are so bizarre and so varied, that only that
one generalisation can embrace them all. Thus the
greatest of all Englishmen was of Danish extraction :
the most singular, the most popular and most diversely
gifted — the most appealing of all England's real rulers
during the nineteenth century was a Jew. These facts
are such truisms that it seems hardly pertinent to
bring them into a serious page; the Englishman
blinks them with his formula, " All these fellows are
ourselves." Yet these facts ar§ so important to a
comprehension of the Spirit of this People, of its
greatnesses and its weaknesses, that no knot in a
handkerchief could ever be sufficiently large to keep
them in our memories. It is not merely for the
achievements of those men, important though they
were, that these facts should be remembered in this
conjunction. It is for the hold that Nelson and
Disraeli had over the popular imagination. And
it is part of the same train of thought that brings
one to the consideration of the reverse of the medal.

THE ROAD TO THE WEST
For, if the attraction of a foreign figure is really
enormous for the Englishman, the attraction of
England and the English spirit for the foreigner
is almost as startling. Once he becomes, by means
of papers, a British subject, your Chinaman, Russian,
or Portuguese is, more than any Englishman, ready
and anxious to asseverate, " I am an Englishman."
I have seldom been more embarrassed than when
travelling in foreign countries with such persons ;
their unwillingness to conform to continental habits ;
their recalcitrance in the face of ticket collectors,
waiters, guides to monuments, and all the other
constituted authorities is singular and troublesome ;
and, in the other department of life, I can imagine
few agonies of injured innocence quite equal to that
of a boy of foreign extraction at an English school.
At times he will get called " Frenchy " or " dirty
German." This will not happen very often, perhaps,
because the English boy, like the English man, is
ready to accept for his particular small republic the
services of all and sundry. I remember being at
school with an African prince, -who was a fast bowler
of formidable efficiency. With enormous arms and
the delivery of a windmill he sent down a ball that,
to myself usually keeping the wickets, was for the
five minutes or so of an over a thing to be almost
deprecated. It was power for our side, but embarrass
ing for myself.
In the last match that he played in he took seven
of the wickets for thirty-two runs, and in the second
33 »

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
innings six for twenty. Our victory was signal. But
I never forgot the injured innocence of our side when
we were faced with the remonstrance that it was not
sporting to have the aid of a " foreigner." I remember
very well saying : " He's been to our school. It isn't
even as if he were a Frenchy or a Dutchman."
The singularity of my own racial position brought
me at that moment to a standstill. But the rest of
my team took up the parable for me. We felt
intensely English. There was our sunshine, our
" whites," our golden wickets, our green turf. And
¦we felt, too, that Stuart, the pure-blooded Dahomeyan,
with the dark tan shining upon his massive and
muscular chest, was as English as our pink-and-white
or sun-browned cheeks could make us. It may have
been this feeling only, a spirit of loyalty to one of
our team. But I think it was deeper than this. It
was a part of the teachings engendered in us by the
teachings of the history of the British Islands : it was
a part of the very spirit of the people. We could not
put it more articulately into words than, " He's been
to our school." But I am almost certain that we felt
that that training, that contact with our traditions,
was suflficient to turn any child of the sun into a very
excellent Englishman. In our history, as we had
confi-onted its spirit, a touch of English soil was
sufficient to do as much for William the Norman,
who, though we call him a Conqueror, seems to most
English boys eminently more English than the Anglo-
Saxon who was weak enough to get shot in the eye.
34

THE ROAD TO THE WEST
Similarly, for the English boy, the French Planta
genets, the Welsh Tudors, the Scotch Stuarts, the
Hanoverian Guelphs, and even Dutch William — all
these kings became "English" the moment they
ruled in England. I know very well that that was the
"impression" that the study of English history left
upon the mind of the English boy of my date.
Looking back upon the remarkable process now, it
is a little difficult for me to reconstitute the gradual
development of this singular, but none the less
veracious. Historic Spirit. When I read the erudite
and almost puzzling "Child's History of England"
that one of my own daughters reads for her private
delectation, I am apt to be a little puzzled to pick up
the string. In this particular work — its circulation is
almost incredible — I see groups of facts, groups of
maps, groups of engravings, but I do not see any
where a trace of the great English Theory. Here
are facts about the conditions of serfs under the great
abbeys ; maps of England under the Angevin kings ;
admirable engravings of rose-nobles; of pre-Re-
formation church ornaments, even of Gothic home
steads. But I do not quite see how my own children,
who by blood are more English than myself, are to
become so violently English as was I myself in
spirit at the age of, let us say, sixteen. That they
will do so, I do not much doubt ; and I do not much
doubt that they will do so along much the same road
as that taken by myself and my comrades.
Our serious impressions of English history began,
35 D2

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
of course, with the Conquest — began, I should imagine
for most of us, with the excellent " Mrs. Markham,"
of which I remember only the name. Without doubt,
before the Conquest there was, for most of us, too,
"Little Arthur," of which I can remember only a
shadowy form of small books in yellow, shiny linep.
covers, that curled backwards in the fingers. " Little
Arthur," I imagine, most of us confused with the
small prince, son of Geoffrey Plantagenet, who died
a pathetic, anecdotal death. "Little Arthur" had
made us dimly acquainted with the fact that there
had been in England, before the dark wall of the
Conquest, some sort of fairy-tale population of the
British Isles. There had been, for instance, a King
Alfred who burned cakes. But he and his contem
poraries were, for us, precisely figures of fairy-tales,
perhaps because his adventure with the cakes forme *
one of those anecdotes that we heard along with the
tales of Giant Blunderbore and the other engrossing
projections of English nursery life. These died away
as soon as we went to " school."
History began with 1066. And the Normans being
the first rulers of England that we heard of became
for us the first Englishmen. That territorial fact did
perhaps have the greatest influence over our minds.
These things took place in England; this was a
history of England ; therefore it was a history of
Englishmen. So the Normans were the first Anglo-
Saxons we became acquainted with. They were the
first to be successful : to conquer against great odds
36

THE ROAD TO THE WEST
— they were the first to show the true genius of the
race. (I fancy that that remains the " note " of adult
England of the present day. I put the question to a
very typical Englishman with whom I entered into
conversation yesterday during a prolonged railway
journey. He said: "Well, of course, the Anglo-
Saxons were a sort of German, weren't they.?")
And, indeed, when later we came at school to learn
that there were English before 1066, we really did
regard these Anglo-Saxons as a sort of German — not
a modern, efficient, Prussianised German, but a pale,
disorganised, ineffectual population. They were
always being harried by the Danes ; they had not
really " settled " the Danes' war when, just before
the battle of Hastings, Harold defeated Harold
Harfager at Stamford Bridge. And I fancy that
most of us regarded the Romans as being infinitely
more "English" than the Britons, in spite of
Cassivellaunus and Boadicea, who being a woman did
not really count. For, after all, Caesar did the sort
of thing that every English boy imagines himself
doing. The really tragic incident of my youngest days
was a Homeric battle which I fought on a piece of
waste ground. It was really tragic because it made
me acquainted with the fact that, even in England,
fate was unjust: fate was on the side of the big
battalions. There was at my small school a red-
haired, hard-headed Irish boy called R — , with a
freckled nose. We had been learning history: we
37

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
heard how Julius Caesar had invaded Britain. The
snow lay on the ground. So that when playtime
came we divided into two sections, the less fortunate
boys being the Britons. (There was, after all, some
thing un-English about these Britons : perhaps that
is why, though few Englishmen resent being called
Britishers by their cousins across the water, every
Englishman dislikes being lumped, along with Scots,
Irish, Welsh, and the inhabitants of the town of
Berwick-on-Tweed, as "British." For the British
were beaten, the English never have been.) Now
R — insisted that I should be Caractacus : I was
equally determined to be Caesar. We fought : I was
beaten — and I was Caractacus. So far so good.
But the battle continued for three whole months. At
the end of that time I beat R — . It was then my
turn to be Caesar. But alas ! R — called in to his aid
his brother — his big brother from another school.
I fought him on that waste ground. I feel to
this day the passionate distention of my chest ; and
to this day, at moments of stress, when fate has
played me some evil trick, my eyes wander round
upon the passionless and inscrutable surfaces of the
material world, and I feel the hot rage that then I
felt to be lurking at the backs of grim and unfinished
houses. I stood up, I was knocked down : I stood
up, I was knocked down. I lay in bed for a whole
week afterwards. It was not because of my injuries,
but because of my passionate rebellion against fate.
For I was doomed to remain a Briton, as it seemed,
38

THE ROAD TO THE WEST
to the end of my days. That at least was the
promise — the dreadful oath — extracted fi-om me by
the big brother of R — , an Irishman, a Celt, descen
dant, no doubt, of Caractacus ; but one who aspired
to be, for the remainder of his days, a Roman.
I had not fought for so long because I expected to
win by mere force : I was not rebellious against fate
because the boy who slogged into my poor chest and
poor jaws was so much bigger. Being English one
expects to fight against odds. But, being English
too, one expects Providence to intervene for one.
Providence, after all, always ought to intervene for
the English. And, gazing round upon that black
and desolate waste ground, I had, I know, been
expecting in some sort of dim way that night, or
Blucher, or Minerva, or an earthquake — one of the
miraculous aids by which Providence manifests itself,
one of the providential assistants that an English
man has a right to expect — that something would
come to the aid of me, an Englishman who had not
more than a few drops of really English blood in my
veins 
Our more protracted studies of history may per
haps a little have blurred the figures of our mental
puppet plays. But the principle remained undimmed
in its radiant effiilgence. The Jews remained
Englishmen: was not Jehovah for them? Did they
not smite Egyptians, Ass3^ans, Philistines — all the
Gentiles who were really French or Germans ? The
Conqueror remained English too — and the Normans.
39

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
But "Ivanhoe" changed the aspect of the case : we read
it all together with a fiiry of enthusiasm for the
" English " of that book. But somehow the Normans,
Front de Bceuf and the rest, were not the Normans.
The Providence of the Romancer was not on their
side : the mysterious current, the elixir, the fluid, the
guiding light which makes all blows strike home, all
arrows pierce the casque — that was on the side of the
Disinherited Knight and all his followers. They
were the English in spirit. Even Rebecca was
English. And so we went our way through English history.
If we lost the French dominions it was because it
was providentially designed. Joan of Arc beat us
in order that our kings might pay more attention to
domestic matters — and, after all, Joan of Arc, that
splendid, shining and original figure, was, in spirit,
an Englishwoman. And the Stuarts, Dutch William,
and the Hanoverian sovereigns, were they not pre
destined to become English } It is true that they
were born in foreign lands — but that only made the
principle the more singularly demonstrable. Was it
not, too, providential that England lost the North
American colonies when she did r Was not even
Washington an Englishman ? And Lafayette ? I am
sure that each of us boys would have answered each
of these questions with a sparkling and unanimous
"Yes!" And the infiuence of such teaching, of such a
careful and deeply-penetrating system of thought,
40

THE ROAD TO THE WEST
upon the opening minds of a generation — or of how
many generations ? — must have been inestimable and
far-reaching beyond conception. Personally I look at
the world with different eyes nowadays — but at the
back of those eyes the old feeling remains. Still for
me William, who landed at Pevensey in the year of
our Lord 1066, was the first Englishman to touch
British soil since Julius Caesar's day. And still, for
me, the loss of the North American colonies is the
crowning mercy. No doubt, too, for the vast
majority of those who were at school in my days — for
the great majority of the English people — the history
of these islands presents itself in that light still. To
what extent the modern, comparatively scientific
breath of thought that has crept over England since
the days of Darwin may have modified these pre
conceptions, or may have altered the methods of
approaching the English race problem as it affects
the teaching of history to children, I can hardly tell.
But the other day I travelled along a branch line : in
my carriage were six members of a grammar school
fifteen going to play a proprietary school in a neigh
bouring town. Their frequent reference to one of
their masters as "Chaucer" — (he was the father of
two boys who had written verses in the school
magazine) — led me to question one or two of them.
They were "doing" the Angevin kings for some
examination. And there were all my old beliefs
brought back to me in a flood. It was not so much
the fact that a spectacled boy in a muddy cap told
41

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
me that the possession of French dominions by the
kings of England "exercised a deleterious influence"
upon domestic affairs — so that it was a jolly good job
we lost them.
I asked : " Were not the first Angevin kings
English ? " and got the answer that they jolly well
were. I asked : " Did they become, more or less,
English when French was not their language any
longer } " and I got the answer : They were jolly well
English when they came, they supposed, and they
were jolly well English when they learned to speak
English. Anyhow, the French they spoke was an
English French, not a French French. That was
what you jolly well meant by the French of Stratford-
atte-Bow. As for the subject race — the scientist's
real Anglo-Saxons — ^the people who had been there
before the Angevins, they were English too. They
were all English.
A rather silent boy, who had been cutting his
initials on the door of the carriage, volunteered the
following sentences for the enlightenment of my
excessive dulness : —
" It was like this. You and the lady with you were
in the train at B  . Well : you were third-class
passengers on this silly line. We six got in at
A  . Well : now we're all third-class passengers
together on the rotten line, and I wish we could jolly
well get somewhere where they sell ginger-beer."
The sentence seems to prove that the old spirit has
not died out of the English schoolboy people ; and,
42

THE ROAD TO THE WEST
inasmuch as the people seldom troubles to revise its
schoolboy judgments once it has passed adolescence,
it may be taken for granted that that spirit remains
to most of the people at the present day. It seems to
me, that sentence, to sum up very admirably the
attitude of our population towards itself. It is not —
the whole of Anglo-Saxondom — a matter of race but
one, quite simply, of place — of place and of spirit,
the spirit being born of the environment. We are
not Teutons ; we are not Latins ; we are not Celts or
Anglo-Saxons in the sense of being descendants of
Jutes or Angles. We are all passengers together,
carving or not carving our initials on the doors of our
carriage, and we all vaguely hope as a nation to jolly
well get somewhere. How we look at our line,
whether we style it a rotten line or a good one,
depends very much upon the immediate state of our
national self-consciousness. But, in a dim way too,
we do hope that we shall jolly well get somewhere
where they sell ginger-beer.
Iam inclined to doubt that the Englishman — whether
we consider him nationally or in that sort of composite
photograph that for us is the typical individual — to
doubt that the Englishman, as far as these matters
are concerned, ever gets much beyond the schoolboy's
point of view. I have used already the word anthro
pomorphic in regard to the Englishman's attitude
towards the brute creation ; I am inclined to repeat it
in regard to his way of looking at other races. He
regards himself as the one proper man, but, possessed
43

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
of a sense of modesty, he cannot rule all the other races
out of the human category. An ordinary foreigner
is, of course, hardly a man ; but as soon as a people
does something fine, the Englishman is inclined to
hold out to it the hand of kinship. I am sure, for
instance, that the English of the middle nineteenth
century regarded Garibaldi as an Englishman.
At the risk of being thought paradoxical, I will
venture to say that this attitude of the Englishman
is not only philosophically true, but is even histori
cally correct, for in the case of a people so mixed in
its origins as is the race inhabiting the most fertile,
the most opulent, and the most pleasant parts of
these islands — in the case of a people descended from
Romans, from Britons, from Anglo-Saxons, from
Danes, from Normans, from Poitevins, from Scotch,
from Huguenots, from Irish, from Gaels, from modern
Germans, and from Jews, a people so mixed that there
is in it hardly a man who can point to seven genera
tions of purely English blood, it is almost absurd to use
the almost obsolescent word " race." These fellows are
all ourselves to such an extent that in almost every
English family, by some trick of atavism, one son will
be dark, broad-headed, and small, another blonde,
and huge in all his members ; one daughter will be
small and dark, with ruddy glints in her hair when
the sun shines, with taking "ways," and another
indeed a daughter of the gods, tall and divinely fair.
There is possibly a west of London population of
these giants, but there is also an east of London
44

THE ROAD TO THE WEST
population — (let us at least say so for the sake of
argument, in order to frame some sort of theory with
which we may agree or from which we may differ) ;
there is an east of London population which is small,
dark, vigorous and gentle. In the natural course
of things this eastern population will rise in the scale,
will cross London, will besiege the palaces, will sit in
the chairs and will attain to the very frames of mind of
these tranquil giants. We cannot nowadays say of
what race are either the giants or the small dark men,
still less will the sociologist of the future be able to
pronounce upon the origins of that mixed dominant
race that shall be. The Englishman is then uttering
a philosophical truism, a historical platitude, when he
says his " All these fellows are ourselves ; " and he is
uttering other platitudes and truisms when he says
that Joshua the son of Nun, or Garibaldi, were
Englishmen. For what he means, more precisely
stated, is that circumstances, environment, the hand
of destiny if you will, have given him a share of the
spirit of those apparently unrelated and irreconcilable
peoples. For if there be no Anglo-Saxon race, there
is in the population of these islands a certain spirit, a
spirit of human fallibility, of optimism, of humanity,
of self- deception, a spirit of a thousand finenesses,
of a thousand energies, of some meannesses, and of
many wrong-headednesses — a spirit which 1 am very
willing to call English, but which I am more than
loth to style Anglo-Saxon.
So many things have gone to these makings — the
45

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
fertility of the land, the pleasantness of the climate,
the richness of its minerals, the spirit of security
given to it by its encircling seas. For invaders of
England have seemed to see in the land not only
communities that they may sack, but a stronghold in
which they may maintain themselves, their goods, and
their sovereignties. And this dream of theirs seeins,
indeed, well warranted, since the Norman invaders
held England but lost Normandy, the Angevins held
England but lost Anjou, and even the Hanoverian
Guelphs hold England still whilst Hanover has been
wrested from their house by a formidable and pre
datory race. But it seems to me that almost more its
position than its desirability has made England
what it is. If in the eyes of the Englishman England
be a home, in the eyes of the whole world England is
almost more, a goodly inn, a harbourage upon a
westward road. Just as you will find upon one of
the shores from which birds of passage take their
flight advanced islets, rocks, or shingle-banks, where
for the moment swallows and finches will rest in
their thousands, so you may see England a little
island lying off the mainland. And upon it the
hordes of European mankind have rested during their
secular flights westward in search of the Islands of
the Blest. If they have succeeded only in founding
a " race " more mingled, more ungraspable, a race
that is a sort of pluperfect English race, a race to
whom no doubt the future belongs ; if, instead of finding
a classical ideal, they have only founded a very modem
46

THE ROAD TO THE WEST
and very inscrutable problem, that fact must be re
garded rather as a comment upon the proneness of
humanity to fall short of its ideals than as a refutation
of the convenient image that England is a road, a
means to an end, not an end in itself.
For it is, I think, a fact that even the most
hardened Anglo-morphist, the English schoolboy
with the very largest race appetite, will not dare to
regard the American people as in any sense English.
The great northern half-continent cannot, even by a
vast figure of speech, be regarded as a morsel too
large to chew. It is simply a sphere so great that
the most distended jaw cannot begin to bite upon it.
Whatever we may think that Napoleon Buonaparte
ought to have been, we do not even commence to
imagine that General Grant was an Englishman.
Perhaps Stonewall Jackson may have been.
The American in his turn well returns that com
pliment. There is no American Historic Theory to
make the Duke of Wellington appear to be a
" Yankee." I doubt whether, much though American
histories belaud him. Governor Spottiswoode can be
regarded as an American. For, upon the whole, the
spirit of the American Historic Theory is as exclusive
as is that breathed in our island schools. But a
certain parallel between these theories is observable.
Thus, on the east of the Anglo-Saxon ocean history
begins suddenly at 1066 : on the west it begins with
the shots fired at Bunker's Hill. On the east, before
the da'wn there was a night in which there moved pale
47

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
Anglo-Saxons : on the west there was a crepuscular
period in which there lived the colonists. And just as,
before the Anglo-Saxons there had been the Romans
who were really English, so before the colonial days
there had been a truly American race — the Pilgrim
Fathers. But there, upon the whole, the parallel
ceases. For the English, having a distinguished history of
their own, find it most agreeable to regard the history
of the United States as a thing practically non-existent.
The Englishman will tell you that he never really had
much to do with " America " ; the American, on the
other hand, will tell you that he flogged the English
man. On the one hand, the United States have a singular
kinship with England of the Spirit. Its peaceful
invaders, coming in their millions to seek castles in
Spain, become almost more violently American than
naturalised English become English ; but, on the
other hand, they do not seem to acquire, once they
are fused into the body of the people, the English
faculty of considering themselves one with foreign
nations. Upon the whole, the American is insular
"all through": the Englishman is insular only in
regard to his clothes, his eatables, and his furniture.
There is, of course, an excellent reason for this : the
English people is very well aware that it is, along its
own lines, as nearly perfect as a people can be ; I
mean that it breeds true to type. Thus there is, in
a corner of Kent and Sussex, a certain stretch of
48

THE ROAD TO THE WEST
marsh-land. Here all the sheep are Kent sheep ;
good, heavy, serviceable, not very fine- bred animals.
Now, if you introduce upon this stretch of territory
sheep of other breeds — Southdowns, Wensleydales,
Blackfaces, or what you -will — you may be certain that,
as the years go on, in a few generations the progeny
of these sheep will so assimilate themselves to the
Kent sheep, that they will become Kent sheep. Thus
the problem before the Kent and Sussex breeder is
not to keep his flocks pure, but rather to attempt to
modify them by the introduction of foreign blood.
Speaking psychologically, that problem is before
the English people. It does not need, in its own
view, to trouble its head to keep the race pure. The
climate, the tradition, the school, will do that. The
children of any Wallachian will become as English as
the children of any Lincolnshire farmer, so that, at
times, an uneasy wave passes across the English
people. A few years ago, for instance, the whole
country was crying out for the Prussianisation of our
schools, our armies, our laboratories, because "we
are a nation of amateurs." But the problem before
the United States, the problem present always in the
consciousness of the American nation, is precisely
that of producing a pure type. Without any secular
traditions, without any homogeneity of climate, of
soil, or of occupation, the American has not yet been
able to strike any national average. Upon the whole,
the Englishman of to-day is very much akin to the
Englishman of early Victorian days; but the
49 E

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
American, Consule Roosevelt, is almost a different
animal from the American who sought, say, to
impeach President Johnson ; and certainly the
American of to-day is unrecognisable as a descendant
of those who were caricatured by Charles Dickens.
We seem to arrive here at two contradictory facts.
It would appear that, on the one hand, the island
upon the west of Europe existed solely as a half-way
house towards the western continent. Yet, in face of
this, it breeds, this island, a population whose sons
come singularly true to type. But, contradictory
as these facts may seem, it will appear, as soon
as they are examined closely, that they are facts
belonging to two different planes of thought — that,
as it were, to say that the ball is round does not
contradict the statement that the ball is white. And
these seeming contradictions may be drawn in a
hundred different and startling ways. Thus nowhere
in the world, so much as in England, do you find the
spirit of the home of ancient peace ; nowhere in the
occidental world will you find turf that so invites you
to lie down and muse, sunshine so mellow and
innocuous, shade so deep or rooks so tranquil in
their voices. You will find nowhere a m-ise-en-scene
so suggestive of the ancient and the enduring as in
an English rose-garden, walled in and stone pathed,
if it be not in an English cathedral close. Yet these
very permanent manifestations of restfiilness were
founded by the restless units of European races, and
these English rose-gardens and cathedral closes breed
50

THE ROAD TO THE WEST
a race whose mission is, after all, to be the eternal
frontiersmen of the world.
These paradoxes reconcile themselves immediately
at the touch of one simile or another. We may, that
is to say, reconcile ourselves to the dictum of the
Chinese Commission that lately visited our shores:
they stated that we had grown too slumbrous, too
slow, too conservative, to be safely imitated by a
renascent Oriental Empire. But, if we put it that
these rose-gardens and cathedral closes are, as it
were, the manifestations of the pleasantness and
fulness that attend the digestion of a very sufficient
meal, these dark places become plain. Assuredly,
the various individuals who took these great dinners
had huge appetites — and, equally assuredly, those
huge appetites will remain to their descendants once
the phase of digestion is over. The English nation,
that is to say, cannot have been made up of all the
" bad eggs " of Europe since the dark ages without
retaining the bad-egg tendency in a degree more
marked than is observable in any continental nation.
For, philosophically regarded, that is one of the
two great lessons of English history. Like the
Romans, the English are not a race : they are the
populations descended from the rogues of a Sanctuary
— of a Sanctuary that arose not so much because it
was holy, as because it was safe or because it was
conquerable. All through the ages it has attracted
precisely the restless, the adventurous, or the out
cast. The outcast were precisely those who did not
51 E 2

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
get on well with their folk at home ; the adventurous
were those who were not satisfied with the chances
offered to them at home ; the restless were the men who
could never settle down. The descendants of these
last have, perhaps many of them, passed already
ftirther west. They may be the eternally unquiet
gold-diggers of South America, the beach-combers
of the South Seas, the hoboes of the United States,
the Jameson raiders, or the mere casuals of our work
houses. But the children of the adventurous and the
outcast remain with us : they are you, I, and our
friends — young Carruthers, the parson's son, who was
no good at home and died, shot through the head,
at Krugersdorp ; or our other friend, Murray, who
suddenly threw up his good post of land-steward to
go out, heaven knows why ! to Argentina. He will,
they say now, die dictator of the whole South American
Pacific railway system.
If we go impressionistically through the history of
South Britain, we see how true, impressionistically
speaking still, is this particular view. We might
almost stretch the theory fiirther, and say that
England is the direct product of successive periods
of unrest in the continental peoples. For want of a
better terminology we may adopt the language of
the Race Theorist, and say that we know practically
nothing of the aboriginal inhabitants of Britain. We
cannot nowadays trace in England any type corre
sponding to the Digger Indians of North America —
corresponding to those unfortunate cave-dwelling,
52

THE ROAD TO THE WEST
mud-eating beings who are said to have been driven
into their holes and fastnesses by the triumphant
Iroquois or their rival races. Interested observers —
observers, that is, who are interested in race
theories — will, however, tell you that in various parts
of England, most notably in Wiltshire around Stone
henge, they find a dark -haired, dark-eyelashed,
mysterious, romantic child, who, in their view, repre
sents the new outcropping of a never extinct, aboriginal
race. Now, they say, that at last the English race
has become an admixture, comparatively stable, of
the continentals, the aboriginal, non-continental race
is about to assert its permanence ; it will gradually
increase by force of atavism until it have swallowed
up all us descendants of blonde, red, dark or tawny
peoples. But that is still very much stuff of dreams
and visions ; even yet we cannot say what visaged
children of men made the great escarpments on the
side of Whitesheet Hill. We cannot say what
manner of men were our aborigines whom, by so
many relays, we have displaced.
Even the original displacers, Gauls, Gaels, Goidels,
Celts, or what you will, are legendary to us ; we know
neither whence they came, nor whither really they
wended. In a vague way we know that a horde of
barbarians, dominated more or less by a myth styled
" Brennus," issued, innumerable, wild, and desolating,
from the gloomy forests of Central Europe. They
sacked, doubtless, Rome ; they passed perhaps into
Spain; it is said that they overran Hellas and
53

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
despoiled the temple of the Pythic oracle. They
found a home, permanent enough, in the very east of
the mainland, and other homes, permanent enough,
in the western parts of our islands. But across
England they were fated to go, if with delaying
footsteps. They found, in fact, no home, but an
hotel ; and though we cannot any more tell what
particular kind of unrest it was that drove them
forth from their hiding-place, we may be very certain
that it was some kind of psychological or material
pressure that forced out from the Central European
forests these, the adventurous, the outcast, or the
restless of an immense people. It was, again, a
national unrest that sent hither the first Caesar and
his troops. They in their day were the troublesome
populations of a Rome that was in a state of fer
ment, constitutional and psychological. It is well
not to drive a theory too far, so that we may
refrain from taking the view that the governors that
Rome sent to Britain during the stable Imperial era
were men of unrest whom the Emperors wished to
send to the ends of the earth. Indeed, we might well
draw a contrary moral from the story of the Roman
occupancy of these islands, , for it was perhaps
precisely because the Romans who held Britain
were more or less conscripted soldiers, that the
Roman period of dominance left so little trace upon
the English peoples. But it remains a fact, observ
able enough to-day, that a colony administered by
men who are sent, has very little chance of per-
54

THE ROAD TO THE WEST
manence in comparison with one founded by men
who choose to go. In that fact we may perhaps see
the secret of the British Empire : it is certainly the
secret of "England."
The Angles, in turn, were men of unrest and of
adventure ; the Danes, who harried them, were even
so, and the Northmen, who finally conquered them,
were the offscourings, the adventurous overmen of
those very Scandinavians whose unrest had peopled
the northern parts of France. And, roughly speaking,
we may say as much of the Angevins, and the Stuarts
with their hordes of Scots. It is, of course, less true
of the Dutch that came with William IIL, or of the
Hanoverian kings.
The tide of armed invasion did actually stop with
the Angevins, and by the time of Shakespeare,
England might well, to a poetic imagination, present
the appearance of an island whose foot spurns
back the ocean's rolling tide that coops from other
lands her islanders. At that date England had
very victoriously passed through a phase of alarums
and excursions ; she might well boast of being
throned inviolable in the west ; she had survived all
the projects for invasion of the reign of Henry VIII.,
projects founded in all Europe during fifty years, to
culminate in the crowning defeat of the Armada. But
that very period of the Elizabethans was in itself a time
of Continental unrest that brought to English shores
a new tide of invasion; it brought to us all those
bad eggs who, beginning with the Anabaptists from
55

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
Miinster — the city from which my friend, the Professor
of Literature, surveyed our race — culminated with
the Huguenots, who have meant so much for
England. England, indeed, that seemed so stable a nest to
the past of the race, was already beginning to assume
more definitely the aspect of a hospice on the long
road to a western Atalantis. And it is significant
that, a few years after the writing of the phrase
" coops from other lands her islanders," England
herself, approaching a period of unrest, exported to
the other shores of the Sea of the British Empire,
her first shiploads of " bad eggs." For it was not a
generation before the Pilgrim Fathers set sail.
From that time onwards England assumed more or
less definitely her character of a road to the ultimate
west. Thus, in any history of the United States, we
may read that such and such a State was founded by
the restless people of France, who, having tried
Flanders for a home, tried England, and finding no
home in England, sailed westward.

56

THE MELTING POT.

CHAPTER III.
THE MELTING POT.
IN my two previous chapters I have drawn atten
tion to two facts — or, let me put it more exactly,
to two aspects that most have struck me in
the corporate manifestations of the history of the
population of England. Let me now add a third
strand to the plait of theories that I offer to my
reader. In my first chapter I put the proposition
that the chief value of England to the world was
that it had shown the nations how mankind, composed
as it is of differing individualities, might, with a sort
of rule-of-thumb agreeableness, live together in great
congeries. And this indeed — if one may be
pardoned for drawing morals from one's own pro
jections — is the moral that I should draw from my
previous book, the first of this series. In my second
chapter I have attempted to make plain a view of
England as a resting-place of humanity in, its road
westward. And this, indeed, if I am allowed to draw
a further moral from a further projection, is the one
that I .should draw from the second work of this
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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
series. For in that, if any generalisation stands
out for me, it is : that the English field- labourer is
throwing down his tools and abandoning his master's
acres. What has hitherto been regarded as the
staple of the population, the stable units of all
peoples, appears to me to be reverting once more to
the order of restless people.* This, of course, is no
very new cry, nor is it a very modern phenomenon.
It was to be observed, for instance, in the time of
Henry VIII., just before the disestablishment of the
monasteries. Such a displacement of the population
has always been attended by great changes in the
psychology of the people ; but for the moment it is
not convenient to enter minutely into the question of
whether the change in the psychology is caused by
the movement of the population. Nor, for the
moment, is it my purpose to attempt to settle, even
in my own" view, whether this change in the basis of
population is for good or for evil in the future of the
people. The general opinion is that it makes for
what is called degeneration ; but it behoves every
thinking man to question the general opinion. In
my book upon a Town I have pointed out that the
one problem before the people is the evolution of a
• I wish again, and very emphatically, to draw attention to the
fact that these pages embody only my personal views, founded upon
facts that have come under my personal acquaintanceship. This
facet of the rural cramping, this phenomenon of depopulation of the
country districts was, for instance, denied in toto by a writer in
the ¦' Academy," who cited against me the fact that Major Poore's
small holdings at Winterslow were attracting many settlers.
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healthy town type. In the second book of this series
I have laid stress upon the fact that the other
problem of the people is the retaining, or the
attracting, of a sufficient population upon the land.
But in this thorny and difficult question it is as easy
to find consolation as to grow depressed. It depends
largely upon one's temperamental or temporary
obsessions. To the man whose ideal is a dense rural population
the gradual shifting of countrymen to towns, and thence
to other lands, is a race nightmare. Population, he
will say, tends invariably to decrease in the towns :
philoprogenitiveness decays in the cities. Never
theless he may find comfort in the thought that the
present type of a city life is not necessarily per
manent. A townsman may very conceivably be
evolved ready to increase and multiply. I was in a
country inn the other day and a commercial traveller
came in to lunch. He was so worried with these
questions (he " travelled in " a kind of lace that is
used principally for decorating infants' clothes) that,
finding me disinclined to talk, he must needs utter
his terrors to the waiter, who stood fidgeting with
the dish-cover in his hand. Said the commercial
traveller :
" Have you read what Roosevelt says ? "
The waiter said : " No, sir."
"Well, what I say is this" (the traveller punctuated
his words with heaps of cabbage) : " what we want
is alliance with America. What's the good of the
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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
entente cordiale ? We haven't any use for learning the
ways of Frenchmen whose birth-rate is declining."
The waiter uttered "No, sir," shuffled his feet in
his pumps, and, pretending to hear a call from the
bar, whisked from the door.
"Here am I unmarried," the traveller fixed me.
" Now why ? " And, after a pause in which I said
nothing, he continued : " Because the birth-rate's
low ! How can I afford a wife } "
I suggested that, in that way, he too contributed to
lower the birth-rate,
"There you have it," he said, "Now the interest
that I represent employs some of the best men in the
country. You'd be astonished if you knew the brain
that there is in the fine white linen trade. Well,
they can't afford to marry either. So there you have
the straight tip. The best men can't afford to marry
because the birth-rate's low, and the birth-rate's low
because the best men can't afford to marry, and so
old England's going to rack and ruin ! " He went on
to revile Mai thus.
But, without going to the full length of the com
mercial traveller, we may, for the sake of argument,
set it down that some sort of depopulation is taking
place, and that this depopulation is bad for the
English people. Let me, against this picture of
gloom, hasten to set down a counterbalancing theory
of a more cheerfiil kind.
I lately tried to have made for my private guidance
composite likenesses of the leading spirits of several
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English centuries. The attempt failed because of the
great difficulty I had in finding assimilable portraits
of the ages that had preceded the era of photography.
But what I wished to prove to my private satisfaction
was this :
It may be granted for the sake of argument, that
the psychology of the civilised world changes — that
the dominant types of the world alter with changing,
if mysterious, alternations in the economic or social
conditions of the races. I have had it put to me that
the modern world began with the discovery of methods
of working metal in great quantities — that, in fact, the
machine has rescued us from the dark ages. That is
a view like another. If for the moment we adopt it,
it will then become obvious that the nation that will
best survive the struggle for existence is the nation
that shall contain the largest number of individuals
fitted to administer, to manufacture and to develop
machines — that that nation will eventually control,
for the time being, the resources of the world. My
own personal view — which is no doubt as idiosyncra
tic as that of my friend who favoured me with his
view of a machine age — or my own personal preference
has led me to see that the modern world began with
the discovery of the balance of power as an inter
national factor. Others, again, will say that the
modern world is the product of the printing press, or
of the fore-and-aft rig in ships — a very powerful
factor. And yet another view will have it that the
real modern world began only with the evolution of
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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
the theory of the survival of the fittest, or with the
discovery of the commercial value of by-products.
All these things are merely convenient systems of
thought by which a man may arrange in his mind his
mental image of the mundane cosmogony — or they
may be systems of thought by which he is able to
claim for his particular calling, craft or art, the status
pf the really important factor in life. Whether we
style our present age, or any previous age, the
Machine, the Balance of Power, the Schooner, the
By-product or the Press Age is immaterial enough —
the fact arising out of this mist of confiicting ideals is
that in the history of the world as among man there
have always been psychological ages.
It remains then one other platitude, which I hasten
to repeat, that in any given age the nation having
the largest number of individuals most fitted to deal
with the peculiar circumstances of that age — that
nation will be the one on the top of the market. In
an Ice Age, in fact, Esquimaux will have an immense
advantage. There is one profound truth that the
English people has always taken for granted — along
with that other truth that Providence is upon our side.
In periods of trial and national stress we have always
the comfortable conviction that somehow we shall
muddle through. And somehow we do, in a way that
almost invariably works for our material advantage.
If, in fact, an Ice Age did supervene, we might be
pretty certain that the Esquimaux would have a great
immediate advantage. England would be horribly
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discomposed ; all sorts of reputations would be hope
lessly marred. But somehow, one man, coming
probably from the very bottom of our particular
basket, would arise among us ; would teach us how
to set a glass roof all over England — how to turn the
land into a vast hothouse. Incidentally, too, he
would probably give us the chance of roofing in, say,
half Sweden or the whole of Africa, so that either
as investors or as a nation, we should profit very
materially. Wherever, in short, the sun did set, its
last rays would shine upon a roof of glass, that upon
the map could be comfortably coloured with red
amidst the white of those polar nights, engulfing the
other nations. We might have begun pretty badly ;
we should be certain to end more than moderately
well. This, of course, is a fanciful projection, but it does
figure a national characteristic. It means that we
believe that somewhere in the back of our people, in
the great middle class, in the aristocracy, or in the
submerged tenth, there are to be found men — the one
man — fitted to deal with any emergency. And, if we
consider our history and our composition as a people,
we may find comforting assurance that this view is at
least reasonably to be justified.
We begin our campaigns, military, economic or
moral, always rather badly. The other nation, our
adversary, is almost invariably in a stronger position.
The age will be either a French, a German, a Spanish
or a Portuguese Age ; and the other nation being
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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
truer to type will, in the immediate present, be able
to overwhelm us. We shall have to go through a
number of domestic revolutions before we shall be
fitted even to begin to face the problem, whatever it
may be. We are, for reasons to which I will refer
later, the nation of vested interests and of established
reputations, so that before we can really get to work
we have to shake off always an immense number of
ancient generals, admirals, agriculturists or textile
manufacturers who have grown into a rut. But the
man among us, seeing his opportunity, hearing his
call, will eventually burst through, and, being quick
to follow a lead, we shall acclaim him, learn from
him, reward him, and then let him and his tradition
become an incubus on us in face of some rising ^ge
in which, for a time, some new nation will take the
lead. In order to escape the charge of glorifying a
people to which, at least partially, I belong, let me
hasten to say that we should do all this precisely
because of the men that that nation will have given us.
If eventually — and no doubt we shall — ^we beat the
Germans in the great war of by-products, it will pro
bably be because of the German strain that is in us
already ; if eventually we did beat the Flemings at
wool-weaving, it was because Philippa of Hainault
introduced into England many large colonies of
Flemish weavers ; if eventually we took the finer
textile trades from the French it was because France
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In the larger matter of political manoeuvres it has
always seemed to me that this characteristic was
particularly observable. England's greatness as an
international factor in Europe began incidentally
with the birth of the modern world.* And, for
me, as I have said, the modern world was born with
the discovery of the political theory of the balance of
the Powers in Europe. That this discovery was in
any particular sense modern, I am not inclined to
assert. Julius Caesar, for instance, as a boy ridded the
Eastern Mediterranean of pirates by skilftilly taking
advantage of the fact that he was an isolated third
party in a naval warfare between freebooters. And,
no doubt, that very able and very wonderful man,
King John of England, used and felt the effects of a
nice adjustment of international forces. But, upon
the whole — speaking impressionistically — we may say
that the mediaeval history of Western Europe before
the fifteenth century, and the history of England in
particular during that period, leaves upon the mind
the impression of being a matter, or a long series of
matters, decided by sword blows. Before that date,
¦* Let me here very particularly impress upon the reader that
these remarks are intended as a purely personal view. They are
matters to promote argument ; they are views, not statements
of fact, spoken with any ex cathedra weight. They are intended
to arouse discussion, not to instruct ; they are part of a scheme
according to which one thinker arranges his ideas. If, in short
any other thinker would present us with a scheme as workable for
his particular temperament, I should be perfectly wiUing to make
the attempt to arrange my ideas according to that scheme.
67 F 2

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
as a rule, the king was a man who smote
his opponent over the head with a heavy mace
and set upon his own brows the circlet that he
found in a thorn bush. In this mode of interna
tional contact England did little more than hold
its own. Its fleets at times held the seas, at
times were driven from them. If England had its
Black Princes, France had its Du Guesclins and its
Joans of Arc. The Plantagenets were the great and
haughty race of their age, the fine flower of combatant
royalty. But the Plantagenets were Frenchmen. And,
if we took France, we were driven out of France. We
ended up, upon the whole, all square. Many factors,
no doubt, conduced to this end — internal warfares,
pestilences, the awakening of the dominant type in
these islands. But, upon the whole, at the end of the
fourteenth century, at the death of Henry VII. and
during the early years of Henry VIII., England
counted for practically nothing in the comity oi
European nations.
I am aware that this statement of the case is a
thought contrary to the general impression. But
upon the whole it is historically true, since the general
impression takes little account of such abortive
attempts at invasion of France as that made by
Henry VIII. in the first year of his reign. He sent,
that is to say, a great expedition of horse and foot
into Spain with the intention that, with the aid of
the Spaniards, they should take France and divide it.
But every kind of failure and ignominy awaited this
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attempt, and, great though the effort was, we have
forgotten it.
We may, however, reconsider it for the moment ;
it is, that is to say, significant that it was not a direct
frontal attack upon France. The expedition was in
tended to make its way through the country, and with
the aid of a friendly nation. In that sense it was what
I may call modern in spirit. It was, at the same time,
conceived in the older spirit, since it was a haphazard,
unprepared blow, struck without much preliminary
negotiation. It was, in short, a conception akin to
the old one of a word and a blow ; there was not any
particular manoeuvring to obtain a diplomatic advan
tage ; there was not any particularly patient waiting
for an advantageous moment to strike. It was,
moreover, practically the last attempt of an English
king to assert by force of arms his theoretic right to
the throne of France. It seems to mark, this futile,
disastrous sortie, the end of the old era.
In a former book, when comparing the works of
Diirer with those of Holbein, I had occasion to say
that the life which Diirer's art seems to chronicle
was at its close. It had been essentially an out-of-
door life. Diirer's lords rode hunting in full steel
from small castles in rugged rocks ; the flesh of his
figures is hardened, dried and tanned by exposure to
the air. But Holbein's lords no longer rode hunting.
The change had set in fiilly by 1530 or so, when
Holbein chronicled the English court. His lords were
precisely indoor statesmen ; they dealt in intrigues ;
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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
they inhabited palaces, not castles ; their flesh was
rounded, their limbs at rest, their eyes sceptical.
And, indeed, the composite photograph that I have
had made from the portraits left by Holbein does
portray a definite type — a definite type that rather
curiously coincides with Holbein's sketches of the
typical Englishman of that day. This was a heavy,
dark, bearded, bull-necked animal, sagacious, smiling,
but with devious and twinkling eyes — a type that
nowadays is generally found in the English rural
districts. If it is not too topical or too personal,
I should say that he reminds me, this typical
Englishman, most of all of Dr. W. G. Grace, the
cricketer. And, indeed, a sort of peasant-cunning did — let me
add again the qualifying "to my mind" — distinguish
the international dealings of the whole world at that
date. Roughly speaking, the ideals of the chivalric
age were altruistic ; roughly speaking, the ideals ot
the age that succeeded it were individualist-oppor
tunist. It was not, of course, England that was first
in the field, since Italy produced Macchiavelli. But
Italy, which produced Macchiavelli, failed utterly to
profit by him. England, on the other hand, had to
wait many years before falling into line with the
spirit of its age. It had, as it were, to wait until
most of the vested interest of the middle ages were
got rid of — until practically the last of the great
barons were brought to the ground. It had to wait
until a man could climb from the very lowest stage of
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the body politic into the very highest chair that the
republic could offer. But then it profited exceed
ingly, so that the England which, at the opening of
Henry VIII.'s reign, had been the laughing-stock,
became, towards the close of that reign, the arbiter of
Europe. But it did produce from its depths, from amidst its
bewildering cross currents of mingled races, the great
man of its age ; and, along with him, it produced a
number of men similar in type, and strong enough to
found a tradition. The man, of course, was Thomas
Cromwell, who welded England into one formidable
whole, and his followers in the tradition were the
tenacious, pettifogging, cunning, utterly unscrupulous
and very wonderful statesmen who supported the
devious policy of Queen Elizabeth — the Cecils, the
Woottons, the Bacons and all the others of England's
golden age.
This splendid and efficient dominant type had, ot
course, its apogee, its crest of the wave and its decline.
It fell a little low with the second of the Stuart Kings
and, as far as international expression was concerned,
its place was taken by the new, Puritan type. This
type, efficient if not very splendid, is interesting,
because it shows so very immediately a foreign
origin. You have only to go back a generation or
so to find its introduction into England. In Ben
Jonson' s day the Puritan was still being laughed at
for a sanctimonious and nefarious Low Country
sniffler in black ; within a generation the strain was
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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
ruling England. It was, too, dictating terms to
France, just as it had laid the foundations of a
New England. If the suddenness of its uprising
and the violence of its manifestations caused it to
fall into temporary discredit in this country — for the
Restoration was the product of a mere reaction — it
recuperated itself soon enough in the final expulsion
of the Stuarts.
For we may put it that James II. was the last
representative of the statesmanship which, founded by
Macchiavelli, reached its highest point with Thomas
Cromwell, the Cecils, Strafford, Laud, and Richelieu,
and declined with Mazzini towards the obstinate
impracticability of the last Stuart king. Speaking
very generally, we may say that mediaeval England
was ruled by French-Norman ; renaissance England
and the England of the Stuarts by Italian-Celtic
dominant types. And, speaking very generally, we
may say that both those types were dominant also in
the occidental Europe of that day. The great
rebellion of the Cromwellians, the revolution of
William III. and the whole Georgian era, were a
calling out of the Germanic forces of the nation.
In my private picture of these great national
waves I see the dominant type of the centuries
preceding Henry VIII. as rufous, reddish tanned,
with dusky-red complexions; the dominant type of
the Tudor-Stuart ages presents itself to me as dark,
bearded and shrewd ; the years following the fall of
James Stuart seem to me to show the gradual
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growth of a dominant type that was fair- haired ;
ingenuous perhaps, unimaginative perhaps, but
"sentimental." I do not wish to imply that the
pre-Tudor psychology was childish, but it seems to
me that pre-Tudor history appeals more directly to
the boy in us. That is probably because its history
was largely a matter of wars for the acquisition of
territory or upon the point of honour. And, upon the
whole, save for the episodes of Smithfield burnings,
of the Armada and the pirating on the Spanish Main,
of Drake and his rivals, the Tudor-Stuart periods of
dominance interest the boy in us very little. They
were, that is to say, periods of tortuous intrigues,
upon no settled basis of principle. Neither the
quasi-religious manoeuvres of Henry VIII., nor the
matrimonial manoeuvres of that King and Queen
Elizabeth interest either the man or the boyhood
of the nation very much. I am far, indeed, from
wishing to be taken as implying that these things
in themselves are uninteresting; but the case may
be put very fairly that for one person who will
know anything of Cardinal Pole's crusade against
his sovereign, ten thousand will be found remem
bering the comparatively unimportant exploits of
Richard of the Lion Heart. And, for one person
who remembers the great works of Thomas Crom
well, twenty thousand will be found to grow con
demnatory or enthusiastic over the actions, relatively
unimportant, of his great-nephew.
For, the pre-Tudor times appeal, by their actions,
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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
to the schoolboy that is in us all; the post-Stuart
times appeal, for their principles, to the amateur
moralist that is in us all. But the Tudor-Stuart era
is interesting merely for its exhibitions of human
greed, heroism, bigotry, martyrdom or savagery. It
is, as it were, a projection of realism between two
widely differing but romantic movements. I am
aware that in thus writing down the Puritan age as
romantic I lay myself open to the disagreeable charge
of writing paradoxes. But I write in all sincerity,
using, perhaps, only half appropriate words. For in
essentials, the Stuarts' cause was picturesque; the
Cromwellian cause was a matter of principle. Now a
picturesque cause may make a very strong and poetic
appeal, but it is, after all, a principle that sweeps
people away. For poetry is the sublime of common-
sense ; principle is wrong-headedness wrought up
to the sublime pitch — and that, in essentials, is
romance. I possess the diary of my English grandfather, a
romantic of the romantics, a man who never survived
his early Byronism. In its faded bluish pages, stained
with a faded and rusting ink, he records the minutiae
of a strenuous, a heroic and a very romantic struggle
with a world unsympathetic enough. At the end of
one of his very hard days he had sat down to read,
I should say, Macaulay. He had been in the winter
air painting a shawl which was sadly needed indoors
by his patient wife. In pursuance of his principle
of recording the smallest details, he had frozen his
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hands so that he could no longer hold a brush that
night. And there, suddenly, in a sprawled and sput
tering handwriting, in great letters appears the
portentous announcement — the result of his winter
night's reading : —
" I love Dutch William ! "
I confess that, at the first, being confronted with
this point of view — with this national outburst — I
rubbed my eyes. For one cannot imagine any
Romantic writing the words in sober, or in romantic
earnest. It seems as difficult, at first sight, to love
William III. as to love Queen Anne or George II.
No one is more unpicturesque. But no one is more
of a principle typified. It is difficult to call up any
personage of recorded English history who is less of
a figure than William III. ; it is, indeed, difficult to
call him up at all. One remembers neither his
features nor the cut of his hair ; neither his clothes
nor whether he stood six feet high. Nevertheless,
this vacant space stands for principles the most vital
to the evolution of modern England — of the whole
modern, Germanised world. If, in fact, William IIL
was no figure, he was very assuredly the figurehead
of a very portentous vessel.
And no doubt inspired by the Victorian canons,
by principles of Protestantism, commercial stability,
political economies, Carlylism, individualism and
liberty — provided, too, with details of feature, dress,
and stature, no doubt my grandfather could evolve a
picture of a strong, silent, hard-featured, dominant
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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
personality. Rising hot-headed from his romantic
perusal he inscribed, before putting out his light, the
words : " I love Dutch William."
Be that as it may — and I think the diagnosis is in
this case a just one — my personal impression of the
three more or less distinct phases of the English
court — the pre-Tudor, the Tudor-Stuart and the post-
Stuart — remains that of fair quasi-Communist, dark
Socialist - Tory, and blonde Germanic - Protestant-
individualist dominant types. Incidentally I may
note that that entry in my grandfather's diary does,
to some extent, substantiate my theory, that the post-
Stuart period most interests the adults among us, the
pre-Tudor making an appeal to the young who have
not yet formed themselves. It is true that in my own
later years at school we were confronted — I am bound
to say, appalled — by a text-book which was called, I
think, a " Short History of the English People," which
sought to push the theocratic period much further
back than the Tudors. But I well remember the rage
and indignation which its substitution for our other
manuals excited. In our particular class the really
brilliant boys sank to the lowest places, and I sank
with them. And the pained look upon our head
master's face — a mild, bearded, dark, rather excitable
face, with spectacles that gleamingly half hid a slight
cast in the black eyes — the disappointment and the
trouble, I remember very well after many years. He
was a man who took a pride in, who had an affec
tion for, his best boys. And they failed rather
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lamentably to follow, or to remember, history as it
was put by the Short Historian. They had been
brilliant to seize the points, the incidents, the adven
tures of kings and generals. Facts were vivid in
their minds ; the onus of a gradual and ordered
growth of a democratic people, puzzled and confused
them. They could get, I mean, some sort of idea of
life from the facts ; they could add something of them
selves to the recital. But they could only memorise
the pages of the "Short History of the English
People," and, in consequence, it was what Mr. E 
called his parrot boys that came to the top. I fancy
that it was for this reason, as much as any, that Mr.
E  , who was an artist in teaching, who delighted
to feel himself in sympathy with awakened intelli
gence and disliked forcing pages of sound theory into
dull memories ; who, in fact, was an educator and
not an instructor — that it was for this reason that
Mr. E  shortly afterwards resigned his head-
mastership. I remember very well his standing on
high by his table, his ragged gown flapping behind
him, his mild dark eyes bent upon a tormentor, who
was the top boy. A  s, a small, spectacled auto
maton with a slight impediment in his speech, had
completed without a hitch a long sentence beginning :
" The evolution of the English peasant was never
more strikingly exemplified ..."
Mr. E  said impatiently, "Very well, A  s,
" but what does it mean .' "
A  s fingered the top button of his coat :
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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
" It means," he said, " ' that the evolution of the
English peasant was never'  "
Mr. E  stopped him with a " tut-tut ! " " What
does it mean ?" he asked, his voice rising.
A  s stuttered very badly :
" It — t — t means that the evolution of — of  "
Mr. E  sat down exasperatedly and rapped the
table for three or four seconds. His dark head hung
down dejectedly.
" Ah well," he said at last, " you'll be an immense
credit to the school, A  s, in the examination
room ! "
He bade us write an essay on the " Statute of
Uses and its effect upon the psychology of the
Reformation," and, whilst we sighed in silence at
this impossible task, even A  s not having com
mitted these pages to memory, Mr. E  himself
began to write. It was, I believe, his letter of resig
nation to the governors that he was composing. At
any rate, all the school knew next morning that Mr.
E  was going. During his tenure of the head-
mastership, the school had dwindled in numbers to
the extent of 150 boys. Mr. E  , in fact, could not
be brought to regard himself as a crammer, and
under him we gained only four scholarships.
I do not wish to draw from this the moral that Mr.
.Green's History is ill-adapted for its special purpose ;
but I do seem to see in this particular scene evidence
that the theory of evolution, as applied to English
history, is little fitted to the boyish apprehension. It
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is, it seems to me, ill-fitted because it calls upon a
boy to be acquainted with modern trains of thought ;
to be acquainted, in fact, with modern conditions of
life, and to read into mediaeval history the lessons
that only years of experience or years of reading the
leaders in newspapers and the works of the Victorian
writers could have taught him.
It is easy, in fact, to say that the turning of the
agricultural districts to wool farming led inevitably
to the evolution of the Puritan spirit, when you know
that the Puritan spirit succeeded to the quasi-Catholic-
quasi-Pagan phase of English mediaeval life. But
you will only see that when you have learned the
doctrine that the sole purpose of English mediaeval
strivings was to produce the Protestant, individualist,
free speech, free thought, free trade, political econo
mics of the Victorian era. This doctrine, this group
of doctrines, this once tremendous frame of mind was
so riveted on the people of the nineteenth century,
that its theories might well be accepted as unquestion
able fact. There stood all these things, from Protes
tantism to freedom, firm, unquestionable, unshakeable,
— and thus, in the psychology of the man, divine
intervention in favour of the nineteenth century was as
deducible from his study of history, as in the boy was
the theory that Providence was on the side of the
Englishman. I remember once putting it tremblingly
to a very liberal relative of the pre-Home Rule days
— putting it that, according to his theory of the
gradual growth of liberty in the English race, the
79

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
cataclysmic abolition of the monasteries was a mis
take. He regarded me from above a foam-flecked,
blonde beard of an imposing venerability.
" Of course," he said, " the monasteries were not
abolished gradually. It wasn't evolution that did
away with them. They were swept away because
they were in the way of a gentle evolution."
I said, in absolute good faith :
" Then the law of a gradual evolution was not
invariable ? "
He made a great and irritable gesture with his
plump white hands.
"You irritate me with your casuistry," he said.
" I have just explained the matter. The monasteries
had to go because they cumbered the ground ; it was
inevitable. Besides, if they had not gone how
should we have reached our Paradise — or the Puritan
spirit ? That's the backbone of England."
It was, I suppose, this sort of reading of history
that the adult Victorian sought to impose upon the
Victorian schoolboy. I think that it probably grated,
since I am sure that it inspired my classmates with
an invincible dislike for, say. Sir Robert Walpole.
But it certainly induced our grandfathers to love
Dutch William, and to believe that the Puritan
spirit is the backbone of England. Perhaps
it is.
In a sense I am, I am aware, running counter to
an accepted idea, when I say that the modern
Puritanism of English life began, not with the
80

THE MELTING POT
Cromwellians, but with the coming of William III.
The Cromwellians, in fact, seem to me to have left
little enbugh mark in England. The Revolution,
since it led the way for Walpole and the National
Debt, still holds us in its clutches. It did away with
personal Royalty ; it did away with priesthood ; it
did away very emphatically with the Arts, or rather,
with the artistic spirit as a factor in life. And it
began the process of doing away with the County
Interest. Philosophically speaking, too, it began
that divorce of principle from life which, carried as
far as it has been carried in England, has earned for
the English the title of a nation of hypocrites. It did
this, of course, because it riveted Protestantism for
good and evil upon the nation's dominant types.
For, speaking very broadly, we may say that
Catholicism, which is a religion of action and ot
frames of mind, is a religion that men can live up to.
Protestantism no man can live up to, since it is a
religion of ideals and of reason. (I am far from
wishing to adumbrate to which religion I give my
preference; for I think it will remain to the end
a matter for dispute whether a practicable or an ideal
code be the more beneficial to humanity.) But, by
voting once and for all for Protestantism, by
casting out from us the possibilities of dominance of
that pagan half of humanity which is fitted for
Catholicism, the Revolution doomed England to be
the land of impracticable ideals. Before that date
a man could live without his finger upon his moral
8i G

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
pulse : since then it has grown gradually more and
more impossible.
And inasmuch as, by the lusty sort of health and
appetite that it brings, a country life does in essence
tend to produce pagans, the Revolution did tend
towards producing a dominant type that could no
longer inhabit the country. And, inasmuch as it is
in the nature of man to desire to rise to eminence, we
may say that the Revolution did conduce towards the
present building up of the great towns. That we
are now tending towards a reaction against these
cendencies seems to me to be arguable, and in a
subsequent chapter I shall endeavour to put that case.
But for the present let me return to my main argument
— that of the successive dominant types that the land
has produced. It is not my purpose to do more than
slightly allude to such of these as suit my purpose.*
It may be taken for granted as a general impression
that the immediate effect of the Revolution was to do
away with loyalty to the personal King. It produced
in its stead a loyalty to the Throne ; and the Throne
meant an institution whose main purpose was to
conserve certain definite interests — those mainly of
Protestantism and the money-making classes. It did
away with Clarendon, who was more royalist than the
King; it produced John Churchill, Duke of Marl-
* I do this without scruple — because, obviously, my desire is to
produce an argument that may or may not be controverted, and
not to lay down with a high hand any law that is to be regarded as
immutable or incontrovertible. 82

THE JVIELTING POT
borough, and his wife, who was more royal than his
sovereign ; it did away with the irresponsible enjoy
ment of life, and rendered possible the sentimental
movement ; it did away with the true Toryism which
is Socialism, and rendered possible Individualism,
which to-day we call the upholding of the right to
free competition ; it gave us, in fact, liberty by
gradually removing responsibility from the State —
and it gave us two centuries of enmity to France and
of growing subjection to German ideals.
So that, if indeed it be true that the enemy is
Prussianism — that the world is gradually coming to
a state of mind in which it shall be most important
to a nation to produce the more essentially Germanic
type, we may well hope to produce the man. We
may well hope, in fact, to muddle through. We have,
in the composition of our complex Republic, Germans
enough to select from. And it must be re-affirmed
that the Germans who have come to England, like
the Scots, the Danes, the French, the Poles, the
Huguenots or the Doukhobors, are precisely the bad
eggs, the adventurous, the restless, the energetic of
their several nations. And these adventurers, these
restless, these energetic units are, precisely too, the
best breeders for a fighting race. We may, in fact,
very well produce yet another dominant type that
shall help England to retain its own, and to gain just
that little bit of material advantage that, except in
the great struggle with the English superman across
the Atlantic, England has always had. Just as in a
83 G2

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
world attuned to Plantagenet ideas, England pro
duced the Plantagenets; just as in a world attuned
to Macchiavelli, England produced Thomas Crom
well ; just as in a world that was opening up to
adventurers, England produced the Drakes and the
Raleighs ; just as in a world fitted for parades of
troops and tortuous intrigues with a Roi Soleil, Eng
land produced a William III. and a Marlborough — so
England may well hope to produce a man fitted to
contend, in the end with the Kaiser or Professor who
is to set the tune for the next generation. We might
even produce a plenty of the best Slav blood to lead
us against Slavs. We might produce anybody to
lead us against anything. Given, in fact, its proper
breathing space in which the man may arise, Eng
land may yet muddle through, since England is not a
nation, not the home of a race, but a small epitome
of the whole world, attracted to a fertile island by
the hope of great gain, or by the faith that there a
man may find freedom. The other day I was down
at the docks, watching the incoming of a ship that
brought many Jews from Odessa. As man after
man crossed the gangway he knelt down and kissed
the muddy coping of the wharf. That was because
still, as for the Anabaptists and the Huguenots, Eng
land appears to the bad eggs of the nations to be
the land of freedom. And it is not impossible that
one of the children of one of these adventurers may
be, like another Disraeli, the man who will help
England to muddle through. 84

FAITHS.

CHAPTER IV.
FAITHS.
I WAS asked some time ago, on the banks of a great
foreign river, by a fair-haired foreign girl, for the
name of an English book to read. She seemed to
be conversant with the whole of the Tauchnitz col
lection; she knew the names at least of all the
English novelists, essayists and romancers with
whom one could be acquainted ; she knew, certainly,
the names of many English writers that I had never
heard of She spoke English idiomatically ; she was
sufficiently akin to the English in sentiment to be
able to appreciate a certain work, so parochially
English that it dealt with the amenities of middle-
class child-life in the topography of Kensington
Gardens. That, she had found ravishing. I sug
gested to her the name of the one English work of
importance that she had not read, because she risked
certain considerable penalties in the perusal. I told
her that although, from reading the eminent secular
novelists and the less eminent novelists whose works
are merely commercial in value, she would doubtless
87

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
acquire, or had already acquired, a considerable insight
into the psychology of the various classes portrayed
by novelists, essayists or romancers, she could not
claim even a nodding acquaintance with the real
bases of the Spirit of the People until she had
assimilated this particular book. A month or so
later she said to me :
" I have finished reading it ; it is horrible.''
Upon the whole you could not have said that she
was not English to look at her — only in her enuncia
tion of the word that meant " horrible " there was a
sincerity that was entirely un-English. Because, of
course, no typical Englishwoman of her class would
be allowed, or would allow herself, to come in contact
with anything that is really " horrible." An
Englishwoman, after all, must not be moved ; if she
suffers it she is not English. But the blue eyes of
Miss G  were really rigid with horror at the
remembrance of what she had read. The book was
horrible. That a girl should be so moved by the reading of
the English Bible did not strike me as peculiar upon
reflection, though for the moment I had to cast about
in my mind for a reason. The point of view was new
to me. Of course the Bible is forbidden reading to
the great majority of Christians — but that is for
reasons purely doctrinal, purely arbitrary, purely of
priestcraft. One accepts the fact, not as a judgment
of the Bible, as poetry, or as a projection of life ;
it is merely because it is inconvenient to the priest-
88

FAITHS
hood of a certain Church that their special interpre
tation of passages should be called in question. It is
part of a game, of a system ; it reflects no discredit
on the Bible as a projection of a frame of mind. But
Miss G  's emotion was a direct censure of Biblical
morality. It said : " Here is a book, horrible for its
ferocity, for the bloodthirsty incidents that it realisti
cally portrays, horrible for its rendering of sexual
necessities, horrible for its spirit." Miss G  , in
fact, regarded it with the new candour of a reader
confronted with a terrifying French piece of realism :
it was as if she had been reading of the gigantic
metal automaton in Flaubert's "Salambo" — the
metal automaton that into its blazing jaws lifted
the bodies of living children to be incinerated.
Thinking about the matter, I remembered a certain
evening service at which I had been present. There is
a country church which I attend somewhat frequently.
It is ancient Norman in character, on a tranquil
knoll in the pleasant English south. You cannot
figure for your private satisfaction anything more
delightful, an)rthing more soothing, than to sit out
a service in the little pews of one of the aisles.
Through the small windows the trees are seen to
spread tranquil boughs ; the organ drones ; the choir
boys sing in tune, and the wonderful English of the
church service awakens all the singular and very
blissful remembrances of one's boyhood between
white stone walls. And, upon the whole, there is
nothing in life that I more rejoice in than that,
89

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
as a boy, I went regularly to English Church services.
It is a thing that a nation may be devoutly thankful
for : it canonifies, it blesses, a whole side of one's
life. It is not, of course, everything — but it is the
most tranquil thing in life as it to-day is lived.
But, as I sat that evening in the little church at
I  , in the quiet of the sunset, great rays of light
fell across the chancel. The choristers sat still, the
cry of sheep came in through the opened doors, a
swallow flitted round among the square pillars, and
the priest read the first lesson. I listened attentively
— and suddenly the whole tone of what was being
read seemed appalling. And all that service, from
psalms to offertory, seemed overwhelming. I looked
round me to see if no one else noticed it ; but there
was no sign. An old man with a shaven chin looked
with weary eyes at the palms of his hands ; a little
boy, with a callous, shaven head, was cutting his
initials on a corner of the pew ; the great tenant-
farmer of the parish had his head cocked back and
gazed at the panes above the reredos with eyes that
saw nothing. But the first lesson was, precisely,
horrible. It described how a king, incited by priests
and the Almighty, sent his soldiers to surround a
church, to massacre the worshippers and to behead
them. It made you see the soldiery returning with
hands sticky with blood, to cast baskets of palm-
leaves, each one filled with a head, at the feet of the
king as he sat in his courtyard.
I am not, of course, quarrelling with the concep-
90

FAITHS
tion of a deity; it is to me nothing that Jehovah
should claim his tens of thousands or Torquemada his
thousands. These things are the necessary con
comitants of certain phases of human thought ; they
exist, and cannot be questioned. But the second
lesson was about damnation ; the psalms were
gloomily minatory. Even the sermon was tinged
with a black, predestinarian pessimism, and dealt
rather intelligently with the mental horrors that must
be endured for all eternity by the outcast of the next
world. But this, as I have said, was acceptable
enough : if you sin against the Omnipotent you must
take the wages of sin. I will however confess that
the whole thing filled me with gloom ; it was so
tremendously well projected that, for the moment,
the view of life, such as it was, seemed irrefutable.
The statements were so definite, the language so
tremendous and so inspired. It was, precisely,
horrible — since horror was the feeling that the whole
service caused to arise.
Receding from these particular emotions I do not, ot
course, feel the same horror. I am filled instead
with a sort of wonder that for so long I could have
basked in the tranquillity of these services. For I
will repeat, that there are in the Church service
certain moments which are unsurpassable in this life.
There is, for instance, the wonderfiil pause at the
very end. The priest has uttered the beautiful
sentence which begins : " The peace of God which
passeth all understanding keep your hearts . . ."
91

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
And then an absolute silence falls — a silence that
seems to last a lifetime, an utter abandonment, a
suspension of life. Then someone sighs, someone
stirs, a great rustle commences, and, a little
sobered, one is again ready to face the material
world. I can imagine nothing quite like this ;
the silence of the canon of the mass is profoundly
exciting and disturbing ; even the silence of a
Quakers' meeting in one of the bare Friends' Houses
is a tension, not a restfulness; but this silence
is a slight footnote, a momentary suggestion of that
peace which passeth all understanding. I am
anxious to emphasise my partaking in this feeling,
because in other places it is my purpose to write in
cold blood of this very wonderful product of the
national frame of mind. Having done it, let me
return to my analysis of the horror of the actual
tenets. For the calmness of the assistants at this terrible
drama seems to me to be extraordinarily character
istic of the singularly English faculty — the faculty of
ignoring the most terrible of facts; the faculty, in
short, which makes us the nation of official optimists.
For the singular congregation of that church — and of
all our churches — was kindly minded to a high
degree. It would have been appalled at the idea of
the slaughter, nowadays, of ten thousand sheep, it
would have blanched dreadfully at the thought of the
slaughter of ten thousand men, even of ten thousand
enemies of the British God of Battles. But most
92

FAITHS
of them listened to the details of this sacrifice to
Jehovah, who was their own God — sat and listened
unmoved, not inattentively, but probably in the same
frame of mind as that of children listening to fairy
tales. They half-believed, half-disbelieved ; it all
took place so very long ago. If the same set of
circumstances should arise, no doubt Jehovah would
exact of the English king that he should make the
same sacrifice — but, fortunately, in these days of
pleasant Sunday clothes, of the tranquillity of an
English Sabbath, of the faint smell of prayer-book
leather and glove leather — in these days no such set
of circumstances could thinkably arise. People don't
any longer do such things ; probably there no
longer exist such inscrutably noxious heathens ;
Baal, in fact, is dead — so this wonderful and happy
people has no call to think about these slaughters.
We owe still the cock to .<Esculapius — but he would
never think of exacting it.
It is, in fact, one of the things that it is unfair to
mention. And really it is unfair. I have frequently
been struck with that aspect of the case when I
have listened to one of the Atheist orators in the
London parks. In some strange way the English
man has digested the early ferocity of his creed just
as he has assimilated all his early conquerors ; and,
just as he will say, " These fellows are ourselves," so
he will feel that his God, who now gives a peace
which passes all understanding, has assimilated the
Jehovah of Joshua the son of Nun. It isn't, that is
93

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
to say, his business to see life steadily or to see it
whole. The audience of the London park Atheist
never puts the matter coldbloodedly that the remorse
less follower of cause is effect, whether you call effect
Jehovah or indigestion ; it never puts to the Atheist
the fact that if you eat your cake you cannot have it,
that if you enjoy yourself you must pay for it, whether
you call your Baal the pursuit of pleasure or your
Jehovah race deterioration. I question, indeed,
whether the Englishman — that typical, composite
photograph that, for his convenience, each one of us
carries, and labels " my countryman " — whether the
Englishman really believes these things.
The English Church allows of no Purgatory between
Heaven and Hell. The English official Deity is a
just God. But I think that, for the Englishman, this
just God is just in the sense only that he rewards the
good. The evil he lets slip by him, as the English
man, remarking "poor devil," would let most
impotent sinners escape punishment. So that, if the
modern Englishman dispenses with Purgatory, it is
because he hardly believes in Hell. He will repeat
to his children a hundred times in the caresses of
childhood the familiar proverb : if questioned, held
to it, and, unfairly pressed, he will acknowledge the
truth of it ; but he will never believe with the
instinctive faith that is part of all our lives, that you
cannot eat your cake and have it.
Two alternatives present themselves to us in the
consideration of this phenomenon. Perhaps he is
94

FAITHS
actually right in his belief; perhaps there is a third
term between cause and effect; or perhaps, in the
alternative, it is only that he does right to believe
this fallacy. It is, perhaps, that alone which makes
him keep all on doing things. For it must be
remembered that, according to his creed and to the
creed of his fathers more especially, we are, all
humanity, miserable sinners. We act always wrongly,
but somehow we muddle through. And, upon the
whole, we hope to do this in the face of the Almighty,
as we hope to do it in the face of all the nations
arrayed for our downfall. It is, I think, an English
town frame of mind, this of muddling through ;
perhaps it is a town and maritime frame of mind ;
for the seaman faces appalling elements with his
little machines of sticks and strings, so dispro
portionately tiny that they seem an absurd challenge
to the force of the waters. Yet somehow he reaches
his port. And the townsman has to fight with the
millions of his fellow townsmen and survive in the
business he makes his career. His watchword, his
catchword, is that something will turn up. He
trusts to a fortuitous rise in the Bank rate to give
him, finally, a competence ; he trusts to the miraculous
properties of some widely-advertised pill to save him
from the effects of an irrational mode of life. Or,
perhaps, it is only that the hurry and rush of what we
call modern life — which is a city product — perhaps it
is only that that allows him to forget the eternal
verities. 95

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
But the countryman is perpetually faced by them ;
he battles with things that have been the same since
the world began — with rain, with frosts, with the too
great heat of the sun in droughty weather. He does
not, taken as a whole, have much hope of attaining
to an ultimate reward greater than his deserts. He
does not keep on doing things in the hope that some
thing may turn up trumps. He keeps, as I have said
before, " all on gooing," without much hope of a better
state. He reads his Bible more closely, in fact.
Jehovah still exists for him ; the sinner is still the
sinner — not the poor devil who will scrape through
when God, applauded by all the good-natured,
momentarily averts his face. And, indeed, it is in
the country — it is at least in the provincial frame of
mind — that one will still discover the stem, old
fashion of Protestantism. Perhaps that is only to
say that the countryman is, precisely, old-fashioned.
One will find, of course, centres of Protes
tantism dispersed in all the towns; one will find
bigotry, narrow-mindedness, genuine faith, or simple,
heavy earnestness. And, perhaps, the heart of the
nation is, in that sense, still sound. But in essence
the note of the great towns is that of tolerance ; a
town is a great, loose, easy-going place, where a man
may do pretty well what he pleases — may break
away from chapel, church, or conventicle, and dis
appear for ever in some next street. So that,
speaking broadly, we may say that the simple faith,
the simple, earnest intolerance of small or large
96

FAITHS
knots of allied worshippers — the Protestant-Puritan
spirit, is precisely "provincial." I do not write the
word in any sneering spirit, but simply state the fact
that Puritanism is out of fashion in the towns. It is
no longer for the moment in the swim ; but very
possibly — if we remember the phenomena of our past
history, we should say very probably — it will return
again. It must be remembered, for instance, that in
the seventeenth century the town frame of mind was
that of dilettante atheism ; any kind of religious
belief was quite hopelessly not in the swim. And
following immediately upon this came the great wave
of Methodism, with its miraculous calling to life of
a religious spirit throughout town and country alike.
To-morrow, in fact, there may be a revival.
It would be hardly possible for there not to be a
revival if the conditions of the nation had not altered
very materially since the days of Wesley. But it
must be remembered, again, that in the days of Wesley
the preponderance of the population was still in the
country, and that Methodism was a country reaction.
Nowadays the preponderance of the townsman is so
huge that it is difficult to imagine a movement in the
rural districts that should seriously affect the towns.
And, nowadays, even the spirit of the very rural
districts seems to have been breathed upon by a new
kind of thought. There is a certain country chapel
which I pass every day. It is a new, red-brick,
expensive structure. Round the corner is a little old
barn which John Wesley himself built, in which
97 H

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
Wesley himself preached, which this red and yellow
structure has replaced. The new chapel has windows
in imitation of stained glass ; these windows portray
scenes in the life of the Virgin, culminating with
her coronation in Heaven at the hands of her
Divine Son.
This surprises in itself, but it might have been an
accident, due to the fact that the German commercial
traveller who brought round samples of his transfers
came from the neighbourhood of Cologne. Yet,
when I put the matter to the Wesleyan in authority
in the village, he was not at all perturbed. He
answered simply : " Well, I don't see why they
should not have crowned the Virgin in Heaven. She
deserved it."
He was perfectly sincere ; and no doubt he was
perfectly right. Nevertheless, his frame of mind does
seem to betray a singular loss of touch with the
theological* history of his creed. He was much
more sound in his secular history, for once when I
walked up with him from the station, he said to me —
with a very great sincerity too — " I suppose that if
the Papists came into power again they would bum
us all ! " And I do not question that Mr. W 
* It should be remarked that the theological notions of this
gentleman were very bizarre. The cook of a family in our village
being much perturbed to account for the fact that the mistress
allowed no currants in the kitchen went to Mr. W  , who was
her spiritual guide. He said : " Oh, Mrs.  is a Mahometan,
and it is part of her creed not to eat currants ! "
98

FAITHS
would cheerfully go to the stake in defence of the
tradition whose tenets he had so tolerantly forgotten.
Probably this, too, is only a symptom of that
general good nature that has spread through
England; most Wesleyans are as much inclined to
deprecate the sterner manifestations of their earlier
years as are the Anglicans who deprecate the earlier
sternness of the agents of Jehovah. And the
Wesleyan who is prepared to go to the stake thinks
that contingency as unlikely to arise as does the
Anglican who would be prepared to carry out the
dictates of a New Jehovah. In a similar way
Unitarians, Congregationalists or Quakers will depre
cate the earlier phases of their creed. Of course, the
revival may be yet to come.
But upon the whole it may be doubted whether
the revival in the nation will come soon. The signs
of the times, in the town and country, are against
it. Speaking impressionistically — and I hope not
offensively — I should say that what distinguishes the
worshippers belonging to the Established Church is
a frame of mind and not a religion — a frame of mind
in which, though the ethical basis of Christianity is
more or less excellently preserved, the theological
conditions remain in a very fragmentary condition.
I do not mean to say that the higher criticism has led
to this cleavage — but that the general sense of the
congregations has rendered any literal acceptance of,
say, the Athanasian Creed, almost a thing of the
past. (I wish again to guard myself from seeming to
99 H 2

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
imply that it may not be a thing of the future.)
But the whole psychology of the immediate present
is a thing of such minutiae ; our attention is charmed
by such an infinity of small things, that close
thinking —which theological logic demands — is for
the moment almost impossible, save to the specialist.
Thus the devout and carefully practising Churchman
is apt to awaken and find the state of his mind to be
singularly chaotic. I remember walking home from
the service of which I have spoken with a singularly
earnest Churchman, for whom I had and still cherish
a very great affection. We discussed the immortality
of the soul, and my friend, who was a man of sixty,
made, as it were, then and there the discovery that
he no longer believed in a future state. Nevertheless
a belief in a just — and even in an avenging Deity —
remained almost unshaken in his mind, and, along
with it, his unwavering attachment to the Church.
He seemed, however, gradually to have dropped
the other belief; it had vanished, fading away, little
by little ; it had been hardly missed in the passage
through a very strenuous middle life. In much the
same way, while we walked in the shadow of tall
elms along the white road that still retained the heat
of the day, the last vestige of rosy light had faded
from the sky. The land lay about us, still visible,
with its long valleys, its tranquil hollows, its blue
sea-horizon. But the last tinge of red had gone from
the shadows.
For my particular friend, the stress of a too com-
lOO

FAITHS
plex life had done this — a stress that eventually
broke him down, the more easily, perhaps, in that he
had lost the stay of that belief. So it may be for
many people. But for many others, too, the same
complexity of modern life, with so many of its inner
depths, with so many of its privacies laid bare for
our daily inspection — the mere number of things that
we have to think about in order to remain at all in
contact with our fellow men, has sapped much of our
power for sustained thought.
I move principally among men of a certain type —
men, that is to say, who " specialise " in one or other
of the departments of thought. But it is rather
seldom that I ever have time for any sustained dis
cussion of any specialised department of thought
— simply because the daily topic claims so much
attention. With a clergyman one will find oneself
discussing the surest method of obtaining novels
from a lending library; with a mathematician, the
latest murder ; with a scientific agriculturist one
begins to talk of the politics of the day, or a bishop
will tell one of the latest idiosyncrasies of the
admiral commanding the Channel Squadron. These
idiosyncrasies will have been revealed in an inter
view with the admiral's lady and published in an
illustrated service magazine. It is true that in the
country this characteristic grows less rapidly, yet it
is growing, and the newspapers facilitate the process
daily. It is true, too, that in solitary chambers
throughout the land, thinkers of the old school may
lOl

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
be found. Without doubt, in Cambridge, say, by
applying to one of the Dons, one might come across
men in book-lined cells pursuing some glorious and
abstruse train of thought of all the trains started by
Hume, pursuing it with that half- artistic, half-ironic
fervour that has distinguished the English schools of
thought of the past.
But, even amongst such thinkers, there is a ten
dency to turn their machinery of thought upon topics
of the day. And I am not sure that such a process is
not very valuable : the utterances of a mind trained in
one or the other of the schools of preciser thinking —
upon a cause celebre in the divorce courts, or the
ultimate ramifications of a Tibetan mission, may
have a very material value, and, in the ultimate
future, the evolution of a trained and slightly nega
tive school of observers upon life as it is lived may
well atone for the loss of several commentaries. Of
that, one may well be uncertain; but it is hardly
possible to doubt that the influence of the world upon
the Churches is eminently destructive of the letter of
laws. It leaves, probably, the same capacity for faith —
but for a faith of a vague and a humanitarian nature.
It is, I mean, almost impossible for a man to believe
that he and his comparatively small sect of the elect
are the sole peoples that shall prosper upon the
earth; it is almost impossible for a man to believe
that when, say, the Japanese are sinking European
fleets and prospering exceedingly. It is, in short,
I02

FAITHS
possible to say that the Japanese are Englishmen in
all but name, but it is impossible to believe that their
success is due to the fact that they are, say, New
Connexion Methodists with nominal differences.
Yet, until quite lately, it was possible to look at
the world in that light. The prospering powers were
invariably Christian, and almost always Protestant.
French, Italian and Spaniards were, with a sufficient
frequency to give support to the point of view, beaten
by the Lion of the North, by the Protestant Hero, or
by ourselves. The rising of the United States was a
Protestant ascendancy. Even the Franco-Prussian
War could be pressed into the service — for all
Germans were Protestants, as all Frenchmen were
atheists. These, in fact, were victories by people
who, if they weren't Anglican, Low Church, Non
conformist, might by Anglican, Low Churchman or
Nonconformist be considered almost of one faith with
themselves. The Germans, for instance, are all
Lutherans in the general view, and a High Church
man knows that Lutherans are very high ; a Low
Churchman knows they are very broad ; a Noncon
formist knows that they do not form a part of the
Church of England as by law established. But the
coming of the daily press has in several directions
shaken this world theory. The enlightenment that
the daily press has wrought has proved to us not
only that German Lutherans are practically atheists
and certainly not Bible Christians : has proved to us
not only that the majority of the German people
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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
are actually papists : it has proved to us that even
the heathen have faiths respectable and vener
able. I am not merely referring to the Japanese
victories. For consider the possibility that some
Indian prince of sacred rank should find it desirable
to travel to England without setting foot upon any
soil other than that of the land that saw the birth of
Buddha, without victuals cooked in the waters of the
Indus, ahd hourly ablutions in those of the Ganges.
The whole English world — or nearly the whole of
it — would follow with respectful sympathy, or with a
sporting interest — the building of a special vessel
made of iron all mined in India, the conveying of tons
of soil on to the decks, the construction of the special
holds that should contain a sufficient supply of the
waters of the holy stream. We should read, we
should see drawings, of the almost miraculous tricks
by which the journey was performed. In innumerable
photographs we should see the sacred man himself,
handsome, melancholy, austere, aloof. His journey
safely accomplished, his return engineered, we should,
when he set foot once more upon his secular and
sacred ground, heave a national sigh of relief. And
assuredly, for a moment, we should feel that this man
did, indeed, possess some of the sacredness to which
he laid claim — to which he had a prescriptive right
conferred on him by the faith of many millions of the
infinitely patient and the very wise in faiths. We
should find it difficult then to go back to our services
and imagine all the heathen as furiously raging.
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FAITHS
In that way one little corner-stone of our doctrinal
faith might be shaken. But we should not the less
believe that God is good.
We have grown rather, to see that God, the
giver of life, is very wonderful. Wonderful he is, in
short, because he is so very complex — and faith, that
of old was a matter of pondering upon a few simple
certainties, tends more and more in this modern
world of ours to become merely a frame of mind,
religious, without doubt — fatalistic, very probably —
with which a man may confront the changing aspects
of his changing day. For it is very certain that, for
the vast mass of the people, if the spread of know
ledge of a sort have in these latter days dealt a shrewd
blow to faith of a doctrinaire kind, it has killed
atheism. Nothing, in fact, is more striking in the modern
world than this change of attitude in face of know
ledgeable things. In the days of Darwin — which
are surely not so long ago — the anti-Darwinians cried :
"This is anathema! " The Darwinians cried: "This
is the end of God ! " But in these years we read yester
day, and we .shall read to-morrow — in the enormous
type — in the loose phraseology of the papers : " Dis
covery of the secret of life." And the statement
being in print, we believe it as we believe in the
discovery of a new cure for consumption. But it
hardly shakes our position towards the eternal
verities. We have, in the language of the news
papers, annihilated space so long ago, that there is
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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
no reason why we should not destroy, sooner or later,
the other attribute. We may, in fact, get rid of
time, or achieve a physical immortality. But, though
we may destroy the one half of the prophet's saying,
we are faced with the other so long as man continues
to be born of woman. We may, that is to say,
become of many days : we have still to face sorrow.
It is there that God comes in.
For the function of God, after all, is to teach us so
to live that our strength may be as our days ; that is
the end to which the man with the religious frame
of mind sets out. For, if he cease to believe in a
personal immortality, a man becomes more filled with
the desire for an immortality in his seed : for the
consummation of a sane and healthy humanity. And
it is there that the idea of God, again, comes in. We
search the Scriptures still, to find that Jehovah is
effect, Baal cause. . . .
That is^ upon the whole, the impression that much
converse with our fellows will leave upon most men,
and, vaguely and indefinitely, he feels something
akin to those feelings. But the calls of modern life
are so insistent, the idea that a prosperous race is a
race fertile of children has rendered competition so
clamant upon our attentions that most men in
England, as opposed to women, have little time to
ponder upon these things at all. One sees, however,
vaguely shadowed in the future, a day when the
dictum : " Taceat mulier in Ecclesia " shall have found
its earthly close. io6

FAITHS
It is naturally to America, that land of the future,
that one must go to find the first manifestation
of a cutting loose from this particular tradition.
In America, of course, one will find everything :
there a man may see the Mormon church, in which
woman, more than anywhere else in Christendom,
has been trampled under foot. For it must be
remembered that monogamy is the one powerful, the
one universal, law that woman has given us. There,
also, one will find — according to the newspapers —
the " first cathedral raised to a woman." The news
papers of course forget the temple of Diana, or the
several cathedrals of the Blessed Virgin that may
be found in both Old World and New. But, in the
sense that the mother church of the Chrhstian
Scientists is the first manifestation in stone of a cult
founded by a woman and administered largely by
women, we may accept this headline as being as true
as headlines can, in the nature of things, be expected
to be. For Joanna Southcott, the false Joan of Arc,
Elizabeth Burton, or Selina, Countess of Huntingdon,
may be forgotten.
But, roughly speaking, we may say that the church
founded by Mrs. Eddy is the first modern faith to be
evolved by a woman. It is interesting, then, to
examine this phenomenon as coldly as we have
examined the more ancient creeds established by
men. We find at once, as we might have expected,
that the chief activity of the church is almost purely
material : it deals with the attainment to a sane mind
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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
by the evolution of a perfected body. I stayed for
some time of a lately-passed summer in an oddly
heterogeneous colony that had filled all the huts and
hovels of a tract of sand dunes across the water.
Here the tone was almost entirely set by the women.
They came from all parts of the world — from New
York, from Sweden, from New Zealand, from the
Transvaal, and, naturally, many came from Hamp
stead. Beneath the tall pines the men of these
women seemed to stand in loose-limbed, incongruous
knots. They were artists, men from government
offices, merchants, brewers, social reformers, school
masters or singers. They gave the impression of
being careless, except as to the weather, which was
rather execrable, heavy shafts of rain piercing the
blue shields of foliage and digging minute pits in the
white sand. . . . But they seemed, all these men,
to be at very loose ends ; their knots were small and
isolated ; they seemed to have lost the power of
combination. The women, on the other hand, appeared to form
great and very voluble gatherings of fifties in the
hollows. Their dresses were gay, flouting, many-
coloured, or sad, close-cut and self-coloured. They
were infinitely articulate — and an infinite number of
children seemed to run in and out between their skirts,
intent, as children will be, upon a world of their own.
It was a scene eminently rejoicing to the eye and
pleasant for the consideration. Here — and that was
the dominant note — was man absolutely dethroned.
1 08

FAITHS
It is true that these were the holidays. The artists
might make cartoons on brown paper to decorate the
bare walls of barns : the musicians might accompany
or might sing in the choirs. But they did this rather
as helots, and the merchants, government officials
and schoolmasters seemed to make up, as helots, too.
the numbers of the congregation. They were, all of
these men, good workers in their particular "lines ; "
they stood a little out of the common run, as being
heavy and solid thinkers. But, beyond that, as
general thinkers they were not, I should say, parti
cularly gifted. You had, in short, to get them on
their own grounds before they shone. And they
were united by a common air: it was that of men
returning from distant regions of work to find their
households running riot. It was as if Ulysses had
come back from long wanderings to find Penelope
surrounded, not by suitors, but by professors of
strange learning.
And thus, on their social sides at least, the cults of
the morrow seem to be foreshadowed. The man
must more and more specialise in his vocation : he
must apply to his daily task his whole intellect and
all his better parts. Returning from these depths of
thought to the light of the world he must be dim-
eyed and inarticulate. That the effects of this are
felt in all departments of the arts every practitioner
of them must know. It takes various forms, but the
end is always the same. Thus every novelist knows
that the only readers are the women : the distinctively
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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
man's writer appeals only to a very small public.
Every journalist knows, too, that the papers now are
written with an eye that more often than not is
turned to the women. In one quite serious paper that
was newly started it was proposed to have an agri
cultural page once a week. The proposal was,
however, negatived by the editor-in-chief, who sub
stituted a woman's page. " All the other papers
have it," he said. I was travelling, quite unwillingly,
the other day in a railway carriage into which there
introduced themselves, hurriedly at the last moment, a
pleasant, well-dressed couple, obviously upon their
honeymoon. At the next stopping station the
gentleman leaned out of the window and purchased,
apparently at random, a couple of daily papers. One
of these, a substantial sheet of Conservative tenden
cies, he offered to his companion. She made a little
moue and did not wish to take it. He substituted
the other, remarking, " Oh, of course'. The  is
the lady's paper, isn't it r " and, leaning back grace
fully, she began to read the magazine page with
what contentment my presence allowed her. The
 was the paper with the largest circulation in the
world. In one of the other arts this tendency reacts in a
manner quite dissimilar. I was asking a very
intimate friend what the ladies had talked about in
the drawing-room after a certain dinner.
"Well," she said, "all the married women were
lamenting the type of play they were forced to go
no

FAITHS
to." They would have preferred, all these martyrs
said, to go and hear something " really vital ; " some
thing serious, harrowing or merely problematic.
Instead of that, every one of them was forced to go
to musical comedies. This was because their
husbands came home from business too tired for
serious entertainment. One of the ladies said she
had been six times to the " Geisha." All the time
she had been yearning to see " Ghosts."
The arts, of course, are not taken very seriously in
England ; but it should be remembered that, as
society is at present constituted, it is to the arts
alone that the English people can go for any know
ledge of life. And it must be remembered, too, that
from one's knowledge of life alone can a religion be
compounded. We seem, then, to be driven to the
conclusion that the religions of the immediate future
must be founded upon kinds of art that appeal to
women alone. ' And, since women alone have time to
think or to feel, women, it would seem, must found
the religions of the fiiture. That this tendency is the
more pronounced in the United States than even in
the islands of the East Atlantic makes the prospect
somewhat less dubious.
So that we seem to be faced by an ultimate
return to those distinctively Alemannic conditions
that, according to some sociologists, was the state
from which the Teutonic races sprung. Here the
basis of the household was, no doubt, "he to the
plough" — but, to the pulpit, she. The system was
I II

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
once matriarchal : that it may once more become.
That, no doubt, is very right and proper : it is, at
any rate, all in the day's journey for Humanity that,
in its course through such a part of eternity as may
belong to it, may well pass many times from woman's
dominion to man's, and back again. But constructive
or projective sociology is no part of my immediate
purpose, which is that of constructing an image of
my present day as it impresses me. Nevertheless, as
an illustration, as an exaggeration, of tendencies
now observable, the prophecy of feminine dominion
is not without its illuminative uses. For, looking at
things by its particular light, many things present
themselves to us.
It is obviously begging the question to say that
the result of the regiment of women at the present
day is to belittle — to belittle in particular the Press,
Christianity, and the Science of Healing. For the
littleness of to-day is so very certainly the greatness
of to-morrow that, from any aloof point of view, the
theory is hardly worth combating. The press
to-day is turning gradually along certain lines : it is
converting itself into an organ for conveying, not
sustained " articles " in one trend of thought, but an
infinite number of small and interesting facts. This
is a principle like another, and the object of the
press being to attract attention by awakening
interest, the principle is a very valid one. It should
indeed be remembered that the principle is a very
ancient one, too ; for I suppose that two of the most
I 12

FAITHS
attractive books in the English language are Bos-
well's "Life of Johnson" and Florio's "Montaigne."
And both of these works are, in essence, collections
of " snippets." That they are well written tells in no
wise against the contention, for there is nothing to
prevent the small announcements of the daily press
from being well put or even from being reasonably
accurate. It might indeed be said that the domination of the
press by women has led simply to a greater honesty
— that, for all the centuries during which man has
been the public of the newspapers man has consented
to be bored for the sake of a principle. Man,
according to this theory, which I have heard gravely
asserted, has thought that he ought to read informa
tive matter; it is only woman that has had the
common sense to say : " Now that we read the news
papers we will have what we like." And man has
very gladly taken her gifts. In a similar way,
when she approaches the matter of constructing a
religion, woman, according to this theory, has decided
to have what she wants.
What she wants is most decidedly not theology.
And it is, very decidedly, a healthy race. She takes
accordingly from the Scriptures what best suits her,
and from the science of healing what best suits her,
and of the two she constructs her faith and her rules
of conduct. From the man-made religion that she
has found ready to her hand she has taken the figure
of the Second Person of the Trinity : from medicine,
113 I

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
the principle that for a person to be cured he must be
" bones voluntatis." For it must be remembered that
the chief social fiinction of woman — the one which
causes her the greatest pleasure and the greatest
pain — is the keeping healthy of her children. A
religion which does not in some sort ensure this
is not a religion that can very intimately appeal to
her. In Catholic countries or communities this
element of satisfaction is to be found in the interces
sion of the Saints or of the Virgin. I remember
being present at an adult baptism in Paris, and of
the touching ceremony the most touching feature
to me was the number of kneeling women in the rear
of the little church. As soon as the, baptism was
completed — as soon, that is, as the convert was
purged of all past sin, and able in consequence to
plead weightily before the throne of grace, these
women approached him and begged him to intercede
for their sick children. And this possibility must
have formed for them a very strong tie with their
church — a motive for adhesion which is lacking in
these islands. But indeed it is hardly necessary to
emphasize the fact that Catholicism maintains a very
close hold over its women communicants — that its
chief hold on the peoples comes from them. It is only
necessary to state the case of Poland, where with the
men, forced by the necessities of the day to enlist in
the public services, and to abandon alike their national
characteristics and their faith, the women with a
splendid perseverance keep alive the old traditions.
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FAITHS
Catholicism — with its female saints, with its female
religious, with its feminine element in the Divine
Concord — has its chief safeguard in its women. But
in these islands, which have discarded alike female
saints, female religious, and the Mother of God as an
object of worship, a comparative lukewarmness in
attachment to established forms of worship has
resulted. I am aware, of course, that the lukewarm
ness is only comparative, and that in England as,
say, in France, the women form the substantial bulk
of the congregation ; nevertheless it is in England
more easy to conceive of a woman's changing her
religion to fall in with the views of her husband than
would be the case in France.
We may set this down to the fact that Protestantism
is of a nobler intellectual growth than is Catholicism,
which is an evolution almost entirely of the senti
ments and the weaknesses of humanity. Protestant
ism in getting rid of the least credible of the Christian
tenets, sacrificed — nobly enough — a great deal of the
appeal of the Church ; it availed itself of reason at
the expense of intuition. It said, to all intents and
purposes : " Here are the holy writings ; we will
use them as a basis for our reasonings ; we will allow
of no corollary however attractive." By so doing it
sacrificed a great part of its appeal and a great part
of its authority. It sacrificed, too, it seems to me, a
great part of its theological traditions and of its
popular comprehensibility.
The other day one of my little daughters returned
115 12

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
from her convent with a rather badly scratched hand .
I said that it must have hurt her a great deal, and
she turned her small face up to whisper to me : " God
suffered much more than that."
The phraseology struck me very forcibly : it aroused
in me all that was Protestant in my early training.
An English child might have said : " Jesus suffered
much more " ; or it would, more likely, have used
some proverbial expression, or have contented itself
with saying that it did hurt. But that an English
child should have attributed to God — to all the
persons of the Trinity — a possibility of physical
suffering is, I take it, almost an impossibility. Of
course, were the proposition put to the child grown a
man he might, after reflection, agree that the sufferings
of Christ, being of one substance with the Father,
would be communicated to all the persons of the
Godhead. But I am inclined to believe that no
Englishman really feels these matters in that way.
Judging from my own early predispositions and
from English conversations on this point, I am fairly
certain that most Englishmen regard the Saviour as
an adult, fairhaired male, distinct altogether from
God the Father, and not very easily or conceivably
blended into the mysterious and ineffable Three in
One. Christ remains the visible sign of the Trinity :
it is not legal to attempt to visualise God the Father :
it is impossible utterly to attempt to form an idea of
the Holy Ghost.
It is difficult to conceive of Jesus even as a child —
ii6

FAITHS
it is, at least, not usual to do so. It may be remem
bered that towards the middle of last century there
were certain painters called pre-Raphaelites. One
of these painted a picture showing the Saviour as a
child subject to his parents. This picture raised a
storm : it was considered blasphemous, simply because
for many centuries it had been the custom in England
to regard the Saviour as a grown man, aloof from
most of the trials, privations and subjections of
humanity. That he should be shown obeying Joseph
and Mary — that he should be shown kissing his
mother — these things seemed to be anathema.
In fact, in the course of the centuries that had
succeeded the sixteenth, there had grown up in
England a cult which was almost solely that of
Christ. This began without doubt as a protest
against Mariolatry and the worship of the Saints.
But the seed fell upon soil very fertile : it became a
part of the tradition of this great and useful nation.
For England is the country of Christism simply
because this human figure of the Saviour appeals so
very strongly to a nation whose human contacts are
always its first consideration. To the modern English
man the actions or the nature of the Father are com
paratively unknown : they appeal to him perhaps at
moments : he is the God of Battles, precisely, and in
England's military moods he is appealed to. But
Christ is always with us — Christ and his eleventh
commandment. We hardly know what are the
attributes of the Holy Ghost, yet every word of
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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
Christ Jesus, every action, every parable we have,
all, by heart.
In a Continental city, at the end of an old market
square, there will stand a church with its doors wide
open. In the intervals of selling her goods the
market woman will go up the steps of the church,
will, before a shimmering altar, tell her beads, mutter
a prayer or two, perform some act of faith. She will
return to her chaffering; she may have prayed to
St. Servatius, St. Eloi, or the Virgin, and her whole
mind will be a matter of her cult, little fragments of
religion interpenetrating the whole fabric of her
inner self, little acts of faith filling in the in
terstices of her outer life. In this way the whole
being of great continental nations is imbued with
a sense of the supernatural side of religion.
In that sense the Englishman is hardly religious at
all, since it is not so much the supernatural as the
human side of the Deity that has a daily sig
nificance for him. His main worship is paid in no
church builded by mortal hands. His Service, which
is not an act of faith, but the payment of a tribute,
is something apart from his life, part only of a special
day, which is singled out from all the others, and
dedicated to what consideration he gives to the
supernatural deity.
Yet if he is not religious he is assuredly devout,
since we may consider the measure of his devotion
to be his desire to act in the spirit of the Master.
For this tradition of Christ is a very singular and
ii8

FAITHS
very fine manifestation, and the Englishman, instead
of asking himself: " How may I best propitiate
St. Servatius ? " — asks in any given contingency :
" How would Christ have acted here } " He takes,
in fact, the Saviour for his master and his
model, and I have been very much struck upon
occasions by the virulence with which even professing
unbelievers in England will defend to the last word,
to the utmost comma of the English New Testament,
the teachings and the person of Christ.
And herein lies at once a very great strength and
a very great danger to revealed religion in England.
For whilst utterly unwilling to acknowledge that a
personage so perfect as Christ can have been of other
than miraculous origin, can have been other than
a God, the Englishman troubles himself very little
about the other sides of his theology. With him,
indeed, his religion — Christism — is almost entirely
a standard of manners. His problem, much more
than the saying of " Holy, holy, holy," is that of
how he shall do as he would be done by. Other
Christians may hope for temporal advance and
ultimate escape from Divine wrath, because they
have set to their account a great number of those
small acts of faith. They try, in short, to do things
acceptable to the hosts of saints and the enthroned
deities. But the Englishman's hopes of profit and
salvation are based upon the fact that he shall be
able to say he had followed his Master's teaching,
who bade him be good to his fellow man.
H9

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
This is, I think, the keynote of the Englishman :
fierce and singular idiosyncrasies. It is the " note "
of the matter. It explains the singular anthropo
morphism — the singular lack of sympathetic imagina
tion that distinguishes the Englishman. His motto
is : " Do as you would be done by." That does not
mean : " Examine into the other man's nature and
see how he would be done by." But it does mean
that, in England, upon the whole, one will find more
well-intentioned and tolerant consideration than in
many countries more religious. And it explains, I
think, why the chief fiinction of the English in the
comity of the nations has been to show how men, in
an easy, a rule-of-thumb and a bearable manner, in
great numbers, scattered across the acres at home
or across the seas, tolerantly and pleasantly may live
together.

I20

CONDUCT.

CHAPTER V.
CONDUCT.
THERE is a passage in the Diary of Samuel
Pepys in which he quotes some speaker whose
name I have forgotten. I am unable, too, to
find again the passage itself. But it is to the effect
that the function of the law is not to avenge but to
restore. And, upon the whole, we may say that
nowadays and, in the large, the fiinction of the
English law is successfully fulfilled. The English
law as it stands upon the statute-books is more fitted
to prevent crime than to avenge it : the English
national temperament vis-d-vis of, say, a thief is
scarcely an avenging one. If, that is to say, a thief
have failed to come off with his booty, or if he have
surrendered it before or after his capture, the English
man as a rule will be contented with, or will applaud
a light sentence. But it must be a sentence that will
deter other criminals.
This "note," I think, permeates the whole fabric
of English society. I was talking to a sheepshearer
this morning. Whilst he knelt in the hot sunshine
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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
above the hot fleeces of a panting ram he told
me that the day before a casual labourer, employed
during the pressure of lamb-shearing, had taken
three shillings from his coat when it hung in the
wool barn. I asked him if he had told the police,
and he answered :
"No, nor I don't suppose I shall. At any rate,
I'll give the chap a fair start. After all, he wasn't of
these parts, so nobody will take him for an example,"
And yesterday, lying upon the sea beach, I asked
a member of our administrative class what would be
done to the fellaheen of an Egyptian village. They
had risen in a body and murdered some officers of
the English army shooting in the Nile fields.
" Oh," he said, " they'll deport a whole lot of them
to the Soudan. It is a beastly thing to do with them,
poor beggars, and probably no one here will know of
it. But it must be done or there would be no end of
these murders. You see Englishmen are walking
about the villages there all day long unarmed." . . .
At the same time, the Englishman views with
equanimity the fact that the law does sanction the
most appallingly vindictive sentences for crimes of
the most insignificant. If you put it to a lay
Englishman that it is appalling that a man should be
sentenced to six months' hard labour for stealing a
pair of shoes, he will say : " Oh well, it is the law."
And, in a similar spirit, he will comment upon the
fine of ten shillings upon a man who just fails to
murder his wife. 124

CONDUCT
In this the English legal courts differ from those
of almost all other nations, since the spirit of nearly
all foreign legal systems is the rendering of justice.
In England the judge administers the law. He
must administer the law in face of his notions of
equity, of . right ; he must do violence to his most
intimate feelings and to the spirit and sympathies of
all people, if the law so demands it. I had a friend
who was tried for a certain misdemeanour before a
judge, whose whole private life was devoted to com
bating a side issue of that misdemeanour. It was,
that particular crime, founded upon Atheism, though
it was not exactly a manifestation of disbelief in the
existence of a Deity — and, indeed, the words were
never mentioned in the Court, though Mr. Justice
 , it was notorious, had a hatred of Atheists that
in one or two instances had bidden fair to prejudice
his career. Nevertheless, although my friend was
found guilty, technically, of his misdemeanour, Mr.
Justice  passed upon him a sentence that was
practically one of acquittal — the payment of the
plaintiff's costs. This, of course, is a common
place record ; but my friend, sitting in the court,
was well aware of the personal hatred that the
judge felt towards him. He said that it felt like
being in a cage with some tremendous, malevolent-
eyed, wild beast prowling round the exterior and
trying bar after bar by which he might enter and
devour. And happening to meet Mr. Justice  ,
a venerable if bad-tempered old gentleman, at a
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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
friend's table shortly afterwards, I had the gratifica
tion to hear him interrupt a discourse upon the
Etruscan vases which were the chief delight of his
private existence, by a violent diatribe against my
friend the misdemeanant. According to him he was,
my friend, a dangerous scoundrel whom, if the law
were satisfactory, he would have sentenced to penal
servitude for a long term of years. But he had, of
course, to administer the law.
There is no lesson to derive from this save that the
average Englishman would say that Mr. Justice 
was in the right. But I fancy that, in pure reason,
he was in the wrong to have inflicted a sentence so
moderate when his instincts and desires — and the
practice of the Courts — would have justified him in
inflicting a penalty certainly more severe than the
mere payment of the plaintiff's costs. I went indeed
so far as to question his lordship, who happened to
be a distant connection of my own, not as to this
particular instance — I had indeed allowed the topic
to recede far enough into the past of the conversation
to allow it to pass from his mind — but as to how, in
general cases, he allowed his predilections to affect
his judgments. I put my question in a sufficiently
deferential form, and he answered good-naturedly :
" Well, you see, there are in every judge two gentle
men rolled into one, as some one said. Now, in the
case of that fellow  " — and his mind had reverted
to the case of my friend — "I dare say you weren't
acquainted with the particulars. But it was so-and-
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CONDUCT
so . ..." ; and, leaning back in his chair and taking
a sip of the barley water that his health forced him to
drink even at dinner, he proceeded to sketch the case
of my friend. It was instructive to see that though
he was virulently unfair to the motives and the
person of my friend, he stated the legal aspect of the
case with an extreme temperateness. "Now," he
continued, " when you have to pass judgment in such
a case you have to consider not only what the
criminal deserves, but what were the legal risks he
ran. Indeed, I personally make it a practice to cast
a general average in my mind of other judg
ments on that sort of case, if I don't — which I do
very often — take the opinion of my fellow judges.
The law, you know, is not any respecter of
persons." So that we seem to arrive at the fact that in the
English lawyer there is not only a personal con
science, which may or may not sway his judgment,
but there is also a legal conscience, a special casting
of the average of what may be the legal public
opinion of the day. And this last does undoubtedly
sway our judges most considerably of all. There are,
of course, cases of outrageous judgments ; just as,
obviously enough, there are persons who, owing to a
fortunate manner in the witness-box, or to some subtle
influence that it is hard to analyse, do get themselves
respected. But, upon the whole, and speaking
impressionistically, the spirit of the law as it is
administered in England to-day is, both actually
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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
and psychologically, wonderfully level in its mani
festations. The law, then, is no respecter of persons in
England, and that is as much as to say that English
law, like the typical Englishman, is singularly un
imaginative, is essentially lacking in constructive
sympathy. That there is one law for the rich and
the poor may or may not be reasonable to the bulk
of humanity in the world ; but that there should be
one law for doctor, man of letters or linen-draper, is
a proposition that most other nations will deny.
Thus, in France bankruptcy for a tradesman is a
crippling and terrible catastrophe, involving loss of
civil rights and other disabilities. For the French
lawgiver argues (I am not concerned to say whether
he is right or wrong) that the business of the
tradesman being money - making, the tradesman
who fails to keep his money accounts straight is a
member detrimental to society. The professional
man or the artist, on the other hand, according to
him, devotes his chief endeavours not to the making
of money, but to the advancement of his science or
art, a thing beneficial to the Republic, outside the
accidents of its marketability. And thus the French
judge attempts to administer, not a law which re
spects no persons, but a law which aims at rendering
an individual justice. The apparently irrational but
psychologically justifiable verdicts of French juries
are so many confirmations of this theory. And it is, no
doubt, owing to the consciousness of this that French
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CONDUCT
la-wyers in practice assume the guilt of an accused
citizen, calling upon him to establish his innocence ;
just as it is no doubt owing to the consciousness that
the law never can render an ideal justice, that the
English law assumes the innocence ot an accused
subject. It is as if the Englishman had said in the
past :
" Oh, well, the law is wonderfully capricious in the
way it affects people; let us make it affect as few
people as it decently need." And so we have that
wonderful phrase : " The benefit of the doubt," and
this tranquil, unreasoning belief in the rightness of all
legal decisions, which casts so singular, so steady a
light upon English character. For I think that there
is nothing in the world more wonderfiil as a national
expression than the tranquillity which falls upon
England after the decision of a great case. For days,
for weeks, nay, even for months, we may have been
following a trial with a nearly breathless attention.
We discuss the evidence in every club corner, over
every restaurant table, or across the fields where the
footpaths lead us. We form our private judgments ;
we say, "He is guilty," or "We don't believe they
did it." And, when the blow falls, when the doom is
pronounced, we really hold our breaths for a moment.
I remember walking along the Strand not so long ago
with a companion, and suddenly there flashed across
the crowded, hurrying, dizzying street the announce
ments, in yellow, in pink, in white papers — " Result
of the  case." 129 K

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
It did, quite literally, call a halt to that tide. For
a long time we had followed the fortunes of the thin,
bold, military-looking, tired-looking prisoner in the
dock. If we had not identified ourselves with his
fortunes, we had felt for them the interest that one
feels for a long-unsolved riddle. And I think every
one of us in the Strand felt convinced that the
man was innocent, in that he was too mad to be sen
tenced. At the block in the corner of Wellington
Street we were able to stop to buy a paper from
behind the pink-lettered apron of a newsvendor, who
had, I remember, a black hat absolutely dun-coloured
with age. As he took the penny he muttered
hoarsely :
" He's got five years 1 "
There was not any doubt about who the He was —
though that was a fame, when one comes to think of
it, almost breathless : to be He for the whole crowded
Strand. I looked in my companion's eyes : I know I
felt some physical shock, a catch in the throat,
perhaps, or a minute difficulty in standing. I said :
Five years ! and my companion looked back at me
and said : " Five years ! " And for an appreciable
moment things really seemed to stand still, till we
could take up a definite mental position with regard
to this new factor in the world. And in that moment
I could see the figure of a traffic policeman as he
leaned back his head to call to an omnibus driver:
" He's got five years ! " We opened our damp
broadsheet in the street and looked, to make certain.
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CONDUCT
Then my companion said : " He was guilty,
then ! "
That was the view at which she had arrived
during her pause. And that is the point that
I wish to make — that in the whole of the Strand
there were all these people taking up that same point
of view. " He was guilty, then !" It was not, I mean,
in any of us to doubt the rightness of the verdict, and
few people doubted the justice of the sentence. And,
without giving voice to it, we framed in our minds
the corollary : " He's had more than a fair trial : he
has had the benefit of all the possible doubts, and
therefore he is guilty."
And that frame of mind is a great tribute from the
nation to the administrators of its laws — but it is also
a very singular national symptom. For it is obvious
that this benefit of the doubt, if it is beneficent to
criminals at times, acts rather hardly upon the
innocent accused, since he would obviously have
stood the test more unflinchingly if he had come
out acquitted from an ordeal in which no possible
doubt existed. And for that reason, in many cases, it
is nearly as much of a calamity to have been tried
and acquitted as to have been tried and found guilty.
I have known more than one man whose whole careers
have been blasted by prosecutions that, as the phrase
is, had not a leg to stand on. Still, when one meets
them where men congregate one seems to hear behind
their backs the whisper of: "The Recorder said that
the plaintiffs had failed to make out their case." I do
131 K 2

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
not indeed know whether, to thinking men, the con
tinental system of leaving it to the accused to " make
out their cases " is not psychologically preferable.
Abroad, in a sense, the law strains all its faculties to
ensure a condemnation, but the human feelings of the
jury have full play, and, probably, in the result, the
general averages of justice or injustice are about
equal in England or on the Continent.
There can, however, be no doubt that to men who
feel — as opposed to men who are cold-blooded enough
to think — the English system is infinitely the more
desirable as an ideal. And we must remember, too,
that the English state of things is the product of
what is practically the oldest system of justice in the
world. For, from French law, which is an evolution
of the Code Napoleon, to Dutch law, which was
founded comparatively lately upon the Roman, there
is not a law to be found that is so much the product
of an ancient and gradual growth of national
necessities. The enactment that makes it penal to
own a Bank of Engraving note is the most striking
instance of the odd adaptability of English penal law
to changing circumstances. There were, that is to
say, after the '45 certain Jacobites who were still
desirous of spreading conftision amongst the lieges of
George II. They hit upon the stratagem of the
Hanover Jack. This was a gilt coin that had upon
its face the head of the reigning king — but upon its
back there was shown, not St. George and the
Dragon, but the Devil flying away with George II.
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CONDUCT
It was an imitation near enough to pass, with other
coins, for a half-guinea, and a great number of these
medals were put into circulation. When prosecutions
ensued it was found that, although it was treason to
counterfeit, or to pass counterfeits of, the coin of the
realm, this was no counterfeit, inasmuch as the
reverse differed from that of the guinea. The accused
were acquitted. The legislature then passed an Act
making it penal to pass medals that were colourable
imitations of the king's coinage. The Jacobites
replied by selling the Hanover Jacks in the street at
so much a dozen. This, again, was not criminal,
since it was merely selling for value, a thing entirely
differing in kind from passing, which implies an
attempt to deceive. Parliament accordingly passed
a law making it penal even to possess a colourable
imitation of current paper or coinage. And it is this
eighteenth-century statute that still makes us bound,
if by misfortune we come into possession of the staple
commodity of the confidence-trick man, to hand it at
once to the police, or to destroy it as best we may.
This instance is striking, not only because it shows
how a very old law may suffice for modern purposes,
but because it shows how innate in English legal
procedure is the tendency to give the prisoner the
benefit of something — if not of the doubt, then of
flaws in the indictment. For there can be no doubt
that if, in each of these cases, the Jacobite hu
mourists did not contravene the letter of the law,
they very notoriously sinned against its spirit.
133

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
It is true that England never had a legal theory
that called upon the accused or the defendant to make
good his case ; nevertheless, though the practice of
the lawmight forbid this, and though, in principle, ever
since the days say of Henry VIII., the spirit of the
penal law was merely deterrent and that of the civil
law merely restorative, there can be little doubt that
the spirit of the legislature was vindictive. It met
its opponents in the administration. This is strikingly
shown in the case of that other "benefit" — that of
clergy. Until the Reformation this was to all intents
and purposes merely an ecclesiastical privilege. The
Church, that is to say, contained at first all those who
could read and write ; later it instructed all readers
and writers, and these became its special proteges.
And these it subtracted from the felons or misde
meanants who were liable to feel the powers of the
secular law.
The English Reformation — that singular movement
which was only partly a manifestation of public
opinion — did away, at the bidding of the cowed
legislature, with the ecclesiastical courts altogether —
in so far, at least, as they affected offences against the
secular authorities or against lay subjects. But,
although the legislature could affect them, and
although the legislature could pass the savagely vin
dictive penal laws of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, it
was unable, in face of the spirit of the whole people,
to do away with this particular benefit — a benefit
which in essence was entirely foreign to the practice
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CONDUCT
of the secular law. Then there ensued a long struggle
between the legislature and the public conscience — a
struggle which lasted for three centuries and ended,
to all intents and purposes, only with the complete
surrender of the legislature. At the beginning of
this period benefit of clergy was extended to all
offences save those of treason. Men who had stolen
eggs or men who had committed murder could alike
go free when they had signed their names and read a
passage from the Psalms. And, indeed, in this
particular manifestation at the commencement we
may see something of that French spirit, that makes
doctors and men of the arts comparatively free of the
laws of debt because of their extraneously benefiting
the Republic. For, in the sixteenth century, the man
who could read and write had still a certain special value.
But gradually the struggle assumed the aspect of a
stubborn determination on the part of judges and
juries to extend to poor devils a means of escape from
hatefully vindictive penalties. As the legislature
continued to extend the number of crimes that were
punishable by death, so the judges continued to make
proof of benefit more easy, until at last any man
who had the capacity to remember certain pot
hooks and get by heart any verse of the Bible which
he could pretend to read, could plead his clergy. The
legislature — which came of a class more intent on the
protection of property than sympathetic to the opinions
or feelings of the people — replied, after several women
had escaped death for stealing loaves, by gradually
135

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
limiting the crimes to which benefit of clergy could
extend. As against that, the administrators of the
¦ law invented the "flaw in the indictment," giving
criminals the benefit of slips of the pen to atone for
the loss of the other benefit. Until at last the legis
lature abandoned a contest grown unequal and, as it
were, with one stroke of the pen abolished the capital
punishment for all crimes save wilful murder, high
treason and the burning of arsenals or dockyards.*
In this way we have arrived, by the influence of a
public opinion acting upon legal practitioners, at a
legal practice that is eminently humane ; that, in a
rule-of-thumb way, works eminently well, and at a
legal practice that is singularly relied upon. Litigants
may nowadays find the costs of lawsuits inconveniently
high, but it is to be argued that no pay can be too
high that ensures the cleanhandedness of national
officials. And, upon the whole, no large class of
public opinion could to-day be found to endorse the
words of a character in an early Victorian novel. The
* I may set down here in counter to the objection that I have
here treated of criminal laws alone, the contention that our
civil law has always followed the practice of the criminal — with
the sole difference that, since no human life or limb is at stake, the
various " benefits " have not been so marked. Nevertheless, the
fact remains that, in general, the onus of proof remains upon the
plaintiff, the defendant being, with the necessary modifications and
the general principle that the province of the law is not to revenge
but to restore, in the position of a prisoner. And, indeed, we might
regard the Statute of Limitations as a special extra benefit not
enjoyed by any criminals save deserters from the army.
136

CONDUCT
law, in those days, appeared to be a "Hass," because it
was in a transitional stage — because, in fact, the
effects of the long struggle between legislature and
people had not yet worn off. But nowadays we can
feel to the full the influence of the simplifying and
nationalising work that was done upon the body ot
the law during the lifetime of, say. Chancellor Lord
Lyndhurst. It is to the judges of England, influenced as they
were from below and not from above, that we owe
this fact, that to-day England enjoys a law that is so
eminently a national expression. Like every national
expression it is, thus far, fiill of theoretic unreason ;
but, like every national expression, it remains a monu
ment of excellent practice. " It works out well," to
use words that are so eminently characteristic of the
English nation. It is, in fact, even as is the English
Constitution itself, like an easy cloak, like an easy
piece of footwear that gives pleasure to its wearer by
dint of many patchings. That it has its disadvantages
is obvious — that it has its unreasons is obvious, too.
For we might say that the earlier stage of the
law, in which crimes against property were punish
able by death, was a more logical expression of
the nation to whom the attainment and retaining
of property more than all else is the ideal of life ;
to whom still, a crime against the person is one
of so relatively little importance that, if a man strike
another and just miss killing him, he will escape with
a tiny fine, whereas if he strike just a hairsbreadth
137

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
deeper he will be hanged — the moral offence in both
cases being precisely similar. I remember coming
across a case in a country police-court, that brought
these aspects of the law out in a singular light of
absurdity. A man called Chapman had just missed
killing his wife with a curious and valuable stick that
he had brought from India. A month before, a
labourer called Noakes was left waiting in Chapman's
hall, having brought a message from a neighbouring
farmer. Noakes, who was a silly, but generally
honest boy, stole the stick, which appealed to his
fancy, not as an object of worth but as a curiosity.
Chapman, who had just failed of manslaughter with
this very stick that had just been returned to him, was
fined forty shillings at the petty sessions succeeding
those at which Noakes was sent to six months' hard
labour for stealing the stick.
-And, indeed, it is one of the disadvantages of such
a legal system as that of England, that the profound
respect which the Englishman has for the practice
of his law, blinds him to such anomalies as that
which I have related above. That is one of the very
cases that I had in my mind when I said that the
Englishman will answer always : " Oh, well, it's the
law ! " to any recital of a hard case. For during the
ensuing year I put this particular case of Noakes and
Chapman (it had shocked me because I liked Noakes,
a simple, rather vacuous youth with a great love for
birds, whose nests he protected with sedulous care) ; I
put this particular case to at least twenty English-
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CONDUCT
men. I received almost invariably that particular
answer. It hampers — this particular answer — the righting
of several wrongs that do earnestly need righting ;
it engenders a tranquil and optimistic state of mind
in which the Englishman, confident in the excellence
of his judge-made legal practice, forgets that to-day,
as always, there are laws that are too strong for
judges, just as there occur at times judges who will
warp the law into allowing them to inflict penalties
that are cruel and oppressive. The Englishman, in
fact, is apt to forget that the excellence of his law
resides in the men who administer it — forgets, that is
to say, that it is the judges, rather than the law itself,
that have inherited a very great tradition. And this
is in very truth what we call official optimism.
It would, indeed, be too much to say that this
official optimism is produced by the excellence of the
English legal system. It is, rather, this rare and
valuable attribute, the product of the national
characteristic reacting upon itself. English public
opinion — the broad, tolerant, humanitarian, practical
optimistic thing which in these islands is public
opinion — has produced an excellent thing — two
excellent things ; since it has produced the body ot
the law and the spirit of the constitution. And these
two excellent things filling very much the mind's eye
of the public, the public is very apt to say that all is
well with ever)d;hing because we have always those
things to fall back upon. It is, of course, difficult in
139

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
this matter to disconnect cause from effect ; it is, that
is to say, difficult to say whether it is because we are
a nation singularly hard to rouse to discontent, that
we are pleased with our state, or because our state is
upon the whole so excellent that we are not easily
roused to discontent.
But certain manifestations of the English spirit are
really amazing. I remember going through a dense
fog to a London station, to catch a train that,
officially, should have left the platform at twenty-five
minutes past one. At twenty-five minutes past one
there was not a single train in all the sidings of the
great terminus. At the almost invisible barrier the
dimly-seen officials had no knowledge of when any
train would leave any platform for anywhere. As the
hour of train after train arrived crowd after crowd
filled the station more and more densely. And,
for hour after hour nothing happened. The fog deep
ened ; the crowds grew more dense — but nothing
happened. No single person proposed even to make
a hostile demonstration before the booking-office ; no
one hooted, no one groaned. We stood there, our
arms filled with parcels, string bags — it was Christmas
time — rubbing against our calves. And still —
nothing. At last, at a quarter-past four, a string of
unlit carriages pushed its way almost soundlessly
between the thick piles of humanity.
And the crowd raised a cheer— humorous, cynical —
but still, a cheer. I do not think that in any con
ceivable world-centre this would be possible — one
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CONDUCT
could not, I mean, if one were a fanciful person,
figure for one's private delectation, an imaginary planet
where human beings would be so longsuffering. Yet
in London, year in, year out, we endure this crippling
strain upon our civic efficiency without the slightest
perceptible effort to change a law that renders so
farcical a service possible and permanent. It was,
after all, the law that we should wait there ; it is,
after all, the law that permits the ceaseless recurrence
of such events. And this characteristic acts balefuUy
upon our national spirit in two distinct directions.
It renders us patient in the face of this abuse ; it
causes us to be patient in our attitude towards
every abuse; and, in the still more deleterious
direction, it renders our officials nonchalant and
wanting in enterprise, I will admit that it is difficult
to deal with a fog, just as it is difficult for our
Foreign Office to deal with, let us say, Leopold II,,
King of the Belgians. The one and the other are
mephitic phenomena — baffling, protean. Yet,
assuredly, were the national spirit at all easy
to raise, we should insist that our railway
officials should search among the inventors until
some system were devised by which all trains at all
times could be worked by blindfolded men. Yet we
suffer our bodies to be wearied, our trade to be
harassed, our time to be lost, and our spirits to be
vexed, year in, year out, at odd moments, at hurried
seasons of the year. We let our officials grow slack,
our inventors lack that incentive ot reward and
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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
encouragement that is so necessary to our national
energy. We are fond of taking refuge in the sooth
ing consideration that we, the English race, have been
so much the pioneers of the railway system that now
adays we have to suffer for inconveniences that were
unforeseeable by the early inventors. In this case,
too, we say. "Ah, well, it's the law." It is, that is
to say, the law that pioneers work roughly, and con
tented with having so early led the van, we do not
harass the officials who have inherited the merits of
the long-dead pioneers. We have still the belief that,
if it were absolutely necessary, something would be
done. Someone, probably, will turn up from some
where, and do it for us. Competition will force it or
an eventual decrease in the use of soft coal.
And, just as we hinder our national and material
welfare by this official optimism, so we jeopardise
our national soul by allowing our Foreign Office to
remain impotent in the face of a dismal potentate,
the organiser of a band of callous scoundrels. I
was looking yesterday at a photograph ; it showed,
seated against the light, a sculpturesque nude form.
A bearded, wonderfully moulded man sat, his knees
nearly up to his mournful face, gazing inscrutably
and without expression at two small objects. These
were the hand and foot of his child. And the child,
a little girl, had been eaten by men, and the men
were the soldiery of a Christian monarch whom
we, as a nation, had helped to set in power over the
regions in which the photograph was taken ; a
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CONDUCT
monarch whom we still maintain in this authority.
Every voter in this country is directly responsible for
the mournful gaze of that negro.
It was open, that is to say, to every voter of the
United Kingdom to be aware of this fact; it was
equally open to him to exact from the parliamentary
candidate for whom he voted a definite pledge that
Great Britain would do its uttermost to put an end to
the reign of Leopold II. , absolute monarch of the
Congo Free State. That the task would be a difficult
one for our officials I am not set to deny. The late
Foreign Minister when privately urged to move in
the matter, said that his hands were tied by the fact
that abuses of natives as great in degree as those to be
witnessed in the Congo were to be witnessed in a
certain portion of the British Dominions. In con
sequence his hands were tied ; the Belgians respon
sible having threatened to raise against him a tu
quoque terrible enough. But, within reason, it should
be possible for the British nation either to reform the
offending colony or to save its reputation and regain
its freedom of criticism by cutting the colony in
question adrift from the assuredly glorious traditions
of the British Empire.*
¦* I do not mean to say that the Queensland question was the only
difficulty that faced Lord Lansdowne, and, unbacked as he was
by any strong public feeling, the complicated international questions
aroused by the peculiarly guaranteed position of Leopold II, were
sufficient to warrant the Government in taking very little action
upon the report of their official. But this fact is not the more
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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
This, of course, is no very important matter; no
doubt a negro child or two must suffer that the world
may march triumphantly towards Occidental civili
sation. I do not raise it with any propagandist
motive, but merely to illustrate a national character
istic, just as I have suffered much, and shall probably
continue to suffer much, from the erratic train services
of several lines without attempting to cure them with
my pen. It is, in short, not my affair at all to attempt
to better the world as I see it, but merely to attempt
to render, to account for, the defects of the singular
and very high qualities of the nation that gives me
shelter. The defects of the Englishman's qualities are
strange in practice, but obvious enough when we
consider the root fact from which they spring. And
that root fact is simply that the Englishman feels
very deeply and reasons very little. It might be
argued, superficially, that because he has done little
to remedy the state of things on the Congo, that he
is lacking in feeling. But, as a matter of fact, it is
really because he is aware — subconsciously if you
will — of the depth of his capacity to feel, that the
Englishman takes refuge in his particular official
optimism. He hides from himself the fact that there
are in the world greed, poverty, hunger, lust or evil
passions, simply because he knows that if he comes
creditable to us as a nation, though it may be taken as largely
absolving the Government which exists to put in force the national
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CONDUCT
to think of them at all they will move him beyond
bearing. He prefers, therefore, to say — and to hyp
notise himself into believing — that the world is a
very good — an all-good — place. He would prefer to
believe that such people as the officials of the Congo
Free State do not really exist in the modern world.
People, he will say, do not do such things.
As quite a boy I was very intimate with a family
that I should say was very typically English of the
middle class. I spent a great part of my summer
holidays with them and most of my week-ends from
school. Lady C  , a practical, comfortable, spec
tacled lady, was accustomed to call herselt my second
mother, and, indeed, at odd moments, she mothered
me very kindly, so that I owe to her the recollection
of many pleasant, slumbrous and long summer days,
such as now the world no longer seems to contain.
One day I rowed one of the daughters up a little
stream from the sea, and halting under the shade ot
a bridge where the waters lapped deliciously, and
swallows flitted so low as to brush our heads, I began
to talk to the fair, large, somnolent girl of some
problem or other — I think of poor umbrella tassel
menders or sweated industries that at that time inter
ested me a great deal. Miss C  was interested
or not interested in my discourse ; I don't know. In
her white frock she lay back among the cushions and
dabbled her hands in the water, looking fair and cool,
and saying very little. But next morning Lady
C  took me into the rose garden, and, having
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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
qualified her remarks with : " Look here. You're a
very good boy, and I like you very much," forbade
me peremptorily to talk to Beatrice about " things."
It bewildered me a little at the time because, I
suppose, not being to the English manner born, I did
not know just what " things " were. And it harassed
me a little for the future, because I did not know at
the time, so it appeared to me, what else to talk about
but "things." Nowadays I know very well what
" things " are ; they include, in fact, religious topics,
questions of the relations of the sexes, the condi
tions of poverty-stricken districts — every subj'ect from
which one can digress into anything moving. That,
in fact, is the crux, the Rubicon that one must never
cross. And that is what makes English conver
sation so profoundly, so portentously, troublesome
to maintain. It is a question of a very fine game,
the rules of which you must observe. It is as if one
were set on making oneself interesting with the left
hand tied behind one's back. And, if one protests
against the inconveniences attendant upon the per
formance of this prime conjuring trick, one is met
by the universal : " Oh, well ; it's the law ! "
The ramifications of this characteristic are so
infinite that it would be hopeless to attempt to
exhaust them. And the looking out for them leads
one into situations of the most bizarre. Thus, I was
talking about a certain book that was hardly more
than mildly " shocking " to a man whose conversation
among men is singularly salacious, and whose life
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CONDUCT
is notoriously not clean. Yet ot this particular
book he said, in a manner that was genuinely
pained :
" It's a thing that the law ought to have powers to
suppress." There was no doubt that he meant what
he said. Yet he could recount with approval and
with gusto incidents that rendered pale and ineffectual
the naive passions depicted in the work in question.
But Mr. N  's position was plainly enough defined
and sufficiently comprehensible ; it said in effect :
"These things are natural processes which must exist.
But it is indelicate to mention them." And you may
set it down that "delicacy" is the note of the English
character — a delicacy that is almost thfe only really
ferocious note that remains in the gamut. It is
retained at the risk of honour and self-sacrifice, at the
cost of sufferings that may be life-long ; so that we
are presented with the spectacle of a whole nation
bearing every appearance of being extraordinarily
tongue-tied, and extraordinarily unable to repress its
emotions. I have assisted at two scenes that in my life have
most profoundly impressed me with those character
istics of my countrymen. In the one case I was at a
railway station awaiting the arrival of a train of
troops from the front. I happened to see upon the
platform an old man, a member of my club, a retired
major. He, too, was awaiting the train ; it was
bringing back to him his son, a young man who had
gone out to the war as of extraordinary promise. He
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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
had, the son, fulfilled this promise in an extraordinary
degree ; he was an only child, and the sole hope for
the perpetuation of an ancient family — a family ot
whose traditions old Major H  was singularly
aware and singularly fond. At the attack upon a
kopje of ill-fated memory, the young man, by the
explosion of some shell, had had an arm, one leg,
and one side of his face completely blown away.
Yet, upon that railway platform I and the old man
chatted away very pleasantly. We talked of the
weather, of the crops, of the lateness of the train, and
kept, as it were, both our minds studiously averted
from the subject that continuously was present in
both our minds. And, when at last the crippled form
of the son let itself down from the train, all that hap
pened was the odd, unembarrassing clutch of left
hand to extended right — a hurried, shuffling shake,
and Major H  said :
"Hullo, Bob!" his son: "Hullo, Governor!"—
And nothing more. It was a thing that must have
happened, day in day out, all over these wonderful
islands ; but that a race should have trained itself to
such a Spartan repression is none the less worthy of
wonder I stayed, too, at the house ot a married couple one
summer. Husband and wife were both extremely
nice people — " good people," as the English phrase
is. There was also living in the house a young girl,
the ward of the husband, and between him and her —
in another of those singularly expressive phrases
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CONDUCT
— an attachment had grown up. P  had not
only never " spoken to " his ward ; his ward, I
fancy, had spoken to Mrs. P  . At any rate, the
situation had grown impossible, and it was arranged
that Miss W  should take a trip round the world
in company with some friends who were making that
excursion. It was all done with the nicest tranquillity.
Miss W  's luggage had been sent on in advance ;
P  was to drive her to the station himself in the
dogcart. The only betrayal of any kind of suspicion
that things were not of their ordinary train was that
the night before the parting P  had said to me :
" I wish you'd drive to the station with us to-morrow
morning." He was, in short, afraid of a " scene."
Nevertheless, I think he need have feared nothing.
We drove the seven miles in the clear weather, I
sitting in the little, uncomfortable, hind seat of the
dogcart. They talked in ordinary voices — of the
places she would see, of how long the posts took,
of where were the foreign banks at which she had
credits. He flicked his whip with the finest show
of unconcern — pointed at the church steeple on the
horizon, said that it would be a long time before she
would see that again — and then gulped hastily and said
that Fanny ought to have gone to be shod that day,
only she always ran a little lame in new shoes, so
he had kept her back because Miss W  liked
to ride behind Fanny.
I won't say that I felt very emotional myself, for
what of the spectacle I could see from my back seat
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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
was too interesting. But the parting at the station
was too surprising, too really superhuman not to give
one, as the saying is, the jumps. For P  never
even shook her by the hand ; touching the flap of his
cloth cap sufficed for leave-taking. Probably he was
choking too badly to say even " Good-bye " — and
she did not seem to ask it. And, indeed, as the train
drew out of the station P  turned suddenly on his
heels, went through the booking-office to pick up a
parcel of fish that was needed for lunch, got into his
trap and drove off. He had forgotten me— but he had
kept his end up.
Now, in its particular way, this was a very fine
achievement; it was playing the game to the bitter
end. It was, indeed, very much the bitter end, since
Miss W  died at Brindisi on the voyage out, and
P  spent the next three years at various places on
the Continent where nerve cures are attempted. That
I think proved that they "cared" — but what was most
impressive in the otherwise commonplace affair, was
the silence of the parting. I am not concerned to dis
cuss the essential ethics of such positions, but it seems
to me that at that moment of separation a word or two
might have saved the girl's life and the man's misery
without infringing eternal verities. It may have been
desirable, in the face of the eternal verities — the
verities that bind together all nations and all
creeds — that the parting should have been complete
and decently arranged. But a silence so utter, a
so demonstrative lack of tenderness, seems to me to
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CONDUCT
be a manifestation of a national characteristic that
is almost appalling.
Nevertheless, to quote another of the English say
ings, hard cases make bad law, and the especial
province of the English nation is the evolution of a
standard of manners. For that is what it comes to
when one says that the province of the Englishman is
to solve the problem of how men may live together.
And that, upon the whole, they are on the road to the
solution of that problem few people would care to
deny. I was talking in Germany last year to a much-
travelled American, and he said to me that it might
be taken for granted that English manners were the
best in the world. In Turks, in Greeks, in Americans,
in Germans, in French, or in Redskins certain differing
points were considered to distinguish the respective
aristocracies— regard for truth, quiet cordiality, soft
ness of voice, independence of opinion and readiness
of quiet apprehension — each of these things were found
in one or the other nations separately and were
regarded as the height of manners. And all these
things were to be found united in the Englishman.
Personally, I think that the American was right ;
but I do not wish to elevate the theory into a dogma.
And against it, if it be acknowledged, we must set the
fact that to the attaining of this standard the English
man has sacrificed the arts — which are concerned
with expression of emotions — and his knowledge
of life, which cannot be attained to by a man who
sees the world as all good ; and much of his motive-
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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
power as a world force which can only be attained
by a people ready to employ to its uttermost the
human-divine quality of discontent.
It is true that in repressing its emotions this people,
so adventurous and so restless, has discovered the
secret of living. For not the railway stations alone,
these scenes of so many tragedies of meeting and
parting, but every street and every office would be
uninhabitable to a people could they see the tragedies
that underlie life and voice the full of their emotions.
Therefore, this people which has so high a mission in
the world has invented a saving phrase which, upon
all occasions, unuttered and perhaps unthought,
dominates the situation. For, if in England we
seldom think it and still more seldom say it, we
nevertheless feel very intimately as a set rule of
conduct, whenever we meet a man, whenever we talk
with a woman : " You will play the game." That an
observer, ready and even eager to set down the worst
defects of the qualities in a people, should have this
to say of them is a singular and precious thing — for
that observer at least. It means that he is able to go
about the world in the confidence that he can return
to a restfiil place where, if the best is still to be
attained to, the worst is nevertheless known — where,
if you cannot expect the next man in the street to
possess that dispassionate, that critical, that steady
view of life that in other peoples is at times so salutary,
so exhilarating and so absolutely necessary, he may
be sure that his neighbour, temperamentally and, to
152

CONDUCT
all human intents, will respect the law that is
written and try very conscientiously to behave in
accordance with that more vital law which is called
Good Conduct. It means that there is in the world a
place to which to return.

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L'ENVOI.
I TOOK my doctor — one of my, alas ! too many
doctors — to the play some time ago. He was,
this Doctor K  , a typical Englishman. It is
nothing to the point that he was bom in Glasgow and
had a Spanish mother. For he was fair, firm in the
jaw, with a drooping moustache, keen, rather reflecting
grey eyes that quailed before no glance, a devout
respect for tradition and a devout, ironic contempt for
what he called " the Radicals," though no one by
disposition and in his own life could be more Radical.
The play was one of those relatively good but posi
tively bad pieces of false sentiment that occasionally
make a success in London. It turned upon the
elopement of a married woman from a husband who
was impossibly bad, with a lover who was impossibly
good, in the company, and under the chaperonage of
an aunt who was altogether impossible. The chief
actress had one property — a worried look, and she had
nothing else, except, ot course, a certain bodily
charm. She used her worried look and nothing else
for every possible occasion, gazing always into a great
distance and absently brushing a curl from her fore-
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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
head. This performance grew monotonous to me and,
at about the 25th " scene between husband and wife,"
I leant back in my chair and said to my companion :
" She is very bad."
Still leaning forward, intent, he turned his head
towards me and uttered, irritated, shocked and dis
tracted by my callousness :
" But think of her temptations."
I was thinking of how the actress performed — he ot
how he would have had his sister — or possibly the
woman he was in love with — behave if her husband
treated her as badly as the stage-husband treated his
wife. And that is how, it seems to me, the typical
Englishman behaves at all plays — or at this spectacle
which is life. He thinks so much about how he
would have himself behave — or his sister, or the
woman he loves — that he loses, once and for ever,
the critic in the sympathiser. And that is the main
note of English life — that, that the Englishman is
always a poet, he is almost never a critic.
For the poet is the man who acts as far as in him
may be in accord with a certain high and aloof
standard of morals. He views life, not as it is,
but as it should be if, in some golden age, he himself
were not driven to play the mean part that, almost
invariably, he does play. If he idealises himself it is
because he has ideals, it is because he sees himself,
to the bitter and disillusionising end, as a hero. For,
if you catch an Englishman, or if, which is more
often the case, he catches himself, in an act of
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meanness, he will feel angry, irritated — he will feel
above all a sense of the flagrant unfairness of Fate.
He will protest, and it will be true : " This is not the
real I ; this is not the normal I ; I am, really, a
man of high standards. This is an accident that,
set against my whole record, does not really count."
In this he differs very radically from the men ot
one other nation, who will shrug their shoulders and
say : " What would you have ? Man is a mean beast
at bottom " ; or from the man of yet another nation,
who will say : "I did this because I wished it ;
everything that I wish is right ! " For he will admit,
your Englishman, that he ought to have played the
game, and he will believe that, really, the game
is a perfectly practicable one. Only a cursed piece
of bad luck has, in this instance, forced him to lift
his voice or do whatever else it is that circumstance
has coerced him into doing. The number of living
Englishmen who have never told a lie to gain a
material advantage must be incredible ; the number
of living Englishmen who would never, save at the
cost of a shrinking like that from a touch upon a
sore place, tell a lie to get out of a scrape must be
almost equally large. And this is not only because of
the incessant clamour of the meanest of all proverbs
— it is because the Englishman believes that his
neighbour does not tell lies, and he hates to think
himself a meaner man than his neighbour. That
honesty is the best policy he may or may not believe,
but his official optimism makes him believe that
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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
people do not tell lies. Nothing, I think, wounds an
Englishman more than to discover his child in its
first lie ; consternation, agony, a half glimpse of all
the tragedy that life may hold, beset him at once,
and, after a moment devoted to a sort of inarticulate
prayer, he sets to with a will to force upon his child's
mind the fact that a lie is the one unpardonable
offence. He tells his son that he will forgive him
any sin so long as it is at once owned to ; he
subjects himself to the possibility of any annoyance
if only he may make his child truth-telling. He
enjoins these things upon all his nurses, upon
all his servants, upon all his educators. For, for
instance, he will send his son to no school where
the masters do not profess to act upon this principle.
He will, that is to say, certainly send his son to
no school where the ushers are allowed to be spies
upon the boys. In that way he fosters in his children
a belief that the universe is run upon those lines —
that the world will pardon, the Almighty favour
beyond his deserts, the man who is ready to confess
to his faults when he is asked about them.
The defects of this policy are twofold. For, in the
first place, the teaching is too soft, too optimistic,
and, in the second, a man finds out that there are
in life many sins that he can commit without ever
being asked about them by any other man. Thus
a hedonistic cult is apt, more particularly in after life,
to lead a man to disaster. I do not say that, as a
system, this discipline of truth-telling is worse or
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better than, say, the French system of spying plus
confession to a priest. It is only different, and, if it
is probably worse for the individual, it is almost
certainly better for his neighbours. In the result, the
Frenchman believes in honour, which is a curious
cross between great achievements and not being
found out ; the Englishman believes in probity,
which is a cross, equally curious, between behaving
justly and having undue allowance made for his
faults. Probably, if we were all to check exactly
the ethical results we should find that the moral
balance of English and French individuals worked
out exactly equal, the Frenchman gaining and losing
more, the Englishman less.
This characteristic of the Englishman is the more
remarkable in that he knows very well that the truth
is an impracticable thing, a thing to make life a
weariness, since, hard pressed, he will acknowledge
that life itself — unless we console ourselves with
illusions — is an illusion. He has come far enough
away from his Elizabethans, yet he is still so
saturated with their quotations that he is singularly
open to convictions of the transience, of the shadow-
nature, of life itself. For no one is so open as the
Englishman to being impressed, say, by the mottoes
upon dials. He will read : " For our time is a very
shadow that passeth away " — and though he will put
the conviction from him as fast as he may, he will,
nevertheless, feel it for the moment, very intimately.
The fact is — and it is one of the irritating quali-
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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
ties of this singular nation — that, whatever the
Englishman may be called, he cannot be styled a
materialist. For the materialist looks things in the
face ; the idealist never does, but weaves around them
instead a veil of values that are purely relative. If
you ask an Englishman why the truth is valuable, he
will say : because it is the truth. If you press him
still fiirther he will say, as like as not: "Magna
est Veritas et prevalebit" — and, as likely as not, it
will be because of this sounding phrase that he really
sets truth upon a pedestal.
If he would open his eyes — or with his eyes closed
—he might see a thousand instances in which
truth has not prevailed. He might, that is to
say, see instances enough to make him question
his dogma. But he will take refuge in his quota
tion, and there, for him, is the end of the matter.
He will never carry his analysis of life sufficiently
far to allow him to say that a society is conceivable
the basis of whose relationship is a lie ; that, in
fact, it is really because the truth is upon the whole
a convenience, a simplification of relationships, that
truth-telling communities prosper. If you put it
before him that the truth is convenient as a
standard simply because it saves time, he will agree.
He will agree, too, that a market in which all the
vendors tell the truth is a market that will save so
much time that it will be able to handle a greater
number of goods than a market in which the buyer
must test every handfiil of peas. In this dim way
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he has discovered the practical value, as he has dis
covered so many of the other practical values, of
altruism. But, not content with that, he must needs
look out for a special and mystical value — a moral
value that, precisely, will prevail because of the
greatness of the principle.
The Englishman, in fact, is the poet. He is not
the poet because in this use of truth he is alone
among the nations. But he unites in himself the
practical virtues of all the nations : he has assimilated
all the quotations. Upon a pedestal as high as
truth he puts, for instance, cleanliness. Now cleanli
ness is of the greatest practical value in a man, and
it is obvious that a nation that washes will have a
great advantage over a nation less stringent in its
ablutions, simply because that nation will contain a
greater percentage of healthy individuals with alert
brains. The Englishman accordingly elevates this
characteristic into a mystical virtue, and says that
cleanliness is next to godliness — putting a purely
material factor into the same range of ideas as a
purely spiritual virtue. He carries, naturally, this
idea into practice — so that, for an Englishman, a
hero has no value if his face be not minutely clean.
For how many times in the course of one's social
career will one not hear : " Oh, one couldn't know
S— — . He doesn't look as if he ever washed." Yet
S  is the greatest living metaphysician. Very
similarly, the Englishman attaches a mystical value
to things that have no immediate or obvious value at
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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
all. For how often, again, has one not heard it said
of So-and-So that he is a " thorough sportsman."
And to these words attaches a special significance
that no one who is not an Englishman can at all
comprehend. For to it we attach the corollary that
So-and-So is trustworthy, socially possible, truthful,
sober, cleanly, sane and generous. So-and-So, in fact,
may be trusted to be a good fellow. And in so trusting
him we are in the right, since the thorough sports-
manias apart from the man who merely excels, say,
at steeplechase riding — on account of the fact that he
"plays the game" and lives in the open air a fairly
abstemious life, is pretty certain to be " straight " and
is pretty certain to have a sufficient stock of technical
and entertaining anecdotes, to be pretty good com
pany. He will breed sound children ; he will vote
according to his conscience ; he will be loyal to the
plot of earth that bore him. In consequence, he is
a valuable citizen ; so we assign to the sport that he
follows a mystical value.
And, as another corollary, with an almost invari
able wrong-headedness, we set about ruining the sport
of the moment by " specialising" it. So that cricket,
which has a national value of the very highest kind,
and a mystical value too, since " playing cricket "
is synonymous with pursuing honourable courses —
cricket has been practically ruined and reduced to
mathematical displays of tactics so scientific that no
mere amateur very much cares any longer to take
part in a game. And, similarly, we have ruined
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football, croquet, hunting, pheasant-shooting — and
we are ruining Bridge and have long since ruined
the great game of racing.
Nevertheless, what the Englishman pursues in all
these things — in truth-telling, cleanliness, or games
— is a personal record. And there, again, he is the
poet. For he desires never to have told a lie, never
to have been unclean, never to have infringed a rule
in any game. And he does these things, he has
these aspirations to satisfy a certain inward sense.
He does not do them for glory alone, not for health
alone, and not alone to escape punishment, but as it
were to preserve a sort of virginity in a fine wrong-
headedness — ^just as now and then you will still come
across a countryman of great age cherishing an in
vincible pride in never having been in a railway train.
And here again is another great strength of the
Englishman, since there are many nations that revel
in sport, in truth-telling, or in the mania of personal
ablutions ; but in no other nation are so many of the
civic and the practical virtues so worked into the
mystical code of life. The Frenchman loves sport as
practically as the Englishman ; the German loves
truth as unreasoningly ; the Japanese excels all
Occidental nations in the number of times that he
submits his cuticle to the influence of hot water. But
the man of these islands, as it were avid after proverbs,
takes them from the German, the French, the
Spaniard, the Swedes, and even from the Irish, and
out of them builds up the typical Englishman.
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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
It is for this reason that one may, with some con
fidence, set down the fact that the English is the
type of the future. For, being born of the best types
of so many other races, the English unite nowadays
in themselves all the virtues of a special sort — all the
perpetuating virtues of the Occidental nations. That
they accept the world and do not grumble at the
rules of the game — that they have nothing in them of
the negational, and little of the questioning, frame of
mind, only make the forecast the more probable.
For a person who accepts the rules of, say. Bridge,
and does not question the justice of giving a person
thirty marks merely because he holds three aces,
whether he employ them well or ill — the person who
plays the game without being troubled by intro
spection, will obviously consider the game better
worth playing and will play it better. That is what
one calls unimaginativeness, and there is little doubt
that to be unimaginative is to be unhandicapped for
the practical business of life.
So that, just as the English language, on account
of its romantic traditions, its utter unreason, and its
slipshod practicability is probably destined to be the
language of the fiiture, so the English frame of mind,
which unites all these characteristics, is almost
logically destined to be the frame of mind of the
world man of the ftiture. I do not say that this
prospect does not appal me — I merely state the fact.
And perhaps one may be even optimistic in face of it.
For, just as the English language is so vague and
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unconnected an instrument that one may turn it to
the uses of a clear Latin frame of mind — of a long-
drawn-out and tenacious Germanic, or a misty and
" locally- coloured" Celtic verse -prose, it is pos
sible, without going outside of England, to find men
to suit one's mood whatever it may be. I do not
mean to say actually that there are so many
Russians, Prussians, Hindoos or Chinese in England
that it is possible to live all one's personal life
amidst these foreigners ; what I mean is, that the
Englishman himself, if one digs into him, if one
presses one's arguments ho.me sufficiently, is able,
romantically if you will, to assimilate almost any
point of view, since probably in his ancestry he
unites the most widely-differing individuals. It is
not, in fact, in his mind that he is true to type,
but solely in his national manifestations. He will
receive the culture of any nation ; he will even,
given the chance, feel all sorts of their national
patriotisms. And if he says that Garibaldi or David
King of the Jews were really Englishmen, this signi
fies actually that the Englishman is able to appreciate
to the ftiU the heroism, the spirit of national endea
vour of Italians as of Hebrews. When, in fact, the
Englishman says, "These fellows are Englishmen,"
he means, "We are at least, in part, Italians," or
Greeks, or Lost Tribes. He never attains to this
scientific statement of the case simply because he is
a poet — and the poet states deep truths in the
phrases of imagery. He is, in fact, the poet through
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THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
and through in his preference for the fine phrase, in
his self-centring, in his anthropomorphism, in his
idealism, and, above all, in his want of sympathy.
For the poet's business is constmctive ; it is not
analytical. He has to frame a world — a portion of a
world — for himself. Especially he is not analj^ical —
and no person can be sympathetic who is wanting in
the faculty of analysis. He may be kind, he may be
genial, he may be the pleasantest of company con
structively ; but he will not have the gift of sympathy.
I have at the present moment a cook with a perfect
mania for rescuing fledglings that have fallen from
the nests. She keeps these little things with their
enormous mouths in a number of baskets near the
stove. She feeds them sedulously, all of them, from
larks to thrushes, from robins to chaffinches, upon
a mixture of bread sopped in water and crushed
hemp seed. Some of them live to pass their days in
cages; many of them die. But she never stays to
enquire whether a diet of bread and hemp seed may
suit, say, a lark, as it will suit a sparrow. It has for
her, this diet, a mystic, a poetic significance. And
she never stays to enquire whether Nature, that gives
fallen nestlings over to the swift death of cold or at
the hands of rodents, is not more kind ; for she has a
poet's love of the pretty creatures. I have another
friend with a mania for sending all the fallen to
Canada. He persuades them there, he opens his
purse to send them there : tramps, prostitutes, dis
contented postmen, consumptives, broken-down men
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L'ENVOI
of letters or incipient barristers ; he dodges them past
the medical inspectors in the Liverpool gangways.
Some of them prosper, some of them die, and many,
no doubt, go to hell. But, to my friend it is all one,
since to him Canada appears to offer a paradise of
golden grain fields, and it is in these that a man finds
health and high thoughts.
And that, too, is the Englishman in his national
manifestations. He takes the subject races — Maltese,
Hindus, Malays, Bengalis, Zulus, Irishmen, Burmese
— he feeds them on the sopped bread of English
constitutional lines, he educates them with the
crushed hempseed of English codes, Christism and
the rules of the game. Some of them live, some of
them die, many of them go to hell. And so there
has arisen the great tradition of the British Raj.
That nature is more kindly, that allows the Hindu to
starve in his own way, is a proposition — whether it
be right or wrong — that never occurs to him. Im
mense, tolerant, wise in its views, assimilative up to a
point but intensely timid intellectually, intensely
afraid to probe things to the depths, the English
nation slowly makes its way towards becoming the
home of every man. Its intellectual timidity, its
very want of sympathy, arises from the Englishman's
necessity to have something fixed, to have some
standard, some model. So that just as the English
man accepts an Anglicised Christ Jesus for his
personal model, so he accepts the British Constitution
and the British frame of mind as the standard accord-
169

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
ing to which he must deal with the undying Celt. If
he fails it is because of his very virtues which are
miasma to certain peoples.
For the Englishman is so much a creature of the
game that he is intensely wearied if he is told that
the game of life has no rules. He is worried, because
he is intellectually lost directly an accepted belief is
destroyed. It is not that he loves the accepted belief
because it is a truth, since he loves it only as a
standard. He hates the Iconoclast because the
Iconoclast gives him the trouble of finding a new
proverb to elevate into a divine dogma. In the
great drink question, for instance, he has accepted,
upon the whole, the principle of the restriction of
licences. Yet it is certainly open to question whether,
for a hundred psychological reasons, the unrestricted
sale of drink might not conserve better the interests
of temperance. Or, if he could once accept that
the unrestricted sale of drink were the millennial
state, he would find it equally difficult to allow for a
moment that the restricted licence might find some
thing to be said for it. For, what Re dreads above all
things is a world in a fluid state ; what he suspects
above all things is the open mind. He wants, above
all things intellectual, that " something settled "
which will allow him to make new practical plans.
These, in short, are the defects of his qualities —
the great defect being his want of sympathetic
imagination. It is this that has got him his reputa
tion for hypocrisy — a reputation that is singularly
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L'ENVOI
undeserved. The fall of an idealist seems to be
greater than the fall of a cynic, because he maintains
that the world is perfectible. Yet, actually, idealist and
cynic are of one flesh, and the temptation that brings
down the one is none the less great for the other.
And for the rest, the Englishman is singularly human.
He is this because of his hopefulness, his optimism
and his eternal childishness, his unreason, things all
which make him good to live with. Speaking for
myself, a man of no race and few ties — or of many
races and many ties — I know perhaps one English
man and perhaps two Englishwomen that are abso
lutely and to the end sympathetic to me. I know
twenty foreigners that I could put up with for long
periods. I know just one corner of these green and
fertile islands that I really love with all my heart,
and one English city. But I know a dozen foreign
districts where, too, I could dwell in comfort for a
long time. But I know very well where the pull lies.
I know very well that, when the key of the street is
given to me, it is that one English city, it is that one
corner of England, it is that one Englishman and
those one or two Englishwomen that will call me
back in the end.
I may well say in my pride : there is no reason why
I should dwell in any one spot. But in my heart I
have proved that this boast is a vain one. Heaven
knows why this is so; but I remember being
" abroad " for a long space of time, amongst people
the most sympathetic, the most benevolent, the most
171

THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
instructed, the most enlightened, speaking lan
guages that, logically, were better adapted to express
thoughts than is this amorphous and fragmentary
language that I now write. There was no reason
why I should not have set up my home, deepened my
associations, taken up again old ties of blood in that
foreign land. There was no reason at all.
Yet somehow, at nights, there rose up before my
eyes a cottage, black against the wintry sky, the stars
being between the black and velvety lines of bare
elms in this place where now I write. And by day,
in the green and sunlit valleys, by the borders of a
great lake, I was obsessed always with an intense
longing to see once more the sails of ships above the
sea wall, the wide stretch of land, the church spire of
Lydd breaking the distant horizon — and I longed, ah I
beyond bearing, to hear English spoken again ; I
longed, beyond bearing, to be in the mists, the
lamplight, the smell of asphalte, of horsedung and
of humanity that so distingiiish the English capital.
And more than anything I longed to see again those
one or two Englishmen and women. . . .
Of course, habit may have done much to create
these feelings — early associations, early readings,
the passage of time, the mere fact of having lived
longer in these places than in others. But I think
that England, more than any other land, has the
power to exercise this attraction simply because in
England it is so easy to form ties, because life is so
easy to live, because the issues of life are so simple.
172

L'ENVOI
It is obviously England that has made the English ;
it is the climate, the shapes of the land, the moisture
that covers walls with lichens, the rain upon the
fertile soils, the great valley in a river basin set
towards the East. It is these things that have
engendered the tranquil state of mind, the optimism,
the contentment, the belief — illusion if you will — that
life is worth living. It is because, in fact, his climate
and his fertile fields give to him this belief, or
this illusion, that the Englishman really does make
such a pleasant thing of life whether in the cities
or in the country. We imagine perhaps signs
of change in the national psychology. And I am
quite prepared to have it said that these pages — if
they get at any spirit at all — get only at a national
spirit that is already on the wane. We are, it will
be said, getting Germanised or Americanised or
automobilised or electrified. But I think that whilst
England remains England, with its climate and its
greenery, these new tendencies will do little more
than be assimilated and converted as it were into a
new language expressing always the old thought.
For, if this people be not the chosen people, this
land will be always one that every race would choose
for its birthings and its buryings until the last Aaron
shall lead the last of the conquering legions across
the world.

FINIS.

By FORD MADOX HUEFFER.
"THE SOUL OF LONDON."
Imp. 161U0. 5s. nett.

" It is long since we came across a more attractive
collection of essays on any subject, and the author is to
be heartily congratulated on his success." — The Morning
Post. "'The Soul of London,' published to-day, is the
latest and truest image of London, built up out of a series
of brilliant negations that together are more hauntingly
near to a composite picture of the city than anything we
have ever seen before. . . ." — Th€ Daily Mail.
*' Londoners should read this book ; and even more
certainly should countrymen and denizens of provincial
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"Dealing mainly with the present, Mr. Hueffer has
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times one marvels at the knowledge of out-of-the-way
subjects, but the information is conveyed so simply that
one never questions its accuracy, and so entirely without
side that one does not resent being instructed." The Daily Chronicle,

LONDON: ALSTON RIVERS, LTD.

By FORD MADOX HUEFFER.
'THE SOUL OF LONDON.'
Imp. i6mo. 5s. nett.

"It is long since we came across a more attractive
collection of essays on any subject, and the author is to
be heartily congratulated on his success." — The Morning
Post. "'The Soul of London,' published to-day, is the
latest and truest image of London, built up out of a series
of brilliant negations that together are more hauntingly
near to a composite picture of the city than anything we
have ever seen before. . . ." — The Daily Mail.
"Londoners should read this book; and even more
certainly should countrymen and denizens of provincial
cities read it." — The Staftdard.
"Dealing mainly with the present, Mr. Hueffer has
displayed to the full the desiderated alertness, precision
and instinct. The reader receives an impression of a
marvellously equipped g:uide, whose business in life it is
to have multifarious information at his fingers' ends. At
times one marvels at the knowledge of out-of-the-way
subjects, but the information is conveyed so simply that
one never questions its accuracy, and so entirely without
side that one does not resent being instructed." The Daily Chronicle.

LONDON: ALSTON RIVERS, LTD.

By FORD MADOX HUEFFER.
THE
HEART OF THE COUNTRY
Imp. l6mo, 5s. nett.

"We have had ' Country' books of the most
varied character, from that of Gilbert White to
those of Richard Jefferies ; but Mr. Hueffer has
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his really beautiful work will assuredly make him
many friends," — The Daily Telegraph.
"There may be several opinions on the unity
of the book ; there can only be one, and that
ENTHUSIASTICALLY ADMIRING, about
the parts of which it is composed." — The World.
"There are not many men writing English just
now who have the talent — or will be at the
pains — to turn out sentences and paragraphs so
pleasing in texture and design as the sentences and
paragraphs of Mr, Hueffer , , , , who is an
accomplished artist in the handling of words."
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