the necessities of an enormous national crisis, it would be absurd to
pretend to have achieved proportion; but I will confess to some attempt
to correct a disproportion. We talk of historical perspective, but I
rather fancy there is too much perspective in history; for perspective
makes a giant a pigmy and a pigmy a giant. The past is a giant
foreshortened with his feet towards us; and sometimes the feet are of
clay. We see too much merely the sunset of the Middle Ages, even when we
admire its colours; and the study of a man like Napoleon is too often
that of "The Last Phase." So there is a spirit that thinks it reasonable
to deal in detail with Old Sarum, and would think it ridiculous to deal
in detail with the Use of Sarum; or which erects in Kensington Gardens a
golden monument to Albert larger than anybody has ever erected to
Alfred. English history is misread especially, I think, because the
crisis is missed. It is usually put about the period of the Stuarts; and
many of the memorials of our past seem to suffer from the same
visitation as the memorial of Mr. Dick. But though the story of the
Stuarts was a tragedy, I think it was also an epilogue.
I make the guess, for it can be no more, that the change really came
with the fall of Richard II., following on his failure to use mediaeval
despotism in the interests of mediaeval democracy. England, like the
other nations of Christendom, had been created not so much by the death
of the ancient civilization as by its escape from death, or by its
refusal to die. Mediaeval civilization had arisen out of the resistance
to the barbarians, to the naked barbarism from the North and the more
subtle barbarism from the East. It increased in liberties and local
government under kings who controlled the wider things of war and
taxation; and in the peasant war of the fourteenth century in England,
the king and the populace came for a moment into conscious alliance.
They both found that a third thing was already too strong for them. That
third thing was the aristocracy; and it captured and called itself the
Parliament. The House of Commons, as its name implies, had primarily
consisted of plain men summoned by the King like jurymen; but it soon
became a very special jury. It became, for good or evil, a great organ
of government, surviving the Church, the monarchy and the mob; it did
many great and not a few good things. It created what we call the
British Empire; it created something which was really far more
valuable, a new and natural sort of aristocracy, more humane and even
humanitarian than most of the aristocracies of the world. It had
sufficient sense of the instincts of the people, at least until lately,
to respect the liberty and especially the laughter that had become
almost the religion of the race. But in doing all this, it deliberately
did two other things, which it thought a natural part of its policy; it
took the side of the Protestants, and then (partly as a consequence) it
took the side of the Germans. Until very lately most intelligent
Englishmen were quite honestly convinced that in both it was taking the
side of progress against decay. The question which many of them are now
inevitably asking themselves, and would ask whether I asked it or no, is
whether it did not rather take the side of barbarism against
civilization.
At least, if there be anything valid in my own vision of these things,
we have returned to an origin and we are back in the war with the
barbarians. It falls as naturally for me that the Englishman and the
Frenchman should be on the same side as that Alfred and Abbo should be
on the same side, in that black century when the barbarians wasted
Wessex and besieged Paris. But there are now, perhaps, less certain
tests of the spiritual as distinct from the material victory of
civilization. Ideas are more mixed, are complicated by fine shades or
covered by fine names. And whether the retreating savage leaves behind
him the soul of savagery, like a sickness in the air, I myself should
judge primarily by one political and moral test. The soul of savagery is
slavery. Under all its mask of machinery and instruction, the German
regimentation of the poor was the relapse of barbarians into slavery. I
can see no escape from it for ourselves in the ruts of our present
reforms, but only by doing what the mediaevals did after the other
barbarian defeat: beginning, by guilds and small independent groups,
gradually to restore the personal property of the poor and the personal
freedom of the family. If the English really attempt that, the English
have at least shown in the war, to any one who doubted it, that they
have not lost the courage and capacity of their fathers, and can carry
it through if they will. If they do not do so, if they continue to move
only with the dead momentum of the social discipline which we learnt
from Germany, there is nothing before us but what Mr. Belloc, the
discoverer of this great sociological drift, has called the Servile
State. And there are moods in which a man, considering that conclusion
of our story, is half inclined to wish that the wave of Teutonic
barbarism had washed out us and our armies together; and that the world
should never know anything more of the last of the English, except that
they died for liberty.
THE END
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