the universe as blind but moral; the pantheist movement of the
anti-clerical factions deified what were taken to be the common moral
emotions of mankind speaking particularly of ‘Truth’ and ‘Justice’ as
though there were real beings in a universe where the personal power
and virtues of a Creator were denied. Throughout the more cultivated
Europe a certain number of special marks of the thing increased,
notably the insistence upon landscape, upon our fellowship with the
rest of animated creation, and side by side with these a disdain
or negligence or despair upon the sharp points of Divine Will, of
personal immortality, of possible doom.
There was formed at last in our own time, as the crystallisation of all
this boiling, a philosophy, a set of judgments accepted vaguely, but
finally, by all that is not Catholic in the Occident, and this I will
call ‘sceptical pantheism.’ Over against it stands the defined, exact,
and traditional revelation maintained by the Catholics intact. This
revelation is as separate from that other mood as is the firm strand
from sea water, or waking from dreams.
Here many men reading me (if indeed many men shall read me, for
whatever number of men may read this hotchpotch of a book, most of
them, I think, will skip these musing passages—seeing that their
subjects are the only ones of real import) will reply:
‘In face of this great, new, general, modern spirit, which you call
sceptical pantheism, and which I admit to be the chief moral phenomenon
of our time, the Catholic Church is negligible. I accept your statement
that there is a great general modern spirit or mood full of this
feeling for nature and of brotherhood with all animated creatures and
a substitution of emotional materialism for dogma. I may or may not
accept your particular title “sceptical pantheism,” but I know what
you mean. We are all agreed that the spirit is there; and in face of
it the Catholic position no longer has weight: it no longer counts. It
is a mere surviving habit with most of its so-called adherents (who at
heart are themselves shaken in their adherence). It is ignorance on the
part of a few sincere ones; a bitter refusal to accept evidence on the
part of a larger number of less sincere ones: a deliberate shutting
of the eyes. Catholicism is in process of dissolution and has become
politically negligible.’
That is the reply which I think most educated men in England would
give to the proposition I have just advanced: the proposition that the
modern world is now divided into two sharply defined camps (of which
Catholicism is one) standing each over against the other.
Now these objectors are provincial, both the better informed and the
less. They should appreciate the modern world more exactly. They
could arrive at such an appreciation by a wise use of travel, and of
even their own contemporary society; by getting to know many kinds of
men intimately in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Belgium, and by
reading the words written upon the Catholic side—a thing which, for
the most part, they wholly neglect to do.
Indeed, I have noticed that the finest and most conclusive pieces of
Catholic apologetics are, in England and America, hidden away in little
publications read by no one but Catholics; and by few, even of these.
If those who make the objection I have just recited would use travel
wisely, or even read contemporary Catholic writing in their own
country, they would appreciate that what I have said is true if one
regards Western Europe as a whole. Outside England every one is aware
of the Catholic Church; two great armies face each other, and the issue
is doubtful. All instructed Europe sees a great duel set between the
Catholic Church and its opponent. All instructed Europe sees that this
duel is taking the form of anti-Catholic laws and of proposals of laws
upon the one side, and upon the other of growing Catholic social power.
Those who, in England, once followed Calvin, who then at second hand
followed Diderot and Voltaire, who then at second or third hand
followed the French romantics, would to-day do well to follow this
great modern quarrel, as it is joined upon the old battleground of
European debate: the arena which lies between the Pyrenees and the
Channel, between the Rhine and the Atlantic: Gaul.
They will find that you can hardly take up a random French newspaper
in a French café without coming upon the great quarrel. They will find
that the statues in the towns express it; the names of the streets; the
titles as well as the tendencies of the novels.
In Italy, though in a different form, it is the same thing. In Spain it
is manifest; in Belgium it is the centre of interest. Throughout the
Occident the struggle is engaged.
The forces on either side use every weapon to hand. Those opposed
to the Catholic Church use, when they are in political power, the
bludgeon of a universal and enforced anti-Catholic popular education,
against which the Catholics use the force of personal intelligence and
individual argument, as also a sort of perpetual wrestling against
their opponents through the claim of freedom. Where it is the other way
about, and the Catholic tradition has at least the sympathy of those
in political power, you have not indeed (as you may have later) strong
insistence on the Catholic side—as defined, as direct, and as violent
as the present anti-Catholic action—you have not, for instance, an
insistence upon the compulsory public teaching of Catholicism in the
popular schools, as you have anti-Catholic public teaching under
the anti-Catholic governments; but you have the continued support
of essentially Catholic things. The new dictatorship in Italy, for
example, when it had cleared out the parliamentary nastiness, took for
one of its first principles the restoration of the crucifix to the
schools, and insisted upon the official world hearing Mass.
Having thus stated the great quarrel, I ought, perhaps, like a good
modern, to begin prophesying, and state what its development will be.
But I deny the capacity of our popular prophets. I do not know the
future. But that these two comparatively simple elements, the Faith and
anti-Faith, stand before us to-day should, I think, be clear to all
sufficiently experienced observers.
There is upon the one side (everywhere except in England) a now large,
a believing, and a coherent Catholic body: there is upon the other
side the mood of which I have spoken—the mood in which it is even
thought worse to be cruel to an animal than to a man; the mood in
which the existence and nature of the human soul are contentedly or
discontentedly left aside as undiscoverable; the mood in which the most
fundamental institutions of society may be questioned or denied; the
mood in which the fixity of marriage is universally abandoned, and in
which property has no longer a reasoned moral right. Indeed, in poor
support of property (outside the Catholic philosophy) to-day only two
rotten struts remain: first, the assertion that possession by a few in
the midst of a free community is natural because it has always existed;
that is mere ignorance of history: secondly, the asinine pretence
that the few who possess have a right to possession through their
greater virtue and intelligence—as for instance a millionaire eating
uneatable things to the noise of an intolerable band in any one of our
cosmopolitan hotels....
I marvel that those who possess on such a tenure should not perceive
the frailty of their tenure. They are, it is true, now fallen into a
permanent state of panic, but they still have a vague conception that
the present arrangement is in some ways secure.
It is not secure. It has no moral basis or custom behind it. The
stability of a society depends upon an acceptation of its laws. If
their enforcement is thought right, and the institutions which they
defend are accepted by the conscience of men, the laws and society
stand; if not, both fall.
But who to-day defends the right of our handful of rich men to govern
as they do, and to control the state? How many even grant them a moral
right to property? They are themselves the negation of property. They
boldly proclaim that the over-reaching of others, the catching-up of
other men’s fortunes into their grasp by tricks, is the only talent
they can exercise, and, indeed, the only one which they revere in
their fellows. They have ruined that middle-class lacking which the
institutions of the State, and particularly ownership, lose their
foundation. Nevertheless, our society, of which these millionaires
are to-day the masters, will not endure; for no one thinks of them
as lords: all despise them, and the greater part of men have ceased
to envy them, and have begun to hate. The rule they exercise through
demagogy, and particularly through their purchase of the press, and
(less important) through their purchase of the politicians, cannot
endure. So much is certain; nor is it prophecy to affirm it any more
than it is prophecy to affirm the consequences of a natural law. Yet
does it not seem probable that when this ephemeral phase is over,
normal freedom will return.
The mass of men in an industrial civilisation is now caught in a
machine from which they cannot escape, and subservience to which has
become at last their nature. Every day there die some number of those
men and women who could still remember an England of the countrysides
and of personal loyalties. Soon, very soon, there will be none left but
those who, all their lives, have known nothing but the universal wage
system of our towns.
It is this which makes the coming of compulsory labour in our great
industrial cities probable enough. Any one can see that there are
only three possible solutions to the present insecurity of all public
service. The best solution would be the production of a contented
populace through the better distribution of property. Such a populace
would, though workers, be interested in the stability and security of
a society in which they were also partners; but that solution will not
be reached, or even approached, because it is against the mentality of
time; because it seems fantastic. The next solution is the servitude
of all under a tyranny of public officials. It involves confiscation
of property now owned by a few, and the organisation of the industrial
world despotically under a group of politicians. It is called Socialism.
That will not come either, although it is the ideal still favoured by
some few belated Utopians. It will not come because the rich are too
powerful and the politicians too corrupt. If it did come, it would mean
a complete breakdown of society—but that is by the way.
The third solution is compulsory labour legally conducted, as it is
virtually conducted to-day, for the advantage of the owners; and _that_
solution seems to be approaching.
When the general services of the community are interrupted by a
strike—the necessary service of communication by rail, for example,
or the necessary service of the modern post-office—the clamour
for compulsory labour at once arises. It sounds reasonable. It is
consonant to the mind of the whole community; and whether it is called
arbitration or fixed contract, or disciplinary power of trades unions,
compulsory labour is the underlying idea. It is close upon us.
But though the chance of servitude is a thing of the highest moment, I
cannot help watching with amusement a small concomitant of the great
process. I confess rather ashamedly to too great an interest in a
subsidiary point, and that is, watching the euphemisms under which the
process is covered.
For when men return to an old institution which they have discarded,
and the proper name for which has grown odious (as we are returning to
the enslavement of labour), they are particularly anxious to avoid that
name, and spend much of their energy in discovering some way of getting
the old thing under a new title—thus no one will call compulsory
labour slavery, nor will even the words ‘compulsory’ or ‘compulsion’
appear on the surface. There will be some other term, and I for one
shall follow with curiosity and delight the evolution of that term.
Just for the moment the odds are in favour of the term ‘loyalty’—it
has a fine chivalric ring and makes an admirable mask; so men who
continue to work for the profit of their masters during a strike are
called ‘loyal.’ To insist upon one’s right to sell one’s labour at
one’s own price, instead of being ruled by some corrupt trade union
leader who has been bought by the masters, is to be ‘disloyal’ to one’s
union, or even to one’s ‘leader.’
There is quite a chance that the words ‘loyal’ and ‘loyalty’ will
capture the position, and that a few generations hence we may have
placards on the wall, ‘Notice: A disloyal employé of the Meat Trust
is at large,’ with a description of him following; and then we shall
have ‘loyalty’ courts for trying and punishing people who rebel against
compulsory labour.
Another word which is still in the running is the word
‘constitutional’; it has a grander sound than ‘loyal,’ but it is
less tender. Men acting as free men are nearly always striking
‘unconstitutionally,’ breaking the terms secretly purchased by the
capitalists from a ‘leader.’ ‘Loyal’ has also a better chance than
‘constitutional,’ because it is a shorter word; but perhaps the two
will be used side by side. The legal indictment against a runaway
slave, a couple of centuries hence, will be, perhaps, that his act
was ‘unconstitutional,’ while the conventional term will, perhaps,
be ‘disloyal’—or there may be some new term. But two things are
probable—not certain: (1) that compulsory labour will come; (2) that
it will be given some name not even remotely connected with the idea of
slavery or compulsion.
Probable, not certain; for who can tell, in the millioned complexity of
affairs, what new factor may not arise? A man may go round on a mule
calling himself a prophet, and change the whole world to-morrow.
Yet men prophesy to-day, when all is mist and fog. They prophesy as
never did they prophesy before: with an assurance and a conviction born
of physical science misapplied.
This passion for prophesying has several sources which converge to
produce such modern folly. I think the strongest motive is mere relief
to the nerves. Men find that, by prophesying that a thing will take
place which they desire to take place, they are themselves soothed.
One could make shoals of books by merely cutting such pronouncements
out of the European papers during the last ten years, cuttings in
which it would be manifest that the writer was in a reckless mood,
indifferent to the probability of his assertion.
Another motive is the motive of reputation; for if the prophet brings
it off, he can point to his success and be sure of a following, whereas
if he does not bring it off, he can rely upon that atrophy of the
memory which the universal reading of the daily press has brought
about. Another cause, as I have said, is the influence of physical
science, that influence which affects the whole of modern life, and
nearly always for ill. Physical science has proceeded from discovery
to discovery in our time, until men are prepared for any marvel. It is
true that side by side with this advance in the control of physical
things there has gone a corresponding decline in the critical faculty,
in the powers of reason: and a still more rapid decline in morals. But
the main fact is familiar to the whole world, and is, superficially,
the most astonishing thing of to-day. Our time has advanced in its
knowledge of inanimate nature and in its control thereof as no other
past time advanced.
Now this process was everywhere accompanied by, and tested by,
prophecy. The seeker after some new ‘law’ (as a sequence of physical
phenomena is rather oddly called) would experiment until sequence was
discovered, and, when it was discovered, he could confidently presume
upon its completion; as, for instance, in the series of atomic weights.
He could say, ‘You will find that this series will follow upon such
and such a course,’ and when he was proved right he had achieved his
end. The whole method of the progress was of this nature. It was
like a man plotting down points upon a curve until he had aligned a
sufficient number to give him the general formula, after which he could
confidently say, ‘You will find, when the curve is fully described,
such and such other points to lie along it.’ Or it was like a man
reëstablishing a Roman road. He says: ‘I find a section of it here
pointing right to a neighbouring port, and a little way on another
section still pointing the same, and I am confident that I shall find
some place-name or parish boundary or other relic confirming that Roman
road throughout.’ He is pretty certain to be right.
On the parallel of physical science, this habit of prophecy as the
confirmation of judgment spread to things, in which, by their nature,
mechanical judgment is impossible.
Another negative source was ignorance, and especially ignorance of the
past. Our moderns have more and more lost the knowledge of the past.
They have been taught to despise it; they think of it first as of
something foreign and odd; later, if they study, as of something very
different from what it was. They, therefore, miss the lessons of the
past, and especially the chief lesson, which is that the developments
of society follow no mechanical process; that their way is not the way
of an arrow, but of a serpent. Ignorant of this, men fall into the
simple error of taking the tangent to the curve, of prolonging the
actions of causes immediately before their eyes, and of conceiving the
future in terms of the present, as children do. Hence these confident
assertions that in so many years such and such a country will have
grown to such and such a population: that such and such a language will
have become dominant—and so forth.
But it is to be noted that this process is not often applied to evils,
for men do not like to face an evil future.
I notice in this political or social prophecy one very strange
omission: they never by any chance allow for that cause which is the
major cause of change in human affairs: I mean religion.
Thirteen hundred years ago, the great fact before all men’s eyes
was the Roman Empire of the East. The commander of the armies, a
half-divine being seated in Constantinople, was the centre of the
world and the acknowledged head of all that counted, from the Atlantic
to the Persian borders, and from the Northern barbarism to the
desert. Pressure menaced from the Persian hills and from the Tigris,
and there was pressure from savage hordes in the mountains, and in
the plains beyond to the north. Had men then been in the habit of
prophesying after our foolish modern fashion, they would have told you
this or that, but all in terms of the Empire, or the German and Slav
barbarians, or the Persians; and while they so thought in terms of the
only things they knew, there had already arisen, in a place remote and
utterly insignificant, among tribes of a few hundreds without power,
culture, or tradition, under conditions utterly negligible, the flaming
spirit of Islam.
To our own modern world there must come either some vast religious
reaction, or some vast religious novelty, or both. It is inevitable;
for men live by religion. Yet no one speaking of the future takes it
for one moment into account. I know of but one book, a book of singular
genius, in which the thing appears, though tentatively; and that is in
Jefferies’ fine vision called ‘After London.’ But even Jefferies did
not make of it the main source of change. In his day men had already
begun to lose the significance of religion in human affairs.
The great light of the Forelands on the weather side, the Goodwin
Lights on the lee, stood like the lamps of a street in the fall of that
darkness as, with the tide beneath us, we ran up for London River. But,
the wind coming from more northerly, we had to choose between beating
up and standing out.
We did the last, though the wind was falling, because that lane of
water is full of the world’s shipping, and it was plainer to keep a
course. By midnight the breeze had died down to a light air, and,
somewhat later, the sky now very clear, we bore up on the other tack,
the starboard tack, and went round till we had the dying air right
abeam, and so came under brilliant stars within the point of Thanet
land and dropped anchor and slept.
But early the next morning we woke to see the sun rising up undimmed
over the wide North Sea, cut sharply by the calm horizon. It promised a
warm and kindly day....
I could wish that this book, already so long as to have become
intolerable to the reader, the writer, the printer, and all others
concerned in its production, already so heavy as to have become a
business to the publisher, the carman, and the railway people (if,
indeed, they transport it, but I have known of books transported in
bulk on shipboard, and sinking to the glory of God, before they reached
their destination, and that to the great advantage of our miserable
world, which is abominably overcrowded with books)—I could wish that
this book, already so prolix, so otiose, so weary of its way that no
poor gabbler in an inn ever more offended his audience than I will
mine; I could wish that this book, which may be called The Great Sea
Serpent of books, or again, The Cromwell Road of Books, or once again,
The Pambiblicon, or endless Compendium, or again, The Long Arctic
Night—what you will—I could wish that this book were longer still, I
say, in order that I might drag you to perdition with the tedium of a
million memories north of the Forelands, north of the Goodwins, north
of Long Nose: memories of the Muddy Rivers of the Trinobantes, whose
descendants inhabit rather than cultivate the Essex clay: memories
of sandbanks rising out of the misty seas like whales, and of the
platters of Harwich, and of the King’s ship called The Serpent, and of
Orford River, and of the Onion, and of Lowestoft, Yarmouth, and the
exceedingly difficult labyrinth of the Wash, and of the awful great
tide at King’s Lynn.
But I renounce—not so much for your sakes as for my own, nor do I even
speak of that Thames River which sailors called London River, and of
the getting across it slantwise in spite of the great ships and the way
in which time has silted up that harbour.
There are many curious things to be noted about the opening of London
River. There is the double tide, so that a man making Long Nose from
the Channel finds a new tide taking him up towards London. There is
the way in which the best of all the channels into the river is the
one least used, because it would make ships go out of their way. Ships
come into the Thames either from the north or from the south, so they
save time, which is money, by skirting either coast, but the main mid
channel only the Dutchmen use when they have occasion to come up London
River; I approve them. Then there is the way in which undoubtedly all
this has silted up and risen since the time of the ancients. It is
not only the stuff brought down by the river which has piled up these
banks; there is also, I am sure, a lifting of the land. Nothing else
could account for Thanet ceasing to be an island, or for Richborough
standing now high and dry. The surface of the earth moves slowly up and
down over centuries, and no one shall persuade me that Pevensey has run
dry, Rye has been drained, Lympne has run far inland, Dover inlet has
been closed, and the Wensum turned from a great sea passage to a ditch
by any action other than the lifting of the land. The last thing to be
said about Thamesmouth is this, that it was never shut for traffic
since the beginning of recorded time ... until.... Men always traded up
and down it with a swarm of shipping since men first left memorial of
their doings, _until_ the fourth of August, 1914.
It is not the least arresting of those many portents accompanying the
Great War that in its first week, for the first time in human history,
the port of London was paralysed.
And so back to the Forelands, and the run between the Kentish corner
and the Goodwin Sands, with a few kind words to Saint Augustine, and
Julius Cæsar, and the men that murdered Saint Thomas, and so grew
tails, and such others as have landed at this turn of the coast; but
none for Hengist and Horsa, who never lived at all, and yet have done
all manner of harm. So through the Downs into the Channel again and
back on my way to the sea of Sussex, and to the shores which may be
drowned and swamped for a while by alien townsmen, but will keep their
own counsel and in due time will rise again.