It had fallen almost calm as we slid into the oily place under the
darkness, and there was a long exasperating swell, not regular, but
coming in stupidly from the southeast, whence no wind blew, and washing
back from the stones of the pier. A drizzling rain also was falling
and, in general, my companion and I paid for the splendour of those
last days round the corner of Kent and across the Thames. It was too
early to sleep and, as I had had the helm the night before, I had slept
also during the day. I sat looking at my main chart, though I knew
every inch (oh! come! say rather millimetres) of the coast I was to
follow; and I pondered upon that shore-line of Kent and Sussex, and
upon places which I had passed far off on my way eastward, and which
I would now see from closer by as I stood down-Channel on my westward
journey home.
How well (too well?... No) does a man get to know a bit of coast like
this between Selsea and the Downs after half a life of lazy passages
along it, and (to be just) sometimes of wicked winds! It becomes as
familiar as a street; not only the aspect of the shore—changeable
as that is—not only lights and buoys, and the hours for the turn of
tides and all the rest of it, but the very sea itself in spite of its
innumerable diversity.
But one effect of this familiarity is odd and unexpected,—I know not
whether others have felt it; I have felt it profoundly (especially in
the last few years),—and that is, the way in which the sameness of the
sea, the reiteration at sea of similar emotions, of similar heights and
bearing-marks of the coast, the unity of scene, of time, of action,
the eternity of the sea, throw into relief the catastrophic change,
the cataract of change, inland: the revolution which has transformed
modern England; so that, of all the states I know, none has become so
intimately different from its own immediate past, within the memory of
men elderly, but not yet old, as England: yes, even South England: the
refuge.
To many I know this is a cause of rejoicing. Worse things have given
way to better in their eyes. To others it is a despair; they are
of that temperament which can only repose in fixed sanctities. For
my part, it is to me a regret. Because the change is unhappy, and
happiness is the end of man.
The older England I knew (the spirit of which has almost disappeared)
was a happier place; happier not only in the immediate elements of
personal happiness, but in the more distant elements of corporate
happiness, such as national pride and security. Yet some find the
change to be good: so they do.
At any rate, in this mixture of good and evil, the thing that we
should note—the thing the historian will note with amazement—is the
profundity and the rapidity of the change.
There stand the same marks, the same headlands, which I knew as a boy;
the sight to landward is very little changed. There are the same three
forts of Spithead, through which I used to set out from the sheltered
water. There is the same odd entry, somewhat shoal and difficult, to
the branches of Chichester Harbour and Bosham, that famous hamlet in
the story of England. There is the low shelf of Selsea Bill, and the
mark on the Mixen, and the two buoys of the Looe Stream, and the Owers
Light winking outside—as I remember it winking when I watched it, a
little boy, from the height of the Downs. The entry to Littlehampton is
the same, and to Shoreham. The breakwater at Newhaven, though it still
seems new to me, is already old. Beachy Head Light, which used to be
on the summit of the cliff, has been shifted to the beach below. The
breakwater at Hastings has failed, but Fairlight gives you the same
marks; and the entry to Rye is what it always was, a caution to camels
who have passed with honours through the eyes of needles. Dungeness
slowly crawling out to sea still seems the same. The only material
change in all that passage is the dangerous failure called Dover
Harbour, against which the rushing tide of the Straits tumbles angrily,
finding interference after so many æons of freedom: so that just
outside Dover in almost any weather you are tossed by a confused and
irritated sea. But all the rest, the Forelands Light and the Goodwins,
are what I have always known. Up and down that stretch of water there
is somewhat more building on the land, slightly changing the aspect of
the distant shore. There is the curious long group of huts on Shoreham
beach, Seaford sending up red brick on to the green of the heights
above it, and Bexhill to-day where once was loneliness. But take it
all in all, it is the same scene, after nearly forty years of sailing
on that sea and watching that land with Highdown still for the best
sea-mark, and with the clump of Chanctonbury—yes, even the stump of
Halnacker Mill, though it is now all ruins. The marks are the same. I
might turn boy again and set sailing and not find the sea-things other
than I had known them.
But on land—in the heart of man—what a transformation! There went
into it the England of the seventies—an England aristocratic, free,
with ease of movement within and acting externally, at will, upon all
nations. An England with a sense of increasing wealth and of increasing
knowledge, and an England English. Of all the men and women you met,
most had been born in the villages, or little market towns, which are
the roots of England. It was one society: that of to-day is another,
almost foreign to the first.
Of all this revolutionary change, covering the short space of half
a lifetime, two effects are most prominent: the fall of Parliament
from great honour to contempt, and the change in the press. Of these
the change in the press is the most obvious, and perhaps the most
remarkable.
The press of England has passed, as a whole, in that space of time from
one social condition to another totally new. There are still dignified
exceptions, but they are survivals and abnormal. The general spirit of
the press has utterly changed. It is as great a change as a man might
experience who, having been brought up, let us say, as an English
public school boy and university man, should so sink as to pass his
middle age up-country in a strange colony far overseas, as a labourer
among labourers.
At the beginning of the period, England had a press—daily, weekly,
monthly, and quarterly—especially designed for, and consonant to, an
aristocracy: not designed for, and consonant to, lords and ladies;
but designed for, and consonant to, a highly cultivated governing
class whose power was unquestioned, and which then directed the whole
community. The intellectual life of the nation was concentrated in that
class: it included men of all births, but having in common the same
cultivation of spirit, the same manner of talking, the same sufficient
knowledge of the European past, the same less, but still sufficient
knowledge, of contemporary Europe: and, what was most important, the
same philosophy and social outlook.
This class (the gentry, or whatever you like to call it), had its own
press, the great daily papers, the weekly reviews, the serious monthly
and quarterly reviews. Side by side with that press there was a frankly
popular press, which had no sort of power, and which was intended to
amuse the non-political mass below. It was represented in two or three
very vulgar Sunday newspapers full of police court cases, and murders,
and the rest; and weekly papers with tittle-tattle about the superiors
of the class which read them; but it was the press of the educated
class which represented, mirrored, and to some extent influenced the
general action of England.
In that press you had, for its daily papers, information more rapidly
acquired, better balanced, more detailed, and more extensive by far
than was to be found in the press of any other country. Everything of
importance was known to the governing class of England through that
press, and was known at once; and, on the whole, was known in something
like the right proportion. The weeklies, monthlies, and quarterlies
were powerful organs of intellectual expression, and set also a
literary standard. You saw in them the names of Tennyson or Browning,
of Huxley and the Duke of Argyll, of Lord Salisbury, of Arnold. There
was about the whole atmosphere of this press something of that tone of
equality, ease, and sure touch which is the mark of a governing class
in any aristocratic state.
To-day, you have a press in which the less vital of these
characteristics remain; the essential have wholly disappeared.
Information is still rapidly acquired (though the English press here
has no longer any advantage over the Continental, such as it used
to have a generation ago), but the type of information is wholly
different; and as for that quality vital to truth, the sense of
proportion, it has vanished. The knowledge of Europe has fallen to
a level negligible or contemptible. All the most weighty things are
either hidden for private purposes, or (this is much the most common
fault) unappreciated. While the Italian, French, and German papers
are giving with full detail and with right balance the aspects of
our contemporary civilisation; while men like Ferrero or Maurras are
perpetually before the eyes of the Continent, we have here men who are
no more than the servants of wealthy, half-educated, or uneducated
millionaires, their owners: men who write to order any nonsense about
Europe which those owners desire to publish. Therefore the great
movements abroad, reacting upon the national life of this country, are
misunderstood and invariably take opinion by surprise. I will give two
examples which will be fresh in the memory of all.
No newspaper here either foresaw or, when it arrived, made
comprehensible the Italian movement which led to the resurrection of
the country by Mussolini. Compare such astonishing ignorance with
the state of affairs in England a lifetime ago, when Italy was first
rising to her modern position. _Then_ the English papers closely
followed all the ferment in Italy. It was to their columns that foreign
statesmen turned for the facts and news on the progress of Savoy.
To-day no Continental statesman looks at our press, save now and then
to protest against some childish blunder. Again, even as I write,
there is taking place in London a highly important conference between
the bankers and politicians, the object of which, on the one side, is
to diminish French power and, on the other, to maintain it. I turn to
the ‘Temps,’ or to the ‘Corriere,’ and I find in the first paper very
full and detailed accounts of the debates of the committees with an
adequate educated judgment upon the results attained. In the second
paper, I find a good, balanced judgment upon the situation with a
leaning towards the English interest regarded as nearly identical with
the Italian. But I defy any one to make out from ‘The Times’ what is
really going on at that conference! You will read plenty of abuse of
the French; plenty of self-praise and acres of generalities. But you
will not find yourself informed—although the great business is going
on here in London right under our eyes.
I thought it the part of a contemporary to follow the affair as
closely as I could. I soon found it necessary to give up looking at
the English papers, and to buy the papers of the Continent in order to
instruct myself. The method had the disadvantage of delay, but had the
advantage of giving me real information. The few papers which still
keep up the façade of culture in their form, though certainly not in
their contents, are, again, of less importance than the new popular
press which makes no pretence to culture in any form, which is owned by
impossible adventurers, such as no one a generation ago would have had
in his house, even had they then existed;and it is this popular press
now which is the main instrument in the moulding of opinion.
The revolution is complete. It is as complete as though the education
of the country were to pass from the hands of the classicists and the
mathematicians to those of Big Business, and boys were to be taught
advertisement and salesmanship instead of the humanities. And this our
passing from one mode of public expression, and control by suggestion,
to another utterly different and far baser system, has come silently
and has worked its effect unnoticed. It is only by contrasting _then_
with _now_ that we notice it.
We are arrived in England to-day at a condition in which the popular
newspaper gives its owner a power in the State comparable only to the
power of finance and far superior to the nominal power of those poor
play-actors, embarrassed, furtive, who still bear titles of authority:
Secretaries of State for this or that. And yet, by the very nature of
the organism, this new instrument of power, the mob press, must be
ill-informed, unreal, and—what is not without its importance—morally
vile.
Less obvious than the complete change in the press, in its functions
and character, perhaps less pronounced and less advanced, yet certainly
of great moment, is the fall of the House of Commons and of Parliament
in general from authority and dignity to well-deserved contempt.
But for this evil there is more hope of remedy than there is for the
evil of the press. When any organ of government reaches a certain
degree of decay, some other automatically takes its place, and if the
substitution is made promptly enough, the state may bridge over the
passage without disaster.
Such substitution lies ready to our hand. We have only to increase the
power of the Crown, and that would indeed give truth to the boast too
often repeated that the continuity of names is valuable to society. The
monarchy is still there in name, and the giving of true power to it is
therefore still possible.
The decline of Parliamentary authority and dignity has been wholly a
rot from within. The people of England did not desire it; they desired
nothing better than to continue their old respect for that aristocratic
institution at Westminster round which every activity of the nation had
centred. The damage was done by permitting personal corruption to go
unpunished. When once the habit arose of condoning the use of public
position for private enrichment—and that secret—it was impossible
for the strength of the institution to survive. The temptation of the
politician to enrich himself at the expense of the public good (to
take bribes, to sell monopolies and contracts and policies) is so very
strong that, unless it is met by as strong a check of discipline, it
is bound to run riot, and it has done so. It has come on in a flood,
especially during the last twenty years, taking every conceivable form,
but all those forms proceeding from the immunity of the evil-doers. Men
possessed of political power create public monopolies which they handle
for their own enrichment: they take bribes, they give out contracts
as against payment. They will assign a valuable state right to some
company and then, resigning office, take up a highly salaried post in
that company. The traffic in honours for the private advantage of those
who bestow them is the least of these cancers which are eating away the
body of Parliament. The habitual practice of blackmail in the course of
personal intrigue for power (it is mutual between the politicians and
the newspaper-owners) is the worst. But all are excessive in degree,
and between them they have done their work. It is now impossible to
restore to politics, which are now professional politics, the old
prestige. It is gone.
In the presence of these experiences, the commonplaces of Parliamentary
life with which all Parliamentarians are thoroughly familiar, and
which at last the public are learning, the attitude of the politicians
themselves is one of tolerance: the attitude of the public is a weary
and disdainful indifference.
This attitude of tolerance on the part of the politicians, this policy
they have chosen of excusing and pardoning corruption, seems to me more
worthy of discussion than anything else in public life to-day; it is
the centre of the whole affair.
Corruption in some degree you must have under any form of government.
Half the art of government is the devising of methods for the
repression, rather than the destruction, of corruption. So long as
men love notoriety and wealth, so long as notoriety and wealth can
be conferred by the possession of political power, and so long as
political power dominates the courts of justice—that is, for ever—so
long you will have corruption present among those who govern, except
under a strong king. It stands to reason that the appetite for wealth
or notoriety or both will incite men in political power to obtain them,
and as that power gives them in a large measure control of the courts
of justice and full control of the police and of prosecution, they can
be rendered in the main immune from the consequences of their actions.
I should not think it remarkable to learn that in any country, at any
time, there was very great corruption among the public men. What I
should think remarkable, what I should think a phenomenon worthy of
special study (because it would be exceptional and would necessarily
produce exceptional results), would be to hear that the corruption was
not punished, and that those who were caught and exposed in flagrant
acts of corruption were actually promoted. That is what we have here
to-day in England.
It is with the toleration of parliamentary corruption as it is with
disease in the human body. Hardly anybody goes through life without
some bad illness. Most people have some one or other specific weakness
which develops into a long illness ending in death, and all human
beings whatsoever are liable to disease, even those few who do not
for the moment suffer from it. But everywhere you see the human race
fighting disease, and trying to avoid its consequences. Now if you
found a man who took his disease as a habit, and tended rather to
accentuate it and foster it, you would think his action abnormal. You
would say, ‘Certain strange consequences will follow upon this.’ And
you would be right.
I have found the modern toleration of bribery and blackmail in
politics to be defended with very different arguments, but I fancy
that the underlying motive of the defence, the real basis of it in a
Parliamentarian’s world, is patriotism combined with a certain new
scale of moral values which has come in with the century. I fancy all
those who have in my hearing defended this later-day toleration of
corruption, really had at the back of their heads a conviction that
such degradation of public life did the country no great harm, being
no more than a sort of permanent necessary evil. They think that the
lessening of the security of the state which would come from exposing
and punishing the culprits a much greater evil than letting them go
their way. It is something of the attitude which most people take
towards a family scandal. They say: ‘These things will happen anyhow;
and we shall lower the family by any public discussion of them.’ So say
the more reputable at Westminster.
There are then, as I see it, two elements in the now admitted and
universal toleration of bribery and blackmail among politicians. The
first element is the noble element of patriotism which judges that of
two evils you must choose the least, and that the evil of a certain
minimum necessary amount of political vice is far less than the
evil of shaking authority and order in society and at the same time
weakening the country in the face of its rivals. The second element is
the judgment that the levying of and submitting to blackmail, and the
offering and taking of bribes among Parliamentarians is only one out of
hundreds of moral evils in the state, and is one of the least.
If these be the real foundations of the tolerance of these evils,
the artificial arguments advanced are many and varied. I remember
one political dinner table in Surrey where we thrashed out the whole
business at some length. Everybody present was connected with public
life directly or indirectly, and no one, so far as I know, was himself
or herself guilty. Yet, out of twenty, only three of us, of whom I was
one, maintained the necessity of checking the evil. All the others,
the remaining men and, of course, _all_ the women, relied upon this
argument: that what you wanted in the conduct of the state was ability,
sound judgment of the elements in any problem to be dealt with, and a
good forecast of the immediate future. If you had these, they said,
the country prospered; lacking these, any disaster might come. If you
got these qualities in those who governed, it did not matter whether
they were also given to peculation, or to odd tricks of spying and
threatening, or to selling policies and monopolies, or to taking bribes.
I think that answer would have been sound if you could have proved that
there was some necessary connection between good judgment, resolute
will, patriotism, and all the rest of it, and the particular vices in
question. For instance, a man defending the luxury and worldliness of
a religious hierarchy might very well say: ‘These are moral evils,
no doubt; but you will hardly get men able to conduct a great
organisation who shall at the same time be indifferent to pomp and
pleasure.’ But I would contend that in the case of Parliamentary life
the connection does not apply. The kind of man who advances by taking
or giving bribes, especially the man who advances by taking bribes, the
kind of man who spends his energy in ferreting out the secret actions
of rivals and then threatening them with exposure if they continue to
compete with him, is not the kind of man who will normally have good
judgment. Such men are, as a rule, of a very base sort intellectually,
and the vices from which they suffer are the vices of small, uncertain,
and despicable minds. If I wanted a man to manage a great business with
foresight, strong will, and a good understanding of the elements of
the problems before him, I might choose him in spite of a record for
cruelty or pride—two very detestable vices. But I should be unwise
to choose him if he had a record for petty peculation and perpetual
intrigue among his fellows. Men suffering from these vices do very well
in the lower ranks of the secret police, but they are unfitted for
high position. Indeed, we have had experience in the last few years,
and very rude experience, of what happens when you give such men even
a small part of the governing power in the state. It was such men who
judged, for instance, that the Jewish Communist revolution in Hungary
would succeed. It was such men who supported the Greek adventure
against Turkey, and it was such men who capitulated to Ireland.
Another argument I have heard advanced is this: that corruption on a
far larger scale was vigorous during all the lifetime in which England
was rising to its modern position of a Great Power.
From Walpole to the younger Pitt, from the South Sea Bubble to the
Act of Union, public life was conducted universally upon a system of
bribes. No one can deny that these were the years during which the
modern greatness of England was founded; therefore (it is advanced)
there is something quite out of proportion in fussing about a modern
Chancellor of the Exchequer taking a few thousand shares across the
breakfast-table, or a modern Postmaster-General signing a contract
in favour of some private company and then taking a highly paid post
with that company as his reward; for, if a very much more extended
system of bribery did the country no harm in its formative period, we
have nothing to fear from little individual peccadilloes in the way of
taking a few thousands here and there, as is the habit of our public
men to-day.
I fully agree that if the bribery were of the same quality in both
cases, this argument would be sound. But the whole point of the affair
is that the bribery is of a different kind.
The corruption of the eighteenth century was the purchase by those who
controlled honours (and in a large measure the public purse) of votes
in support of their policy; at the same time it was the open grasping
of lucrative sinecures and large salaries by those in power.