THE CONDITION OF ENGLAND
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
TENNYSON AS A RELIGIOUS TEACHER
IN PERIL OF CHANGE
THE CONDITION
OF ENGLAND
BY
C. F. G. MASTERMAN
“WHETHER IN GENERAL WE ARE GETTING ON, AND IF SO
WHERE WE ARE GOING TO.”
RUSKIN
METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
_First Published in 1909_
TO
MY WIFE
PREFACE
“I’ve got to a time of life,” says the hero of a modern novel,
“when the only theories that interest me are generalisations about
realities.” There are many contemporary observers who do not require
advancing years and a wider experience of life to concentrate them
upon so serious a study. It is not that they deliberately turn towards
consideration of the meaning and progress of the actual life around
them. It is that they cannot--with the best desire in the world--escape
from such an encompassing problem. To those the only question before
them is the present: the past but furnishing material through which
that present can rightly be interpreted, the future appearing as a
present which is hurrying towards them--impatient to be born. They ask
for fact; not make-believe. With Thoreau, “Be it life or death,” they
will cry, “We crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear
the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are
alive, let us go about our business.”
The following pages offer an attempt to estimate some of these
“realities” in the life of contemporary England. The effort
might appear presumptuous, demanding not one volume but ten, the
observation, not of a decade, but of a lifetime. I would plead,
however, that any contribution may help in some degree the work of
others in a more far-reaching and detailed survey. The right judgment
of such an attempt should be directed not at its completeness, but
its sincerity. In my former work as a critic and reviewer it was this
test alone that I sought to apply to similar estimates of to-day and
to-morrow. It is to this test alone that I now venture to appeal.
“Things are what they are. Their consequences will be what they will
be. Why then should we seek to be deceived?” The custom of mankind to
live in a world of illusion endows Butler’s magnificent platitude with
something of the novelty of a paradox. For many generations--perhaps
since man first was--we have succeeded in believing what we wished
to believe. The process has gone so far as to have excited a kind of
reverse wave. We are supposed to wish to believe what we believe. We
identify diagnosis with desire, and think that the prophet of evil
is secretly rejoicing over the impending calamity. We are convinced
that no man would assert that certain events are going to happen if
he did not wish them to happen. If an observer anticipates a victory
for Tariff Reform he is supposed to be weakening on Free Trade. If he
proclaims a decline in religion he is deemed to be little better than
an atheist.
I have no doubt wrongly estimated and anticipated events of the present
and future, and gladly acknowledge the personal and tentative character
of each particular assertion. I should like, however, to think myself
free from the charge of disguising polemic as observation. I should
like, in a word, to think that no one would be able to ascertain,
merely from the following pages, whether their author was advocate
of Free Trade or Protection, Socialist or Individualist, Pagan or
Christian.
Portions of some of these chapters have already appeared--in
substance--in the pages of _The Nation_, and I am indebted to the
proprietors of that journal for permission to reproduce them. The book
has been completed under circumstances of haste and pressure, for which
I must ask indulgence. I would have delayed its publication until
further leisure was possible, did I see any opportunity of that leisure
being attained. But any one who has chosen to embark upon the storm
and tumult of public affairs, must henceforth reconcile himself to the
limitation of other interests to odd corners of time and short holidays
avariciously husbanded. If I had delayed a study of modern England to a
less hurried and more tranquil future, I might have found that it would
be a very different England which I should then be compelled to examine.
C. F. G. MASTERMAN
_Easter, 1909_
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE 1
II. THE CONQUERORS 19
III. THE SUBURBANS 68
IV. THE MULTITUDE 96
V. PRISONERS 157
VI. THE COUNTRYSIDE 190
VII. SCIENCE AND PROGRESS 209
VIII. LITERATURE AND PROGRESS 230
IX. RELIGION AND PROGRESS 261
X. THE ILLUSION OF SECURITY 277
XI. POSTSCRIPT 304
INDEX 307
THE CONDITION OF ENGLAND
CHAPTER I
THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
What will the future make of the present? That is a question which
opens a wide field for speculation, but secures no certain reply.
There is difficulty from two causes. The one is the imperfection of
contemporary record, with its distortions or exaggerations of the life
of to-day. The other is the inability of the life of to-day to picture
its own appearance, even if accurately delineated, when set in historic
background. So much of the future becomes then read into the present
that (for example) altogether divergent elements in national life
will be emphasised if that life be on the highway toward success, or
hovering on the brink of calamity, or a cross section only of progress
towards a national decay. The reconstruction of the past has been
largely effected from the testimony of contemporary documents, each
author setting out to write of his own personal experience. Yet with
all the material at our disposal, the vision of it is still fluctuating
and changing; varying in the estimate of individuals, and from decade
to decade. To some the days of declining Rome represent a period of
tranquillity and human enjoyment; to others they appear as a tremendous
warning of the triumph of the deadly sins. The Middle Age stands for
one set of historians as a period of gold and innocence; with stately
purposes, solemn processions, and widely diffused, if frugal, comfort;
the whole illuminated by great dreams of adventure and aspiration.
To another it presents itself as a prolonged delirium in which men
wrestled in the darkness with fear and torment. To-day, perhaps too
complacently, we assume that history will sharply distinguish our
particular period of security from such troublous upheavals of Birth
or of Death. We see ourselves painted as a civilisation in the vigour
of early manhood, possessing contentment still charged with ambition;
a race in England and Europe full of energy and of purpose, in which
life, for the general, has become more tolerable than ever before.
We would confess that we had not been able to “still the old sob of
the sea,” or compel Time to stand still in his courses, or abolish
altogether those “two black birds of night,” sighing and sorrow. But
we would exhibit a people labouring and enjoying, more secure from
plague, pestilence, and famine than in former ages, so accustomed to
carry out unimpeded the labours of the day as almost to have forgotten
the experience of a time when life itself was precarious and hazardous,
and every morning an adventure into the unknown. We would defend our
Literature, our Art, our Architecture, as, if not indubitably inspired,
yet respectable if judged by any but the highest standard; with an
intelligence ever more widely diffused, much reading, some thought,
even an original, or, at least, a courageous outlook towards the bigger
problems of human existence and human destiny. Condemn our poverty, we
confront it with our charity. Reveal the ravages of disease, cancer,
appendicitis, complaints of the brain, nerves, and stomach, we retort
with the revelation of our warfare against disease, maintained with a
devotion and a determination unparalleled in all the past. If we have
Atheisms, here are all our Churches; if Social Maladies, our Social
Reformers. That any future estimate should associate us even in thought
with the dying days of Rome or the delirium of the medieval twilight
seems to us a proposition obviously incredible.
We have to remember, however, in such an estimate, that each generation
stands in the roll-book of the centuries, not as it appears to itself,
but as it appears to observers gazing, as from a distance, over a gulf
of time. What records will survive, what evidence of existence, when
all the pleasantness and amenity of little, comfortable, satisfied
people have vanished over the limits of the world? Imagine, for
example, the twentieth century interpreted to the twenty-fifth by its
popular newspapers: to-day, more certainly than its popular drama, the
abstract and chronicle of the time. England seen through the medium of
its Sunday Press--the Press which to seven out of ten of its present
inhabitants represents the sole picture they possess of the world
outside their local lives--takes upon itself an appearance of violence
and madness. Men and women knife each other in the dark. Children
are foully butchered by unknown assailants. Suicides sprinkle every
page:--now that a girl may die with another woman’s husband; now that a
family may escape the hell of unemployment; now simply for weariness,
because the whole effort of life has lost significance and crumbled
into dust and ashes. The most insistent noise which reverberates
through their pages is the clicking of the huge machine of English
justice, as couples once married in affection are torn apart, or a long
procession of murderers, thieves, absconding solicitors, fraudulent
company promoters, are swept away into the cold silence of the penal
prison. The supply seems never to run short. The various Courts are
in continuous sitting, and yet never overtake the work so bountifully
provided. Itinerant justices are even compelled to journey round
the countryside, arresting their courses at the principal towns, in
order more speedily to deal with the continuous parade of brutality,
outrage, and unnatural crime. Is it possible, one can imagine the
future historian demanding, that any one could have been in those
days altogether sane? as he pictures the decent wayfarer stealing
furtively through labyrinthine ways lest ruffians should spring upon
him in the dark, clutching his difficult savings for fear that they
should be snatched from him; with the terror of poverty yawning before
him, against which no prudence can guard, in cities visibly given up
to the dominion of lust and greed. All this is in England: with a
Sunday Press, if liberally providing the salt and flavour which so many
colourless lives demand, yet on the whole committed to some standard
of accuracy, some reflection of the fact in the record. In America,
where such limitations are voted tiresome, the vision becomes gigantic,
monstrous, like the Gargantuan architecture of its distorted cities.
The observer who, in any future civilisation which may arise there,
should attempt reconstruction of the barbaric past from a file of the
New York Sunday editions, would find himself plunged into a region
grotesque and hideous, like evil dreams.
But the survival of this peculiar literature is too impossible--perhaps
too dreadful--an assumption. Let us believe that the great works will
endure--the poetry, the fiction, the social studies and declamations
of the representative people of the age. Are we in any better plight?
Select ten, say, of the greatest writers of the Victorian era, and
attempt from the picture which they present to effect a reconstruction
of the Victorian age. The product is a human society so remote from all
benignant ways as to demand nothing less than the advent of a kindly
comet which will sweep the whole affair into nothingness. Our fathers
led their decent, austere lives in that Victorian age which now seems
so remote from us, making their money, carrying out their business and
boisterous pleasure, inspired by their vigorous, if limited, creeds.
They wrangled about politics and theology; they feasted at Christmas,
and in the summer visited the seaside; they gave alms to the poor,
and rejoiced that they lived in nineteenth-century England. But to
the prophets of their age they were unclean from crown of head to
sole of foot, a people who had visibly exhausted the patience of God.
You may choose your verdict where you please--in Carlyle’s “torpid,
gluttonous, sooty, swollen, and squalid England,” given up to the
“deaf stupidities and to the fatalities that follow, likewise deaf”;
or, in Ruskin’s interpretation of the “storm cloud” as “a symbol of
the moral darkness of a nation that has blasphemed the name of God
deliberately and openly, and has done iniquity by proclamation, every
man doing as much injustice to his brother as it was in his power to
do.” You may accept the condemnation kindly, as in Meredith’s “folly
perpetually sliding into new shapes in a society possessed of wealth
and leisure, with many whims, many strange ailments, and strange
fancies”; the condemnation plaintive, as in Arnold’s “brazen prison,”
in which most men, with “heads bent o’er their toil,” languidly “their
lives to some unmeaning task-work give”; the condemnation defiant and
rejoicing, as in Morris: “Civilisation which I _know_ now is destined
to perish; what a joy to think of.” You may find it rising to a rather
shrill shriek in the later Tennyson, with his protest against the city
children--who “soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime”--with
his calling upon vastness and silence to swallow up the noises of his
clamorous, intolerable day. You may hear it sinking to a deep note of
strong repudiation, in that vision of a city, “perchance of Death but
certainly of Night,” from the heart of which, in the pulpit of a great
cathedral, a strange preacher proclaims the triumph of night and its
despairs. One observer looking to the future will see “the whole life
of the immense majority of its inhabitants, from infancy to the grave,
a dreary routine of soulless, mechanical labor.” Another will call for
a cosmic cataclysm to quickly make an end. Another in a more chilling
indifference will turn away from the unlovely sight as from a spectacle
irrelevant, impossible. Literature has no tolerance for the existence
of comfort and security which to so many people seems the last word
of human welfare. And no reconstruction, from the works of genius,
the great novelists, artists, critics, of the vanishing present,
can provide any judgment much more satisfying to our pride than the
judgment of summarised theft and fraud and violence which is the weekly
enjoyment of many million readers.
We know--at once--that this is a one-sided verdict. Of ten thousand
citizens, all but three or four will pass their lives unchronicled;
and these three or four--a murderer, an adulterer, an adventurer, a
saint--will come to stand alone as lives whose existence is recorded.
The remainder pursue their brave and patient labours, not too exacting
in ideal, not too clamorous in pleasure, not at the end having very
much to complain of, or being very eager to complain. So--in every
civilisation, in every century, have passed the lives of the multitude
of mankind. Yet it is change--obscure change in economic conditions,
in aspirations, in faiths, in energies or lassitudes--which is
responsible for the rise and fall of nations, for the variegated
panorama of an ever-changing world. We have enjoyed in England
security and settled society since the period of the great Civil War.
For two hundred and fifty years ten generations have flourished and
faded in a universe where regular government and an ordered apparatus
of justice have guaranteed that life shall be reasonably safe, and
that foresight shall attain reward. We are coming to believe that no
circumstance will ever arise in which an insurance policy will not be
honoured on presentation, and contracts entered into by the parents be
fulfilled by the children. Yet during the whole of this period there
have been cataclysms of change in the intimate life and convictions
of the people which are more instinctive than opinions. So that the
nineteenth-century civilisation is far removed from the eighteenth,
and the twentieth from the nineteenth, in the estimate of the kingdom
of the Soul. A study of those changes--a revelation and diagnosis
of the hidden life of England--would be a study exceedingly worth
attempting to-day. It would be a study which, passing from the external
organisation, the condition of trade, the variation in fortune, would
endeavour to tear out the inner secret of the life of this people:
to exhibit the temper, mettle, response, character of an island race
at a particular period of its supremacy. Changes in such temper and
character are usually only revealed in times of national crisis: just
as an individual only comes to “know himself” when confronted with
the challenge of some overwhelming choice or anxiety. And as at that
moment he reaps the fruit of the long obscure processes of sowing and
ripening, so a nation in social upheavals, foreign perils, or some
similar intrusion of reality, discovers in a moment also that it no
longer possesses adequate forces of resistance, or that its religion,
its boast of power, its patriotism, have been meaningless phrases.
“Contemporary England”--its origin, its varying elements of good
and evil, its purposes, its future drift--is a study demanding a
lifetime’s investigation by a man of genius. But every tiny effort,
if sincerely undertaken, may stimulate discussion of a problem which
cannot be discussed too widely. It will study the most sincere of
the popular writers of fiction, especially those who from a direct
experience of some particular class of society--the industrial
peoples, the tramp, the village life, the shop assistant, the country
house--can provide under the form of fiction something in the nature
of a personal testimony. It is assisted by those who to-day see
instinctively the first tentative effort towards the construction of a
sociology--investigation into the lives and wages, social character,
beliefs and prejudices of various selected classes and localities.
Biography is not without its contribution, especially the biography
of typical men--a labour-leader who reveals himself as a conspicuous
member of a labouring class at the base, or a politician who voices
the scepticisms, manners, fascinations, and prejudices of a cultured,
leisured society at the summit of the social order. The satirist
and the moralist, if the grimace in the case of the one be not too
obviously forced and bitter, and the revolt in the case of the other
not too exacting and scornful, may also exhibit the tendencies of
an age. And there is always much to be learned from those alien
observers, each of whom, entering into our midst a stranger, has set
down his impression of the life of our own people with something of the
freshness and curiosity of a child on a first visit to Wonderland.
And here indeed it is largely upon foreign criticism that we have
to depend. We are familiar with the “composite photograph” in which
thousands of superimposed likenesses result in the elimination of
personal variants, the production of a norm or type. We seek a kind of
mental or moral “composite photograph” showing the average sentiment,
the average emotion, the average religion. And this is a method of
investigation far more familiar to Europe, where introspection is
regarded as a duty, than to England, where introspection is regarded
as a disease. Most modern attempts at the analysis of the English
character have come from the European resident or visitor. In books
translated from the French, like that of M. Boutmy, or from the German,
like that of Dr. Karl Peters, the Englishman learns with amazement
that he presents this aspect to one observer, that to another. His
sentiments are like that of the savage who is suddenly confronted
with the looking-glass; or, rather (since he is convinced that all
these impressions are distorted or prejudiced), like the crowd which
constantly gathers before the shop windows which present convex or
concave mirrors--for the pleasure of seeing their natural faces weirdly
elongated or foreshortened. Yet we are compelled to read such books.
We are compelled to read all such books. Even as a result of such
unfair description we acknowledge the stimulus and challenge which such
description affords. We cannot help being interested in ourselves.
Sometimes, indeed, these impartial minds are able to sting us into
anxiety by their agitation over things which we generally accept as
normal. Again and again the foreigner and the colonial, entering this
rich land with too exuberant ideals of its wealth and comfort, have
broken into cries of pain and wonder at the revelation of the life
of poverty festering round the pillars which support the material
greatness of England. A picture to which we have become accustomed,
which we endure as best we may, seems to them a picture of horror and
desolation. Again and again we have found our material splendours and
extravagances which have developed by almost inconspicuous gradations
year by year and generation by generation, set out for surprise or
condemnation, by those who had maintained a tradition of simplicity,
even of austerity, in England’s social life. Again and again a revisit,
after prolonged absence, has exhibited some transformation of things of
which those who have been living in the current are hardly themselves
conscious--a transformation effected by no man’s definite desires.
All such observations, however, are faced with some fundamental
difficulties. One of these is the difficulty of ascertaining where the
essential nation resides: what spirit and temper, in what particular
class or locality, will stand to the future for twentieth-century
England. A few generations ago that difficulty did not exist. England
was the population of the English countryside: the “rich man in his
castle,” the “poor man at his gate”; the feudal society of country
house, country village, and little country town, in a land whose
immense wealth still slept undisturbed. But no one to-day would seek
in the ruined villages and dwindling population of the countryside the
spirit of an “England” four-fifths of whose people have now crowded
into the cities. The little red-roofed towns and hamlets, the labourer
in the fields at noontide or evening, the old English service in the
old English village church, now stand but as the historical survival of
a once great and splendid past. Is “England” then to be discovered in
the feverish industrial energy of the manufacturing cities? In the vast
welter and chaos of the capital of Empire? Amongst the new Plutocracy?
The middle classes? The artisan populations? The broken poor? All
contribute their quota to the stream of the national life. All have
replies to give the interrogator of their customs and beliefs and
varying ideals. All together make up a picture of a “roaring reach of
death and life” in a world where the one single system of a traditional
hierarchy has fissured into a thousand diversified channels, with
eddies and breakwaters, whirlpools and sullen marshes, and every
variety of vigour, somnolence, and decay.
Again, no living observer has ever seen England in adversity: beaten
to the knees, to the ground. No one can foresee what spirit--either of
resistance or acquiescence--latent in this kindly, lazy, good-natured
people might be evoked by so elemental a challenge. England is often
sharply contrasted with Ireland, and the Irish with the English
people. What spirit would be manifest amongst the English people
to-day if they had been subjugated by an alien conqueror, with their
lands dispossessed, their religion penalised, their national ideals
everywhere faced with opposition and disdain? Such an experience might
have been stamped upon history if the Armada had reached these shores;
it might have “staggered humanity” with unforgettable memories. Would
an invaded England offer the resistance of an invaded Germany, or of an
invaded Spain, in the Napoleonic Wars? How would we actually treat our
“Communists” if they seized London after a time of national disaster
and established a “Social” Republic? No one can tell what a man will do
in such a shock as the Messina earthquake, or when the shells of the
invader, without warning, crash through the ruins of his home. And no
one can foresee what a nation will do in adversity which has never seen
itself compelled to face the end of its customary world.
Again, we know little or nothing to-day of the great multitude of the
people who inhabit these islands. They produce no authors. They edit
no newspapers. They find no vocal expression for their sentiments and
desires. Their leaders are either chosen from another class, or, from
the very fact of leadership, sharply distinguished from the members of
their own. They are never articulate except in times of exceptional
excitement; in depression, when trade is bad; in exuberance, when, as
on the “Mafeking” nights, they suddenly appear from nowhere to take
possession of the city. England, for the nation or foreign observer,
is the tone and temper which the ideals and determinations of the
middle class have stamped upon the vision of an astonished Europe. It
is the middle class which stands for England in most modern analyses.
It is the middle class which is losing its religion; which is slowly
or suddenly discovering that it no longer believes in the existence of
the God of its fathers, or a life beyond the grave. It is the middle
class whose inexhaustible patience fills the observer with admiration
and amazement as he beholds it waiting in the fog at a London terminus
for three hours beyond the advertised time, and then raising a cheer,
half joyful, half ironical, when the melancholy train at last emerges
from the darkness. And it is the middle class which has preserved under
all its security and prosperity that elemental unrest which this same
observer has identified as an inheritance from an ancestry of criminals
and adventurers: which drives it out from many a quiet vicarage and
rose garden into a journey far beyond the skyline, to become the
“frontiersmen of all the world.”[1]
But below this large kingdom, which for more than half a century has
stood for “England,” stretches a huge and unexplored region which
seems destined in the next half-century to progress towards articulate
voice, and to demand an increasing power. It is the class of which
Matthew Arnold, with the agreeable insolence of his habitual attitude,
declared himself to be the discoverer, and to which he gave the name of
the “Populace.” “That vast portion of the working class,” he defined
it, nearly forty years ago, “which, raw and half-developed, has long
been half hidden amid its poverty and squalor, and is now issuing from
its hiding-place to assert an Englishman’s heaven-born privilege of
doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it
likes, meeting where it likes, bending what it likes, breaking what it
likes.” “To this vast residuum,” he adds, “we may with great propriety
give the name of Populace.” To most observers from the classes above,
this is the Deluge; and its attainment of power--if such attainment
ever were realised--the coming of the twilight of the gods. They see
our civilisation as a little patch of redeemed land in the wilderness;
preserved as by a miracle from one decade to another. They behold the
influx, as the rush of a bank-holiday crowd upon some tranquil garden:
tearing up the flowers by the roots, reeling in drunken merriment on
the grass plots, strewing the pleasant landscape with torn paper and
broken bottles. This class--in the cities--cannot be accused of losing
its religion. It is not losing its religion, because it had never
gained a religion. In the industrial centres of England, since the city
first was, the old inherited faiths have never been anything but the
carefully preserved treasure of a tiny minority. It is a class full
of sentiment which the foreigner is apt to condemn as sentimentality.
Amusing examples are familiar of its uncalculating kindliness. An
immense traffic is held up for considerable time because a sheep--on
its way to immediate slaughter--is entangled between two tramcars.
The whole populace cheerfully submit to this inconvenience, sooner
than consummate the decease of the unfortunate animal. In a certain
pottery manufactory, the apparatus has been arranged for the baking
process, and the fires are about to be lighted, when the mewing of
a cat is heard from inside the kiln. The men refuse to proceed with
the work. A whole day is spent in an endeavour to entice the cat out
again; and, on this proving fruitless, in the unloading of the kiln, in
order to rescue the creature. When it is liberated, it is immediately
hurled--with objurgations--into the river. The men were exasperated
with the trouble which had been caused and the time wasted; but they
could not allow the cat to be roasted alive.
Next to this “sentimentality,” so astonishing to Europe--because so
irrational--comes the invincible patience of the English workman. He
will endure almost anything--in silence--until it becomes unendurable.
When he is vocal, it is pretty certain that things _have_ become
unendurable. I once had occasion to visit a family whose two sons were
working on the railway when the dispute between directors and the
union leaders threatened a universal disturbance. I inquired about the
strike. There was an awkward pause in the conversation. “Jim won’t have
to come out,” said the mother, “because he isn’t on the regular staff.”
“Of course Jim will come out,” said the father firmly, “if the others
come out.” “The fact is,” they explained, after further silence, “we
don’t talk about the strike here; we try to forget that there ever
may be one.” It was the experience of a thousand homes. There was no
recognised or felt grievance. There was no clear understanding of the
purpose and meaning of it all. But there were firmly planted in the
mind two bedrock facts: the one, the tragedy that the strike would mean
in this particular household; the other, the complete impossibility of
any other choice but of the boys standing with their comrades in the
day of decision. And this is England; an England which has learnt more
than all other peoples the secret of acquiescence, of toleration, of
settling down and making the best of things in a world on the whole
desirable; but an England also of a determination unshaken by the
vicissitudes of purpose and time, with a certain ruthlessness about
the means when it has accepted the end, and with a patience which is
perhaps more terrible in its silence than the violence of a conspicuous
despair.
These and other qualities form an absorbing subject of study. A figure
emerges from it all. It is the figure of an average from which all
its great men are definitely variants. No body of men have ever been
so “un-English” as the great Englishmen, Nelson, Shelley, Gladstone:
supreme in war, in literature, in practical affairs; yet with no single
evidence in the characteristics of their energy that they possess
any of the qualities of the English blood. But in submitting to the
leadership of such perplexing variations from the common stock, the
Englishman is merely exhibiting his general capacity for accepting the
universe, rather than for rebelling against it. His idea of its origin
or of its goal has become vague and cloudy; definite statements of the
average belief, set out in black and white by the average congregation,
would astonish the average preacher. But he drives ahead along the
day’s work: in pursuing his own business, conquering great empires:
gaining them by his power of energy and honesty, jeopardising them
by his stiffness and lack of sympathy and inability to learn. So he
will continue to the end; occupying, not in Mr. Pinero’s bitter gibe
the “suburb of the Universe”; but rather that locality whose jolly,
stupid, brave denizens may be utilised for every kind of hazardous and
unimaginable enterprise; fulfilling the work of another, content to
know nothing of the reason of it all; journeying always, like Columbus,
“to new Americas, or whither God wills.”
* * * * *
It may be helpful to break up this composite figure of an “Englishman”
into the various economic divisions of the present time, to examine
what changes are fermenting amongst the rich, the middle stratum of
comfort, the multitudinous ranks of the toilers, the dim hordes of the
disinherited. A summary of science, art, literature, and religion in
their influence upon the common life will indicate the changes most
manifest, less in material conveniences than in the spirit of man.
At the end arises the question of the future of a society, evidently
moving in a direction which no one can foresee, towards experience of
far-reaching change.