believed in his pretensions any more. He was no longer the leader and
complement of the revolution; no longer the embodied spirit of a world
reborn; he was just a new and nastier sort of autocrat. He had estranged
all free-spirited men, and he had antagonized the church. Kings and
Jacobins were at one, when it came to the question of his overthrow.
Only base and self-seeking people supported him, because he seemed to
have the secret of success. Britain was now his inveterate enemy, Spain
was blazing with a spirit that surely a Corsican should have understood;
it needed only a breach with Alexander I to set this empire of bluff and
stage scenery swaying towards its downfall. The quarrel came.
Alexander’s feelings for Napoleon had always been of a very mixed sort;
he envied Napoleon as a rival, and despised him as an underbred upstart.
Moreover, there was a kind of vague and sentimental greatness about
Alexander; he was given to mystical religiosity, he had the conception
of a mission for Russia and himself to bring peace to Europe and the
world--by destroying Napoleon. In that respect he had an imaginative
greatness Napoleon lacked. But bringing peace to Europe seemed to him
quite compatible with the annexation of Finland, of most of Poland, and
of great portions of the Turkish empire. This man’s mind moved in a
luminous fog. And particularly he wanted to resume trading with Britain,
against which Napoleon had set his face. For all the trade of Germany
had been dislocated and the mercantile classes embittered by the
Napoleonic “Continental System,” which was to ruin Britain by excluding
British goods from every country in Europe. Russia had suffered more
even than Germany.
The breach came in 1811, when Alexander withdrew from the “Continental
System.” In 1812 a great mass of armies, amounting altogether to 600,000
men, began to move towards Russia under the supreme command of the new
emperor. About half this force was French; the rest was drawn from the
French allies and subject peoples. It was a conglomerate army like the
army of Darius or the army of Kavadh. The Spanish war was still going
on; Napoleon made no attempt to end it. Altogether, it drained away a
quarter of a million men from France. He fought his way across Poland
and Russia to Moscow before the winter--for the most part the Russian
armies declined battle--and even before the winter closed in upon him
his position became manifestly dangerous. He took Moscow, expecting that
this would oblige Alexander to make peace. Alexander would not make
peace, and Napoleon found himself in much the same position as Darius
had been in 2,300 years before in South Russia. The Russians, still
unconquered in a decisive battle, raided his communications, wasted his
army--disease helped them; even before Napoleon reached Moscow 150,000
men had been lost. But he lacked the wisdom of Darius, and would not
retreat. The winter remained mild for an unusually long time--he could
have escaped; but instead he remained in Moscow, making impossible
plans, at a loss. He had been marvellously lucky in all his previous
flounderings; he had escaped undeservedly from Egypt, he had been saved
from destruction in Britain by the British naval victories; but now he
was in the net again, and this time he was not to escape. Perhaps he
would have wintered in Moscow, but the Russians smoked him out; they set
fire to and burnt most of the city.[452]
It was late in October, too late altogether, before he decided to
return. He made an ineffectual attempt to break through to a fresh line
of retreat to the southwest, and then turned the faces of the survivors
of his Grand Army towards the country they had devastated in their
advance. Immense distances separated them from any friendly territory.
The winter was in no hurry. For a week the Grand Army struggled through
mud; then came sharp frosts, and then the first flakes of snow, and then
snow and snow....
Slowly discipline dissolved. The hungry army spread itself out in search
of supplies until it broke up into mere bands of marauders. The
peasants, if only in self-defence, rose against them, waylaid them, and
murdered them; a cloud of light cavalry--Scythians still--hunted them
down. That retreat is one of the great tragedies of history.
At last Napoleon and his staff and a handful of guards and attendants
reappeared in Germany, bringing no army with him, followed only by
straggling and demoralized bands. The Grand Army, retreating under
Murat, reached Königsberg in a disciplined state, but only about a
thousand strong out of six hundred thousand. From Königsberg Murat fell
back to Posen. The Prussian contingent had surrendered to the Russians;
the Austrians had gone homeward to the south. Everywhere scattered
fugitives, ragged, lean, and frost-bitten, spread the news of the
disaster.
Napoleon’s magic was nearly exhausted. He did not dare to stay with his
troops in Germany; he fled post haste to Paris. He began to order new
levies and gather fresh armies amidst the wreckage of his world empire.
Austria turned against him (1813); all Europe was eager to rise against
this defaulting trustee of freedom, this mere usurper. He had betrayed
the new order; the old order he had saved and revived now destroyed him.
Prussia rose, and the German “War of Liberation” began. Sweden joined
his enemies. Later Holland revolted. Murat had rallied about 14,000
Frenchmen round his disciplined nucleus in Posen, and this force
retreated through Germany, as a man might retreat who had ventured into
a cageful of drugged lions and found that the effects of the drug were
evaporating. Napoleon, with fresh forces, took up the chief command in
the spring, won a great battle at Dresden, and then for a time he seems
to have gone to pieces intellectually and morally. He became insanely
irritable, with moods of inaction. He did little or nothing to follow up
the Battle of Dresden. In September the “Battle of the Nations” was
fought round and about Leipzig, after which the Saxons, who had hitherto
followed his star, went over to the allies. The end of the year saw the
French beaten back into France.
1814 was the closing campaign. France was invaded from the east and the
south; Swedes, Germans, Austrians, Russians, crossed the Rhine; British
and Spanish came through the Pyrenees. Once more Napoleon fought
brilliantly, but now he fought ineffectually. The eastern armies did not
so much defeat him as push past him, and Paris capitulated in March. A
little later at Fontainebleau the emperor abdicated.
In Provence, on his way out of the country, his life was endangered by a
royalist mob.
§ 5
[Illustration: The TRAIL of NAPOLEON]
This was the natural and proper end of Napoleon’s career. So this raid
of an intolerable egotist across the disordered beginnings of a new time
should have closed. At last he was suppressed. And had there been any
real wisdom in the conduct of human affairs, we should now have to tell
of the concentration of human science and will upon the task his
treachery and vanity had interrupted, the task of building up a world
system of justice and free effort in the place of the bankrupt ancient
order. But we have to tell of nothing of the sort. Science and wisdom
were conspicuously absent from the great council of the allies. Came the
vague humanitarianism and dreamy vanity of the Tsar Alexander, came the
shaken Habsburgs of Austria, the resentful Hohenzollerns of Prussia, the
aristocratic traditions of Britain, still badly frightened by the
revolution and its conscience all awry with stolen commons and sweated
factory children. No peoples came to the Congress, but only monarchs and
foreign ministers; and though you bray a foreign office in the bloodiest
of war mortars, yet will its diplomatic habits not depart from it. The
Congress had hardly assembled before the diplomatists set to work making
secret bargains and treaties behind each other’s backs. Nothing could
exceed the pompous triviality of the Congress which gathered at Vienna
after a magnificent ceremonial visit of the allied sovereigns to London.
The social side of the congress was very strong, pretty ladies abounded,
there was a galaxy of stars and uniforms, endless dinners and balls, a
mighty flow of bright anecdotes and sparkling wit. Whether the two
million dead men upon the battle-fields laughed at the jokes, admired
the assemblies, and marvelled at the diplomatists is beyond our
knowledge. It is to be hoped their poor wraiths got something out of the
display. The brightest spirit of the gathering was a certain Talleyrand,
one of Napoleon’s princes, a very brilliant man indeed, who had been a
pre-revolutionary cleric, who had proposed the revolutionary
confiscation of the church estates, and who was now for bringing back
the Bourbons.
The allies, after the fashion of Peace Congresses, frittered away
precious time in more and more rapacious disputes; the Bourbons returned
to France. Back came all the remainder of the émigrés with them, eager
for restitution and revenge. One great egotism had been swept
aside--only to reveal a crowd of meaner egotists. The new king was the
brother of Louis XVI; he had taken the title of Louis XVIII very eagerly
so soon as he learnt that his little nephew (Louis XVII) was dead in the
Temple. He was gouty and clumsy, not perhaps ill-disposed, but the
symbol of the ancient system; all that was new in France felt the heavy
threat of reaction that came with him. This was no liberation, only a
new tyranny, a heavy and inglorious tyranny instead of an active and
splendid one. Was there no hope for France but this? The Bourbons showed
particular malice against the veterans of the Grand Army, and France was
now full of returned prisoners of war, who found themselves under a
cloud. Napoleon had been packed off to a little consolation empire of
his own, upon the island of Elba. He was still to be called Emperor and
keep a certain state. The chivalry or whim of Alexander had insisted
upon this treatment of his fallen rival. The Habsburgs, who had toadied
to his success, had taken away his Habsburg empress--she went willingly
enough--to Vienna, and he never saw her again.
After eleven months at Elba Napoleon judged that France had had enough
of the Bourbons; he contrived to evade the British ships that watched
his island, and reappeared at Cannes in France for his last gamble
against fate. His progress to Paris was a triumphal procession; he
walked on white Bourbon cockades. For a hundred days, “the Hundred
Days,” he was master of France again.
His return created a perplexing position for any honest Frenchman. On
the one hand there was this adventurer who had betrayed the republic; on
the other the dull weight of old kingship restored. The allies would not
hear of any further experiments in republicanism; it was the Bourbons or
Napoleon. Is it any wonder that on the whole France was with Napoleon?
And he came back professing to be a changed man; there was to be no more
despotism; he would respect the constitution régime....
He gathered an army, he made some attempts at peace with the allies;
when he found these efforts ineffectual, he struck swiftly at the
British, Dutch, and Prussians in Belgium, hoping to defeat them before
the Austrians and Russians could come up. He did very nearly manage
this. He beat the Prussians at Ligny, but not sufficiently; and then he
was hopelessly defeated by the tenacity of the British under Wellington
at Waterloo (1815), the Prussians, under Blücher, coming in on his right
flank as the day wore on. Waterloo ended in a rout; it left Napoleon
without support and without hope. France fell away from him again.
Everyone who had joined him was eager now to attack him, and so efface
that error. A provisional government in Paris ordered him to leave the
country; was for giving him twenty-four hours to do it in.
He tried to get to America, but Rochefort, which he reached, was watched
by British cruisers. France, now disillusioned and uncomfortably
royalist again, was hot in pursuit of him. He went aboard a British
frigate, the _Bellerophon_, asking to be received as a refugee, but
being treated as a prisoner. He was taken to Plymouth, and from Plymouth
straight to the lonely tropical island of St. Helena.
There he remained until his death from cancer in 1821, devoting himself
chiefly to the preparation of his memoirs, which were designed to
exhibit the chief events of his life in a misleading and attractive
light and to minimize his worst blunders. One or two of the men with him
recorded his conversations and set down their impressions of him.
These works had a great vogue in France and Europe. The Holy Alliance of
the monarchs of Russia, Austria, and Prussia (to which other monarchs
were invited to adhere) laboured under the delusion that in defeating
Napoleon they had defeated the Revolution, turned back the clock of
fate, and restored Grand Monarchy--on a sanctified basis for evermore.
The cardinal document of the scheme of the Holy Alliance is said to have
been drawn up under the inspiration of the Baroness von Krüdener, who
seems to have been a sort of spiritual director to the Russian emperor.
It opened, “In the name of the Most Holy and Indivisible Trinity,” and
it bound the participating monarchs “regarding themselves towards their
subjects and armies as fathers of families,” and “considering each other
as fellow-countrymen,” to sustain each other, protect true religion, and
urge their subjects to strengthen and exercise themselves in Christian
duties. Christ, it was declared, was the real king of all Christian
peoples, a very Merovingian king, one may remark, with these reigning
sovereigns as his mayors of the palace. The British king had no power to
sign this document, the Pope and the sultan were not asked; the rest of
the European monarchs, including the king of France, adhered. But the
king of Poland did not sign because there was no king in Poland;
Alexander, in a mood of pious abstraction, was sitting on the greater
part of Poland. The Holy Alliance never became an actual legal alliance
of states; it gave place to a real league of nations, the Concert of
Europe, which France joined in 1818, and from which Britain withdrew in
1822.
There followed a period of peace and dull oppression in Europe over
which Alexander brooded in attitudes of orthodoxy, piety, and
unquenchable self-satisfaction. Many people in those hopeless days were
disposed to regard even Napoleon with charity, and to accept his claim
that in some inexplicable way he had, in asserting himself, been
asserting the revolution and France. A cult of him as of something
mystically heroic grew up after his death.[453]
§ 6
In the long perspectives of history the cult of Napoleon, and his
peculiar effect upon certain types of mind, is of far more interest and
far more importance than his actual adventures. The world has largely
recovered from the mischief he did; perhaps that amount of mischief had
to be done by some agency; perhaps his career, or some such career, was
a necessary consequence of the world’s mental unpreparedness for the
crisis of the revolution. But that his peculiar personality should
dominate the imaginations of great numbers of people, throws a light
upon factors of enduring significance in our human problem.
It would be difficult to find a human being less likely to arouse
affection. One reads in vain through the monstrous accumulations of
Napoleonic literature for a single record of self-forgetfulness.
Laughter is one great difference between man and the lower animals, one
method of our brotherhood, and there is no evidence that Napoleon ever
laughed. Nor can we imagine another of the most beautiful of human
expressions upon the face of this saturnine egotist, that expression of
disinterested interest that one sees in the face of an artist or artisan
“lost,” as we say, in his work. Out of his portraits he looks at us with
a thin scorn upon his lips, the scorn of the criminal who believes that
he can certainly cheat such fools as we are, and withal with a certain
uneasiness in his eyes. That uneasiness haunts all his portraits. Are
we really convinced he is quite right? Are his laurels straight? He had
a vast contempt for man in general and men in particular, a contempt
that took him at last to St. Helena, that same contempt that fills our
jails with forgers, poisoners, and the like victims of self-conceit.
There is no proof that this unbrotherly, unhumorous egotist was ever
sincerely loved by any human being. The Empress Josephine was unfaithful
to him as he to her. His young Austrian wife would not accompany him to
Elba. A certain Polish countess followed him thither, but not, it would
seem, for love, but on account of the son she had borne him. She wanted
settlements. She stayed only two days with him. He had never even a dog
to love him. He estranged most of his colleagues and fellow generals. He
had no familiar friend. No one who knew him felt safe with him. In his
intimacy, his unflinching self-concentration must have been a terrible
bore. His personal habits were unpleasant; the moodiness of bad health
came to him early. True it is that his soldiers, who, save for a few
rare melodramatic encounters, saw nothing of him, idolized their “Little
Corporal.” But it was not him they idolized, but a carefully fostered
legend of an incredibly clever, recklessly brave little man, a little
pet of a man, who was devoted to France and them.
Why, then, is there an enormous cult of Napoleon, an endless writing of
books about him, an insatiable collecting of relics and documents, a
kind of worship of his memory? Marat was a far more noble, persistent,
subtle, and pathetic figure; Talleyrand a greater statesman and a much
more amusing personality; Moreau and Hoche abler leaders of armies; his
rival, the Tsar Alexander, as egotistical, more successful, more
emotional, and with a finer imagination. Are men dazzled simply by the
scale of his flounderings, by the mere vastness of his notoriety?
No doubt scale has something to do with the matter; he was a “record,”
the record plunger; but there is something more in it than that. There
is an appeal in Napoleon to something deeper and more fundamental in
human nature than mere astonishment at bigness. His very deficiencies
bring out starkly certain qualities that lurk suppressed and hidden in
us all. He was unhampered. He had never a gleam of religion or affection
or the sense of duty. He was, as few men are or dare to be, a
scoundrel, bright and complete. Most of us are constrained more or less
and now and then to serve God or our fellow men, to do things
disinterestedly, to behave decently when no one is watching us. He was
not so constrained. Most men do a little regret and resent their good
deeds, and find a secret satisfaction in their unpunished bad ones. The
early palæolithic strain is still strong in us; we are being made over,
slowly and reluctantly, into social and fraternal creatures. Few of us
thoroughly enjoy being good citizens. Our moral conflicts, therefore,
are intricate and comic; the constant effort to explain to ourselves and
others that there is a fine moral purpose in this shirking of our duty
or in that self-seeking act. We are all regretfully of the race of Tsar
Alexander, who destroyed the freedom of Poland, annexed Finland, and
secured his imperial predominance piously, “in the name of the most Holy
and Indivisible Trinity”--when it would have been far more agreeable to
have done it in the name of the most Holy and Magnificent Alexander.
There was none of this robing of greed and crime about Napoleon. His
self-conceit and his instinctive and fundamental atheism made him at
least magnificently direct. What we all want to do secretly, more or
less, he did in the daylight.
Directness was his distinctive and immortalizing quality. He had no
brains to waste in secondary considerations. He flung his armies across
Europe straight at their mark, there never were such marches before; he
fought to win; when he struck he struck with all his might. And what he
wanted, he wanted simply and completely, and got--if he could.
There lies his fascination. Since his time his name has been one of the
utmost reassurance to great multitudes of doubting men; to the business
man hesitating over a more than shady transaction, to the clerk
fingering a carelessly written cheque that could so easily be altered,
to the trustee in want of ready money, to the manufacturer meditating
the pros and cons of an adulteration, to thousands of such people the
word “Napoleonic” has come with an effect of decisive relief. We live in
a world full of would-be Napoleons of finance, of the press, of the
turf; half the cells in our jails and many in our mad-houses are St.
Helenas. He was the very embodiment of that sound, clear, self-centred
common sense, without sentiment or scruples or reflection, that
struggles with our feebler better nature, that may ultimately destroy
mankind. In all history there is no figure so completely antithetical to
the figure of Jesus of Nazareth, whose pitiless and difficult doctrine
of self-abandonment and self-forgetfulness we can neither disregard nor
yet bring ourselves to obey. That summons to a new way of life haunts
our world to-day, haunts wealth and comfort and every sort of success.
It is a trouble to us all. Our uneasiness grows. Napoleon was free from
it. The cultivation of the Napoleonic legend seems to offer a kind of
refuge. From salvation.
In that antithesis lies the essential historical importance of Napoleon.
His career marks the beginning of a new phase in the elations of strong
and able and energetic and advantageously placed men to the main mass of
mankind. They are robbed of Self-deception; they must either serve or
openly defy the idea of service. They must be humble or Napoleonic;
there is no more service with privilege and pride. Napoleon adorned
himself with ancient titles and antiquated robes, but the more he
brought himself into contact with tradition, the more manifestly he
displayed himself as something new. In the Tsar Alexander I, who was
never direct, this direct new imperialism met the old. Hitherto the
kings and potentates of the world had taken themselves in good faith,
had had the support of religion in their consciences, had believed they
were serving God in their kingship, and that they were necessary to
mankind and beneficial to mankind. In many cases they were no doubt
swayed by very mixed motives, his majesty had “weaknesses,” his majesty
almost always had a sensitive personal vanity. Sometimes, indeed, a born
rascal like Charles II of England would have the grace or the
gracelessness to laugh at himself, but the generality of kings and
tyrants had the profoundest faith in themselves, and were sustained by
the sincere faith of their loyal supporters. The emperor Charles V and
his son Philip II, Charles I of England, Louis XIV, and the Tsar
Alexander were all inspired by a complete assurance of their own
righteousness, were convinced that opposition to them was sheer
wickedness, wickedness to be overcome in any way and punished with the
utmost severity. But Napoleon knew himself for what he was, an
individual man getting the better of his fellow men. He had small doubt
in his struggle with the republicans, where the moral superiority lay.
With Napoleon, we note the beginning of a clearer-headed age. The
self-deceptions of wealth, power, and prominence wear thin. His new
imperialism reflected upon the old.
For a time the Concert of Europe struggled valiantly to carry on upon
the old lines, but the French Revolution had shrivelled the heart of
monarchy. In 1830, and again in 1848, the evaporation of the simple old
royalist faith became very evident. Alexander I and his narrow-minded
successor, Nicholas I, could still sustain the delusion of divine right
in Russia--that did not perish until 1917--the idea hung on in Prussia
in spite of much muttered criticism,[454] but for the rest of Europe the
days of the unchallenged claim of kingship had gone. “What good are
you?” said the world to monarchs; “and what do you do for us?”
So challenged, many of the monarchs became apologetic and fussily
useful. One or two, as we shall have to tell, became “Napoleonic.” But
so far no European monarch has betrayed any disposition to waive the
remnant of his ancient trappings, to cease his passive and traditional
opposition to political readjustment, and to move of his own accord
towards that more broadly conceived government of human affairs as one
world-wide community of will, which the future welfare of mankind
demands.
§ 7[455]
For nearly forty years the idea of the Holy Alliance, the Concert of
Europe which arose out of it, and the series of congresses and
conferences that succeeded the concert, kept an insecure peace in
war-exhausted Europe. Two main things prevented that period from being a
complete social and international peace, and prepared the way for the
cycle of wars between 1854 and 1871. The first of these was the tendency
of the royal courts concerned, towards the restoration of unfair
privilege and interference with freedom of thought and writing and
teaching. The second was the impossible system of boundaries drawn by
the diplomatists of Vienna.
The obstinate disposition of monarchy to march back towards past
conditions was first and most particularly manifest in Spain. Here even
the Inquisition was restored. Across the Atlantic the Spanish colonies
had followed the example of the United States and revolted against the
European Great Power system, when Napoleon set up his brother Joseph
upon the Spanish throne in 1810. The Washington of South America was
General Bolivar. Spain was unable to suppress this revolt, it dragged on
much as the United States War of Independence had dragged on, and at
last the suggestion was made by Austria in accordance with the spirit of
the Holy Alliance, that the European monarchs should assist Spain in
this struggle. This was opposed by Britain in Europe, but it was the
prompt action of President Monroe of the United States in 1823 which
conclusively warned off this projected monarchist restoration. He
announced that the United States would regard any extension of the
European system in the Western Hemisphere as a hostile act. Thus arose
the Monroe Doctrine, which has kept the Great Power System out of
America for nearly a hundred years, and permitted the new states of
Spanish America to work out their destinies along their own lines. But
if Spanish monarchism lost its colonies, it could at least, under the
protection of the Concert of Europe, do what it chose in Europe. A
popular insurrection in Spain was crushed by a French army in 1823, with
a mandate from a European congress, and simultaneously Austria
suppressed a revolution in Naples. The moving spirit in this conspiracy
of governments against peoples was the Austrian statesman, Metternich.
In 1824 Louis XVIII died, and was succeeded by that Count d’Artois whom
we have seen hovering as an émigré on the French frontiers in 1789; he
took the title of Charles X. Charles set himself to destroy the liberty
of the press and universities, and to restore absolute government; the
sum of a billion francs was voted to compensate the nobles for the
château burnings and sequestrations of 1789. In 1830 Paris rose against
this embodiment of the ancient régime, and replaced him by the son of
that sinister Philip, Duke of Orleans, whose execution was one of the
brightest achievements of the Terror. The other continental monarchies,
in face of the open approval of the revolution by Great Britain and a
strong liberal ferment in Germany and Austria, did not interfere in this
affair. After all, France was still a monarchy. This young man, Louis
Philippe (1830-48), remained the constitutional king of France for
eighteen years. He went down in 1848, a very eventful year for Europe,
of which we shall tell in the next chapter.
[Illustration: EUROPE after the Congress of Vienna]
Such were the uneasy swayings of the peace of the Congress of Vienna,
which were provoked by the reactionary proceedings to which, sooner or
later, all monarchist courts seem by their very nature to gravitate. The
stresses that arose from the unscientific map-making of the diplomatists
gathered force more deliberately, but they were even more dangerous to
the peace of mankind. It is extraordinarily inconvenient to administer
together the affairs of peoples speaking different languages and so
reading different literatures and having different general ideas,
especially if those differences are exacerbated by religious disputes.
Only some strong mutual interest, such as the common defensive needs of
the Swiss mountaineers, can justify a close linking of peoples of
dissimilar languages and faiths; and even in Switzerland there is the
utmost local autonomy. Ultimately, when the Great Power tradition is
certainly dead and buried, those Swiss populations may gravitate towards
their natural affinities in Germany, France, and Italy. When, as in
Macedonia, populations are mixed in a patchwork of villages and
districts, the cantonal system is imperatively needed. But if the reader
will look at the map of Europe as the Congress of Vienna drew it, he
will see that this gathering seems almost as if it had planned the
maximum of local exasperation. It destroyed the Dutch Republic, quite
needlessly, it lumped together the Protestant Dutch with the
French-speaking Catholics of the old Spanish (Austrian) Netherlands, and
set up a kingdom of the Netherlands. It handed over not merely the old
republic of Venice, but all of North Italy as far as Milan to the
German-speaking Austrians. French-speaking Savoy it combined with pieces
of Italy to restore the kingdom of Sardinia.[456] Austria and Hungary,
already a sufficiently explosive mixture of discordant nationalities,
Germans, Hungarians, Czecho-Slovaks, Jugo-Slavs, Roumanians, and now
Italians, was made still more impossible by confirming Austria’s Polish
acquisitions of 1772 and 1795. The Polish people, being catholic and
republican-spirited, were chiefly given over to the less civilized rule
of the Greek-orthodox Tsar, but important districts went to Protestant
Russia. The Tsar was also confirmed in his acquisition of the entirely
alien Finns. The very dissimilar Norwegian and Swedish peoples were
bound together under one king. Germany, the reader will see, was left
in a particularly dangerous state of muddle. Prussia and Austria were
both partly in and partly out of a German confederation, which included
a multitude of minor states. The King of Denmark came into the German
confederation by virtue of certain German-speaking possessions in
Holstein. Luxembourg was included in the German Confederation, though
its ruler was also King of the Netherlands, and though many of its
peoples talked French. Here was a crazy tangle, an outrage on the common
sense of mankind, a preposterous disregard of the fact that the people
who talk German and base their ideas on German literature, the people
who talk Italian and base their ideas on Italian literature, and the
people who talk Polish and base their ideas on Polish literature, will
all be far better off and most helpful and least obnoxious to the rest
of mankind if they conduct their own affairs in their own idiom within
the ring-fence of their own speech. Is it any wonder that one of the
most popular songs in Germany during this period declared that wherever
the German tongue was spoken, there was the German Fatherland?
Even to-day men are still reluctant to recognize that areas of
government are not matters for the bargaining and interplay of tsars and
kings and foreign offices. There is _a natural and necessary political
map of the world_ which transcends these things. There is _a best way
possible_ of dividing any part of the world into administrative areas,
and a best possible kind of government for every area, having regard to
the speech and race of its inhabitants, and it is the common concern of
all men of intelligence to secure those divisions and establish those
forms of government quite irrespective of diplomacies and flags,
“claims” and melodramatic “loyalties” and the existing political map of
the world. The natural political map of the world insists upon itself.
It heaves and frets beneath the artificial political map like some
misfitted giant. In 1830 French-speaking Belgium, stirred up by the
current revolution in France, revolted against its Dutch association in
the kingdom of the Netherlands. The Powers, terrified at the possibility
of a republic and of annexation to France, hurried in to pacify this
situation, and gave the Belgians a monarch from that rich
breeding-ground of monarchs, Germany, Leopold I of Saxe-Coburg Gotha.
There were also ineffectual revolts in Italy and Germany in 1830, and a
much more serious one in Russian Poland. A republican government held
out in Warsaw for a year against Nicholas I (who succeeded Alexander in
1825), and was then stamped out of existence with great violence and
cruelty. The Polish language was banned, and the Greek Orthodox church
was substituted for the Roman Catholic as the State religion....
An outbreak of the natural political map of the world, which occurred in
1821, ultimately secured the support of England, France, and Russia.
This was the insurrection of the Greeks against the Turks. For six years
they fought a desperate war, while the governments of Europe looked on.
Liberal opinion protested against this inactivity; volunteers from every
European country joined the insurgents, and at last Britain, France, and
Russia took joint action. The Turkish fleet was destroyed by the French
and English at the Battle of Navarino (1827), and the Tsar invaded
Turkey. By the treaty of Adrianople (1829) Greece was declared free, but
she was not permitted to resume her ancient republican traditions. There
is a sort of historical indecency in a Greek monarchy. But a Greek
republic would have been dangerous to all monarchy in a Europe that
fretted under the ideas of the Holy Alliance. One monarch makes many. A
German king was found for Greece, one Prince Otto of Bavaria, slightly
demented, but quite royal--he gave way to delusions about his divine
right, and was ejected in 1862--and Christian governors were set up in
the Danubian provinces (which are now Roumania) and Serbia (a part of
the Jugo-Slav region). This was a partial concession to the natural
political map, but much blood had still to run before the Turk was
altogether expelled from these lands. A little later the natural
political map was to assert itself in Italy and Germany.
[Illustration: The NATURAL POLITICAL MAP of EUROPE]
XXXIX
THE REALITIES AND IMAGINATIONS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY[457]
§ 1. _The Mechanical Revolution._ § 2. _Relation of the Mechanical
to the Industrial Revolution._ § 3. _The Fermentation of Ideas,
1848._ § 4. _The Development of the Idea of Socialism._ § 5.
_Shortcomings of Socialism as a Scheme of Human Society._ § 6. _How
Darwinism Affected Religious and Political Ideas._ § 7. _Mr.
Gladstone and the Idea of Nationalism._ § 8. _Europe between 1848
and 1878._ § 9. _The (Second) Scramble for Overseas Empires._ § 10.
_The Indian Precedent in Asia._ § 11. _The History of Japan._ § 12.
_Close of the Period of Overseas Expansion._ § 13. _The British
Empire in 1914._
§ 1
The career and personality of Napoleon I bulks disproportionately in the
nineteenth century histories. He was of little significance to the broad
onward movement of human affairs; he was an interruption, a reminder of
latent evils, a thing like the bacterium of some pestilence. Even
regarded as a pestilence, he was not of supreme rank; he killed far
fewer people than the influenza epidemic of 1918, and produced less
political and social disruption than the plague of Justinian. Some such
interlude had to happen, and some such patched-up settlement of Europe
as the Concert of Europe, because there was no worked-out system of
ideas upon which a new world could be constructed. And even the Concert
of Europe had in it an element of progress. It did at least set aside
the individualism of Machiavellian monarchy and declare that there was a
human or at any rate a European commonweal. If it divided the world
among the kings, it made respectful gestures towards human unity and the
service of God and man.
The permanently effective task before mankind which had to be done
before any new and enduring social and political edifice was possible,
the task upon which the human intelligence is, with many interruptions
and amidst much anger and turmoil, still engaged, was, and is, the task
of working out and applying a Science of Property as a basis for freedom
and social justice, a Science of Currency to ensure and preserve an
efficient economic medium, a Science of Government and Collective
Operations whereby in every community men may learn to pursue their
common interests in harmony, a Science of World Politics, through which
the stark waste and cruelty of warfare between races, peoples, and
nations may be brought to an end and the common interests of mankind
brought under a common control, and, above all, a world-wide System of
Education to sustain the will and interest of men in their common human
adventure. The real makers of history in the nineteenth century, the
people whose consequences will be determining human life a century
ahead, were those who advanced and contributed to this fivefold
constructive effort. Compared to them, the foreign ministers and
“statesmen” and politicians of this period were no more than a number of
troublesome and occasionally incendiary schoolboys--and a few metal
thieves--playing about and doing transitory mischief amidst the
accumulating materials upon the site of a great building whose nature
they did not understand.
And while throughout the nineteenth century the mind of Western
civilization, which the Renascence had released, gathered itself to the
task of creative social and political reconstruction that still lies
before it, there swept across the world a wave of universal change in
human power and the material conditions of life that the first
scientific efforts of that liberated mind had made possible. The
prophecies of Roger Bacon began to live in reality. The accumulating
knowledge and confidence of the little succession of men who had been
carrying on the development of science, now began to bear fruit that
common men could understand. The most obvious firstfruit was the
steam-engine. The first steam-engines in the eighteenth century were
pumping engines used to keep water out of the newly opened coal mines.
These coal mines were being worked to supply coke for iron smelting, for
which wood-charcoal had previously been employed. It was James Watt, a
mathematical instrument maker of Glasgow, who improved this
steam-pumping engine and made it available for the driving of machinery.
The first engine so employed was installed in a cotton mill in
Nottingham in 1785. In 1804 Trevithick adapted the Watt engine to
transport, and made the first locomotive. In 1830 the first railway,
between Liverpool and Manchester, was opened, and Stephenson’s “Rocket,”
with a thirteen-ton train, got up to a speed of forty-four miles per
hour. From 1830 onward railways multiplied. By the middle of the century
a network of railways had spread all over Europe.
Here was a sudden change in what had long been a fixed condition of
human life, the maximum rate of land transport. After the Russian
disaster, Napoleon travelled from near Vilna to Paris in 312 hours. This
was a journey of about 1,400 miles. He was travelling with every
conceivable advantage, and he averaged under five miles an hour. An
ordinary traveller could not have done this distance in twice the time.
These were about the same maximum rates of travel as held good between
Rome and Gaul in the first century A.D., or between Sardis and Susa in
the fourth century B.C. Then suddenly came a tremendous change. The
railways reduced this journey for any ordinary traveller to less than
forty-eight hours. That is to say, they reduced the chief European
distances to about a tenth of what they had been. They made it possible
to carry out administrative work in areas ten times as great as any that
had hitherto been workable under one administration. The full
significance of that possibility in Europe still remains to be realized.
Europe is still netted in boundaries drawn in the horse and road era. In
America the effects were immediate. To the United States of America,
sprawling westward, it meant the possibility of a continuous access to
Washington, however far the frontier travelled across the continent. It
meant unity, sustained on a scale that would otherwise have been
impossible.
The steamboat was, if anything, a little ahead of the steam-engine in
its earlier phases. There was a steamboat, the _Charlotte Dundas_, on
the Firth of Clyde Canal in 1802, and in 1807 an American named Fulton
had a paying steamer, _The Clermont_, with British-built engines, upon
the Hudson River above New York. The first steamship to put to sea was
also an American, the _Phœnix_, which went from New York (Hoboken) to
Philadelphia. So, too, was the first ship using steam (she also had
sails) to cross the Atlantic, the _Savannah_ (1819). All these were
paddle-wheel boats, and paddle-wheel boats are not adapted to work in
heavy seas. The paddles smash too easily, and the boat is then disabled.
The screw steamship followed rather slowly. Many difficulties had to be
surmounted before the screw was a practicable thing. Not until the
middle of the century did the tonnage of steamships upon the sea begin
to overhaul that of sailing-ships. After that the evolution in sea
transport was rapid. For the first time men began to cross the seas and
oceans with some certainty as to the date of their arrival. The
transatlantic crossing, which had been an uncertain adventure of several
weeks--which might stretch to months--was accelerated, until in 1910 it
was brought down, in the case of the fastest boats, to under five days,
with a practically notifiable hour of arrival. All over the oceans there
was the same reduction in the time and the same increase in the
certainty of human communications.
Concurrently with the development of steam transport upon land and sea a
new and striking addition to the facilities of human intercourse arose
out of the investigations of Volta, Galvani, and Faraday into various
electrical phenomena. The electric telegraph came into existence in
1835. The first underseas cable was laid in 1851 between France and
England. In a few years the telegraph system had spread over the
civilized world, and news which had hitherto travelled slowly from point
to point became practically simultaneous throughout the earth.
These things, the steam railway and the electric telegraph, were to the
popular imagination of the middle nineteenth century the most striking
and revolutionary of inventions, but they were only the most
conspicuous and clumsy firstfruits of a far more extensive process.
Technical knowledge and skill were developing with an extraordinary
rapidity, and to an extraordinary extent measured by the progress of any
previous age. Far less conspicuous at first in everyday life, but
finally far more important, was the extension of man’s power over
various structural materials. Before the middle of the eighteenth
century iron was reduced from its ores by means of wood-charcoal, was
handled in small pieces, and hammered and wrought into shape. It was
material for a craftsman. Quality and treatment were enormously
dependent upon the experience and sagacity of the individual iron
worker. The largest masses of iron that could be dealt with under those
conditions amounted at most (in the sixteenth century) to two or three
tons. (There was a very definite upward limit, therefore, to the size of
cannon.) The blast furnace arose in the eighteenth century, and
developed with the use of coke. Not before the eighteenth century do we
find rolled sheet iron (1728) and rolled rods and bars (1783). Nasmyth’s
steam hammer came as late as 1838. The ancient world, because of its
metallurgical inferiority, could not use steam. The steam engine, even
the primitive pumping engine, could not develop before sheet iron was
available. The early engines seem to the modern eye very pitiful and
clumsy bits of ironmongery, but they were the utmost that the
metallurgical science of the time could do. As late as 1856 came the
Bessemer process, and presently (1864) the open-hearth process, in which
steel and every sort of iron could be melted, purified, and cast in a
manner and upon a scale hitherto unheard of. To-day in the electric
furnace one may see tons of incandescent steel swirling about like
boiling milk in a saucepan. Nothing in the previous practical advances
of mankind is comparable in its consequences to the complete mastery
over enormous masses of steel and iron and over their texture and
quality which man has now achieved. The railways and early engines of
all sorts were the mere first triumphs of the new metallurgical methods.
Presently came ships of iron and steel, vast bridges, and a new way of
building with steel upon a gigantic scale. Men realized too late that
they had planned their railways with far too timid a gauge, that they
could have organized their travelling with far more steadiness and
comfort upon a much bigger scale.
Before the nineteenth century there were no ships in the world much over
2,000 tons burthen; now there is nothing wonderful about a 50,000-ton
liner. There are people who sneer at this kind of progress as being a
progress in “mere size,” but that sort of sneering merely marks the
intellectual limitations of those who indulge in it. The great ship or
the steel-frame building is not, as they imagine, a magnified version of
the small ship or building of the past; it is a thing different in kind,
more lightly and strongly built, of finer and stronger materials;
instead of being a thing of precedent and rule-of-thumb, it is a thing
of subtle and intricate calculation. In the old house or ship, matter
was dominant--the material and its needs had to be slavishly obeyed; in
the new, matter has been captured, changed, coerced. Think of the coal
and iron and sand dragged out of the banks and pits, wrenched, wrought,
molten and cast, to be flung at last, a slender, glittering pinnacle of
steel and glass, six hundred feet above the crowded city!
We have given these particulars of the advance in man’s knowledge of the
metallurgy of steel and its results by way of illustration. A parallel
story could be told of the metallurgy of copper and tin, and of a
multitude of metals, nickel and aluminium to name but two, unknown
before the nineteenth century dawned. It is in this great and growing
mastery over substances, over different sorts of glass, over rocks and
plasters and the like, over colours and textures, that the main triumphs
of the mechanical revolution have thus far been achieved. Yet we are
still in the stage of the firstfruits in the matter. We have the power,
but we have still to learn how to use our power. Many of the first
employments of these gifts of science have been vulgar, tawdry, stupid,
or horrible. The artist and the adaptor have still hardly begun to work
with the endless variety of substances now at their disposal.
Concurrently with this extension of mechanical possibilities the new
science of electricity grew up. It was only in the eighties of the
nineteenth century that this body of inquiry began to yield results to
impress the vulgar mind. Then suddenly came electric light and electric
traction; and the transmutation of forces, the possibility of sending
_power_, that could be changed into mechanical motion or light or heat
as one chose, along a copper wire, as water is sent along a pipe, began
to come through to the ideas of ordinary people....
The British and the French were at first the leading peoples in this
great proliferation of knowledge; but presently the German, who had
learnt humility under Napoleon, showed such zeal and pertinacity in
scientific inquiry as to overhaul these leaders. British science was
largely the creation of Englishmen and Scotchmen[458] working outside
the ordinary centres of erudition.[459] We have told how in England the
universities after the reformation ceased to have a wide popular appeal,
how they became the educational preserve of the nobility and gentry, and
the strongholds of the established church. A pompous and unintelligent
classical pretentiousness dominated them, and they dominated the schools
of the middle and upper classes. The only knowledge recognized was an
uncritical textual knowledge of a selection of Latin and Greek classics,
and the test of a good style was its abundance of quotations, allusions,
and stereotyped expressions. The early development of British science
went on, therefore, in spite of the formal educational organization, and
in the teeth of the bitter hostility of the teaching and clerical
professions. French education, too, was dominated by the classical
tradition of the Jesuits, and consequently it was not difficult for the
Germans to organize a body of investigators, small indeed in relation to
the possibilities of the case, but large in proportion to the little
band of British and French inventors and experimentalists. And though
this work of research and experiment was making Britain and France the
most rich and powerful countries in the world, it was not making
scientific and inventive men rich and powerful. There is a necessary
unworldliness about a sincere scientific man; he is too preoccupied with
his research to plan and scheme how to make money out of it. The
economic exploitation of his discoveries falls very easily and
naturally, therefore, into the hands of a more acquisitive type; and so
we find that the crops of rich men which every fresh phase of scientific
and technical progress has produced in Great Britain, though they have
not displayed quite the same passionate desire to insult and kill the
goose that laid the national golden eggs as the scholastic and clerical
professions, have been quite content to let that profitable creature
starve. Inventors and discoverers came by nature, they thought, for
cleverer people to profit by.
In this matter the Germans were a little wiser. The German “learned” did
not display the same vehement hatred of the new learning. They permitted
its development. The German business man and manufacturer again had not
quite the same contempt for the man of science as had his British
competitor. Knowledge, these Germans believed, might be a cultivated
crop, responsive to fertilizers. They did concede, therefore, a certain
amount of opportunity to the scientific mind; their public expenditure
on scientific work was relatively greater, and this expenditure was
abundantly rewarded. By the latter half of the nineteenth century the
German scientific worker had made German a necessary language for every
science student who wished to keep abreast with the latest work in his
department, and in certain branches, and particularly in chemistry,
Germany acquired a very great superiority over her western neighbours.
The scientific effort of the sixties and seventies in Germany began to
tell after the eighties, and the Germans gained steadily upon Britain
and France in technical and industrial prosperity.
In an _Outline of History_ such as this it is impossible to trace the
network of complex mental processes that led to the incessant extension
of knowledge and power that is now going on; all we can do here is to
call the reader’s attention to the most salient turning-points that
finally led the toboggan of human affairs into its present swift ice-run
of progress. We have told of the first release of human curiosity and of
the beginnings of systematic inquiry and experiment. We have told, too,
how, when the plutocratic Roman system and its resultant imperialism had
come and gone again, this process of inquiry was renewed. We have told
of the escape of investigation from ideas of secrecy and personal
advantage to the idea of publication and a brotherhood of knowledge,
and we have noted the foundation of the British Royal Society, the
Florentine Society, and their like as a consequence of this socializing
of thought. These things were the roots of the mechanical revolution,
and so long as the root of pure scientific inquiry lives, that
revolution will progress. The mechanical revolution itself began, we may
say, with the exhaustion of the wood supply for the ironworks of
England. This led to the use of coal, the coal mine led to the simple
pumping engine, the development of the pumping engine by Watt into a
machine-driving engine led on to the locomotive and the steamship. This
was the first phase of a great expansion in the use of steam. A second
phase in the mechanical revolution began with the application of
electrical science to practical problems and the development of electric
lighting, power-transmission, and traction.
A third phase is to be distinguished when in the eighties a new type of
engine came into use, an engine in which the expansive force of an
explosive mixture replaced the expansive force of steam. The light,
highly efficient engines that were thus made possible were applied to
the automobile, and developed at last to reach such a pitch of lightness
and efficiency as to render flight--long known to be possible--a
practical achievement. A successful flying-machine--but not a machine
large enough to take up a human body--was made by Professor Langley of
the Smithsonian Institution of Washington as early as 1897. By 1909 the
aeroplane was available for human locomotion. There had seemed to be a
pause in the increase of human speed with the perfection of railways and
automobile road traction, but with the flying-machine came fresh
reductions in the effective distance between one point of the earth’s
surface and another. In the eighteenth century the distance from London
to Edinburgh was an eight days’ journey; in 1918 the British Civil Air
Transport Commission reported that the journey from London to Melbourne,
half-way round the earth, would probably, in a few years’ time, be
accomplished in that same period of eight days.
Too much stress must not be laid upon these striking reductions in the
time distances of one place from another. They are merely one aspect of
a much profounder and more momentous enlargement of human possibility.
The science of agriculture and agricultural chemistry, for instance,
made quite parallel advances during the nineteenth century. Men learnt
so to fertilize the soil as to produce quadruple and quintuple the crops
got from the same area in the seventeenth century. There was a still
more extraordinary advance in medical science; the average duration of
life rose, the daily efficiency increased, the waste of life through
ill-health diminished.
Now here altogether we have such a change in human life as to constitute
a fresh phase of history. In a little more than a century this
mechanical revolution has been brought about. In that time man made a
stride in the material conditions of his life vaster than he had done
during the whole long interval between the palæolithic stage and the age
of cultivation, or between the days of Pepi in Egypt and those of George
III. A new gigantic material framework for human affairs has come unto
existence. Clearly it demands great readjustments of our social,
economical, and political methods. But these readjustments have
necessarily waited upon the development of the mechanical revolution,
and they are still only in their opening stage to-day.
§ 2
There is a tendency in many histories to confuse together what we have
here called the _mechanical revolution_, which was an entirely new thing
in human experience arising out of the development of organized science,
a new step like the invention of agriculture or the discovery of metals,
with something else, quite different in its origins, something for which
there was already an historical precedent, the social and financial
development which is called the _industrial revolution_. The two
processes were going on together, they were constantly reacting upon
each other, but they were in root and essence different. There would
have been an industrial revolution of sorts if there had been no coal,
no steam, no machinery; but in that case it would probably have followed
far more closely upon the lines of the social and financial developments
of the later years of the Roman republic. It would have repeated the
story of dispossessed free cultivators, gang labour, great estates,
great financial fortunes, and a socially destructive financial process.
Even the factory method came before power and machinery. Factories were
the product not of machinery, but of the “division of labour.” Drilled
and sweated workers were making such things as millinery, cardboard
boxes, and furniture, and colouring maps and book illustrations, and so
forth, before even water-wheels had been used for industrial processes.
There were factories in Rome in the days of Augustus. New books, for
instance, were dictated to rows of copyists in the factories of the
booksellers. The attentive student of Defoe and of the political
pamphlets of Fielding will realize that the idea of herding poor people
into establishments to work collectively for their living was already
current in Britain before the close of the seventeenth century. There
are intimations of it even as early as More’s _Utopia_ (1516). It was a
social and not a mechanical development.
Up to past the middle of the eighteenth century the social and economic
history of western Europe was in fact retreading the path along which
the Roman State had gone in the three last centuries B.C. America was in
many ways a new Spain, and India and China a new Egypt. But the
political disunions of Europe, the political convulsions against
monarchy, the recalcitrance of the common folk and perhaps also the
greater accessibility of the western European intelligence to mechanical
ideas and inventions, turned the process into quite novel directions.
Ideas of human solidarity, thanks to Christianity, were far more widely
diffused in this newer European world, political power was not so
concentrated, and the man of energy anxious to get rich turned his mind,
therefore, very willingly from the ideas of the slave and of gang labour
to the idea of mechanical power and the machine.
The mechanical revolution, the process of mechanical invention and
discovery, was a new thing in human experience, and it went on
regardless of the social, political, economic, and industrial
consequences it might produce. The industrial revolution, on the other
hand, like most other human affairs, was and is more and more profoundly
changed and deflected by the constant variation in human conditions
caused by the mechanical revolution. And the essential difference
between the amassing of riches, the extinction of small farmers and
small business men, and the phase of big finance in the latter centuries
of the Roman republic on the one hand, and the very similar
concentration of capital in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on
the other, lies in the profound difference in the character of labour
that the mechanical revolution was bringing about. The power of the old
world was human power; everything depended ultimately upon the driving
power of human muscle, the muscle of ignorant and subjugated men. A
little animal muscle, supplied by draft oxen, horse traction, and the
like, contributed. Where a weight had to be lifted, men lifted it; where
a rock had to be quarried, men chipped it out; where a field had to be
ploughed, men and oxen ploughed it; the Roman equivalent of the
steamship was the galley with its banks of sweating rowers. A vast
proportion of mankind in the early civilizations was employed in purely
mechanical drudgery. At its onset, power-driven machinery did not seem
to promise any release from such unintelligent toil. Great gangs of men
were employed in excavating canals, in making railway cuttings and
embankments, and the like. The number of miners increased enormously.
But the extension of facilities and the output of commodities increased
much more. And as the nineteenth century went on, the plain logic of the
new situation asserted itself more clearly. Human beings were no longer
wanted as a source of mere indiscriminated power. What could be done
mechanically by a human being could be done faster and better by a
machine. The human being was needed now only where choice and
intelligence had to be exercised. Human beings were wanted only as human
beings. The _drudge_, on whom all the previous civilizations had rested,
the creature of mere obedience, the man whose brains were superfluous,
had become unnecessary to the welfare of mankind.
This was as true of such ancient industries as agriculture and mining as
it was of the newest metallurgical processes. For ploughing, sowing, and
harvesting, swift machines came forward to do the work of scores of
men.[460] The Roman civilization was built upon cheap and degraded human
beings; modern civilization is being rebuilt upon cheap mechanical
power. For a hundred years power has been getting cheaper and labour
dearer. If for a generation or so machinery has had to wait its turn in
the mine, it is simply because for a time men were cheaper than
machinery.[461]
Now here was a change-over of quite primary importance in human affairs.
The chief solicitude of the rich and of the ruler in the old
civilization had been to keep up a supply of drudges. As the nineteenth
century went on, it became more and more plain to the intelligent
directive people that the common man had now to be something better than
a drudge. He had to be educated--if only to secure “industrial
efficiency.” He had to understand what he was about. From the days of
the first Christian propaganda, popular education had been smouldering
in Europe, just as it has smouldered in Asia wherever Islam has set its
foot, because of the necessity of making the believer understand a
little of the belief by which he is saved, and of enabling him to read a
little in the sacred books by which his belief is conveyed. Christian
controversies, with their competition for adherents, ploughed the ground
for the harvest of popular education. In England, for instance, by the
thirties and forties of the nineteenth century, the disputes of the
sects and the necessity of catching adherents young had produced an
abundance of night schools, Sunday schools, and a series of competing
educational organizations for children, the dissenting British schools,
the church National Schools, and even Roman Catholic elementary schools.
The earlier, less enlightened manufacturers, unable to take a broad view
of their own interests, hated and opposed these schools. But here again
needy Germany led her richer neighbours. The religious teacher found the
profit-seeker at his side, unexpectedly eager to get the commonalty, if
not educated, at least “trained.” The student of the English magazines
of the middle and later Victorian period may trace the steadily
spreading recognition of the new necessity for popular education. The
upper and middle classes of England, themselves by no means well
educated, for a generation or so regarded popular education with a sort
of tittering hostility. In the middle Victorian period it was thought to
be extraordinarily funny that a shop assistant should lean across the
counter and ask two lady customers not to speak French, as he
“understood the langwidge.” This was a “joke” in that monumental record
of British humour, _Punch_. It was almost as amusing to the Victorian
English as the story of Balaam’s ass. The German competitor later on
robbed that joke of its fun. Before the death of Queen Victoria, English
shop assistants were being badgered to attend evening classes to learn
French.
The second half of the nineteenth century was a period of rapid advance
in popular education throughout all the Westernized world. There was no
parallel advance in the education of the upper classes, some advance no
doubt, but nothing to correspond, and so the great gulf that had divided
that world hitherto into the readers and the non-reading mass became
little more than a slightly perceptible difference in educational level.
At the back of this process was the mechanical revolution, apparently
regardless of social conditions, but really insisting inexorably upon
the complete abolition of a totally illiterate class throughout the
world.
The economic revolution of the Roman republic had never been clearly
apprehended by the common people of Rome. The ordinary Roman citizen
never saw the changes through which he lived, clearly and
comprehensively as we see them. But the industrial revolution, as it
went on towards the end of the nineteenth century, was more and more
distinctly _seen_ as one whole process by the common people it was
affecting, because presently they could read and discuss and
communicate, and because they went about and saw things as no commonalty
had ever done before.
In this Outline of History we have been careful to indicate the gradual
appearance of the ordinary people as a class with a will and ideas in
common. It is the writer’s belief that massive movements of the
“ordinary people” over considerable areas only became possible as a
result of the propagandist religions, Christianity and Islam, and their
insistence upon individual self-respect. We have cited the enthusiasm of
the commonalty for the First Crusade as marking a new phase in social
history. But before the nineteenth century even these massive movements
were comparatively restricted. The equalitarian insurrections of the
peasantry, from the Wycliffe period onward, were confined to the peasant
communities of definite localities, they spread only slowly into
districts affected by similar forces. The town artisan rioted indeed,
but only locally. The château-burning of the French revolution was not
the act of a peasantry who had overthrown a government, it was the act
of a peasantry released by the overthrow of a government. The Commune of
Paris was the first effective appearance of the town artisan as a
political power, and the Parisian crowd of the First Revolution was a
very mixed, primitive-thinking, and savage crowd compared with any
Western European crowd after 1830.
But the mechanical revolution was not only pressing education upon the
whole population, it was leading to a big-capitalism and to a
large-scale reorganization of industry that was to produce a new and
distinctive system of ideas in the common people in the place of the
mere uncomfortable recalcitrance and elemental rebellions of an
illiterate commonalty. We have already noted how the industrial
revolution had split the manufacturing class, which had hitherto been a
middling and various sort of class, into two sections, the employers,
who became rich enough to mingle with the financial, merchandizing, and
landowning classes, and the employees, who drifted to a status closer
and closer to that of mere gang and agricultural labour. As the
manufacturing employee sank, the agricultural labourer, by the
introduction of agricultural machinery and the increase in his
individual productivity, rose. By the middle of the nineteenth century,
Karl Marx (1818-83), a German Jew of great scholarly attainments, who
did much of his work in the British Museum library in London, was
pointing out that the organization of the working classes by the
steadily concentrating group of capitalist owners, was developing a new
social classification to replace the more complex class systems of the
past (see chapter xx, §§ 4, 5, and 6). Property, so far as it was power,
was being gathered together into relatively few hands, the hands of the
big rich men, the capitalist class; while there was a great mingling of
workers with little or no property, whom he called the “expropriated,”
or “proletariat”--a misuse of this word (see chap. xxvii, § 2)--who were
bound to develop a common “class consciousness” of the conflict of their
interests with those of the rich men. Differences of education and
tradition between the various older social elements which were in
process of being fused up into the new class of the expropriated, seemed
for a time to contradict this sweeping generalization; the traditions of
the professions, the small employers, the farmer peasant and the like
were all different from one another and from the various craftsman
traditions of the workers; but with the spread of education and the
cheapening of literature, this “Marxian” generalization becomes now more
and more acceptable. These classes, who were linked at first by nothing
but a common impoverishment, were and are being reduced or raised to the
same standard of life, forced to read the same books and share the same
inconveniences. A sense of solidarity between all sorts of poor and
propertyless men, as against the profit-amassing and
wealth-concentrating class, is growing more and more evident in our
world. Old differences fade away, the difference between craftsman and
open-air worker, between black coat and overall, between poor clergyman
and elementary school-master, between policeman and bus-driver. They
must all buy the same cheap furnishings and live in similar cheap
houses; their sons and daughters will all mingle and marry; success at
the upper levels becomes more and more hopeless for the rank and file.
Marx, who did not so much advocate the class-war, the war of the
expropriated mass against the appropriating few, as foretell it, is
being more and more justified by events.[462]
§ 3
To trace any broad outlines in the fermentation of ideas that went on
during the mechanical and industrial revolution of the nineteenth
century is a very difficult task. But we must attempt it if we are to
link what has gone before in this history with the condition of our
world to-day.
It will be convenient to distinguish two main periods in the hundred
years between 1814 and 1914. First came the period 1814-48, in which
there was a very considerable amount of liberal thinking and writing _in
limited circles_, but during which there were no great changes or
development of thought in the general mass of the people. Throughout
this period the world’s affairs were living, so to speak, on their old
intellectual capital, they were going on in accordance with the leading
ideas of the Revolution and the counter-revolution. The dominant liberal
ideas were freedom and a certain vague equalitarianism; the conservative
ideas were monarchy, organized religion, social privilege, and
obedience.
Until 1848 the spirit of the Holy Alliance, the spirit of Metternich,
struggled to prevent a revival of the European revolution that Napoleon
had betrayed and set back. In America, both North and South, on the
other hand, the revolution had triumphed and nineteenth-century
liberalism ruled unchallenged. Britain was an uneasy country, never
quite loyally reactionary nor quite loyally progressive, neither truly
monarchist nor truly republican, the land of Cromwell and also of the
Merry Monarch, Charles; anti-Austrian, anti-Bourbon, anti-papal, yet
weakly repressive. We have told of the first series of liberal storms in
Europe in and about the year 1830; in Britain in 1832 a Reform Bill,
greatly extending the franchise and restoring something of its
representative character to the House of Commons, relieved the
situation. Round and about 1848 came a second and much more serious
system of outbreaks, that overthrew the Orleans monarchy and established
a second Republic in France (1848-52), raised North Italy and Hungary
against Austria, and the Poles in Posen against the Germans, and sent
the Pope in flight from the republicans of Rome. A very interesting
Pan-Slavic conference held at Prague foreshadowed many of the
territorial readjustments of 1919. It dispersed after an insurrection at
Prague had been suppressed by Austrian troops.
Ultimately all these insurrections failed; the current system staggered,
but kept its feet. There were no doubt serious social discontents
beneath these revolts, but as yet, except in the case of Paris, these
had no very clear form; and this 1848 storm, so far as the rest of
Europe was concerned, may be best described, in a phrase, as a revolt
of the natural political map against the artificial arrangements of the
Vienna diplomatists, and the system of suppressions those arrangements
entailed.
The history of Europe, then, from 1815 to 1848 was, generally speaking,
a sequel to the history of Europe from 1789 to 1814. There were no
really new _motifs_ in the composition. The main trouble was still the
struggle, though often a blind and misdirected struggle, of the
interests of ordinary men against the Great Powers system which cramped
and oppressed the life of mankind.
But after 1848, from 1848 to 1914, though the readjustment of the map
still went on towards a free and unified Italy and a unified Germany,
there began a fresh phase in the process of mental and political
adaptation to the new knowledge and the new material powers of mankind.
Came a great irruption of new social, religious, and political ideas
into the general European mind. In the next three sections we will
consider the origin and quality of these irruptions. They laid the
foundations upon which we base our political thought to-day, but for a
long time they had no very great effect on contemporary politics.
Contemporary politics continued to run on in the old lines, but with a
steadily diminishing support in the intellectual convictions and
consciences of men. We have already described the way in which a strong
intellectual process undermined the system of Grand Monarchy in France
before 1789. A similar undermining process was going on throughout
Europe during the Great Power period of 1848-1914. Profound doubts of
the system of government and of the liberties of many forms of property
in the economic system spread throughout the social body. Then came the
greatest and most disorganizing war in history, so that it is still
impossible to estimate the power and range of the accumulated new ideas
of those sixty-six years. We have been through a greater catastrophe
even than the Napoleonic catastrophe, and we are in a slack-water
period, corresponding to the period 1815-30. Our 1830 and our 1848 are
still to come and show us where we stand.
§ 4
We have traced throughout this history the gradual restriction of the
idea of property from the first unlimited claim of the strong man to
possess everything and the gradual realization of brotherhood as
something transcending personal self-seeking (see especially chap.
xxxvii, § 13). Men were first subjugated into more than tribal societies
by the fear of monarch and deity. It is only within the last three or at
most four thousand years that we have any clear evidence that voluntary
self-abandonment to some greater end, without fee or reward, was an
acceptable idea to men, or that anyone had propounded it. Then we find
spreading over the surface of human affairs, as patches of sunshine
spread and pass over the hillsides upon a windy day in spring, the idea
that there is a happiness in self-devotion greater than any personal
gratification or triumph, and a life of mankind different and greater
and more important than the sum of all the individual lives within it.
We have seen that idea become vivid as a beacon, vivid as sunshine
caught and reflected dazzlingly by some window in the landscape, in the
teaching of Buddha, Lao Tse, and, most clearly of all, of Jesus of
Nazareth. Through all its variations and corruptions Christianity has
never completely lost the suggestion of a devotion to God’s commonweal
that makes the personal pomps of monarchs and rulers seem like the
insolence of an over-dressed servant and the splendours and
gratifications of wealth like the waste of robbers. No man living in a
community which such a religion as Christianity or Islam has touched can
be altogether a slave; there is an ineradicable quality in these
religions that compels men to judge their masters and to realize their
own responsibility for the world.
As men have felt their way towards this new state of mind from the
fierce self-centred greed and instinctive combativeness of the early
Palæolithic family group, they have sought to express the drift of their
thoughts and necessities very variously. They have found themselves in
disagreement and conflict with old-established ideas, and there has been
a natural tendency to contradict these ideas flatly, to fly over to the
absolute contrary. Faced by a world in which rule and classes and order
seem to do little but give opportunity for personal selfishness and
unrighteous oppression, the first impatient movement was to declare for
a universal equality and a practical anarchy. Faced by a world in which
property seemed little more than a protection for selfishness and a
method of enslavement, it was as natural to repudiate all property. Our
history shows an increasing impulse to revolt against rulers and against
ownership. We have traced it in the middle ages burning the rich man’s
châteaux and experimenting in theocracy and communism. In the French
revolutions this double revolt is clear and plain. In France we find
side by side, inspired by the same spirit and as natural parts of the
same revolutionary movement, men who, with their eyes on the ruler’s
taxes, declared that property should be inviolable, and others who, with
their eyes on the employer’s hard bargains, declared that property
should be abolished. But what they are really revolting against in each
case is that the ruler and the employer, instead of becoming servants of
the community, still remain, like most of mankind, self-seeking,
oppressive individuals.
Throughout the ages we find this belief growing in men’s minds that
there can be such a rearrangement of laws and powers as to give rule and
order while still restraining the egotism of any ruler and of any ruling
class that may be necessary, and such a definition of property as will
give freedom without oppressive power. We begin to realize nowadays that
these ends are only to be attained by a complex constructive effort;
they arise through the conflict of new human needs against ignorance and
old human nature; but throughout the nineteenth century there was a
persistent disposition to solve the problem by some simple formula. (And
be happy ever afterwards, regardless of the fact that all human life,
all life, is throughout the ages nothing but the continuing solution of
a continuous synthetic problem.)
The earlier half of the nineteenth century saw a number of experiments
in the formation of trial human societies of a new kind. One of these,
the Oneida Community (1845-79), under the leadership of a man of very
considerable genius and learning, John Humphry Noyes, did for a number
of decades succeed in realizing many of the most striking proposals of
Plato’s _Republic_; it became wealthy and respected; but it broke up in
1879 largely because of the disposition of the younger generation to
leave its peculiar limitations in order to play a part in the larger
community of the world outside. A powerful business corporation still
preserves its industrial tradition.[463] But the Oneida experiment was
too bold and strange a departure to influence the general development of
modern civilization. Far more important historically were the
experiments and ideas of Robert Owen (1771-1858), a Manchester
cotton-spinner. He is very generally regarded as the founder of modern
Socialism; it was in connection with his work that the word “socialism”
first arose (about 1835).
He seems to have been a thoroughly competent business man; he made a
number of innovations in the cotton-spinning industry, and acquired a
fair fortune at an early age. He was distressed by the waste of human
possibilities among his workers, and he set himself to improve their
condition and the relations of employer and employed. This he sought to
do first at his Manchester factory and afterwards at New Lanark, where
he found himself in practical control of works employing about two
thousand people. Between 1800 and 1828 he achieved very considerable
things: he reduced the hours of labour, made his factory sanitary and
agreeable, abolished the employment of very young children, improved the
training of his workers, provided unemployment pay during a period of
trade depression, established a system of schools, and made New Lanark a
model of a better industrialism, while at the same time sustaining its
commercial prosperity. He wrote vigorously to defend the mass of mankind
against the charges of intemperance and improvidence which were held to
justify the economic iniquities of the time.[464] He held that men and
women are largely the product of their educational environment, a thesis
that needs no advocacy to-day. And he set himself to a propaganda of the
views that New Lanark had justified. He attacked the selfish indolence
of his fellow manufacturers, and in 1819, largely under his urgency, the
first Factory Act was passed, the first attempt to restrain employers
from taking the most stupid and intolerable advantages of their workers’
poverty. Some of the restrictions of that Act amaze us to-day. It seems
incredible now that it should ever have been necessary to protect little
children of _nine_ (!) from work in factories, or to limit the nominal
working day of such employees to _twelve hours_!
People are perhaps too apt to write of the industrial revolution as
though it led to the enslavement and overworking of poor children who
had hitherto been happy and free. But this misinterprets history. From
the very beginnings of civilization the little children of the poor had
always been obliged to do whatever work they could do. But the factory
system gathered up all this infantile toil and made it systematic,
conspicuous, and scandalous. The factory system challenged the
quickening human conscience on that issue. The British Factory Act of
1819, weak and feeble though it seems to us, was the Magna Carta of
childhood; thereafter the protection of the children of the poor, first
from toil and then from bodily starvation and ignorance, began.
We cannot tell here in any detail the full story of Owen’s life and
thought.[465] His work at New Lanark had been, he felt, only a trial
upon a small working model. What could be done for one industrial
community could be done, he held, for every industrial community in the
country; he advocated a resettlement of the industrial population in
townships on the New Lanark plan. For a time he seemed to have captured
the imagination of the world. The _Times_ and _Morning Post_ supported
his proposals; among the visitors to New Lanark was the Grand Duke
Nicholas who succeeded Alexander I as Tsar; a fast friend was the Duke
of Kent, son of George III and father of Queen Victoria. But all the
haters of change and all--and there are always many such--who were
jealous of the poor, and all the employers who were likely to be
troubled by his projects, were waiting for an excuse to counter-attack
him, and they found it in the expression of his religious opinions,
which were hostile to official Christianity, and through those he was
successfully discredited. But he continued to develop his projects and
experiments, of which the chief was a community at New Harmony in
Indiana (U. S. A.), in which he sank most of his capital. His partners
bought him out of the New Lanark business in 1828.
Owen’s experiments and suggestions ranged very widely, and do not fall
under any single formula. There was nothing doctrinaire about him. His
New Lanark experiment was the first of a number of “benevolent
businesses” in the world; Lord Leverhulme’s Port Sunlight, the Cadburys’
Bournville, and the Ford businesses in America are contemporary
instances; it was not really a socialist experiment at all; it was a
“paternal” experiment. But his proposals for state settlements were what
we should call state socialism to-day. His American experiment and his
later writings point to a completer form of socialism, a much wider
departure from the existing state of affairs. It is clear that the
riddle of currency exercised Owen. He understood that we can no more
hope for real economic justice while we pay for work with money of
fluctuating value than we could hope for a punctual world if there was a
continual inconstant variability in the length of an hour. One of his
experiments was an attempt at a circulation of labour notes representing
one hour, five hours, or twenty hours of work. The co-operative
societies of to-day, societies of poor men which combine for the
collective buying and distribution of commodities or for collective
manufacture or dairying or other forms of agriculture, arose directly
out of his initiatives, though the pioneer co-operative societies of his
own time ended in failure. Their successors have spread throughout the
whole world, and number to-day some thirty or forty million of
adherents.
A point to note about this early socialism of Owen’s is that it was not
at first at all “democratic.” Its initiative was benevolent, its early
form patriarchal; it was something up to which the workers were to be
educated by liberally disposed employers and leaders. The first
socialism was not a worker’s movement; it was a master’s movement.
Concurrently with this work of Owen’s, another and quite independent
series of developments was going on in America and Britain which was
destined to come at last into reaction with his socialistic ideas. The
English law had long prohibited combinations in restraint of trade,
combinations to raise prices or wages by concerted action. There had
been no great hardship in these prohibitions before the agrarian and
industrial changes of the eighteenth century let loose a great swarm of
workers living from hand to mouth and competing for insufficient
employment. Under these new conditions, the workers in many industries
found themselves intolerably squeezed. They were played off one against
another; day by day and hour by hour none knew what concession his
fellow might not have made, and what further reduction of pay or
increase of toil might not ensue. It became vitally necessary for the
workers to make agreements--illegal though they were--against such
underselling. At first these agreements had to be made and sustained by
secret societies. Or clubs, established ostensibly for quite other
purposes, social clubs, funeral societies, and the like, served to mask
the wage-protecting combination. The fact that these associations were
illegal disposed them to violence; they were savage against “blacklegs”
and “rats” who would not join them, and still more savage with traitors.
In 1824 the House of Commons recognized the desirability of relieving
tension in these matters by conceding the right of workmen to form
combinations for “collective bargaining” with the masters. This enabled
Trade Unions to develop with a large measure of freedom. At first very
clumsy and primitive organizations and with very restricted freedoms,
the Trade Unions have risen gradually to be a real Fourth Estate in the
country, a great system of bodies representing the mass of industrial
workers.
Arising at first in Britain and America, they have, with various
national modifications, and under varying legal conditions, spread to
France, Germany, and all the westernized communities.
Organized originally to sustain wages and restrict intolerable hours,
the Trade Union movement was at first something altogether distinct from
socialism. The Trade Unionist tried to make the best for himself of the
existing capitalism and the existing conditions of employment; the
socialist proposed to change the system. It was the imagination and
generalizing power of Karl Marx which brought these two movements into
relationship. He was a man with the sense of history very strong in him;
he was the first to perceive that the old social classes that had
endured since the beginning of civilization were in process of
dissolution and regrouping. His racial Jewish commercialism made the
antagonism of property and labour very plain to him. And his upbringing
in Germany--where, as we have pointed out, the tendency of class to
harden into caste was more evident than in any other European
country--made him conceive of labour as presently becoming “class
conscious” and collectively antagonistic to the property-concentrating
classes. In the Trade Union movement which was spreading over the world,
he believed he saw this development of class-conscious labour.
What, he asked, would be the outcome of the “class war” of the
capitalist and proletariat? The capitalist adventurers, he alleged,
because of their inherent greed and combativeness, would gather power
over capital into fewer and fewer hands,[466] until at last they would
concentrate all the means of production, transit, and the like into a
form seizable by the workers, whose class consciousness and solidarity
would be developed _pari passu_ by the process of organizing and
concentrating industry. They would seize this capital and work it for
themselves. This would be the social revolution. Then individual
property and freedom would be restored, based upon the common ownership
of the earth and the management by the community as a whole of the great
productive services which the private capitalist had organized and
concentrated. This would be the end of the “capitalist” system, but not
the end of the system of capitalism. State capitalism would replace
private owner capitalism.
This marks a great stride away from the socialism of Owen. Owen (like
Plato) looked to the common sense of men of any or every class to
reorganize the casual and faulty political, economic, and social
structure. Marx found something more in the nature of a driving force in
his class hostility based on expropriation and injustice. And he was not
simply a prophetic theorist; he was also a propagandist of the revolt of
labour, the revolt of the so-called “proletariat.” Labour, he perceived,
had a common interest against the capitalist everywhere, though under
the test of the Great Power wars of the time, and particularly of the
liberation of Italy, he showed that he failed to grasp the fact that
labour everywhere has a common interest in the peace of the world. But
with the social revolution in view he did succeed in inspiring the
formation of an international league of workers, the First
International.
The subsequent history of socialism is chequered between the British
tradition of Owen and the German class feeling of Marx. What is called
Fabian Socialism, the exposition of socialism by the London Fabian
Society, makes its appeal to reasonable men of all classes. What are
called “Revisionists” in German Socialism incline in the same direction.
But on the whole, it is Marx who has carried the day against Owen, and
the general disposition of socialists throughout the world is to look to
the organization of labour and labour only to supply the fighting forces
that will disentangle the political and economic organization of human
affairs from the hands of the more or less irresponsible private owners
and adventurers who now control it.
These are the broad features of the project which is called Socialism.
We will discuss its incompletenesses and inadequacies in our next
section. It was perhaps inevitable that socialism should be greatly
distraught and subdivided by doubts and disputes and sects and schools;
they are growth symptoms like the spots on a youth’s face. Here we can
but glance at the difference between state socialism, which would run
the economic business of the country through its political government,
and the newer schools of syndicalism and guild socialism which would
entrust a large measure in the government of each industry to the
workers of every grade--including the directors and managers--engaged in
that industry. This “guild socialism” is really a new sort of capitalism
with a committee of workers and officials in each industry taking the
place of the free private capitalists of that industry. The _personnel_
becomes the collective capitalist. Nor can we discuss the undemocratic
idea of the Russian leader Lenin, that a population cannot judge of
socialism before it has experienced it, and that a group of socialists
are therefore justified in seizing and socializing, if they can, the
life of a country without at first setting up any democratic form of
general government at all, for which sort of seizure he uses the Marxian
phrase, a very incompetent phrase, the “dictatorship of the
proletariat.” All Russia now is a huge experiment in that dictatorship
(August, 1920).[467] The “proletariat” is supposed to be dictating
through committees of workmen and soldiers, the Soviets, but at present
we have no means of ascertaining how far Russian affairs are under the
direction of a genuine mass intelligence and will, and how far the
activities of the Soviets are restrained and directed by the group of
vigorous personalities which leads the revolution. Nor do we know if the
methods of election used for the Soviets are any improvement upon the
unsatisfactory methods in use in the Atlantic democracies. Non-workers
have no representation in this new Russian state.
§ 5
We are all socialists nowadays, said Sir William Harcourt years ago, and
that is loosely true to-day. There can be few people who fail to realize
the provisional nature and the dangerous instability of our present
political and economic system, and still fewer who believe with the
doctrinaire individualists that profit-hunting “go as you please” will
guide mankind to any haven of prosperity and happiness. Great
rearrangements are necessary, and a systematic legal subordination of
personal self-seeking to the public good. So far most reasonable men are
socialists. But these are only preliminary propositions. How far has
socialism and modern thought generally gone towards working out the
conception of this new political and social order, of which our world
admittedly stands in need? We are obliged to answer that there is no
clear conception of the new state towards which we vaguely struggle,
that our science of human relationships is still so crude and
speculative as to leave us without definite guidance upon a score of
primarily important issues. In 1920 we are no more in a position to set
up a scientifically conceived political system in the world than were
men to set up an electric power station in 1820. They could not have
done that then to save their lives.
The Marxist system points us to an accumulation of revolutionary forces
in the modern world. These forces will continually tend towards
revolution. But Marx assumed too hastily that a revolutionary impulse
would necessarily produce an ordered state of a new and better kind. A
revolution may stop half way in mere destruction. No socialist sect has
yet defined its projected government clearly; the Bolsheviks in their
Russian experiment seem to have been guided by a phrase, the
dictatorship of the proletariat, and in practice, we are told, Trotsky
and Lenin have proved as autocratic as the less intelligent but equally
well-meaning Tsar, Alexander I. We have been at some pains to show from
our brief study of the French revolution that a revolution can establish
nothing permanent that has not already been thought out beforehand and
apprehended by the general mind. The French republic, confronted with
unexpected difficulties in economics, currency, and international
relationships, collapsed to the egotisms of the newly rich people of the
Directory, and finally to the egotism of Napoleon. Law and a plan,
steadily upheld, are more necessary in revolutionary times than in
ordinary hum-drum times, because in revolutionary times society
degenerates much more readily into a mere scramble under the ascendancy
of the forcible and cunning.
If in general terms we take stock of the political and social science of
our age, we shall measure something of the preliminary intellectual task
still to be done by mankind before we can hope to see any permanent
constructive achievements emerging from the mere traditionalism and
adventuring that rule our collective affairs to-day. This Socialism,
which professes to be a complete theory of a new social order, we
discover, when we look into it, to be no more than a partial
theory--very illuminating, so far as it goes--about property. We have
already discussed the relationship of social development to the
restriction of the idea of property (chap. xxxvii, § 13). There are
various schools of thought which would restrict property more or less
completely. Communism is the proposal to abolish property altogether,
or, in other words, to hold all things in common. Modern Socialism, on
the other hand--or, to give it a more precise name, “Collectivism”--does
clearly distinguish between personal property and collective property.
The gist of the socialist proposal is that land and all the natural
means of production, transit, and distribution should be collectively
owned. Within these limits there is to be much free private ownership
and unrestricted personal freedom. Given efficient administration, it
may be doubted whether many people nowadays would dispute that proposal.
But socialism has never gone on to a thorough examination of that
proviso for efficient administration.
Again, what community is it that is to own the collective property; is
it to be the sovereign or the township or the county or the nation or
mankind? Socialism makes no clear answer. Socialists are very free with
the word “nationalize,” but we have been subjecting the ideas of
“nations” and “nationalism” to some destructive criticism in this
_Outline_. If socialists object to a single individual claiming a mine
or a great stretch of agricultural land as his own individual property,
with a right to refuse or barter its use and profit to others, why
should they permit a single nation to monopolize the mines or trade
routes or natural wealth of the territories in which it lives, against
the rest of mankind? There seems to be great confusion in socialist
theory in this matter. And unless human life is to become a mass meeting
of the race in permanent session, how is the community to appoint its
officers to carry on its collective concerns? After all, the private
owner of land or of a business or the like is a sort of public official
in so far as his ownership is sanctioned and protected by the community.
Instead of being paid a salary or fees, he is allowed to make a profit.
The only valid reason for dismissing him from his ownership is that the
new control to be substituted will be more efficient and profitable and
satisfactory to the community. And, being dismissed, he has at least the
same claim to consideration from the community that he himself has shown
in the past to the worker thrown out of employment by a mechanical
invention.
This question of administration, the sound and adequate bar to much
immediate socialization, brings us to the still largely unsolved problem
of human association; how are we to secure the best direction of human
affairs and the maximum of willing co-operation with that direction?
This is ultimately a complex problem in psychology, but it is absurd to
pretend that it is an insoluble one. There must be a definite best,
which is the right thing, in these matters. But if it is not insoluble,
it is equally unreasonable to pretend that it has been solved. The
problem in its completeness involves the working out of the best methods
in the following departments, and their complete correlation:--
(i) _Education._--The preparation of the individual for an understanding
and willing co-operation in the world’s affairs.
(ii) _Information._--The continual truthful presentation of public
affairs to the individual for his judgment and approval. Closely
connected with this need for current information is the codification of
the law, the problem of keeping the law plain, clear, and accessible to
all.
(iii) _Representation._--The selection of representatives and agents to
act in the collective interest in harmony with the general will based on
this education and plain information.
(iv) _The Executive._--The appointment of executive agents and the
maintenance of means for keeping them responsible to the community,
without at the same time hampering intelligent initiatives.
(v) _Thought and Research._--The systematic criticism of affairs and
laws to provide data for popular judgments, and through those judgments
to ensure the secular improvement of the human organization.
These are the five heads under which the broad problem of human society
presents itself to us. In the world around us we see makeshift devices
at work in all those branches, ill co-ordinated one with another and
unsatisfactory in themselves. We see an educational system meanly
financed and equipped, badly organized and crippled by the interventions
and hostilities of religious bodies; we see popular information supplied
chiefly by a venal press dependent upon advertisements and subsidies; we
see farcical methods of election returning politicians to power as
unrepresentative as any hereditary ruler or casual conqueror; everywhere
the executive is more or less influenced or controlled by groups of rich
adventurers, and the pursuit of political and social science and of
public criticism is still the work of devoted and eccentric individuals
rather than a recognized and honoured function in the state. There is a
gigantic task before right-thinking men in the cleansing and sweetening
of the politician’s stable; and until it is done, any complete
realization of socialism is impossible. While private adventurers
control the political life of the State it is ridiculous to think of the
state taking over collective economic interests from private
adventurers.
Not only has the socialist movement failed thus far to produce a
scientifically reasoned scheme for the correlation of education, law,
and the exercise of public power, but even in the economic field, as we
have already pointed out, creative forces wait for the conception of a
right organization of credit and a right method of payment and
interchange. It is a truism that the willingness of the worker depends,
among other things, upon his complete confidence in the purchasing
power of the currency in which he is paid. As this confidence goes, work
ceases, except in so far as it can be rewarded by payment in goods. But
there is no sufficient science of currency and business psychology to
restrain governments from the most disturbing interferences with the
public credit and with the circulation. And such interferences lead
straight to the cessation of work, that is, of the production of
necessary things. Upon such vital practical questions it is scarcely too
much to say that the mass of those socialists who would recast the world
have no definite ideas at all. Yet in a socialist world quite as much as
in any other sort of world, people must be paid money for their work
rather than be paid in kind if any such thing as personal freedom is to
continue. Here too there must be an ascertainable right thing to do.
Until that is determined, history in these matters will continue to be
not so much a record of experiments as of flounderings.[468]
And in another direction the social and political thinking of the
nineteenth century was, in the face of the vastness of the mechanical
revolution, timid, limited, and insufficient, and that was in regard to
international relations. The reader of socialistic literature will find
the socialists constantly writing and talking of the “State,” and never
betraying any realization that the “State” might be all sorts of
organizations in all sorts of areas, from the republic of San Marino to
the British Empire. It is true that Karl Marx had a conception of a
solidarity of interests between the workers in all the industrialized
countries, but there is little or no suggestion in Marxist socialism of
the logical corollary of this, the establishment of a democratic world
federal government (with national or provincial “state” governments) as
a natural consequence of his projected social revolution. At most there
is a vague aspiration. But if there is any logic about the Marxist, it
should be his declared political end for which he should work without
ceasing. Put to the test of the war of 1914, the socialists of almost
all the European countries showed that their class-conscious
internationalism was veneered very thinly indeed over their patriotic
feelings, and had to no degree replaced them. Everywhere during the
German war socialists denounced that war as made by capitalist
governments, but it produces little or no permanent effect to denounce a
government or a world system unless you have a working idea of a better
government and a better system to replace it.
We state these things here because they are facts, and a living and
necessary part of a contemporary survey of human history. It is not our
task either to advocate or controvert socialism. But it is in our
picture to note that political and social life are, and must remain,
chaotic and disastrous without the development of some such constructive
scheme as socialism _sketches_, and to point out clearly how far away
the world is at present from any such scheme. An enormous amount of
intellectual toil and discussion and education and many years--whether
decades or centuries, no man can tell--must intervene before a new
order, planned as ships and railways are planned, runs, as the cables
and the postal deliveries run, over the whole surface of our earth. And
until such a new order draws mankind together with its net, human life,
as we shall presently show by the story of the European wars since 1854,
must become more and more casual, dangerous, miserable, anxious, and
disastrous because of the continually more powerful and destructive war
methods the continuing mechanical revolution produces.
§ 6[469]
While the mechanical revolution which the growth of physical science had
brought about was destroying the ancient social classification of the
civilized state which had been evolved through thousands of years, and
producing new possibilities and new ideals of a righteous human
community and a righteous world order, a change at least as great and
novel was going on in the field of religious thought. That same growth
of scientific knowledge from which sprang the mechanical revolution was
the moving cause of these religious disturbances.
In the opening chapters of this _Outline_ we have given the main story
of the Record of the Rocks; we have shown life for the little beginning
of consciousness that it is in the still waiting vastness of the void of
space and time. But before the end of the eighteenth century, this
enormous prospect of the past which fills a modern mind with humility
and illimitable hope, was hidden from the general consciousness of our
race. It was veiled by the curtain of a Sumerian legend. The heavens
were no more than a stage background to a little drama of kings. Men had
been too occupied with their own private passions and personal affairs
to heed the intimations of their own great destiny that lay about them
everywhere.
They learnt their true position in space long before they placed
themselves in time. We have already named the earlier astronomers, and
told how Galileo was made to recant his assertion that the earth moved
round the sun. He was made to do so by the church, and the church was
stirred to make him do so because any doubt that the world was the
centre of the universe seemed to strike fatally at the authority of
Christianity.
Now, upon that matter the teller of modern history is obliged to be at
once cautious and bold. He has to pick his way between cowardly evasion
on the one hand, and partisanship on the other. As far as possible he
must confine himself to facts and restrain his opinions. Yet it is well
to remember that no opinions can be altogether restrained. The writer
has his own very strong and definite persuasions, and the reader must
bear that in mind. It is a fact in history that the teaching of Jesus of
Nazareth had in it something profoundly new and creative; he preached a
new Kingdom of Heaven in the hearts and in the world of men. There was
nothing in his teaching, so far as we can judge it at this distance of
time, to clash or interfere with any discovery or expansion of the
history of the world and mankind. But it is equally a fact in history
that St. Paul and his successors added to or completed or imposed upon
or substituted another doctrine for--as you may prefer to think--the
plain and profoundly revolutionary teachings of Jesus by expounding a
subtle and complex theory of salvation, a salvation which could be
attained very largely by belief and formalities, without any serious
disturbance of the believer’s ordinary habits and occupations, and that
this Pauline teaching did involve very definite beliefs about the
history of the world and man. It is not the business of the historian to
controvert or explain these matters; the question of their ultimate
significance depends upon the theologian; the historian’s concern is
merely with the fact that official Christianity throughout the world
adopted St. Paul’s view so plainly expressed in his epistles and so
untraceable in the gospels, that the meaning of religion lay not in the
future, but in the past, and that Jesus was not so much a teacher of
wonderful new things, as a predestinate divine blood sacrifice of deep
mystery and sacredness made in atonement of a particular historical act
of disobedience to the Creator committed by our first parents, Adam and
Eve, in response to the temptation of a serpent in the Garden of Eden.
Upon the belief in that Fall as a fact, and not upon the personality of
Jesus of Nazareth, upon the theories of Paul, and not upon the
injunctions of Jesus, doctrinal Christianity built itself.
We have already noted that this story of the special creation of the
world and of Adam and Eve and the serpent was also an ancient Babylonian
story, and probably a still more ancient Sumerian story, and that the
Jewish sacred books were the medium by which this very ancient and
primitive “heliolithic” serpent legend entered Christianity. Wherever
official Christianity has gone, it has taken this story with it. It has
tied itself up to that story. Until a century and less ago the whole
Christianized world felt bound to believe and did believe, that the
universe had been specially created in the course of six days by the
word of God a few thousand years before--according to Bishop Ussher,
4004 B.C. (The _Universal History_, in forty-two volumes, published in
1779 by a group of London booksellers, discusses whether the precise
date of the first day of Creation was March 21st or September 21st, 4004
B.C., and inclines to the view that the latter was the more probable
season.)
Upon this historical assumption rested the religious fabric of the
Western and Westernized civilization, and yet the whole world was
littered, the hills, mountains, deltas, and seas were bursting with
evidence of its utter absurdity. The religious life of the leading
nations, still a very intense and sincere religious life, was going on
in a house of history built upon sand.
There is frequent recognition in classical literature of a sounder
cosmogony. Aristotle was aware of the broad principles of modern
geology, they shine through the speculations of Lucretius, and we have
noted also Leonardo da Vinci’s (1452-1519) lucid interpretation of
fossils. A Frenchman, Descartes (1596-1650), speculated boldly upon the
incandescent beginnings of our globe, and an Italian, Steno (1631-87),
began the collection of fossils and the description of strata. But it
was only as the eighteenth century drew to its close that the systematic
study of geology assumed such proportions as to affect the general
authority of the Bible version of that ancient Sumerian narrative.
Contemporaneously with the _Universal History_ quoted above, a great
French naturalist, Buffon, was writing upon the Epochs of Nature (1778),
and boldly extending the age of the world to 70,000 or 75,000 years. He
divided his story into six epochs to square with the six days of the
Creation story. These days, it was argued, were figurative days; they
were really ages. There was a general disposition to do this on the part
of the new science of geology. By that accommodating device, geology
contrived to make a peace with orthodox religious teaching that lasted
until the middle of the nineteenth century.
We cannot trace here the contributions of such men as Hutton and
Playfair and Sir Charles Lyell, and the Frenchmen Lamarck and Cuvier, in
unfolding and developing the record of the rocks. It was only slowly
that the general intelligence of the Western world was awakened to two
disconcerting facts: firstly, that the succession of life in the
geological record did not correspond to the acts of the six days of
creation; and, secondly, that the record, in harmony with a mass of
biological facts, pointed away from the Bible assertion of a separate
creation of each species straight towards a genetic relation between
all forms of life, _in which even man was included_! The importance of
this last issue to the existing doctrinal system was manifest. If all
the animals and man had been evolved in this ascendant manner, then
there had been no first parents, no Eden, and no Fall. And if there had
been no fall, then the entire historical fabric of Christianity, the
story of the first sin and the reason for an atonement, upon which the
current teaching based Christian emotion and morality, collapsed like a
house of cards.
It was with something like horror, therefore, that great numbers of
honest and religious-spirited men followed the work of the great English
naturalist, Charles Darwin (1809-82); in 1859 he published his _Origin
of Species by Means of Natural Selection_, a powerful and permanently
valuable exposition of that conception of the change and development of
species which we have sketched briefly in Chapter III; and in 1871 he
completed the outline of his work with the _Descent of Man_, which
brought man definitely into the same scheme of development with the rest
of life.
Many men and women are still living who can remember the dismay and
distress among ordinary intelligent people in the Western communities as
the invincible case of the biologists and geologists against the
orthodox Christian cosmogony unfolded itself. The minds of many quite
honest men resisted the new knowledge instinctively and irrationally.
Their whole moral edifice was built upon false history; they were too
old and set to rebuild it; they felt the practical truth of their moral
convictions, and this new truth seemed to them to be incompatible with
that. They believed that to assent to it would be to prepare a moral
collapse for the world. And so they produced a moral collapse by not
assenting to it. The universities in England particularly, being
primarily clerical in their constitution, resisted the new learning very
bitterly. During the seventies and eighties a stormy controversy raged
throughout the civilized world. The quality of the discussions and the
fatal ignorance of the church may be gauged by a description in
Hackett’s _Commonplace Book_ of a meeting of the British Association in
1860, at which Bishop Wilberforce assailed Huxley, the great champion of
the Darwinian views, in this fashion.
Facing “Huxley with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, _was it
through his grandfather or grandmother that he claimed his descent from
a monkey_? Huxley turned to his neighbour, and said, ‘The Lord hath
delivered him into my hands.’ Then he stood before us and spoke these
tremendous words, ‘He was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor;
but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts
to obscure the truth.’” (Another version has it: “I have certainly said
that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his
grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel ashamed in
recalling, it would rather be a man of restless and versatile intellect
who plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real
acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric and distract
the attention of his audience from the real point at issue by eloquent
digressions and skilled appeals to prejudice.”) These words were
certainly spoken with passion. The scene was one of great excitement. A
lady fainted, says Hackett.... Such was the temper of this controversy.
The Darwinian movement took formal Christianity unawares, suddenly.
Formal Christianity was confronted with a clearly demonstrable error in
her theological statements. The Christian theologians were neither wise
enough nor mentally nimble enough to accept the new truth, modify their
formulæ, and insist upon the living and undiminished vitality of the
religious reality those formulæ had hitherto sufficed to express. For
the discovery of man’s descent from sub-human forms does not even
remotely touch the teaching of the Kingdom of Heaven. Yet priests and
bishops raged at Darwin; foolish attempts were made to suppress
Darwinian literature and to insult and discredit the exponents of the
new views. There was much wild talk of the “antagonism” of religion and
science. Now in all ages there have been sceptics in Christendom. The
Emperor Frederick II was certainly a sceptic; in the eighteenth century
Gibbon and Voltaire were openly anti-Christian, and their writings
influenced a number of scattered readers. But these were exceptional
people.... Now the whole of Christendom became as a whole sceptical.
This new controversy touched everybody who read a book or heard
intelligent conversation. A new generation of young people grew up, and
they found the defenders of Christianity in an evil temper, fighting
their cause without dignity or fairness. It was the orthodox theology
that the new scientific advances had compromised, but the angry
theologians declared that it was religion.
In the end men may discover that religion shines all the brighter for
the loss of its doctrinal wrappings, but to the young it seemed as if
indeed there had been a conflict of science and religion, and that in
that conflict science had won.
The immediate effect of this great dispute upon the ideas and methods of
people in the prosperous and influential classes throughout the
westernized world was very detrimental indeed. The new biological
science was bringing nothing constructive as yet to replace the old
moral stand-bys. A real de-moralization ensued. The general level of
social life in those classes was far higher in the early twentieth than
in the early seventeenth century, but in one respect, in respect to
disinterestedness and conscientiousness in these classes, it is probable
that the tone of the earlier age was better than the latter. In the
owning and active classes of the seventeenth century, in spite of a few
definite “infidels,” there was probably a much higher percentage of men
and women who prayed sincerely, who searched their souls to find if they
had done evil, and who were prepared to suffer and make great sacrifices
for what they conceived to be right, than in the opening years of the
twentieth century. There was a real loss of faith after 1859. The true
gold of religion was in many cases thrown away with the worn-out purse
that had contained it for so long, and it was not recovered. Towards the
close of the nineteenth century a crude misunderstanding of Darwinism
had become the fundamental mindstuff of great masses of the “educated”
everywhere. The seventeenth-century kings and owners and rulers and
leaders had had the idea at the back of their minds that they prevailed
by the will of God; they really feared Him, they got priests to put
things right for them with Him; when they were wicked, they tried not to
think of Him. But the old faith of the kings, owners, and rulers of the
opening twentieth century had faded under the actinic light of
scientific criticism. Prevalent peoples at the close of the nineteenth
century believed that they prevailed by virtue of the Struggle for
Existence, in which the strong and cunning get the better of the weak
and confiding. And they believed further that they had to be strong,
energetic, ruthless, “practical,” egotistical, because God was dead, and
had always, it seemed, been dead--which was going altogether further
than the new knowledge justified.
They soon got beyond the first crude popular misconception of Darwinism,
the idea that every man is for himself alone. But they stuck at the next
level. Man, they decided, is a social animal like the Indian hunting
dog. He is much more than a dog--but this they did not see. And just as
in a pack it is necessary to bully and subdue the younger and weaker for
the general good, so it seemed right to them that the big dogs of the
human pack should bully and subdue. Hence a new scorn for the ideas of
democracy that had ruled the earlier nineteenth century, and a revived
admiration for the overbearing and the cruel. It was quite
characteristic of the times that Mr. Kipling should lead the children of
the middle and upper-class British public back to the Jungle, to learn
“the law,” and that in his book _Stalky and Co._ he should give an
appreciative description of the torture of two boys by three others, who
have by a subterfuge tied up their victims helplessly before revealing
their hostile intentions.
It is worth while to give a little attention to this incident in _Stalky
and Co._, because it lights up the political psychology of the British
Empire at the close of the nineteenth century very vividly. The history
of the last half century is not to be understood without an
understanding of the mental twist which this story exemplifies. The two
boys who are tortured are “bullies,” that is the excuse of their
tormentors, and these latter have further been incited to the orgy by a
clergyman. Nothing can restrain the gusto with which they (and Mr.
Kipling) set about the job. Before resorting to torture, the teaching
seems to be, see that you pump up a little justifiable moral
indignation, and all will be well. If you have the authorities on your
side, then you cannot be to blame. Such, apparently, is the simple
doctrine of this typical imperialist. But every bully has to the best of
his ability followed that doctrine since the human animal developed
sufficient intelligence to be consciously cruel.
Another point in the story is very significant indeed. The head master
and his clerical assistant are both represented as being privy to the
affair. They want this bullying to occur. Instead of exercising their
own authority, they use these boys, who are Mr. Kipling’s heroes, to
punish the two victims. Head master and clergyman turn a deaf ear to the
complaints of an indignant mother. All this Mr. Kipling represents as a
most desirable state of affairs. In this we have the key to the ugliest,
most retrogressive, and finally fatal idea of modern imperialism; the
idea of a _tacit conspiracy between the law and illegal violence_. Just
as the Tsardom wrecked itself at last by a furtive encouragement of the
ruffians of the Black Hundreds, who massacred Jews and other people
supposed to be inimical to the Tsar, so the good name of the British
Imperial Government has been tainted--and is still tainted--by an
illegal raid made by Doctor Jameson into the Transvaal before the Boer
War, and by the adventures, which we shall presently describe, of Sir
Edward Carson and Mr. F. E. Smith (now Lord Birkenhead) in Ireland. By
such treasons against their subjects, empires destroy themselves. The
true strength of rulers and empires lies not in armies and emotions, but
in the belief of men that they are inflexibly open and truthful and
legal. So soon as a government departs from that standard, it ceases to
be anything more than “the gang in possession,” and its days are
numbered.
It was just this dignity of government which the crude Darwinism and the
Kiplingism of the later Victorian years were destroying. Competition and
survival were accepted as the basal facts of life. “War is the natural
state of nations,” said a popular London men’s weekly[470] the other
day, with an air of repeating something universally known. “Peace is
only the interval of rest and preparation between wars.” In accordance
with such ideas the growing boy was exhorted to be “loyal” to his school
and contemptuous of other schools, “loyal” to his class against other
classes, “loyal” to his nation and contemptuous and fierce towards other
nations, “loyal” to the English-speaking peoples and contemptuous and
hostile to the German or French-speaking. His instinct for brotherhood
was narrowed and debased. The universal brotherhood of mankind was
laughed to scorn. All life was bickering, he was taught; and yet the
whole course of history has shown that the bickering nations perish, and
that the alliances and coalescences of peoples and nations ensure the
life they comprehend.
So the Darwinian crisis continued that destruction of Christian prestige
which the narrowness of priestcraft and the consequent division of
Christendom among the monarchist and national Protestant churches of the
Reformation had begun, and at a time when man’s need for pacifying and
unifying ideas was greater than it had ever been. Just when men of
different races and languages and political ideas were being brought by
the mechanical revolution to a closeness of contact and a power of
mutual injury undreamt of before, the authority of the doctrines by
which men had hitherto transcended tribal and local limitations was
undermined. Just when different classes were being aroused to a fierce
realization of mutual economic antagonism, the fundamental teaching of
brotherhood was discredited and a pseudo-scientific sanction given to
self-seeking and oppression.[471] From this stage onward the historian
can tell no longer of ordinary clerical Christianity as a power in men’s
affairs. In politics and social questions the appeal to its standards
ceased. Yet never was there so imperative a demand in the world of men
for a common basis upon which they could work together, a common
conception of aim in which they could lose themselves. We shall find
great masses of people inspired to passionate devotion, by ideas of
nationalism, of imperialism, of class-conscious socialism. But official
and orthodox Christianity no longer inspired. Men would no longer live
by it or die for it.
This paradoxical final decline of a universal faith in the Westernized
world, just when men were being drawn together by the mechanical
revolution into one inseparable political and economic system, may have
been due entirely to the coincidence of that revolution with destructive
scientific discovery, or it may also have been accelerated by the
irritations produced by the sudden close clashing with unfamiliar
peoples and races. It may have been a merely temporary decline due to
the need for a sloughing-off of the out-worn theology and antique
sacerdotalism which confined its appeal to the western world,
preparatory to a reconstruction of religious statement upon simpler
world-wide lines. It may have been merely a cleansing of the teachings
of Jesus of Nazareth from theological and ceremonial accretions. Upon
such “may have beens” we can speculate here, but we cannot decide.
History can deal with the small beginnings in the past of the great
things of the present, but in the present only with what is plain and
obvious. We cannot tell what seeds of the future may not be germinating
already amidst our present confusions.
§ 7
The vast changes we have been recording in the range of human power and
intercourse constitute the fundamental realities of nineteenth-century
history. But the atlas and political history of a time do not show what
is being made, but what has been made, and what is still going on. The
formal history of the latter half of the nineteenth century is not so
much concerned with these permanent changes in human affairs, as with
the schemes of Foreign Offices and the continuing exploits of the Great
Powers. The men who were discovering, inventing, developing inventions
and working out ideas were far too busy and far too few for effective
interference in public affairs. The diplomatists, politicians, and
statesmen, on the other hand, were far too occupied with their
established interplay of nations and parties to heed what the
contemporary mind was doing. The Earl of Beaconsfield (1804-81), a
leading British statesman, remarked (of the Darwinian controversy) that
it seemed to be a dispute whether men were descended from apes or
angels, and that for his part, he was “on the side of the angels”--a
sprightly saying which added greatly to his reputation. His rival,
Gladstone (1809-98), was of a more serious quality, and in the habit of
plunging during his vacations heavily and conspicuously into
intellectual affairs; among other such exploits he joined in public
controversy with Huxley upon Huxley’s own subject. He revealed ideas
derived from Buffon (died 1788) uncontaminated by any later influence.
The whole field of modern discovery, says Lecky in his _Democracy and
Liberty_ was outside his range.
When this Mr. Gladstone was taken by Sir John Lubbock to see Charles
Darwin,[472] he talked all the time of Bulgarian politics, and was
evidently quite unaware of the real importance of the man he was
visiting. Darwin, Lord Morley records, expressed himself as deeply
sensible of the honour done him by the visit of “such a great man,” but
he offered no comments on the Bulgarian discourse. Faraday, the English
electrician, whose work lives wherever a dynamo spins, who is in the
aeroplane, the deep-sea cable, the lights that light the ways of the
world, and wherever electricity serves our kind, was also visited by
Gladstone when the latter was Chancellor of the Exchequer. The man of
science tried in vain to explain some simple piece of apparatus to this
fine flower of the parliamentary world. “But,” said Mr. Gladstone,
“after all, what _good_ is it?” “Why, sir,” said Faraday, doing his best
to bring things home to him, “presently you will be able to tax
it.”[473]
[Illustration: Mr. Gladstone]
Mr. Gladstone was one of the most central and representative politician
statesmen of the later nineteenth century, and it will be worth while to
devote a paragraph or so to his ideas and intellectual limitations. They
will help us to understand better the astonishing irrelevance of the
political life of this period to the realities that rose about it. He
was a person of exceptional intellectual vigour; he had flashes of real
insight; but his circumstances and temperament conspired against his
ever attaining any real vision of the world in which he lived.
He was the son of Sir John Gladstone, a West Indian slave-holder, the
mortality among whose slaves was a matter of debate in the House of
Commons; he was educated at Eton College, and at Christ Church, Oxford,
and his mind never recovered from the process. We have already told how
after the Reformation the English universities ceased to be the organs
of the general intellectual life, and shrank to be merely the
educational preserves of the aristocracy and the church. Jews, Roman
Catholics, dissenters, sceptics, and all forms of intellectual activity
were carefully barred out from those almost extinguished lamps of
learning. Their mathematical work was poor, a series of exercises in the
mere patience-games and formulæ-writing of lower mathematics; science
they despised and excluded, and their staple training was the study,
without any archæology or historical perspective, of the more rhetorical
and “poetic” of the Latin and Greek classics.[474] Such a training
prepared men not so much to tackle and solve the problems of life, as to
plaster them over with more or less apt quotations. It turned the mind
away from living contemporary things; it showed the world reflected in a
distorting mirror of bad historical analogies; all the fated
convergences of history were refracted into false parallels. The British
Parliament was thought of as a Senate, statesmen postured as patricians
and equestrians; the new industrial population, now learning to read and
think for itself, was transfigured into the likeness of the illiterate
savage and privileged citizen mob of later republican Rome.[475] It was
natural, therefore, that at the Oxford Union Society young Gladstone
should distinguish himself by an eloquent speech against the threatened
reform of the worst electoral abuses (see chap. xxxiv, § 2), should
contest the immediate emancipation of the parental slaves--slavery, he
said, was “sanctioned by Holy Scripture”--and should oppose on religious
grounds the removal of the disabilities of the Jews. He was returned to
Parliament as Tory member for Newark in 1832, promising to resist “that
growing desire for change” which threatened to produce, “along with
partial good, a melancholy preponderance of mischief.” In his first
Parliament he distinguished himself by his opposition to the admission
of religious dissenters to the universities.
Here we have a mind manifestly of a tradition and make-up akin to that
of the framers of the Holy Alliance, a mind set steadfastly against all
the vast creative tendencies of the nineteenth-century world, as though
they were no more than a mere mischievous restlessness of slaves and
lower-class persons that would presently be allayed. But because of the
streak of insight in his composition, Gladstone did not remain set in a
course of pure conservatism, he presently began to realize the strength
of the stream upon which things were being carried forward; his
intelligence, in spite of its perversion, set itself to grasp the real
forms of the torrent of change about him. He was a man of great
ambitions and immense energy; his animosity against his brilliant and
flippant Jewish rival Disraeli (afterwards Lord Beaconsfield), who was
becoming a leader amid the shifting of groups and parties, swung this
man who had been the “rising hope of the stern unbending Tories” more
and more into a liberal attitude. He began to express belief in the
people, to support extensions of the franchise, to cultivate the esteem
of the dissenters, and, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, to shift the
burthen of taxation from the food and comforts of the new classes of
needy voters, that the franchise extensions were bringing into the
political world. It is clear that for some years he was profoundly
perplexed by the deep forces that evidently lay beneath the stir and
thrust of international politics; then he became a great exponent of a
half-true theory, the theory of Nationalism, that has played and still
plays an intensely mischievous part in the world.
We have already pointed out that there must be a natural political map
of the world which gives the best possible geographical divisions for
human administrations. Any other political division of the world than
this natural political map will necessarily be a misfit, and must
produce stresses of hostility and insurrection tending to shift
boundaries in the direction indicated by the natural political map.
These would seem to be self-evident propositions were it not that the
diplomatists at Vienna evidently neither believed nor understood
anything of the sort, and thought themselves as free to carve up the
world as one is free to carve up such a boneless structure as a cheese.
Nor were these propositions evident to Mr. Gladstone. Most of the
upheavals and conflicts that began in Europe as the world recovered from
the exhaustion of the Napoleonic wars were quite obviously attempts of
the ordinary common men to get rid of governments that were such misfits
as to be in many cases intolerable. Generally the existing governments
were misfits throughout Europe because they were not socially
representative, and so they were hampering production and wasting human
possibilities; but when there were added to these universal annoyances
differences of religion and racial culture between rulers and ruled (as
in most of Ireland), differences in race and language (as in Austrian
North Italy and throughout most of the Austrian Empire), or differences
in all these respects (as in Poland and the Turkish Empire in Europe),
the exasperation drove towards bloodshed. Europe was a system of
governing machines abominably adjusted. But Mr. Gladstone was no patient
mechanic set upon easing and righting the clumsy injuries of those
stupid adjustments. He was a white-faced, black-haired man of incredible
energy, with eyes like an eagle’s, wrath almost divine, and the “finest
baritone voice in Europe.” He apprehended these things romantically,
therefore, in a manner suitable for passionate treatment in large halls.
He was blind to the pitiful and wonderful reality of mankind, to these
millions and millions of ill-informed, ill-equipped, inexpressive, and
divided human beings, mostly very willing, could they but do it, to live
righteously and well. He fixed his eagle eye on a fantastic vision of
“nations rightly struggling to be free.”[476]
What is a nation? What is nationality? He never paused to ask. No one
under the spell of that fine baritone paused to ask. But historians must
stand to the questions a politician can evade. If our story of the world
has demonstrated anything, it has demonstrated the mingling of races and
peoples, the instability of human divisions, the swirling variety of
human groups and human ideas of association. A nation, it has been said,
is an accumulation of human beings who think they are one people; but we
are told that Ireland is a nation, and Protestant Ulster certainly does
not share that idea; and Italy did not think it was one people until
long after its unity was accomplished. When the writer was in Italy in
1916, people were saying: “This war will make us one nation.” Again, are
the English a nation or have they merged into a “British nationality”?
Scotchmen do not seem to believe very much in this British nationality.
It cannot be a community of race or language that constitutes a nation,
because the Gaels and the Lowlanders make up the Scotch “nation”; it
cannot be a common religion, for England has scores; nor a common
literature, or why is Britain separated from the United States, and the
Argentine Republic from Spain? We may suggest that a nation is in effect
any assembly, mixture, or confusion of people which is either afflicted
by or wishes to be afflicted by a foreign office of its own, in order
that it should behave collectively as if it alone constituted humanity.
We have already in Chapter xxxvi, § 6, traced the development of the
Machiavellian monarchies into the rule of their foreign offices, playing
the part of “Powers.” The “nationality” which Mr. Gladstone made his
guiding political principle, is really no more than the romantic and
emotional exaggeration of the stresses produced by the discord of the
natural political map with unsuitable political arrangements. These
stresses could be used for the benefit of this power or the detriment of
that.
[Illustration: Tribal Gods--national symbols for which men would die--of
the 19th Century
John Bull Britannia Germania France Cathleen ni Houlihan]
Throughout the nineteenth century, and particularly throughout its
latter half, there has been a great working up of this nationalism in
the world. All men are by nature partisans and patriots, but the natural
tribalism of men in the nineteenth century was unnaturally exaggerated,
it was fretted and over-stimulated and inflamed and forced into the
nationalist mould. Nationalism was taught in schools, emphasized by
newspapers, preached and mocked and sung into men. Men were brought to
feel that they were as improper without a nationality as without their
clothes in a crowded assembly. Oriental peoples who had never heard of
nationality before, took to it as they took to the cigarettes and bowler
hats of the west. India, a galaxy of contrasted races, religions, and
cultures, Dravidian, Mongolian, and Aryan, became a “nation.” There were
perplexing cases, of course, as when a young Whitechapel Jew had to
decide whether he belonged to the British or the Jewish nation.[477]
Caricature and political cartoons played a large part in this elevation
of the cult of these newer and bigger tribal gods--for such indeed the
modern “nations” are--to their ascendancy over the imagination of the
nineteenth century. If one turns over the pages of _Punch_, that queer
contemporary record of the British soul, which has lasted now since
1841, one finds the figures of Britannia, Hibernia, France, and Germania
embracing, disputing, reproving, rejoicing, grieving. It greatly helped
the diplomatists to carry on their game of Great Powers to convey
politics in this form to the doubting general intelligence. To the
common man, resentful that his son should be sent abroad to be shot, it
was made clear that instead of this being merely the result of the
obstinacy and greed of two foreign offices, it was really a necessary
part of a righteous inevitable gigantic struggle between two of these
dim vast divinities. France had been wronged by Germania, or Italia was
showing a proper spirit to Austria. The boy’s death ceased to appear an
outrage on common sense; it assumed a sort of mythological dignity. And
insurrection could clothe itself in the same romantic habiliments as
diplomacy. Ireland became a Cinderella goddess, Cathleen ni Houlihan,
full of heart-rending and unforgivable wrongs, and young India
transcended its realities in the worship of Bande Mataram.
The essential idea of nineteenth-century nationalism was the “legitimate
claim” of every nation to complete sovereignty, the claim of every
nation to manage all its affairs within its own territory, regardless of
any other nation. The flaw in this idea is that the affairs and
interests of every modern community extend to the uttermost parts of the
earth. The assassination of Sarajevo in 1914, for example, which caused
the great war, produced the utmost distress among the Indian tribes of
Labrador because that war interrupted the marketing of the furs upon
which they relied for such necessities as ammunition, without which they
could not get sufficient food. A world of independent sovereign nations
means, therefore, a world of perpetual injuries, a world of states
constantly preparing for or waging war. But concurrently and
discordantly with the preaching of this nationalism of which Gladstone
was the outstanding exponent,[478] there was, among the stronger
nationalities, a vigorous propagation of another set of ideas, the
ideas of imperialism, in which a powerful and advanced nation was
conceded the right to dominate a group of other less advanced nations or
less politically developed nations or peoples whose nationality was
still undeveloped, who were expected by the dominating nation to be
grateful for its protection and dominance. This use of the word empire
was evidently a different one from its former universal significance.
The new empires did not even pretend to be a continuation of the world
empire of Rome. The leading spirit in British imperialism was Lord
Beaconsfield, Gladstone’s antagonist. These two ideas of nationality
and, as the crown of national success, “empire,” ruled European
political thought, ruled indeed the political thought of the world,
throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, and ruled it to
the practical exclusion of any wider conception of a common human
welfare. They were plausible and dangerously unsound working ideas. They
represented nothing fundamental and inalterable in human nature, and
they failed to meet the new needs of world controls and world security
that the mechanical revolution was every day making more imperative.
They were accepted because people in general had neither the sweeping
views that a scientific study of history can give, nor had they any
longer the comprehensive charity of a world religion. Their danger to
all the routines of ordinary life was not realized until it was too
late.
§ 8
After the middle of the nineteenth century, this world of new powers and
old ideas, this fermenting new wine in the old bottles of diplomacy,
broke out through the flimsy restraints of the Treaty of Vienna into a
series of wars. By an ironical accident the new system of disturbances
was preceded by a peace festival in London, the Great Exhibition of
1851.
The moving spirit in this exhibition was Prince Albert of
Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the nephew of Leopold I, the German king who had
been placed upon the Belgian throne in 1831, and who was also the
maternal uncle of the young Queen Victoria of England. She had become
queen in 1837 at the age of eighteen. The two young cousins--they were
of the same age--had married in 1840 under their uncle’s auspices, and
Prince Albert was known to the British as the “Prince Consort.” He was a
young man of sound intelligence and exceptional education, and he seems
to have been greatly shocked by the mental stagnation into which England
had sunken. Oxford and Cambridge, those once starry centres, were still
recovering but slowly from the intellectual ebb of the later eighteenth
century. At neither university did the annual matriculations number more
than four hundred. The examinations were for the most part mere _viva
voce_ ceremonies. Except for two colleges in London (the University of
London) and one in Durham, this was all the education on a university
footing that England had to offer. It was very largely the initiative of
this scandalized young German who had married the British queen which
produced the university commission of 1850, and it was with a view to
waking up England further that he promoted the first International
Exhibition which was to afford some opportunity for a comparison of the
artistic and industrial products of the various European nations.