For the student of history who is able to place himself within the
stream of evolution the really important events of today are not taking
place on the battle lines, but behind them. The key-note of the new era
has been struck in Russia. And as I write these words, after the Italian
retreat, a second revolution seems possible. For three years one has
thought inevitably of 1789, and of the ensuing world conflict out
of which issued the beginnings of democracy. History does not repeat
itself, yet evolution is fairly consistent. While our attention has been
focused on the military drama enacted before our eyes and recorded in
the newspapers, another drama, unpremeditated but of vastly greater
significance, is unfolding itself behind the stage. Never in the history
of the world were generals and admirals, statesmen and politicians so
sensitive to or concerned about public opinion as they are today. From
a military point of view the situation of the Allies at the present
writing is far from reassuring. Germany and her associates have the
advantage of interior lines, of a single dominating and purposeful
leadership, while our five big nations, democracies or semi-democracies,
are stretched in a huge ring with precarious connections on land, with
the submarine alert on the sea. Much of their territory is occupied.
They did not seek the war; they still lack co-ordination and leadership
in waging it. In some of these countries, at least, politicians and
statesmen are so absorbed by administrative duties, by national rather
than international problems, by the effort to sustain themselves, that
they have little time for allied strategy. Governments rise and fall,
familiar names and reputations are juggled about like numbered balls in
a shaker, come to the top to be submerged again in a new 'emeute'. There
are conferences and conferences without end. Meanwhile a social ferment
is at work, in Russia conspicuously, in Italy a little less so, in
Germany and Austria undoubtedly, in France and England, and even in our
own country--once of the most radical in the world, now become the most
conservative.
What form will the social revolution take? Will it be unbridled,
unguided; will it run through a long period of anarchy before the
fermentation begun shall have been completed, or shall it be handled, in
all the nations concerned, by leaders who understand and sympathize with
the evolutionary trend, who are capable of controlling it, of taking
the necessary international steps of co-operation in order that it
may become secure and mutually beneficial to all? This is an age of
co-operation, and in this at least, if not in other matters, the United
States of America is in an ideal position to assume the leadership.
To a certain extent, one is not prepared to say how far, the military
and social crises are interdependent. And undoubtedly the military
problem rests on the suppression of the submarine. If Germany continues
to destroy shipping on the seas, if we are not able to supply our new
armies and the Allied nations with food and other things, the increasing
social ferment will paralyze the military operations of the Entente.
The result of a German victory under such circumstances is impossible to
predict; but the chances are certainly not worth running. In a sense,
therefore, in a great sense, the situation is “up” to us in more
ways than one, not only to supply wise democratic leadership but to
contribute material aid and brains in suppressing the submarine, and to
build ships enough to keep Britain, France, and Italy from starving.
We are looked upon by all the Allies, and I believe justly, as being a
disinterested nation, free from the age-long jealousies of Europe.
And we can do much in bringing together and making more purposeful the
various elements represented by the nations to whose aid we have come.
I had not intended in these early papers to comment, but to confine
myself to such of my experiences abroad as might prove interesting and
somewhat illuminating. So much I cannot refrain from saying.
It is a pleasure to praise where praise is due, and too much cannot be
said of the personnel of our naval service--something of which I can
speak from intimate personal experience. In these days, in that part of
London near the Admiralty, you may chance to run across a tall, erect,
and broad-shouldered man in blue uniform with three stars on his collar,
striding rapidly along the sidewalk, and sometimes, in his haste,
cutting across a street. People smile at him--costermongers, clerks,
and shoppers--and whisper among themselves, “There goes the American
admiral!” and he invariably smiles back at them, especially at the
children. He is an admiral, every inch a seaman, commanding a devoted
loyalty from his staff and from the young men who are scouring the seas
with our destroyers. In France as well as in England the name Sims is a
household word, and if he chose he might be feted every day of the week.
He does not choose. He spends long hours instead in the quarters devoted
to his administration in Grosvenor Gardens, or in travelling in France
and Ireland supervising the growing forces under his command.
It may not be out of place to relate a characteristic story of Admiral
Sims, whose career in our service, whose notable contributions to naval
gunnery are too well known to need repetition. Several years ago, on a
memorable trip to England, he was designated by the admiral of the fleet
to be present at a banquet given our sailors in the Guildhall. Of course
the lord mayor called upon him for a speech, but Commander Sims insisted
that a bluejacket should make the address. “What, a bluejacket!”
exclaimed the lord mayor in astonishment. “Do bluejackets make speeches
in your country?” “Certainly they do,” said Sims. “Now there's a
fine-looking man over there, a quartermaster on my ship. Let's call on
him and see what he has to say.” The quartermaster, duly summoned, rose
with aplomb and delivered himself of a speech that made the hall
ring, that formed the subject of a puzzled and amazed comment by
the newspapers of the British Capital. Nor was it ever divulged
that Commander Sims had foreseen the occasion and had picked out the
impressive quartermaster to make a reputation for oratory for the
enlisted force.
As a matter of fact, it is no exaggeration to add that there were and
are other non-commissioned officers and enlisted men in the service who
could have acquitted themselves equally well. One has only to attend
some of their theatrical performances to be assured of it.
But to the European mind our bluejacket is still something of an
anomaly. He is a credit to our public schools, a fruit of our system
of universal education. And he belongs to a service in which are
reconciled, paradoxically, democracy and discipline. One moment you may
hear a bluejacket talking to an officer as man to man, and the next you
will see him salute and obey an order implicitly.
On a wet and smoky night I went from the London streets into the
brightness and warmth of that refuge for American soldiers and sailors,
the “Eagle Hut,” as the Y. M. C. A. is called. The place was full,
as usual, but my glance was at once attracted by three strapping,
intelligent-looking men in sailor blouses playing pool in a corner. “I
simply can't get used to the fact that people like that are ordinary
sailors,” said the lady in charge to me as we leaned against the
soda-fountain. “They're a continual pride and delight to us Americans
here--always so willing to help when there's anything to be done, and
so interesting to talk to.” When I suggested that her ideas of the navy
must have been derived from Pinafore she laughed. “I can't imagine using
a cat-o'-nine-tails on them!” she exclaimed--and neither could I.
I heard many similar comments. They are indubitably American, these
sailors, youngsters with the stamp of our environment on their features,
keen and self-reliant. I am not speaking now only of those who have
enlisted since the war, but of those others, largely from the small
towns and villages of our Middle West, who in the past dozen years or so
have been recruited by an interesting and scientific system which is the
result of the genius of our naval recruiting officers. In the files at
Washington may be seen, carefully tabulated, the several reasons for
their enlisting. Some have “friends in the service”; others wish to
“perfect themselves in a trade,” to “complete their education” or “see
the world”--our adventurous spirit. And they are seeing it. They are
also engaged in the most exciting and adventurous sport--with the
exception of aerial warfare ever devised or developed--that of hunting
down in all weathers over the wide spaces of the Atlantic those
modern sea monsters that prey upon the Allied shipping. For the
superdreadnought is reposing behind the nets, the battle-cruiser
ignominiously laying mines; and for the present at least, until some
wizard shall invent a more effective method of annihilation, victory
over Germany depends primarily on the airplane and the destroyer.
At three o'clock one morning I stood on the crowded deck of an Irish
mail-boat watching the full moon riding over Holyhead Mountain and
shimmering on the Irish Sea. A few hours later, in the early light, I
saw the green hills of Killarney against a washed and clearing sky,
the mud-flats beside the railway shining like purple enamel. All
the forenoon, in the train, I travelled through a country bathed in
translucent colours, a country of green pastures dotted over with white
sheep, of banked hedges and perfect trees, of shadowy blue hills in
the high distance. It reminded one of nothing so much as a
stained-glass-window depicting some delectable land of plenty and peace.
And it was Ireland! When at length I arrived at the station of the port
for which I was bound, and which the censor does not permit me to name,
I caught sight of the figure of our Admiral on the platform; and the
fact that I was in Ireland and not in Emmanuel's Land was brought home
to me by the jolting drive we took on an “outside car,” the admiral
perched precariously over one wheel and I over the other. Winding up the
hill by narrow roads, we reached the gates of the Admiralty House.
The house sits, as it were, in the emperor's seat of the amphitheatre
of the town, overlooking the panorama of a perfect harbour. A ring of
emerald hills is broken by a little gap to seaward, and in the centre
is a miniature emerald isle. The ships lying at anchor seemed like
children's boats in a pond. To the right, where a river empties in, were
scattered groups of queer, rakish craft, each with four slanting pipes
and a tiny flag floating from her halyards; a flag--as the binoculars
revealed--of crimson bars and stars on a field of blue. These were our
American destroyers. And in the midst of them, swinging to the tide,
were the big “mother ships” we have sent over to nurse them when, after
many days and nights of hazardous work at sea, they have brought their
flock of transports and merchantmen safely to port. This “mothering” by
repair-ships which are merely huge machine-shops afloat--this trick
of keeping destroyers tuned up and constantly ready for service has
inspired much favourable comment from our allies in the British
service. It is an instance of our national adaptability, learned from
an experience on long coasts where navy-yards are not too handy. Few
landsmen understand how delicate an instrument the destroyer is.
A service so hazardous, demanding as it does such qualities as the
ability to make instantaneous decisions and powers of mental and
physical endurance, a service so irresistibly attractive to the young
and adventurous, produces a type of officer quite unmistakable. The day
I arrived in London from France, seeking a characteristically English
meal, I went to Simpson's in the Strand, where I found myself seated by
the side of two very junior officers of the British navy. It appeared
that they were celebrating what was left of a precious leave. At a
neighbouring table they spied two of our officers, almost equally
youthful. “Let's have 'em over,” suggested one of the Britishers; and
they were “had” over; he raised his glass. “Here's how--as you say in
America!” he exclaimed. “You destroyer chaps are certainly top hole.”
And then he added, with a blush, “I say, I hope you don't think I'm
cheeking you!”
I saw them afloat, I saw them coming ashore in that Irish port,
these young destroyer captains, after five wakeful nights at sea,
weather-bitten, clear-eyed, trained down to the last ounce. One, with
whom I had played golf on the New England hills, carried his clubs in
his hand and invited me to have a game with him. Another, who apologized
for not being dressed at noon on Sunday--he had made the harbour at
three that morning!--was taking his racquet out of its case, preparing
to spend the afternoon on the hospitable courts of Admiralty House with
a fellow captain and two British officers. He was ashamed of his late
rising, but when it was suggested that some sleep was necessary he
explained that, on the trip just ended, it wasn't only the submarines
that kept him awake. “When these craft get jumping about in a seaway you
can't sleep even if you want to.” He who has had experience with them
knows the truth of this remark. Incidentally, though he did not mention
it, this young captain was one of three who had been recommended by the
British admiral to his government for the Distinguished Service
Order. The captain's report, which I read, is terse, and needs to be
visualized. There is simply a statement of the latitude and longitude,
the time of day, the fact that the wave of a periscope was sighted at
1,500 yards by the quartermaster first class on duty; general quarters
rung, the executive officer signals full speed ahead, the commanding
officer takes charge and manoeuvres for position--and then something
happens which the censor may be fussy about mentioning. At any rate,
oil and other things rise to the surface of the sea, and the Germans are
minus another submarine. The chief machinist's mate, however, comes in
for special mention. It seems that he ignored the ladder and literally
fell down the hatch, dislocating his shoulder but getting the throttle
wide open within five seconds!
In this town, facing the sea, is a street lined with quaint houses
painted in yellows and browns and greens, and under each house the kind
of a shop that brings back to the middleaged delectable memories of
extreme youth and nickels to spend. Up and down that street on a bright
Saturday afternoon may be seen our Middle-Western jackies chumming with
the British sailors and Tommies, or flirting with the Irish girls, or
gazing through the little panes of the show-windows, whose enterprising
proprietors have imported from the States a popular brand of chewing-gum
to make us feel more at home. In one of these shops, where I went to
choose a picture post-card, I caught sight of an artistic display of a
delicacy I had thought long obsolete--the everlasting gum-drop. But when
I produced a shilling the shopkeeper shook his head. “Sure, every day
the sailors are wanting to buy them of me, but it's for ornament I'm
keeping them,” he said. “There's no more to be had till the war will
be over. Eight years they're here now, and you wouldn't get a tooth in
them, sir!” So I wandered out again, joined the admiral, and inspected
the Bluejackets' Club by the water's edge. Nothing one sees, perhaps, is
so eloquent of the change that has taken place in the life and fabric of
our navy. If you are an enlisted man, here in this commodious group of
buildings you can get a good shore meal and entertain your friends among
the Allies, you may sleep in a real bed, instead of a hammock, you may
play pool, or see a moving-picture show, or witness a vaudeville worthy
of professionals, like that recently given in honour of the visit of
the admiral of our Atlantic fleet. A band of thirty pieces furnished the
music, and in the opinion of the jackies one feature alone was lacking
to make the entertainment a complete success--the new drop-curtain had
failed to arrive from London. I happened to be present when this curtain
was first unrolled, and beheld spread out before me a most realistic
presentation of “little old New York,” seen from the North River,
towering against blue American skies. And though I have never been
overfond of New York, that curtain in that place gave me a sensation!
Such is the life of our officers and sailors in these strange times that
have descended upon us. Five to eight days of vigilance, of hardship
and danger--in short, of war--and then three days of relaxation and
enjoyment in clubs, on golf-courses and tennis-courts, barring the time
it takes to clean ship and paint. There need be no fear that the war
will be neglected. It is eminently safe to declare that our service will
be true to its traditions.
III
“Dogged does it” ought to be added to “Dieu et mon droit” and other
devices of England. On a day when I was lunching with Mr. Lloyd George
in the dining-room at 10 Downing Street that looks out over the Horse
Guards' Parade, the present premier, with a characteristic gesture,
flung out his hand toward the portrait of a young man in the panel over
the mantel. It was of the younger Pitt, who had taken his meals and
drunk his port in this very room in that other great war a hundred years
ago. The news of Austerlitz, brought to him during his illness, is said
to have killed him. But England, undismayed, fought on for a decade,
and won. Mr. Lloyd George, in spite of burdens even heavier than
Pitt's, happily retains his health; and his is the indomitable spirit
characteristic of the new Britain as well as of the old. For it is a new
Britain one sees. Mr. Lloyd George is prime minister of a transformed
Britain, a Britain modernized and democratized. Like the Englishman who,
when he first witnessed a performance of “Uncle Tom's Cabin,” cried
out, “How very unlike the home life of our dear Queen!” the American who
lunches in Downing Street is inclined to exclaim: “How different from
Lord North and Palmerston!” We have, I fear, been too long accustomed
to interpret Britain in terms of these two ministers and of what they
represented to us of the rule of a George the Third or of an inimical
aristocracy. Three out of the five men who form the war cabinet of an
empire are of what would once have been termed an “humble origin.”
One was, if I am not mistaken, born in Nova Scotia. General Smuts,
unofficially associated with this council, not many years ago was in
arms against Britain in South Africa, and the prime minister himself
is the son of a Welsh tailor. A situation that should mollify the most
exacting and implacable of our anti-British democrats!
I listened to many speeches and explanations of the prejudice that
existed in the mind of the dyed-in-the-wool American against England,
and the reason most frequently given was the “school-book” reason;
our histories kept the feeling alive. Now; there is no doubt that the
histories out of which we were taught made what psychologists would
call “action patterns,” or “complexes,” in our brains, just as the
school-books have made similar complexes in the brains of German
children and prepared them for this war. But, after all, there was a
certain animus behind the histories. Boiled down, the sentiment was one
against the rule of a hereditary aristocracy, and our forefathers had it
long before the separation took place. The Middle-Western farmer has no
prejudice against France, because France is a republic. The French are
lovable, and worthy of all the sympathy and affection we can give them.
But Britain is still nominally a monarchy; and our patriot thinks of its
people very much as the cowboy used to regard citizens of New York. They
all lived on Fifth Avenue. For the cowboy, the residents of the dreary
side streets simply did not exist. We have been wont to think of all
the British as aristocrats, while they have returned the compliment by
visualizing all Americans as plutocrats--despite the fact that one-tenth
of our population is said to own nine-tenths of all our wealth!
But the war will change that, is already changing it.
'Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner'. We have been soaked in the same
common law, literature, and traditions of liberty--or of chaos, as one
likes. Whether we all be of British origin or not, it is the mind that
makes the true patriot; and there is no American so dead as not to feel
a thrill when he first sets foot on British soil. Our school-teachers
felt it when they began to travel some twenty years ago, and the
thousands of our soldiers who pass through on their way to France are
feeling it today, and writing home about it. Our soldiers and sailors
are being cared for and entertained in England just as they would be
cared for and entertained at home. So are their officers. Not long ago
one of the finest town houses in London was donated by the owner for
an American officers' club, the funds were raised by contributions
from British officers, and the club was inaugurated by the King and
Queen--and Admiral Sims. Hospitality and good-will have gone much
further than this. Any one who knows London will understand the
sacredness of those private squares, surrounded by proprietary
residences, where every tree and every blade of grass has been jealously
guarded from intrusion for a century or more. And of all these squares
that of St. James's is perhaps the most exclusive, and yet it is
precisely in St. James's there is to be built the first of those hotels
designed primarily for the benefit of American officers, where they can
get a good room for five shillings a night and breakfast at a reasonable
price. One has only to sample the war-time prices of certain hostelries
to appreciate the value of this.
On the first of four unforgettable days during which I was a guest
behind the British lines in France the officer who was my guide stopped
the motor in the street of an old village, beside a courtyard surrounded
by ancient barns.
“There are some of your Americans,” he remarked.
I had recognized them, not by their uniforms but by their type. Despite
their costumes, which were negligible, they were eloquent of college
campuses in every one of our eight and forty States, lean, thin-hipped,
alert. The persistent rains had ceased, a dazzling sunlight made that
beautiful countryside as bright as a coloured picture post-card, but a
riotous cold gale was blowing; yet all wore cotton trousers that left
their knees as bare as Highlanders' kilts. Above these some had an
sweaters, others brown khaki tunics, from which I gathered that they
belonged to the officers' training corps. They were drawn up on two
lines facing each other with fixed bayonets, a grim look on their faces
that would certainly have put any Hun to flight. Between the files stood
an unmistakable gipling sergeant with a crimson face and a bristling
little chestnut moustache, talking like a machine gun.
“Now, then, not too lidylike!--there's a Bosch in front of you! Run 'im
through! Now, then!”
The lines surged forward, out went the bayonets, first the long thrust
and then the short, and then a man's gun was seized and by a swift
backward twist of the arm he was made helpless.
“Do you feel it?” asked the officer, as he turned to me. I did. “Up
and down your spine,” he added, and I nodded. “Those chaps will do,”
he said. He had been through that terrible battle of the Somme, and he
knew. So had the sergeant.
Presently came a resting-spell. One of the squad approached me, whom I
recognized as a young man I had met in the Harvard Union.
“If you write about this,” he said, “just tell our people that we're
going to take that sergeant home with us when the war's over. He's too
good to lose.”
IV
It is trite to observe that democracies are organized--if, indeed, they
are organized at all--not for war but for peace. And nowhere is this
fact more apparent than in Britain. Even while the war is in progress
has that internal democratic process of evolution been going on,
presaging profound changes in the social fabric. And these changes must
be dealt with by statesmen, must be guided with one hand while the war
is being prosecuted with the other. The task is colossal. In no previous
war have the British given more striking proof of their inherent quality
of doggedness. Greatness, as Confucius said, does not consist in never
falling, but in rising every time you fall. The British speak with
appalling frankness of their blunders. They are fighting, indeed, for
the privilege of making blunders--since out of blunders arise new truths
and discoveries not contemplated in German philosophy.
America must now contribute what Britain and France, with all their
energies and resources and determination, have hitherto been unable
to contribute. It must not be men, money, and material alone, but some
quality that America has had in herself during her century and a half
of independent self-realization. Mr. Chesterton, in writing about the
American Revolution, observes that the real case for the colonists is
that they felt that they could be something which England would not help
them to be. It is, in fact, the only case for separation. What may
be called the English tradition of democracy, which we inherit, grows
through conflicts and differences, through experiments and failures and
successes, toward an intellectualized unity,--experiments by states,
experiments by individuals, a widely spread development, and new
contributions to the whole.
Democracy has arrived at the stage when it is ceasing to be national and
selfish.
It must be said of England, in her treatment of her colonies subsequent
to our Revolution, that she took this greatest of all her national
blunders to heart. As a result, Canada and Australia and New Zealand
have sent their sons across the seas to fight for an empire that
refrains from coercion; while, thanks to the policy of the British
Liberals--which was the expression of the sentiment of the British
nation--we have the spectacle today of a Botha and a Smuts fighting
under the Union Jack.
And how about Ireland? England has blundered there, and she admits it
freely. They exist in England who cry out for the coercion of Ireland,
and who at times have almost had their way. But to do this, of course,
would be a surrender to the German contentions, an acknowledgment of the
wisdom of the German methods against which she is protesting with all
her might. Democracy, apparently, must blunder on until that question
too, is solved.
V
Many of those picturesque features of the older England, that stir us by
their beauty and by the sense of stability and permanence they convey,
will no doubt disappear or be transformed. I am thinking of the great
estates, some of which date from Norman times; I am thinking of
the aristocracy, which we Americans repudiated in order to set up
a plutocracy instead. Let us hope that what is fine in it will
be preserved, for there is much. By the theory of the British
constitution--that unwritten but very real document--in return for
honours, emoluments, and titles, the burden of government has hitherto
been thrown on a class. Nor can it be said that they have been untrue to
their responsibility. That class developed a tradition and held fast to
it; and they had a foreign policy that guided England through centuries
of greatness. Democracy too must have a foreign policy, a tradition of
service; a trained if not hereditary group to guide it through troubled
waters. Even in an intelligent community there must be leadership. And,
if the world will no longer tolerate the old theories, a tribute may
at least be paid to those who from conviction upheld them; who ruled,
perhaps in affluence, yet were also willing to toil and, if need be, to
die for the privilege.
One Saturday afternoon, after watching for a while the boys playing
fives and football and romping over the green lawns at Eton, on my way
to the head master's rooms I paused in one of the ancient quads. My eye
had been caught by a long column of names posted there, printed in heavy
black letters. 'Etona non, immemora'! Every week many new names are
added to those columns. On the walls of the chapel and in other quads
and passages may be found tablets and inscriptions in memory of those
who have died for England and the empire in by-gone wars. I am told that
the proportion of Etonians of killed to wounded is greater than that
of any other public school--which is saying a great deal. They go back
across the channel and back again until their names appear on the last
and highest honour list of the school and nation.
In one of the hospitals I visited lay a wounded giant who had once been
a truckman in a little town in Kent. Incidentally, in common with his
neighbours, he had taken no interest in the war, which had seemed as
remote to him as though he had lived in North Dakota. One day a Zeppelin
dropped a bomb on that village, whereupon the able-bodied males enlisted
to a man, and he with them. A subaltern in his company was an Eton boy.
“We just couldn't think of 'im as an orficer, sir; in the camps 'e used
to play with us like a child. And then we went to France. And one night
when we was wet to the skin and the Boschs was droppin' shell all
around us we got the word. It was him leaped over the top first of all,
shouting back at us to come on. He tumbled right back and died in my
arms, 'e did, as I was climbin' up after 'im. I shan't ever forget 'im.”
As you travel about in these days you become conscious, among the people
you meet, of a certain bewilderment. A static world and a static order
are dissolving; and in England that order was so static as to make the
present spectacle the more surprising. Signs of the disintegration of
the old social strata were not lacking, indeed, in the earlier years of
the twentieth century, when labour members and north-country radicals
began to invade parliament; but the cataclysm of this war has
accelerated the process. In the muddy trenches of Flanders and France
a new comradeship has sprung up between officers and Tommies, while
time-honoured precedent has been broken by the necessity of giving
thousands of commissions to men of merit who do not belong to the
“officer caste.” At the Haymarket Theatre I saw a fashionable audience
wildly applaud a play in which the local tailor becomes a major-general
and returns home to marry the daughter of the lord of a mayor whose
clothes he used to cut before the war.
“The age of great adventure,” were the words used by Mr. H. G. Wells to
describe this epoch as we discussed it. And a large proportion of
the descendants of those who have governed England for centuries are
apparently imbued with the spirit of this adventure, even though it
may spell the end of their exclusive rule. As significant of the social
mingling of elements which in the past never exchanged ideas or points
of view I shall describe a week-end party at a large country house of
Liberal complexion; on the Thames. I have reason to believe it fairly
typical. The owner of this estate holds an important position in the
Foreign Office, and the hostess has, by her wit and intelligent grasp of
affairs, made an enviable place for herself. On her right, at luncheon
on Sunday, was a labour leader, the head of one of the most powerful
unions in Britain, and next him sat a member of one of the oldest of
England's titled families. The two were on terms of Christian names. The
group included two or three women, a sculptor and an educator, another
Foreign Office official who has made a reputation since the beginning of
the war, and finally an employer of labour, the chairman of the biggest
shipbuilding company in England.
That a company presenting such a variety of interests should have been
brought together in the frescoed dining-room of that particular house is
noteworthy.
The thing could happen nowhere save in the England of today. At first
the talk was general, ranging over a number of subjects from that of
the personality of certain politicians to the conduct of the war and
the disturbing problem raised by the “conscientious objector”; little
by little, however, the rest of us became silent, to listen to a debate
which had begun between the labour leader and the ship-builder on the
“labour question.” It is not my purpose here to record what they said.
Needless to add that they did not wholly agree, but they were much
nearer to agreement than one would have thought possible. What was
interesting was the open-mindedness with which, on both sides, the
argument was conducted, and the fact that it could seriously take place
then and there. For the subject of it had long been the supreme problem
in the lives of both these men, their feelings concerning it must at
times have been tinged with bitterness, yet they spoke with courtesy and
restraint, and though each maintained his contentions he was quick to
acknowledge a point made by the other. As one listened one was led
to hope that a happier day is perhaps at hand when such things as
“complexes” and convictions will disappear.
The types of these two were in striking contrast. The labour leader was
stocky, chestnut-coloured, vital, possessing the bulldog quality of
the British self-made man combined with a natural wit, sharpened in the
arena, that often startled the company into an appreciative laughter.
The ship-builder, on the other hand, was one of those spare and hard
Englishmen whom no amount of business cares will induce to neglect
the exercise of his body, the obligation at all times to keep “fit”;
square-rigged, as it were, with a lean face and a wide moustache
accentuating a square chin. Occasionally a gleam of humour, a ray of
idealism, lighted his practical grey eyes. Each of these two had managed
rather marvellously to triumph over early training by self-education:
the labour leader, who had had his first lessons in life from injustices
and hard knocks; and the ship-builder, who had overcome the handicap of
the public-school tradition and of Manchester economics.
“Yes, titles and fortunes must go,” remarked our hostess with a smile as
she rose from the table and led the way out on the sunny, stone-flagged
terrace. Below us was a wide parterre whose flower-beds, laid out by a
celebrated landscape-gardener in the days of the Stuarts, were filled
with vegetables. The day was like our New England Indian summerthough
the trees were still heavy with leaves--and a gossamer-blue veil of haze
stained the hills between which the shining river ran. If the social
revolution, or evolution, takes place, one wonders what will become of
this long-cherished beauty.
I venture to dwell upon one more experience of that week-end party.
The Friday evening of my arrival I was met at the station, not by a
limousine with a chauffeur and footman, but by a young woman with a
taxicab--one of the many reminders that a war is going on. London had
been reeking in a green-yellow fog, but here the mist was white, and
through it I caught glimpses of the silhouettes of stately trees in a
park, and presently saw the great house with its clock-tower looming up
before me. A fire was crackling in the hall, and before it my hostess
was conversing amusedly with a well-known sculptor--a sculptor typical
of these renaissance times, large, full-blooded, with vigorous opinions
on all sorts of matters.
“A lecturer is coming down from London to talk to the wounded in the
amusement-hall of the hospital,” our hostess informed us. “And you both
must come and speak too.”
The three of us got into the only motor of which the establishment now
boasts, a little runabout using a minimum of “petrol,” and she guided
us rapidly by devious roads through the fog until a blur of light
proclaimed the presence of a building, one of some score or more built
on the golf-course by the British Government. I have not space hereto
describe that hospital, which is one of the best in England; but it must
be observed that its excellence and the happiness of its inmates are
almost wholly due to the efforts of the lady who now conducted us across
the stage of the amusement-hall, where all the convalescents who
could walk or who could be rolled thither in chairs were gathered. The
lecturer had not arrived. But the lady of the manor seated herself at
the speaker's table, singling out Scotch wits in the audience--for
whom she was more than a match--while the sculptor and I looked on and
grinned and resisted her blandishments to make speeches. When at last
the lecturer came he sat down informally on the table with one foot
hanging in the air and grinned, too, at her bantering but complimentary
introduction. It was then I discovered for the first time that he was
one of the best educational experts of that interesting branch of the
British Government, the Department of Reconstruction, whose business
it is to teach the convalescents the elements of social and political
science. This was not to be a lecture, he told them, but a debate in
which every man must take a part. And his first startling question was
this:
“Why should Mr. Lloyd George, instead of getting five thousand pounds a
year for his services as prime minister, receive any more than a common
labourer?”
The question was a poser. The speaker folded his hands and beamed down
at them; he seemed fairly to radiate benignity.
“Now we mustn't be afraid of him, just because he seems to be
intelligent,” declared our hostess. This sally was greeted with
spasmodic laughter. Her eyes flitted from bench to bench, yet met
nothing save averted glances. “Jock! Where are you, Jock? Why don't you
speak up?--you've never been downed before.”
More laughter, and craning of necks for the Jocks. This appeared to be
her generic name for the vita. But the Jocks remained obdurately modest.
The prolonged silence did not seem in the least painful to the lecturer,
who thrust his hand in his pocket and continued to beam. He had learned
how to wait. And at last his patience was rewarded. A middleaged soldier
with a very serious manner arose hesitatingly, with encouraging noises
from his comrades.
“It's not Mr. Lloyd George I'm worrying about, sir,” he said, “all I
wants is enough for the missus and me. I had trouble to get that before
the war.”
Cries of “Hear! Hear!”
“Why did you have trouble?” inquired the lecturer mildly.
“The wages was too low.”
“And why were the wages too low?”
“You've got me there. I hadn't thought.”
“But isn't it your business as a voter to think?” asked the lecturer.
“That's why the government is sending me here, to start you to thinking,
to remind you that it is you soldiers who will have to take charge of
this country and run it after the war is over. And you won't be able to
do that unless you think, and think straight.”
“We've never been taught to think,” was the illuminating reply.
“And if we do think we've never been educated to express ourselves, same
as you!” shouted another man, in whom excitement had overcome timidity.
“I'm here to help you educate yourselves,” said the lecturer. “But first
let's hear any ideas you may have on the question I asked you.”
There turned out to be plenty of ideas, after all. An opinion was
ventured that Mr. Lloyd George served the nation, not for money but from
public spirit; a conservative insisted that ability should be rewarded
and rewarded well; whereupon ensued one of the most enlightening
discussions, not only as a revelation of intelligence, but of complexes
and obsessions pervading many of the minds in whose power lies the
ultimate control of democracies. One, for instance, declared that--“if
every man went to church proper of a Sunday and minded his own business
the country would get along well enough.” He was evidently of the
opinion that there was too much thinking and not enough of what he would
have termed “religion.” Gradually that audience split up into liberals
and conservatives; and the liberals noticeably were the younger men who
had had the advantages of better board schools, who had formed fewer
complexes and had had less time in which to get them set. Of these, a
Canadian made a plea for the American system of universal education,
whereupon a combative “stand-patter” declared that every man wasn't fit
to be educated, that the American plan made only for discontent. “Look
at them,” he exclaimed, “They're never satisfied to stay in their
places.” This provoked laughter, but it was too much for the
sculptor--and for me. We both broke our vows and made speeches in favour
of equality and mental opportunity, while the lecturer looked on and
smiled. Mr. Lloyd George and his salary were forgotten. By some subtle
art of the chairman the debate had been guided to the very point where
he had from the first intended to guide it--to the burning question of
our day--education as the true foundation of democracy! Perhaps, after
all, this may be our American contribution to the world's advance.
As we walked homeward through the fog I talked to him of Professor
Dewey's work and its results, while he explained to me the methods of
the Reconstruction Department. “Out of every audience like that we get
a group and form a class,” he said. “They're always a bit backward at
first, just as they were tonight, but they grow very keen. We have
a great many classes already started, and we see to it that they are
provided with text-books and teachers. Oh, no, it's not propaganda,” he
added, in answer to my query; “all we do is to try to give them facts in
such a way as to make them able to draw their own conclusions and join
any political party they choose--just so they join one intelligently.”
I must add that before Sunday was over he had organized his class and
arranged for their future instruction.