fairly over. The down grade lies now before us. But, then, so far as I
can judge, most people have talked so ever since the morning when
Hengist and Horsa, Limited, landed from their three keels in the Isle of
Thanet. Gildas is the oldest historian of these islands, and his work
consists entirely of a good old Tory lament in the Ashmead-Bartlett
strain upon the degeneracy of the times and the proximate ruin of the
British people. Gildas wrote some fourteen hundred years ago or
thereabouts--and the country is not yet quite visibly ruined. On the
contrary, it seems to the impartial eye a more eligible place of
residence to-day than in the stirring times of the Saxon invasion.
Hence, for the last two or three centuries, I have learned to discount
these recurrent Jeremiads of Toryism, and to judge the question of our
decadence or progress by a more rational standard.
There is only one such rational standard; and that is, to discover the
causes and conditions of our commercial prosperity, and then to inquire
whether those causes and conditions are being largely altered or
modified by the evolution of new phases. If they are, England must begin
to decline; if they are not, her day is not yet come. Home Rule she will
survive; even the Eight Hours bogey, we may presume, will not finally
dispose of her.
Now, the centre of civilisation is not a fixed point. It has varied from
time to time, and may yet vary. In the very earliest historical period,
there was hardly such a thing as a centre of civilisation at all. There
were civilisations in Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Etruria; discrete
civilisations of the river valleys, mostly, which scarcely came into
contact with one another in their first beginnings; any more than our
own came into contact once with the civilisations of China, of Japan, of
Peru, of Mexico. As yet there was no world-commerce, no mutual
communication of empire with empire. It was in the Ægean and the eastern
basin of the Mediterranean that navigation first reached the point where
great commercial ports and free intercourse became possible. The
Phoenicians, and later the Greeks, were the pioneers of the new era.
Tyre, Athens, Miletus, Rhodes, occupied the centre of the nascent world,
and bound together Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece,
Sicily, and Italy in one mercantile system. A little later, Hellas
itself enlarged, so as to include Syracuse, Byzantium, Alexandria,
Cyrene, Cumae, Neapolis, Massilia. The inland sea became "a Greek lake."
But as navigation thus slowly widened to the western Mediterranean
basin, the centre of commerce had to shift perforce from Hellas to the
mid-point of the new area. Two powerful trading towns occupied such a
mid-point in the Mediterranean--Rome and Carthage; and they were driven
to fight out the supremacy of the world (the world as it then existed)
between them. With the Roman Empire, the circle extended so as to take
in the Atlantic coasts, Gaul, Spain, and Britain, which then, however,
lay not at the centre but on the circumference of civilisation. During
the Middle Ages, when navigation began to embrace the great open sea as
well as the Mediterranean, a double centre sprang up: the Italian
Republics, Venice, Florence, Genoa, Pisa, were still the chief carriers;
but the towns of Flanders, Bruges, Ghent, and Antwerp began to compete
with them, and the Atlantic states, France, England, the Low Countries,
rose into importance. By and by, as time goes on, the discoveries of
Columbus and of Vasco di Gama open out new tracks. Suddenly commerce is
revolutionised. France, England, Spain, become nearer to America and
India than Italy; so Italy declines; while the Atlantic states usurp the
first place as the centres of civilisation.
Our own age brings fresh seas into the circle once more. It is no longer
the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, or the Indian Ocean that alone count;
the Pacific also begins to be considered. China, Japan, the Cape; Chili,
Peru, the Argentine; California, British Columbia, Australia, New
Zealand; all of them are parts of the system of to-day; civilisation is
world-wide.
Has this change of area altered the central position of England? Not at
all, save to strengthen it. If you look at the hemisphere of greatest
land, you will see that England occupies its exact middle. Insular
herself, and therefore all made up of ports, she is nearer all ports in
the world than any other country is or ever can be. I don't say that
this insures for her perpetual dominion, such as Virgil prophesied for
the Roman Empire; but I do say it makes her a hard country to beat in
commercial competition. It accounts for Liverpool, London, Glasgow,
Newcastle; it even accounts in a way for Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds,
and Sheffield. England now stands at the mathematical centre of the
practical world, and unless some Big Thing occurs to displace her, she
must continue to stand there. It takes a great deal to upset the balance
of an entire planet.
Is anything now displacing her? Well, there is the fact that railways
are making land-carriage to-day more important relatively to
water-carriage than at any previous period. That may, perhaps, in time
shift the centre of the world from an island like England to the middle
of a great land area, like Chicago or Moscow. And, no doubt, if ever the
centre shifts at all, it will shift towards Western America, or rather
the prairie region. But, just at present, what are the greatest
commercial towns of the world? All ports to a man. And the day when it
will be otherwise, if ever, seems still far distant. Look at the newest
countries. What are their great focal points? Every one of them ports.
Melbourne and Sydney; Rio, Buenos Ayres, and Valparaiso; Cape Town, San
Francisco, Bombay, Calcutta, Yokohama. Chicago itself, the most vital
and the quickest grower among modern towns, owes half its importance to
the fact that there water-carriage down the Great Lakes begins; though
it owes the other half, I admit, to the converse fact that all the great
trans-continental railways have to bend south at that point to avoid
Lake Michigan. Still, on the whole, I think, as long as conditions
remain what they are, the commercial supremacy of England is in no
immediate danger. It is these great permanent geographical factors that
make or mar a country, not Eight Hours Bills or petty social
reconstructions. Said the Lord Mayor of London to petulant King James,
when he proposed to remove the Court to Oxford, "May it please your
Majesty not to take away the Thames also."
"But our competitors? We are being driven out of our markets." Oh, yes,
if that's all you mean, I don't suppose we shall always be able in
everything to keep up our exclusive position. Our neighbours, who (bar
the advantage of insularity, which means a coast and a port always close
at hand) seem nearly as well situated as we are for access to the
world-markets, are beginning to wake up and take a slice of the cake
from us. Germany is manufacturing; Belgium is smelting; Antwerp is
exporting; America is occupying her own markets. But that's a very
different thing indeed from national decadence. We may have to compete a
little harder with our rivals, that's all. The Boom may be over; but the
Thames remains: the geographical facts are still unaltered. And notice
that all the time while there's been this vague talk about "bad
times"--income-tax has been steadily increasing, London has been
steadily growing, every outer and visible sign of commercial prosperity
has been steadily spreading. Have our watering-places shrunk? Have our
buildings been getting smaller and less luxurious? If Antwerp has grown,
how about Hull and Cardiff? "Well, perhaps the past is all right; but
consider the future! Eight hours are going to drive capital out of the
country!" Rubbish! I'm not a political economist, thank God; I never
sank quite so low as that. And I'm not speaking for or against Eight
Hours: I'm only discounting some verbose nonsense. But I know enough to
see that the capital of a country can no more be exported than the land
or the houses. Can you drive away the London and North-Western Railway?
Can you drive away the factories of Manchester, the mines of the Black
Country, the canals, the buildings, the machinery, the docks, the plant,
the apparatus? Impossible, on the very face of it! Most of the capital
of a country is fixed in its soil, and can't be uprooted. People fall
into this error about driving away capital because they know you can
sell particular railway shares or a particular factory and leave the
country with the proceeds, provided somebody else is willing to buy; but
you can't sell all the railways and all the factories in a lump, and
clear out with the capital. No, no; England stands where she does,
because God put her there; and until He invents a new order of things
(which may, of course, happen any day--as, for example, if aerial
navigation came in) she must continue, in spite of minor changes, to
maintain in the main her present position.
But a truce to these frivolities! The little Italian boy next door calls
me to play ball with him, with a green lemon from the garden. Vengo,
Luigi, vengo! I return at once to the realities of life, and dismiss
such shadows.
VII.
_THE GAME AND THE RULES._
A sportive friend of mine, a mighty golfer, is fond of saying, "You
Radicals want to play the game without the rules." To which I am
accustomed mildly to retort, "Not at all; but we think the rules unfair,
and so we want to see them altered."
Now life is a very peculiar game, which differs in many important
respects even from compulsory football. The Rugby scrimmage is mere
child's play by the side of it. There's no possibility of shirking it. A
medical certificate won't get you off; whether you like it or not, play
you must in your appointed order. We are all unwilling competitors.
Nobody asks our naked little souls beforehand whether they would prefer
to be born into the game or to remain, unfleshed, in the limbo of
non-existence. Willy nilly, every one of us is thrust into the world by
an irresponsible act of two previous players; and once there, we must
play out the set as best we may to the bitter end, however little we
like it or the rules that order it.
That, it must be admitted, makes a grave distinction from the very
outset between the game of human life and any other game with which we
are commonly acquainted. It also makes it imperative upon the framers of
the rules so to frame them that no one player shall have an unfair or
unjust advantage over any of the others. And since the penalty of bad
play, or bad success in the match, is death, misery, starvation, it
behoves the rule-makers to be more scrupulously particular as to
fairness and equity than in any other game like cricket or tennis. It
behoves them to see that all start fair, and that no hapless beginner is
unduly handicapped. To compel men to take part in a match for dear life,
whether they wish it or not, and then to insist that some of them shall
wield bats and some mere broom-sticks, irrespective of height, weight,
age, or bodily infirmity, is surely not fair. It justifies the committee
in calling for a revision.
But things are far worse than even that in the game as actually played
in Europe. What shall we say of rules which decide dogmatically that one
set of players are hereditarily entitled to be always batting, while
another set, less lucky, have to field for ever, and to be fined or
imprisoned for not catching? What shall we say of rules which give one
group a perpetual right to free lunch in the tent, while the remainder
have to pick up what they can for themselves by gleaning among the
stubble? How justify the principle in accordance with which the captain
on one side has an exclusive claim to the common ground of the club, and
may charge every player exactly what he likes for the right to play upon
it?--especially when the choice lies between playing on such terms, or
being cast into the void, yourself and your family. And then to think
that the ground thus tabooed by one particular member may be all
Sutherlandshire, or, still worse, all Westminster! Decidedly, these
rules call for instant revision; and the unprivileged players must be
submissive indeed who consent to put up with them.
Friends and fellow-members, let us cry with one voice, "The links for
the players!"
Once more, just look at the singular rule in our own All England club,
by which certain assorted members possess a hereditary right to veto all
decisions of the elective committee, merely because they happen to be
their fathers' sons, and the club long ago very foolishly permitted the
like privilege to their ancestors! That is an irrational interference
with the liberty of the players which hardly anybody nowadays ventures
to defend in principle, and which is only upheld in some half-hearted
way (save in the case of that fossil anachronism, the Duke of Argyll) by
supposed arguments of convenience. It won't last long now; there is talk
in the committee of "mending or ending it." It shows the long-suffering
nature of the poor blind players at this compulsory game of national
football that they should ever for one moment permit so monstrous an
assumption--permit the idea that one single player may wield a
substantive voice and vote to outweigh tens of thousands of his
fellow-members!
These questions of procedure, however, are after all small matters. It
is the real hardships of the game that most need to be tackled. Why
should one player be born into the sport with a prescriptive right to
fill some easy place in the field, while another has to fag on from
morning to night in the most uninteresting and fatiguing position? Why
should _pâté de foie gras_ and champagne-cup in the tent be so unequally
distributed? Why should those who have made fewest runs and done no
fielding be admitted to partake of these luxuries, free of charge, while
those who have borne the brunt of the fight, those who have suffered
from the heat of the day, those who have contributed most to the honour
of the victory, are turned loose, unfed, to do as they can for
themselves by hook or by crook somehow? These are the questions some of
us players are now beginning to ask ourselves; and we don't find them
efficiently answered by the bald statement that we "want to play the
game without the rules," and that we ought to be precious glad the
legislators of the club haven't made them a hundred times harder against
us.
No, no; the rules themselves must be altered. Time was, indeed, when
people used to think they were made and ordained by divine authority.
"Cum privilegio" was the motto of the captains. But we know very well
now that every club settles its own standing orders, and that it can
alter and modify them as fundamentally as it pleases. Lots of funny old
saws are still uttered upon this subject--"There must always be rich and
poor;" "You can't interfere with economical laws;" "If you were to
divide up everything to-morrow, at the end of a fortnight you'd find the
same differences and inequalities as ever." The last-named argument (I
believe it considers itself by courtesy an argument) is one which no
self-respecting Radical should so much as deign to answer. Nobody that I
ever heard of for one moment proposed to "divide up everything," or, for
that matter, anything: and the imputation that somebody did or does is a
proof either of intentional malevolence or of crass stupidity. Neither
should be encouraged; and you encourage them by pretending to take them
seriously. It is the initial injustices of the game that we Radicals
object to--the injustices which prevent us from all starting fair and
having our even chance of picking up a livelihood. We don't want to
"divide up everything"--a most futile proceeding; but we do want to
untie the legs and release the arms of the handicapped players. To drop
metaphor at last, it is the conditions we complain about. Alter the
conditions, and there would be no need for division, summary or gradual.
The game would work itself out spontaneously without your intervention.
The injustice of the existing set of rules simply appals the Radical.
Yet oddly enough, this injustice itself appeals rather to the
comparative looker-on than to the heavily-handicapped players in person.
They, poor creatures, dragging their log in patience, have grown so
accustomed to regarding the world as another man's oyster, that they put
up uncomplainingly for the most part with the most patent inequalities.
Perhaps 'tis their want of imagination that makes them unable to
conceive any other state of things as even possible--like the dog who
accepts kicking as the natural fate of doghood. At any rate, you will
find, if you look about you, that the chief reformers are not, as a
rule, the ill-used classes themselves, but the sensitive and thinking
souls who hate and loathe the injustice with which others are treated.
Most of the best Radicals I have known were men of gentle birth and
breeding. Not all: others, just as earnest, just as eager, just as
chivalrous, sprang from the masses. Yet the gently-reared preponderate.
It is a common Tory taunt to say that the battle is one between the
Haves and the Have-nots. That is by no means true. It is between the
selfish Haves, on one side, and the unselfish Haves, who wish to see
something done for the Have-nots, on the other. As for the poor
Have-nots themselves, they are mostly inarticulate. Indeed, the Tory
almost admits as much when he alters his tone and describes the
sympathising and active few as "paid agitators."
For myself, however, I am a born Conservative. I hate to see any old
custom or practice changed; unless, indeed, it is either foolish or
wicked--like most existing ones.
VIII.
_THE RÔLE OF PROPHET._
One great English thinker and artist once tried the rash experiment of
being true to himself--of saying out boldly, without fear or reserve,
the highest and noblest and best that was in him. He gave us the most
exquisite lyrics in the English language; he moulded the thought of our
first youth as no other poet has ever yet moulded it; he became the
spiritual father of the richest souls in two succeeding generations of
Englishmen. And what reward did he get for it? He was expelled from his
university. He was hounded out of his country. He was deprived of his
own children. He was denied the common appeal to the law and courts of
justice. He was drowned, an exile, in a distant sea, and burned in
solitude on a foreign shore. And after his death he was vilified and
calumniated by wretched penny-a-liners, or (worse insult still)
apologised for, with half-hearted shrugs, by lukewarm advocates. The
purest in life and the most unselfish in purpose of all mankind, he was
persecuted alive with the utmost rancour of hate, and pursued when dead
with the vilest shafts of malignity. He never even knew in his scattered
grave the good he was to do to later groups of thinkers.
It was a noble example, of course; but not, you will admit, an alluring
one for others to follow.
"Be true to yourself," say the copy-book moralists, "and you may be sure
the result will at last be justified." No doubt; but in how many
centuries? And what sort of life will you lead yourself, meanwhile, for
your allotted space of threescore years and ten, unless haply hanged, or
burned, or imprisoned before it? What the copy-book moralists mean is
merely this--that sooner or later your principles will triumph, which
may or may not be the case according to the nature of the principles.
But even suppose they do, are you to ignore yourself in the
interim--you, a human being with emotions, sensations, domestic
affections, and, in the majority of instances, wife and children on whom
to expend them? Why should it be calmly taken for granted by the world
that if you have some new and true thing to tell humanity (which
humanity, of course, will toss back in your face with contumely and
violence) you are bound to blurt it out, with childish unreserve,
regardless of consequences to yourself and to those who depend upon you?
Why demand of genius or exceptional ability a gratuitous sacrifice which
you would deprecate as wrong and unjust to others in the ordinary
citizen? For the genius, too, is a man, and has his feelings.
The fact is, society considers that in certain instances it has a right
to expect the thinker will martyrise himself on its account, while it
stands serenely by and heaps faggots on the pile, with every mark of
contempt and loathing. But society is mistaken. No man is bound to
martyrise himself; in a great many cases a man is bound to do the exact
opposite. He has given hostages to Fortune, and his first duty is to the
hostages. "We ask you for bread," his children may well say, "and you
give us a noble moral lesson. We ask you for clothing, and you supply us
with a beautiful poetical fancy." This is not according to bargain. Wife
and children have a first mortgage on a man's activities; society has
only a right to contingent remainders.
A great many sensible men who had truths of deep import to deliver to
the world must have recognised these facts in all times and places, and
must have held their tongues accordingly. Instead of speaking out the
truths that were in them, they must have kept their peace, or have
confined themselves severely to the ordinary platitudes of their age and
nation. Why ruin yourself by announcing what you feel and believe, when
all the reward you will get for it in the end will be social ostracism,
if not even the rack, the stake, or the pillory? The Shelleys and
Rousseaus there's no holding, of course; they _will_ run right into it;
but the Goethes--oh, no, they keep their secret. Indeed, I hold it as
probable that the vast majority of men far in advance of their times
have always held their tongues consistently, save for mere common
babble, on Lord Chesterfield's principle that "Wise men never say."
The _rôle_ of prophet is thus a thankless and difficult one. Nor is it
quite certainly of real use to the community. For the prophet is
generally too much ahead of his times. He discounts the future at a
ruinous rate, and he takes the consequences. If you happen ever to have
read the Old Testament you must have noticed that the prophets had
generally a hard time of it.
The leader is a very different stamp of person. _He_ stands well abreast
of his contemporaries, and just half a pace in front of them; and he has
power to persuade even the inertia of humanity into taking that one
half-step in advance he himself has already made bold to adventure. His
post is honoured, respected, remunerated. But the prophet gets no
thanks, and perhaps does mankind no benefit. He sees too quick. And
there can be very little good indeed in so seeing. If one of us had been
an astronomer, and had discovered the laws of Kepler, Newton, and
Laplace in the thirteenth century, I think he would have been wise to
keep the discovery to himself for a few hundred years or so. Otherwise,
he would have been burned for his trouble. Galileo, long after, tried
part of the experiment a decade or so too soon, and got no good by it.
But in moral and social matters the danger is far graver. I would say to
every aspiring youth who sees some political or economical or ethical
truth quite clearly: "Keep it dark! Don't mention it! Nobody will listen
to you; and you, who are probably a person of superior insight and
higher moral aims than the mass, will only destroy your own influence
for good by premature declarations. The world will very likely come
round of itself to your views in the end; but if you tell them too soon,
you will suffer for it in person, and will very likely do nothing to
help on the revolution in thought that you contemplate. For thought that
is too abruptly ahead of the mass never influences humanity."
"But sometimes the truth will out in spite of one!" Ah, yes, that's the
worst of it. Do as I say, not as I do. If possible, repress it.