Wellington, himself an Irishman though of the narrower party, was
preeminently a realist, and, like many Irishmen, was especially a
realist about Englishmen. He said the army he commanded was the scum of
the earth; and the remark is none the less valuable because that army
proved itself useful enough to be called the salt of the earth. But in
truth it was in this something of a national symbol and the guardian, as
it were, of a national secret. There is a paradox about the English,
even as distinct from the Irish or the Scotch, which makes any formal
version of their plans and principles inevitably unjust to them. England
not only makes her ramparts out of rubbish, but she finds ramparts in
what she has herself cast away as rubbish. If it be a tribute to a thing
to say that even its failures have been successes, there is truth in
that tribute. Some of the best colonies were convict settlements, and
might be called abandoned convict settlements. The army was largely an
army of gaol-birds, raised by gaol-delivery; but it was a good army of
bad men; nay, it was a gay army of unfortunate men. This is the colour
and the character that has run through the realities of English history,
and it can hardly be put in a book, least of all a historical book. It
has its flashes in our fantastic fiction and in the songs of the street,
but its true medium is conversation. It has no name but incongruity. An
illogical laughter survives everything in the English soul. It survived,
perhaps, with only too much patience, the time of terrorism in which the
more serious Irish rose in revolt. That time was full of a quite
topsy-turvey tyranny, and the English humorist stood on his head to suit
it. Indeed, he often receives a quite irrational sentence in a police
court by saying he will do it on his head. So, under Pitt's coercionist
regime, a man was sent to prison for saying that George IV. was fat; but
we feel he must have been partly sustained in prison by the artistic
contemplation of how fat he was. That sort of liberty, that sort of
humanity, and it is no mean sort, did indeed survive all the drift and
downward eddy of an evil economic system, as well as the dragooning of a
reactionary epoch and the drearier menace of materialistic social
science, as embodied in the new Puritans, who have purified themselves
even of religion. Under this long process, the worst that can be said is
that the English humorist has been slowly driven downwards in the social
scale. Falstaff was a knight, Sam Weller was a gentleman's servant, and
some of our recent restrictions seem designed to drive Sam Weller to the
status of the Artful Dodger. But well it was for us that some such
trampled tradition and dark memory of Merry England survived; well for
us, as we shall see, that all our social science failed and all our
statesmanship broke down before it. For there was to come the noise of a
trumpet and a dreadful day of visitation, in which all the daily workers
of a dull civilization were to be called out of their houses and their
holes like a resurrection of the dead, and left naked under a strange
sun with no religion but a sense of humour. And men might know of what
nation Shakespeare was, who broke into puns and practical jokes in the
darkest passion of his tragedies, if they had only heard those boys in
France and Flanders who called out "Early Doors!" themselves in a
theatrical memory, as they went so early in their youth to break down
the doors of death.
XVII
THE RETURN OF THE BARBARIAN
The only way to write a popular history, as we have already remarked,
would be to write it backwards. It would be to take common objects of
our own street and tell the tale of how each of them came to be in the
street at all. And for my immediate purpose it is really convenient to
take two objects we have known all our lives, as features of fashion or
respectability. One, which has grown rarer recently, is what we call a
top-hat; the other, which is still a customary formality, is a pair of
trousers. The history of these humorous objects really does give a clue
to what has happened in England for the last hundred years. It is not
necessary to be an aesthete in order to regard both objects as the
reverse of beautiful, as tested by what may be called the rational side
of beauty. The lines of human limbs can be beautiful, and so can the
lines of loose drapery, but not cylinders too loose to be the first and
too tight to be the second. Nor is a subtle sense of harmony needed to
see that while there are hundreds of differently proportioned hats, a
hat that actually grows larger towards the top is somewhat top-heavy.
But what is largely forgotten is this, that these two fantastic objects,
which now strike the eye as unconscious freaks, were originally
conscious freaks. Our ancestors, to do them justice, did not think them
casual or commonplace; they thought them, if not ridiculous, at least
rococo. The top-hat was the topmost point of a riot of Regency dandyism,
and bucks wore trousers while business men were still wearing
knee-breeches. It will not be fanciful to see a certain oriental touch
in trousers, which the later Romans also regarded as effeminately
oriental; it was an oriental touch found in many florid things of the
time--in Byron's poems or Brighton Pavilion. Now, the interesting point
is that for a whole serious century these instantaneous fantasies have
remained like fossils. In the carnival of the Regency a few fools got
into fancy dress, and we have all remained in fancy dress. At least, we
have remained in the dress, though we have lost the fancy.
I say this is typical of the most important thing that happened in the
Victorian time. For the most important thing was that nothing happened.
The very fuss that was made about minor modifications brings into relief
the rigidity with which the main lines of social life were left as they
were at the French Revolution. We talk of the French Revolution as
something that changed the world; but its most important relation to
England is that it did not change England. A student of our history is
concerned rather with the effect it did not have than the effect it
did. If it be a splendid fate to have survived the Flood, the English
oligarchy had that added splendour. But even for the countries in which
the Revolution was a convulsion, it was the last convulsion--until that
which shakes the world to-day. It gave their character to all the
commonwealths, which all talked about progress, and were occupied in
marking time. Frenchmen, under all superficial reactions, remained
republican in spirit, as they had been when they first wore top-hats.
Englishmen, under all superficial reforms, remained oligarchical in
spirit, as they had been when they first wore trousers. Only one power
might be said to be growing, and that in a plodding and prosaic
fashion--the power in the North-East whose name was Prussia. And the
English were more and more learning that this growth need cause them no
alarm, since the North Germans were their cousins in blood and their
brothers in spirit.
The first thing to note, then, about the nineteenth century is that
Europe remained herself as compared with the Europe of the great war,
and that England especially remained herself as compared even with the
rest of Europe. Granted this, we may give their proper importance to the
cautious internal changes in this country, the small conscious and the
large unconscious changes. Most of the conscious ones were much upon the
model of an early one, the great Reform Bill of 1832, and can be
considered in the light of it. First, from the standpoint of most real
reformers, the chief thing about the Reform Bill was that it did not
reform. It had a huge tide of popular enthusiasm behind it, which wholly
disappeared when the people found themselves in front of it. It
enfranchised large masses of the middle classes; it disfranchised very
definite bodies of the working classes; and it so struck the balance
between the conservative and the dangerous elements in the commonwealth
that the governing class was rather stronger than before. The date,
however, is important, not at all because it was the beginning of
democracy, but because it was the beginning of the best way ever
discovered of evading and postponing democracy. Here enters the
homoeopathic treatment of revolution, since so often successful. Well
into the next generation Disraeli, the brilliant Jewish adventurer who
was the symbol of the English aristocracy being no longer genuine,
extended the franchise to the artisans, partly, indeed, as a party move
against his great rival, Gladstone, but more as the method by which the
old popular pressure was first tired out and then toned down. The
politicians said the working-class was now strong enough to be allowed
votes. It would be truer to say it was now weak enough to be allowed
votes. So in more recent times Payment of Members, which would once have
been regarded (and resisted) as an inrush of popular forces, was passed
quietly and without resistance, and regarded merely as an extension of
parliamentary privileges. The truth is that the old parliamentary
oligarchy abandoned their first line of trenches because they had by
that time constructed a second line of defence. It consisted in the
concentration of colossal political funds in the private and
irresponsible power of the politicians, collected by the sale of
peerages and more important things, and expended on the jerrymandering
of the enormously expensive elections. In the presence of this inner
obstacle a vote became about as valuable as a railway ticket when there
is a permanent block on the line. The facade and outward form of this
new secret government is the merely mechanical application of what is
called the Party System. The Party System does not consist, as some
suppose, of two parties, but of one. If there were two real parties,
there could be no system.
But if this was the evolution of parliamentary reform, as represented by
the first Reform Bill, we can see the other side of it in the social
reform attacked immediately after the first Reform Bill. It is a truth
that should be a tower and a landmark, that one of the first things done
by the Reform Parliament was to establish those harsh and dehumanised
workhouses which both honest Radicals and honest Tories branded with the
black title of the New Bastille. This bitter name lingers in our
literature, and can be found by the curious in the works of Carlyle and
Hood, but it is doubtless interesting rather as a note of contemporary
indignation than as a correct comparison. It is easy to imagine the
logicians and legal orators of the parliamentary school of progress
finding many points of differentiation and even of contrast. The
Bastille was one central institution; the workhouses have been many, and
have everywhere transformed local life with whatever they have to give
of social sympathy and inspiration. Men of high rank and great wealth
were frequently sent to the Bastille; but no such mistake has ever been
made by the more business administration of the workhouse. Over the most
capricious operations of the _lettres de cachet_ there still hovered
some hazy traditional idea that a man is put in prison to punish him for
something. It was the discovery of a later social science that men who
cannot be punished can still be imprisoned. But the deepest and most
decisive difference lies in the better fortune of the New Bastille; for
no mob has ever dared to storm it, and it never fell.
The New Poor Law was indeed not wholly new in the sense that it was the
culmination and clear enunciation of a principle foreshadowed in the
earlier Poor Law of Elizabeth, which was one of the many anti-popular
effects of the Great Pillage. When the monasteries were swept away and
the mediaeval system of hospitality destroyed, tramps and beggars became
a problem, the solution of which has always tended towards slavery, even
when the question of slavery has been cleared of the irrelevant question
of cruelty. It is obvious that a desperate man might find Mr. Bumble and
the Board of Guardians less cruel than cold weather and the bare
ground--even if he were allowed to sleep on the ground, which (by a
veritable nightmare of nonsense and injustice) he is not. He is actually
punished for sleeping under a bush on the specific and stated ground
that he cannot afford a bed. It is obvious, however, that he may find
his best physical good by going into the workhouse, as he often found it
in pagan times by selling himself into slavery. The point is that the
solution remains servile, even when Mr. Bumble and the Board of
Guardians ceased to be in a common sense cruel. The pagan might have the
luck to sell himself to a kind master. The principle of the New Poor
Law, which has so far proved permanent in our society, is that the man
lost all his civic rights and lost them solely through poverty. There is
a touch of irony, though hardly of mere hypocrisy, in the fact that the
Parliament which effected this reform had just been abolishing black
slavery by buying out the slave-owners in the British colonies. The
slave-owners were bought out at a price big enough to be called
blackmail; but it would be misunderstanding the national mentality to
deny the sincerity of the sentiment. Wilberforce represented in this the
real wave of Wesleyan religion which had made a humane reaction against
Calvinism, and was in no mean sense philanthropic. But there is
something romantic in the English mind which can always see what is
remote. It is the strongest example of what men lose by being
long-sighted. It is fair to say that they gain many things also, the
poems that are like adventures and the adventures that are like poems.
It is a national savour, and therefore in itself neither good nor evil;
and it depends on the application whether we find a scriptural text for
it in the wish to take the wings of the morning and abide in the
uttermost parts of the sea, or merely in the saying that the eyes of a
fool are in the ends of the earth.
Anyhow, the unconscious nineteenth-century movement, so slow that it
seems stationary, was altogether in this direction, of which workhouse
philanthropy is the type. Nevertheless, it had one national institution
to combat and overcome; one institution all the more intensely national
because it was not official, and in a sense not even political. The
modern Trade Union was the inspiration and creation of the English; it
is still largely known throughout Europe by its English name. It was the
English expression of the European effort to resist the tendency of
Capitalism to reach its natural culmination in slavery. In this it has
an almost weird psychological interest, for it is a return to the past
by men ignorant of the past, like the subconscious action of some man
who has lost his memory. We say that history repeats itself, and it is
even more interesting when it unconsciously repeats itself. No man on
earth is kept so ignorant of the Middle Ages as the British workman,
except perhaps the British business man who employs him. Yet all who
know even a little of the Middle Ages can see that the modern Trade
Union is a groping for the ancient Guild. It is true that those who
look to the Trade Union, and even those clear-sighted enough to call it
the Guild, are often without the faintest tinge of mediaeval mysticism,
or even of mediaeval morality. But this fact is itself the most striking
and even staggering tribute to mediaeval morality. It has all the
clinching logic of coincidence. If large numbers of the most hard-headed
atheists had evolved, out of their own inner consciousness, the notion
that a number of bachelors or spinsters ought to live together in
celibate groups for the good of the poor, or the observation of certain
hours and offices, it would be a very strong point in favour of the
monasteries. It would be all the stronger if the atheists had never
heard of monasteries; it would be strongest of all if they hated the
very name of monasteries. And it is all the stronger because the man who
puts his trust in Trades Unions does not call himself a Catholic or even
a Christian, if he does call himself a Guild Socialist.
The Trade Union movement passed through many perils, including a
ludicrous attempt of certain lawyers to condemn as a criminal conspiracy
that Trade Union solidarity, of which their own profession is the
strongest and most startling example in the world. The struggle
culminated in gigantic strikes which split the country in every
direction in the earlier part of the twentieth century. But another
process, with much more power at its back, was also in operation. The
principle represented by the New Poor Law proceeded on its course, and
in one important respect altered its course, though it can hardly be
said to have altered its object. It can most correctly be stated by
saying that the employers themselves, who already organized business,
began to organize social reform. It was more picturesquely expressed by
a cynical aristocrat in Parliament who said, "We are all Socialists
now." The Socialists, a body of completely sincere men led by several
conspicuously brilliant men, had long hammered into men's heads the
hopeless sterility of mere non-interference in exchange. The Socialists
proposed that the State should not merely interfere in business but
should take over the business, and pay all men as equal wage-earners, or
at any rate as wage-earners. The employers were not willing to surrender
their own position to the State, and this project has largely faded from
politics. But the wiser of them were willing to pay better wages, and
they were specially willing to bestow various other benefits so long as
they were bestowed after the manner of wages. Thus we had a series of
social reforms which, for good or evil, all tended in the same
direction; the permission to employees to claim certain advantages as
employees, and as something permanently different from employers. Of
these the obvious examples were Employers' Liability, Old Age Pensions,
and, as marking another and more decisive stride in the process, the
Insurance Act.
The latter in particular, and the whole plan of the social reform in
general, were modelled upon Germany. Indeed the whole English life of
this period was overshadowed by Germany. We had now reached, for good or
evil, the final fulfilment of that gathering influence which began to
grow on us in the seventeenth century, which was solidified by the
military alliances of the eighteenth century, and which in the
nineteenth century had been turned into a philosophy--not to say a
mythology. German metaphysics had thinned our theology, so that many a
man's most solemn conviction about Good Friday was that Friday was named
after Freya. German history had simply annexed English history, so that
it was almost counted the duty of any patriotic Englishman to be proud
of being a German. The genius of Carlyle, the culture preached by
Matthew Arnold, would not, persuasive as they were, have alone produced
this effect but for an external phenomenon of great force. Our internal
policy was transformed by our foreign policy; and foreign policy was
dominated by the more and more drastic steps which the Prussian, now
clearly the prince of all the German tribes, was taking to extend the
German influence in the world. Denmark was robbed of two provinces;
France was robbed of two provinces; and though the fall of Paris was
felt almost everywhere as the fall of the capital of civilization, a
thing like the sacking of Rome by the Goths, many of the most
influential people in England still saw nothing in it but the solid
success of our kinsmen and old allies of Waterloo. The moral methods
which achieved it, the juggling with the Augustenburg claim, the forgery
of the Ems telegram, were either successfully concealed or were but
cloudily appreciated. The Higher Criticism had entered into our ethics
as well as our theology. Our view of Europe was also distorted and made
disproportionate by the accident of a natural concern for Constantinople
and our route to India, which led Palmerston and later Premiers to
support the Turk and see Russia as the only enemy. This somewhat cynical
reaction was summed up in the strange figure of Disraeli, who made a
pro-Turkish settlement full of his native indifference to the Christian
subjects of Turkey, and sealed it at Berlin in the presence of Bismarck.
Disraeli was not without insight into the inconsistencies and illusions
of the English; he said many sagacious things about them, and one
especially when he told the Manchester School that their motto was
"Peace and Plenty, amid a starving people, and with the world in arms."
But what he said about Peace and Plenty might well be parodied as a
comment on what he himself said about Peace with Honour. Returning from
that Berlin Conference he should have said, "I bring you Peace with
Honour; peace with the seeds of the most horrible war of history; and
honour as the dupes and victims of the old bully in Berlin."
But it was, as we have seen, especially in social reform that Germany
was believed to be leading the way, and to have found the secret of
dealing with the economic evil. In the case of Insurance, which was the
test case, she was applauded for obliging all her workmen to set apart a
portion of their wages for any time of sickness; and numerous other
provisions, both in Germany and England, pursued the same ideal, which
was that of protecting the poor against themselves. It everywhere
involved an external power having a finger in the family pie; but little
attention was paid to any friction thus caused, for all prejudices
against the process were supposed to be the growth of ignorance. And
that ignorance was already being attacked by what was called
education--an enterprise also inspired largely by the example, and
partly by the commercial competition of Germany. It was pointed out that
in Germany governments and great employers thought it well worth their
while to apply the grandest scale of organization and the minutest
inquisition of detail to the instruction of the whole German race. The
government was the stronger for training its scholars as it trained its
soldiers; the big businesses were the stronger for manufacturing mind as
they manufactured material. English education was made compulsory; it
was made free; many good, earnest, and enthusiastic men laboured to
create a ladder of standards and examinations, which would connect the
cleverest of the poor with the culture of the English universities and
the current teaching in history or philosophy. But it cannot be said
that the connection was very complete, or the achievement so thorough as
the German achievement. For whatever reason, the poor Englishman
remained in many things much as his fathers had been, and seemed to
think the Higher Criticism too high for him even to criticize.
And then a day came, and if we were wise, we thanked God that we had
failed. Education, if it had ever really been in question, would
doubtless have been a noble gift; education in the sense of the central
tradition of history, with its freedom, its family honour, its chivalry
which is the flower of Christendom. But what would our populace, in our
epoch, have actually learned if they had learned all that our schools
and universities had to teach? That England was but a little branch on a
large Teutonic tree; that an unfathomable spiritual sympathy,
all-encircling like the sea, had always made us the natural allies of
the great folk by the flowing Rhine; that all light came from Luther and
Lutheran Germany, whose science was still purging Christianity of its
Greek and Roman accretions; that Germany was a forest fated to grow;
that France was a dung-heap fated to decay--a dung-heap with a crowing
cock on it. What would the ladder of education have led to, except a
platform on which a posturing professor proved that a cousin german was
the same as a German cousin? What would the guttersnipe have learnt as a
graduate, except to embrace a Saxon because he was the other half of an
Anglo-Saxon? The day came, and the ignorant fellow found he had other
things to learn. And he was quicker than his educated countrymen, for
he had nothing to unlearn.
He in whose honour all had been said and sung stirred, and stepped
across the border of Belgium. Then were spread out before men's eyes all
the beauties of his culture and all the benefits of his organization;
then we beheld under a lifting daybreak what light we had followed and
after what image we had laboured to refashion ourselves. Nor in any
story of mankind has the irony of God chosen the foolish things so
catastrophically to confound the wise. For the common crowd of poor and
ignorant Englishmen, because they only knew that they were Englishmen,
burst through the filthy cobwebs of four hundred years and stood where
their fathers stood when they knew that they were Christian men. The
English poor, broken in every revolt, bullied by every fashion, long
despoiled of property, and now being despoiled of liberty, entered
history with a noise of trumpets, and turned themselves in two years
into one of the iron armies of the world. And when the critic of
politics and literature, feeling that this war is after all heroic,
looks around him to find the hero, he can point to nothing but a mob.
XVIII
CONCLUSION