He is a nationalist and therefore opposed to imperialism. His belief in
peasant proprietorship flows naturally from his belief in nationalism.
He defends peasant proprietorship in "Irish Impressions" because he
believes that a country controlled by peasants will survive long after
more majestically-governed nations have declined and fallen:--
I do not know how far modern Europe really shows a menace of
Bolshevism, or how far merely a panic of Capitalism. But I know
that if any honest resistance has to be offered to mere robbery,
the resistance of Ireland will be the most honest and probably the
most important.... It is where property is well distributed that
it will be well defended. The post of honour will be with those
who fight in very truth for their own land.
Now, here we are on very debateable ground, as debateable as his
statement that "honour is a luxury for aristocrats, but it is a
necessity for hall-porters," which is surely an obscure rendering
of the entirely commercial statement that "honesty is the best
policy." Honour is not honour when a man uses it merely because it
is profitable to him, and I cannot see much virtue in him who fights
for his land simply because he owns it. Honour is admirable when it
brings not profit but loss to the man who wears it. Virtue is in the
man who fights for his country though he does not own an inch of it.
And here I come to my objection to Mr. Chesterton's beloved peasant
proprietorship, the cause of my dismay at the thought that my own
country of Ireland may soon be controlled by small farmers.
It is true that a peasant will fight desperately for his own piece
of land, but he manifests a sturdy reluctance to fight for another
man's land; and I cannot understand why Mr. Chesterton regards his
determination to hold on to his property as more "honest," or more
"honourable" than the determination of a Victory bondholder to get
the last cent of interest out of the taxpayers. Peasants, no less
than other men, in fact more than other men, have itching palms, and
it is sheer sentimentalism to describe as "honest" or "honourable"
behaviour in them which is denounced as dishonest and dishonourable in
a stockbroker. It is true that Lenin's schemes collapsed completely
before the resistance of the Russian peasants, and that his plans for
the nationization of everything failed to include the principal thing
of all, namely, the land; but Mr. Chesterton will hardly maintain
that the Russian peasants had disinterested motives in offering this
resistance to Lenin. He may, indeed, insist that their motives were
entirely interested and base his case for the Distributive State,
as Mr. Belloc named it, on that very interest. But a nation should
be something more than a crowd of peasants digging in the earth for
their personal profit, and when Mr. Chesterton commends his peasant
proprietors to me, I ask not for the signs of their interested
behaviour, but for the signs of their disinterested behaviour. When
he tells me that the peasant will fight for his own land, I ask him
whether the peasant will fight for his neighbour's land? When he tells
me that the Irish peasant will resist the attempts of the Bolshevist to
communalize his land, I ask him whether the Irish peasant is equally
ready to defend the French peasant from Russian aggression? Mr.
Chesterton declares that France had claims on the gratitude of Ireland.
Did the Irish peasant farmer remember those claims on his gratitude?
Or did he find it more convenient and profitable to ejaculate, "Yah,
dirty atheist, go and fight your own battles!" In deriding the idea of
empire, Mr. Chesterton says in this book of "Irish Impressions" that
"the British combination" is "more lax and liable to schism" than a
combination of peasants. I do not believe there is any truth in this
statement, particularly when I remember that "the British combination"
held together for five years in circumstances that might have been
expected to shake it to pieces. Let me give you an example, out of
my experience during the War, of the way in which the Imperial idea
rallies men to its support to their own loss. While I was being trained
to be an officer, I shared a hut with twenty-five other men. Between
us, we represented every part of the British Empire. The twenty-six men
in that hut included Englishmen, Scotsmen, Welshmen and two Irishmen
(one of whom was an Orangeman, and the other, myself, a Home Ruler). In
addition to these, there were two Australians, a man from New Zealand,
two men from Canada, two from South Africa and a couple of men from
South America, one a Spaniard and the other the son of English parents.
Many of these men had travelled for thousands of miles at their own
expense in order to join the British Army. They were volunteers. I
would like to see the community of peasants that would travel ten
yards to defend anything but their own personal property, except under
compulsion.
When I cited this case to Mr. Chesterton some time ago, in controversy
with him, he replied with characteristic amiability, that Serbia was a
community of peasants, and that Serbia had fought in the War. When I
asked whether Serbia would have fought for Montenegro, he replied that
she had done more than that, she had fought for "the wholly invisible
bond of all Christendom." But Serbia did nothing of the sort. She
fought for herself because she was invaded. That was a perfectly proper
thing to do, but there is no comparison between it and the behaviour
of men responding at their own cost to the Imperial idea, although
many hundreds of miles away from the place of argument and under no
compulsion to go to it.
The truth about a peasant civilization is that it is a mean
civilization, in which mean virtues compete with mean vices, and the
small and local thing is esteemed above the big and worldwide thing.
There are many defects in empires, even in one so loosely-bound as the
British Empire, but although those who control an empire are often
guilty of cruel deeds, there is at least this to be said in their
defense, that they honestly believe themselves to be possessed of
greater wisdom than those whom they oppress, and do desire in their
stupid fashion to govern them for their good.
On the whole, freedom may be defined as the right to choose; but that
definition must obviously be subject to limitations. There is a sort
of wild and woolly democrat who believes in the right of uninstructed
persons to choose wrong. It is not a right in which I believe. Mr.
Chesterton thinks, not without justification, that the common man can
choose in a right manner. If his creed were confined to that clause we
could accept it with heartiness, but there are times when he seems to
think that the common man chooses aright because he is a common man,
and he leaves us with the impression that he can never quite forgive
Magna Charta because it was won by peers, and not by peasants. He seems
not to realize that if Magna Charta had depended upon peasants, it
would never have been won.
V
But he helps us to keep a balance. His service to us is that when we
are inclined to run frantically after the superman, he reminds us of
the existence of the common man. If he were not so well-padded with
flesh, I should describe him as the skeleton at a feast of supermen,
reminding them that even a superman can be a fool.
There are times indeed, when his faith in the common man undergoes a
sea-change, and he utters sentiments that might be spoken by Mr. H. L.
Mencken, who cannot abide the common mind. In one of his essays, Mr.
Chesterton says, "I certainly would much rather share my apartments
with a gentleman who thought he was God than with a gentleman who
thought he was a grasshopper." So would Nietzsche. But I doubt whether
the Early Christians would have approved his preference. They, who were
ready to pronounce all flesh to be grass, would not have found anything
incompatible with their faith in a gentleman who regarded himself
as a grasshopper. They would certainly have considered his rival in
misapprehension to be a blasphemer. And if Mr. Chesterton would fail
to find pleasure in the company of a man who believed himself to be
that interesting but monotonous insect, how much less pleasure would he
derive from sharing his apartments with a man who believed not only
himself, but all men, to be worms?
He is personally the most kindly and agreeable of men, in whom the
one virtue commonly ascribed to fat men, that of good nature, is
most highly developed. His anger is almost completely impersonal.
His pardon is on the heels of his condemnation. The sins of jealousy
and hatred are unknown to him, and he seems to be without the power
of resenting spiteful things done to himself. He said to me on one
occasion, "Arnold Bennett says I'm an imbecile!" in the tone of a man
who was not in the least annoyed by the statement, but puzzled by
the fact that any man should call another one an offensive name. We
are all children of the one God, in his belief, even if some of us
are Jews, and in some mystical manner he contrives, in his anger, to
discriminate between the human being and the thing which the human
being does. If ever he is moved to slay a sweater or an international
financier or a Prohibitionist, he will do so entirely without prejudice
to that person's right to be called a child of God. It is a tribute to
the charm of his character and the equability of his temper that his
stoutest admirers are those who most vigorously combat his opinions,
and that most of his friends are men who do not share any of his views,
except perhaps the only view that matters, the view that an ill deed
must be exposed and a wrong put right. He is Don Quixote in the body of
Sancho Panza.