CHAPTER X

THE BATTLE OF THE MARNE

The Hour of Peril--The Human Deluge--The

English at the Marne.

THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND

I--_Some Words to Professor Whirlwind_

DEAR PROFESSOR WHIRLWIND,

Your name in the original German is too much for me; and this is the

nearest I propose to get to it: but under the majestic image of pure

wind marching in a movement wholly circular I seem to see, as in a

vision, something of your mind. But the grand isolation of your thoughts

leads you to express them in such words as are gratifying to yourself,

and have an inconspicuous or even an unfortunate effect upon others. If

anything were really to be made of your moral campaign against the

English nation, it was clearly necessary that somebody, if it were only

an Englishman, should show you how to leave off professing philosophy

and begin to practise it. I have therefore sold myself into the Prussian

service, and in return for a cast-off suit of the Emperor's clothes (the

uniform of an English midshipman), a German hausfrau's recipe for poison

gas, two penny cigars, and twenty-five Iron Crosses, I have consented

to instruct you in the rudiments of international controversy. Of this

part of my task I have here little to say that is not covered by a

general adjuration to you to observe certain elementary rules. They are,

roughly speaking, as follows:--

First, stick to one excuse. Thus if a tradesman, with whom your social

relations are slight, should chance to find you toying with the coppers

in his till, you may possibly explain that you are interested in

Numismatics and are a Collector of Coins; and he may possibly believe

you. But if you tell him afterwards that you pitied him for being

overloaded with unwieldy copper discs, and were in the act of replacing

them by a silver sixpence of your own, this further explanation, so far

from increasing his confidence in your motives, will (strangely enough)

actually decrease it. And if you are so unwise as to be struck by yet

another brilliant idea, and tell him that the pennies were all bad

pennies, which you were concealing to save him from a police prosecution

for coining, the tradesman may even be so wayward as to institute a

police prosecution himself. Now this is not in any way an exaggeration

of the way in which you have knocked the bottom out of any case you may

ever conceivably have had in such matters as the sinking of the

_Lusitania_. With my own eyes I have seen the following explanations,

apparently proceeding from your pen, (i) that the ship was a troop-ship

carrying soldiers from Canada; (ii) that if it wasn't, it was a

merchant-ship unlawfully carrying munitions for the soldiers in France;

(iii) that, as the passengers on the ship had been warned in an

advertisement, Germany was justified in blowing them to the moon; (iv)

that there were guns, and the ship had to be torpedoed because the

English captain was just going to fire them off; (v) that the English or

American authorities, by throwing the _Lusitania_ at the heads of the

German commanders, subjected them to an insupportable temptation; which

was apparently somehow demonstrated or intensified by the fact that the

ship came up to schedule time, there being some mysterious principle by

which having tea at tea-time justifies poisoning the tea; (vi) that the

ship was not sunk by the Germans at all but by the English, the English

captain having deliberately tried to drown himself and some thousand of

his own countrymen in order to cause an exchange of stiff notes between

Mr. Wilson and the Kaiser. If this interesting story be true, I can only

say that such frantic and suicidal devotion to the most remote interests

of his country almost earns the captain pardon for the crime. But do you

not see, my dear Professor, that the very richness and variety of your

inventive genius throws a doubt upon each explanation when considered in

itself? We who read you in England reach a condition of mind in which it

no longer very much matters what explanation you offer, or whether you

offer any at all. We are prepared to hear that you sank the _Lusitania_

because the sea-born sons of England would live more happily as deep-sea

fishes, or that every person on board was coming home to be hanged. You

have explained yourself so completely, in this clear way, to the

Italians that they have declared war on you, and if you go on explaining

yourself so clearly to the Americans they may quite possibly do the

same.

Second, when telling such lies as may seem necessary to your

international standing, do not tell the lies to the people who know the

truth. Do not tell the Eskimos that snow is bright green; nor tell the

negroes in Africa that the sun never shines in that Dark Continent.

Rather tell the Eskimos that the sun never shines in Africa; and then,

turning to the tropical Africans, see if they will believe that snow is

green. Similarly, the course indicated for you is to slander the

Russians to the English and the English to the Russians; and there are

hundreds of good old reliable slanders which can still be used against

both of them. There are probably still Russians who believe that every

English gentleman puts a rope round his wife's neck and sells her in

Smithfield. There are certainly still Englishmen who believe that every

Russian gentleman takes a rope to his wife's back and whips her every

day. But these stories, picturesque and useful as they are, have a limit

to their use like everything else; and the limit consists in the fact

that they are not _true_, and that there necessarily exists a group of

persons who know they are not true. It is so with matters of fact about

which you asseverate so positively to us, as if they were matters of

opinion. Scarborough might be a fortress; but it is not. I happen to

know it is not. Mr. Morel may deserve to be universally admired in

England; but he is not universally admired in England. Tell the Russians

that he is by all means; but do not tell us. We have seen him; we have

also seen Scarborough. You should think of this before you speak.

Third, don't perpetually boast that you are cultured in language which

proves that you are not. You claim to thrust yourself upon everybody on

the ground that you are stuffed with wit and wisdom, and have enough for

the whole world. But people who have wit enough for the whole world,

have wit enough for a whole newspaper paragraph. And you can seldom get

through even a whole paragraph without being monotonous, or irrelevant,

or unintelligible, or self-contradictory, or broken-minded generally. If

you have something to teach us, teach it to us now. If you propose to

convert us after you have conquered us, why not convert us before you

have conquered us? As it is, we cannot believe what you say about your

superior education because of the way in which you say it. If an

Englishman says, "I don't make no mistakes in English, not me," we can

understand his remark; but we cannot endorse it. To say, "Je parler le

Frenche language, non demi," is comprehensible, but not convincing. And

when you say, as you did in a recent appeal to the Americans, that the

Germanic Powers have sacrificed a great deal of "red fluid" in defence

of their culture, we point out to you that cultured people do not employ

such a literary style. Or when you say that the Belgians were so

ignorant as to think they were being butchered when they weren't, we

only wonder whether _you_ are so ignorant as to think you are being

believed when you aren't. Thus, for instance, when you brag about

burning Venice to express your contempt for "tourists," we cannot think

much of the culture, as culture, which supposes St. Mark's to be a thing

for tourists instead of historians. This, however, would be the least

part of our unfavourable judgment. That judgment is complete when we

have read such a paragraph as this, prominently displayed in a paper in

which you specially spread yourself: "That the Italians have a perfect

knowledge of the fact that this city of antiquities and tourists is

subject, and rightly subject, to attack and bombardment, is proved by

the measures they took at the beginning of the war to remove some of

their greatest art treasures." Now culture may or may not include the

power to admire antiquities, and to restrain oneself from the pleasure

of breaking them like toys. But culture does, presumably, include the

power to think. For less laborious intellects than your own it is

generally sufficient to think once. But if you will think twice or

twenty times, it cannot but dawn on you that there is something wrong in

the reasoning by which the placing of diamonds in a safe proves that

they are "rightly subject" to a burglar. The incessant assertion of such

things can do little to spread your superior culture; and if you say

them too often people may even begin to doubt whether you have any

superior culture after all. The earnest friend now advising you cannot

but grieve at such incautious garrulity. If you confined yourself to

single words, uttered at intervals of about a month or so, no one could

possibly raise any rational objection, or subject them to any rational

criticism. In time you might come to use whole sentences without

revealing the real state of things.

Through neglect of these maxims, my dear Professor, every one of your

attacks upon England has gone wide. In pure fact they have not touched

the spot, which the real critics of England know to be a very vulnerable

spot. We have a real critic of England in Mr. Bernard Shaw, whose name

you parade but apparently cannot spell; for in the paper to which I have

referred he is called Mr. Bernhard Shaw. Perhaps you think he and

Bernhardi are the same man. But if you quoted Mr. Bernard Shaw's

statement instead of misquoting his name, you would find that his

criticism of England is exactly the opposite of your own; and naturally,

for it is a rational criticism. He does not blame England for being

against Germany. He does most definitely blame England for not being

sufficiently firmly and emphatically on the side of Russia. He is not

such a fool as to accuse Sir Edward Grey of being a fiendish Machiavelli

plotting against Germany; he accuses him of being an amiable

aristocratic stick who failed to frighten the Junkers from their plan of

war. Now, it is not in the least a question of whether we happen to like

this quality or that: Mr. Shaw, I rather fancy, would dislike such

verbose compromise more than downright plotting. It is simply the fact

that Englishmen like Grey are open to Mr. Shaw's attack and are not open

to yours. It is not true that the English were sufficiently clearheaded

or self-controlled to conspire for the destruction of Germany. Any man

who knows England, any man who hates England as one hates a living

thing, will tell you it is not true. The English may be snobs, they may

be plutocrats, they may be hypocrites, but they are not, as a fact,

plotters; and I gravely doubt whether they could be if they wanted to.

The mass of the people are perfectly incapable of plotting at all, and

if the small ring of rich people who finance our politics were plotting

for anything, it was for peace at almost any price. Any Londoner who

knows the London streets and newspapers as he knows the Nelson column or

the Inner Circle, knows that there were men in the governing class and

in the Cabinet who were literally thirsting to defend Germany until

Germany, by her own act, became indefensible. If they said nothing in

support of the tearing up of the promise of peace to Belgium, it is

simply because there was nothing to be said.

You were the first people to talk about World-Politics; and the first

people to disregard them altogether. Even your foreign policy is

domestic policy. It does not even apply to any people who are not

Germans; and of your wild guesses about some twenty other peoples, not

one has gone right even by accident. Your two or three shots at my own

not immaculate land have been such that you would have been much nearer

the truth if you had tried to invade England by crossing the Caucasus,

or to discover England among the South Sea Islands. With your first

delusion, that our courage was calculated and malignant when in truth

our very corruption was timid and confused, I have already dealt. The

case is the same with your second favourite phrase; that the British

army is mercenary. You learnt it in books and not in battlefields; and I

should like to be present at a scene in which you tried to bribe the

most miserable little loafer in Hammersmith as if he were a cynical

condottiere selling his spear to some foreign city. It is not the fact,

my dear sir. You have been misinformed. The British Army is not at this

moment a hireling army any more than it is a conscript army. It is a

volunteer army in the strict sense of the word; nor do I object to your

calling it an amateur army. There is no compulsion, and there is next to

no pay. It is at this moment drawn from every class of the community,

and there are very few classes which would not earn a little more money

in their ordinary trades. It numbers very nearly as many men as it would

if it were a conscript army; that is with the necessary margin of men

unable to serve or needed to serve otherwise. Ours is a country in which

that democratic spirit which is common to Christendom is rather

unusually sluggish and far below the surface. And the most genuine and

purely popular movement that we have had since the Chartists has been

the enlistment for this war. By all means say that such vague and

sentimental volunteering is valueless in war if you think so; or even

if you don't think so. By all means say that Germany is unconquerable

and that we cannot really kill you. But if you say that we do not really

want to kill you, you do us an injustice. You do indeed.

I need not consider the yet crazier things that some of you have said;

as that the English intend to keep Calais and fight France as well as

Germany for the privilege of purchasing a frontier and the need to keep

a conscript army. That, also, is out of books, and pretty mouldy old

books at that. It was said, I suppose, to gain sympathy among the

French, and is therefore not my immediate business, as they are

eminently capable of looking after themselves. I merely drop one word in

passing, lest you waste your powerful intellect on such projects. The

English may some day forgive you; the French never will. You Teutons are

too light and fickle to understand the Latin seriousness. My only

concern is to point out that about England, at least, you are invariably

and miraculously wrong.

Now speaking seriously, my dear Professor, it will not do. It could be

easy to fence with you for ever and parry every point you attempt to

make, until English people began to think there was nothing wrong with

England at all. But I refuse to play for safety in this way. There is a

very great deal that is really wrong with England, and it ought not to

be forgotten even in the full blaze of your marvellous mistakes. I

cannot have my countrymen tempted to those pleasures of intellectual

pride which are the result of comparing themselves with you. The deep

collapse and yawning chasm of your ineptitude leaves me upon a perilous

spiritual elevation. Your mistakes are matters of fact; but to enumerate

them does not exhaust the truth. For instance, the learned man who

rendered the phrase in an English advertisement "cut you dead" as "hack

you to death," was in error; but to say that many such advertisements

are vulgar is not an error. Again, it is true that the English poor are

harried and insecure, with insufficient instinct for armed revolt,

though you will be wrong if you say that they are occupied literally in

shooting the moon. It is true that the average Englishman is too much

attracted by aristocratic society; though you will be in error if you

quote dining with Duke Humphrey as an example of it. In more ways than

one you forget what is meant by idiom.

I have therefore thought it advisable to provide you with a catalogue of

the real crimes of England; and I have selected them on a principle

which cannot fail to interest and please you. On many occasions we have

been very wrong indeed. We were very wrong indeed when we took part in

preventing Europe from putting a term to the impious piracies of

Frederick the Great. We were very wrong indeed when we allowed the

triumph over Napoleon to be soiled with the mire and blood of Blucher's

sullen savages. We were very wrong indeed when we allowed the peaceful

King of Denmark to be robbed in broad daylight by a brigand named

Bismarck; and when we allowed the Prussian swashbucklers to enslave and

silence the French provinces which they could neither govern nor

persuade. We were very wrong indeed when we flung to such hungry

adventurers a position so important as Heligoland. We were very wrong

indeed when we praised the soulless Prussian education and copied the

soulless Prussian laws. Knowing that you will mingle your tears with

mine over this record of English wrong-doing, I dedicate it to you, and

I remain,

Yours reverently,

G. K. CHESTERTON

II--_The Protestant Hero_

A question is current in our looser English journalism touching what

should be done with the German Emperor after a victory of the Allies.

Our more feminine advisers incline to the view that he should be shot.

This is to make a mistake about the very nature of hereditary monarchy.

Assuredly the Emperor William at his worst would be entitled to say to

his amiable Crown Prince what Charles II. said when his brother warned

him of the plots of assassins: "They will never kill me to make you

king." Others, of greater monstrosity of mind, have suggested that he

should be sent to St. Helena. So far as an estimate of his

historical importance goes, he might as well be sent to Mount Calvary.

What we have to deal with is an elderly, nervous, not unintelligent

person who happens to be a Hohenzollern; and who, to do him justice,

does think more of the Hohenzollerns as a sacred caste than of his own

particular place in it. In such families the old boast and motto of

hereditary kingship has a horrible and degenerate truth. The king never

dies; he only decays for ever.

If it were a matter of the smallest importance what happened to the

Emperor William when once his house had been disarmed, I should satisfy

my fancy with another picture of his declining years; a conclusion that

would be peaceful, humane, harmonious, and forgiving.

In various parts of the lanes and villages of South England the

pedestrian will come upon an old and quiet public-house, decorated with

a dark and faded portrait in a cocked hat and the singular inscription,

"The King of Prussia." These inn signs probably commemorate the visit of

the Allies after 1815, though a great part of the English middle classes

may well have connected them with the time when Frederick II. was

earning his title of the Great, along with a number of other territorial

titles to which he had considerably less claim. Sincere and

simple-hearted Dissenting ministers would dismount before that sign (for

in those days Dissenters drank beer like Christians, and indeed

manufactured most of it) and would pledge the old valour and the old

victory of him whom they called the Protestant Hero. We should be using

every word with literal exactitude if we said that he was really

something devilish like a hero. Whether he was a Protestant hero or not

can be decided best by those who have read the correspondence of a

writer calling himself Voltaire, who was quite shocked at Frederick's

utter lack of religion of any kind. But the little Dissenter drank his

beer in all innocence and rode on. And the great blasphemer of Potsdam

would have laughed had he known; it was a jest after his own heart. Such

was the jest he made when he called upon the emperors to come to

communion, and partake of the eucharistic body of Poland. Had he been

such a Bible reader as the Dissenter doubtless thought him, he might

haply have foreseen the vengeance of humanity upon his house. He might

have known what Poland was and was yet to be; he might have known that

he ate and drank to his damnation, discerning not the body of God.

Whether the placing of the present German Emperor in charge of one of

these wayside public-houses would be a jest after _his_ own heart

possibly remains to be seen. But it would be much more melodious and

fitting an end than any of the sublime euthanasias which his enemies

provide for him. That old sign creaking above him as he sat on the bench

outside his home of exile would be a much more genuine memory of the

real greatness of his race than the modern and almost gimcrack stars and

garters that were pulled in Windsor Chapel. From modern knighthood has

departed all shadow of chivalry; how far we have travelled from it can

easily be tested by the mere suggestion that Sir Thomas Lipton, let us

say, should wear his lady's sleeve round his hat or should watch his

armour in the Chapel of St. Thomas of Canterbury. The giving and

receiving of the Garter among despots and diplomatists is now only part

of that sort of pottering mutual politeness which keeps the peace in an

insecure and insincere state of society. But that old blackened wooden

sign is at least and after all the sign of something; the sign of the

time when one solitary Hohenzollern did not only set fire to fields and

cities, but did truly set on fire the minds of men, even though it were

fire from hell.

Everything was young once, even Frederick the Great. It was an

appropriate preface to the terrible epic of Prussia that it began with

an unnatural tragedy of the loss of youth. That blind and narrow savage

who was the boy's father had just sufficient difficulty in stamping out

every trace of decency in him, to show that some such traces must have

been there. If the younger and greater Frederick ever had a heart, it

was a broken heart; broken by the same blow that broke his flute. When

his only friend was executed before his eyes, there were two corpses to

be borne away; and one to be borne on a high war-horse through victory

after victory: but with a small bottle of poison in the pocket. It is

not irrelevant thus to pause upon the high and dark house of his

childhood. For the peculiar quality which marks out Prussian arms and

ambitions from all others of the kind consists in this wrinkled and

premature antiquity. There is something comparatively boyish about the

triumphs of all the other tyrants. There was something better than

ambition in the beauty and ardour of the young Napoleon. He was at

least a lover; and his first campaign was like a love-story. All that

was pagan in him worshipped the Republic as men worship a woman, and all

that was Catholic in him understood the paradox of Our Lady of

Victories. Henry VIII., a far less reputable person, was in his early

days a good knight of the later and more florid school of chivalry; we

might almost say that he was a fine old English gentleman so long as he

was young. Even Nero was loved in his first days: and there must have

been some cause to make that Christian maiden cast flowers on his

dishonourable grave. But the spirit of the great Hohenzollern smelt from

the first of the charnel. He came out to his first victory like one

broken by defeats; his strength was stripped to the bone and fearful as

a fleshless resurrection; for the worst of what could come had already

befallen him. The very construction of his kingship was built upon the

destruction of his manhood. He had known the final shame; his soul had

surrendered to force. He could not redress that wrong; he could only

repeat it and repay it. He could make the souls of his soldiers

surrender to his gibbet and his whipping-post; he could 'make the souls

of the nations surrender to his soldiers. He could only break men in as

he had been broken; while he could break in, he could never break out.

He could not slay in anger, nor even sin with simplicity. Thus he stands

alone among the conquerors of their kind; his madness was not due to a

mere misdirection of courage. Before the whisper of war had come to him

the foundations of his audacity had been laid in fear.

Of the work he did in this world there need be no considerable debate.

It was romantic, if it be romantic that the dragon should swallow St.

George. He turned a small country into a great one: he made a new

diplomacy by the fulness and far-flung daring of his lies: he took away

from criminality all reproach of carelessness and incompleteness. He

achieved an amiable combination of thrift and theft. He undoubtedly gave

to stark plunder something of the solidity of property. He protected

whatever he stole as simpler men protect whatever they have earned or

inherited. He turned his hollow eyes with a sort of loathsome affection

upon the territories which had most reluctantly become his: at the end

of the Seven Years' War men knew as little how he was to be turned out

of Silesia as they knew why he had ever been allowed in it. In Poland,

like a devil in possession, he tore asunder the body he inhabited; but

it was long before any man dreamed that such disjected limbs could live

again. Nor were the effects of his break from Christian tradition

confined to Christendom; Macaulay's world-wide generalisation is very

true though very Macaulayese. But though, in a long view, he scattered

the seeds of war all over the world, his own last days were passed in a

long and comparatively prosperous peace; a peace which received and

perhaps deserved a certain praise: a peace with which many European

peoples were content. For though he did not understand justice, he could

understand moderation. He was the most genuine and the most wicked of

pacifists. He did not want any more wars. He had tortured and beggared

all his neighbours; but he bore them no malice for it.

The immediate cause of that spirited disaster, the intervention of

England on behalf of the new Hohenzollern throne, was due, of course,

to the national policy of the first William Pitt. He was the kind of man

whose vanity and simplicity are too easily overwhelmed by the obvious.

He saw nothing in a European crisis except a war with France; and

nothing in a war with France except a repetition of the rather fruitless

glories of Agincourt and Malplaquet. He was of the Erastian Whigs,

sceptical but still healthy-minded, and neither good enough nor bad

enough to understand that even the war of that irreligious age was

ultimately a religious war. He had not a shade of irony in his whole

being; and beside Frederick, already as old as sin, he was like a rather

brilliant schoolboy.

But the direct causes were not the only causes, nor the true ones. The

true causes were connected with the triumph of one of the two traditions

which had long been struggling in England. And it is pathetic to record

that the foreign tradition was then represented by two of the ablest men

of that age, Frederick of Prussia and Pitt; while what was really the

old English tradition was represented by two of the stupidest men that

mankind ever tolerated in any age, George III. and Lord Bute. Bute was

the figurehead of a group of Tories who set about fulfilling the fine if

fanciful scheme for a democratic monarchy sketched by Bolingbroke in

"The Patriot King." It was bent in all sincerity on bringing men's minds

back to what are called domestic affairs, affairs as domestic as George

III. It might have arrested the advancing corruption of Parliaments and

enclosure of country-sides, by turning men's minds from the foreign

glories of the great Whigs like Churchill and Chatham; and one of its

first acts was to terminate the alliance with Prussia. Unfortunately,

whatever was picturesque in the piracy of Potsdam was beyond the

imagination of Windsor. But whatever was prosaic in Potsdam was already

established at Windsor; the economy of cold mutton, the heavy-handed

taste in the arts, and the strange northern blend of boorishness with

etiquette. If Bolingbroke's ideas had been applied by a spirited person,

by a Stuart, for example, or even by Queen Elizabeth (who had real

spirit along with her extraordinary vulgarity), the national soul might

have broken free from its new northern chains. But it was the irony of

the situation that the King to whom Tories appealed as a refuge from

Germanism was himself a German.

We have thus to refer the origins of the German influence in England

back to the beginning of the Hanoverian Succession; and thence back to

the quarrel between the King and the lawyers which had issue at Naseby;

and thence again to the angry exit of Henry VIII. from the mediaeval

council of Europe. It is easy to exaggerate the part played in the

matter by that great and human, though very pagan person, Martin Luther.

Henry VIII. was sincere in his hatred for the heresies of the German

monk, for in speculative opinions Henry was wholly Catholic; and the two

wrote against each other innumerable pages, largely consisting of terms

of abuse, which were pretty well deserved on both sides. But Luther was

not a Lutheran. He was a sign of the break-up of Catholicism; but he was

not a builder of Protestantism. The countries which became corporately

and democratically Protestant, Scotland, for instance, and Holland,

followed Calvin and not Luther. And Calvin was a Frenchman; an

unpleasant Frenchman, it is true, but one full of that French capacity

for creating official entities which can really act, and have a kind of

impersonal personality, such as the French Monarchy or the Terror.

Luther was an anarchist, and therefore a dreamer. He made that which is,

perhaps, in the long run, the fullest and most shining manifestation of

failure; he made a name. Calvin made an active, governing, persecuting

thing, called the Kirk. There is something expressive of him in the fact

that he called even his work of abstract theology "The Institutes."

In England, however, there were elements of chaos more akin to Luther

than to Calvin. And we may thus explain many things which appear rather

puzzling in our history, notably the victory of Cromwell not only over

the English Royalists but over the Scotch Covenanters. It was the

victory of that more happy-go-lucky sort of Protestantism, which had in

it much of aristocracy but much also of liberty, over that logical

ambition of the Kirk which would have made Protestantism, if possible,

as constructive as Catholicism had been. It might be called the victory

of Individualist Puritanism over Socialist Puritanism. It was what

Milton meant when he said that the new presbyter was an exaggeration of

the old priest; it was his _office_ that acted, and acted very harshly.

The enemies of the Presbyterians were not without a meaning when they

called themselves Independents. To this day no one can understand

Scotland who does not realise that it retains much of its mediæval

sympathy with France, the French equality, the French pronunciation of

Latin, and, strange as it may sound, is in nothing so French as in its

Presbyterianism.

In this loose and negative sense only it may be said that the great

modern mistakes of England can be traced to Luther. It is true only in

this, that both in Germany and England a Protestantism softer and less

abstract than Calvinism was found useful to the compromises of courtiers

and aristocrats; for every abstract creed does something for human

equality. Lutheranism in Germany rapidly became what it is to-day--a

religion of court chaplains. The reformed church in England became

something better; it became a profession for the younger sons of

squires. But these parallel tendencies, in all their strength and

weakness, reached, as it were, symbolic culmination when the mediæval

monarchy was extinguished, and the English squires gave to what was

little more than a German squire the damaged and diminished crown.

It must be remembered that the Germanics were at that time used as a

sort of breeding-ground for princes. There is a strange process in

history by which things that decay turn into the very opposite of

themselves. Thus in England Puritanism began as the hardest of creeds,

but has ended as the softest; soft-hearted and not unfrequently

soft-headed. Of old the Puritan in war was certainly the Puritan at his

best; it was the Puritan in peace whom no Christian could be expected to

stand. Yet those Englishmen to-day who claim descent from the great

militarists of 1649 express the utmost horror of militarism. An

inversion of an opposite kind has taken place in Germany. Out of the

country that was once valued as providing a perpetual supply of kings

small enough to be stop-gaps, has come the modern menace of the one

great king who would swallow the kingdoms of the earth. But the old

German kingdoms preserved, and were encouraged to preserve, the good

things that go with small interests and strict boundaries, music,

etiquette, a dreamy philosophy, and so on. They were small enough to be

universal. Their outlook could afford to be in some degree broad and

many-sided. They had the impartiality of impotence. All this has been

utterly reversed, and we find ourselves at war with a Germany whose

powers are the widest and whose outlook is the narrowest in the world.

It is true, of course, that the English squires put themselves over the

new German prince rather than under him. They put the crown on him as an

extinguisher. It was part of the plan that the new-comer, though royal,

should be almost rustic. Hanover must be one of England's possessions

and not England one of Hanover's. But the fact that the court became a

German court prepared the soil, so to speak; English politics were

already subconsciously committed to two centuries of the belittlement of

France and the gross exaggeration of Germany. The period can be

symbolically marked out by Carteret, proud of talking German at the

beginning of the period, and Lord Haldane, proud of talking German at

the end of it. Culture is already almost beginning to be spelt with a k.

But all such pacific and only slowly growing Teutonism was brought to a

crisis and a decision when the voice of Pitt called us, like a trumpet,

to the rescue of the Protestant Hero.

Among all the monarchs of that faithless age, the nearest to a man was a

woman. Maria Theresa of Austria was a German of the more generous sort,

limited in a domestic rather than a national sense, firm in the ancient

faith at which all her own courtiers were sneering, and as brave as a

young lioness. Frederick hated her as he hated everything German and

everything good. He sets forth in his own memoirs, with that clearness

which adds something almost superhuman to the mysterious vileness of his

character, how he calculated on her youth, her inexperience and her lack

of friends as proof that she could be despoiled with safety. He invaded

Silesia in advance of his own declaration of war (as if he had run on

ahead to say it was coming) and this new anarchic trick, combined with

the corruptibility of nearly all the other courts, left him after the

two Silesian wars in possession of the stolen goods. But Maria Theresa

had refused to submit to the immorality of nine points of the law. By

appeals and concessions to France, Russia, and other powers, she

contrived to create something which, against the atheist innovator even

in that atheist age, stood up for an instant like a spectre of the

Crusades. Had that Crusade been universal and whole-hearted, the great

new precedent of mere force and fraud would have been broken; and the

whole appalling judgment which is fallen upon Christendom would have

passed us by. But the other Crusaders were only half in earnest for

Europe; Frederick was quite in earnest for Prussia; and he sought for

allies, by whose aid this weak revival of good might be stamped out, and

his adamantine impudence endure for ever. The allies he found were the

English. It is not pleasant for an Englishman to have to write the

words.

This was the first act of the tragedy, and with it we may leave

Frederick, for we are done with the fellow though not with his work. It

is enough to add that if we call all his after actions satanic, it is

not a term of abuse, but of theology. He was a Tempter. He dragged the

other kings to "partake of the body of Poland," and learn the meaning of

the Black Mass. Poland lay prostrate before three giants in armour, and

her name passed into a synonym for failure. The Prussians, with their

fine magnanimity, gave lectures on the hereditary maladies of the man

they had murdered. They could not conceive of life in those limbs; and

the time was far off when they should be undeceived. In that day five

nations were to partake not of the body, but of the spirit of Poland;

and the trumpet of the resurrection of the peoples should be blown from

Warsaw to the western isles.

III--_The Enigma of Waterloo_

That great Englishman Charles Fox, who was as national as Nelson, went

to his death with the firm conviction that England had made Napoleon. He

did not mean, of course, that any other Italian gunner would have done

just as well; but he did mean that by forcing the French back on their

guns, as it were, we had made their chief gunner necessarily their chief

citizen. Had the French Republic been left alone, it would probably have

followed the example of most other ideal experiments; and praised peace

along with progress and equality. It would almost certainly have eyed

with the coldest suspicion any adventurer who appeared likely to

substitute his personality for the pure impersonality of the Sovereign

People; and would have considered it the very flower of republican

chastity to provide a Brutus for such a Caesar. But if it was

undesirable that equality should be threatened by a citizen, it was

intolerable that it should be simply forbidden by a foreigner. If

France could not put up with French soldiers she would very soon have to

put up with Austrian soldiers; and it would be absurd if, having decided

to rely on soldiering, she had hampered the best French soldier even on the

ground that he was not French. So that whether we regard Napoleon as a

hero rushing to the country's help, or a tyrant profiting by the

country's extremity, it is equally clear that those who made the war

made the war-lord; and those who tried to destroy the Republic were

those who created the Empire. So, at least, Fox argued against that much

less English prig who would have called him unpatriotic; and he threw

the blame upon Pitt's Government for having joined the anti-French

alliance, and so tipped up the scale in favour of a military France. But

whether he was right or no, he would have been the readiest to admit

that England was not the first to fly at the throat of the young

Republic. Something in Europe much vaster and vaguer had from the first

stirred against it. What was it then that first made war--and made

Napoleon? There is only one possible answer: the Germans. This is the

second act of our drama of the degradation of England to the level of

Germany. And it has this very important development; that Germany means

by this time _all_ the Germans, just as it does to-day. The savagery of

Prussia and the stupidity of Austria are now combined. Mercilessness and

muddleheadedness are met together; unrighteousness and unreasonableness

have kissed each other; and the tempter and the tempted are agreed. The

great and good Maria Theresa was already old. She had a son who was a

philosopher of the school of Frederick; also a daughter who was more

fortunate, for she was guillotined. It was natural, no doubt, that her

brother and relatives should disapprove of the incident; but it occurred

long after the whole Germanic power had been hurled against the new

Republic. Louis XVI. himself was still alive and nominally ruling when

the first pressure came from Prussia and Austria, demanding that the

trend of the French emancipation should be reversed. It is impossible to

deny, therefore, that what the united Germanics were resolved to destroy

was the reform and not even the Revolution. The part which Joseph of

Austria played in the matter is symbolic. For he was what is called an

enlightened despot, which is the worst kind of despot. He was as

irreligious as Frederick the Great, but not so disgusting or amusing.

The old and kindly Austrian family, of which Maria Theresa was the

affectionate mother, and Marie Antoinette the rather uneducated

daughter, was already superseded and summed up by a rather dried-up

young man self-schooled to a Prussian efficiency. The needle is already

veering northward. Prussia is already beginning to be the captain of the

Germanics "in shining armour." Austria is already becoming a loyal

_sekundant_.

But there still remains one great difference between Austria and Prussia

which developed more and more as the energy of the young Napoleon was

driven like a wedge between them. The difference can be most shortly

stated by saying that Austria did, in some blundering and barbaric way,

care for Europe; but Prussia cared for nothing but Prussia. Austria is

not a nation; you cannot really find Austria on the map. But Austria is

a kind of Empire; a Holy Roman Empire that never came, an expanding and

contracting-dream. It does feel itself, in a vague patriarchal way, the

leader, not of a nation, but of nations. It is like some dying Emperor

of Rome in the decline; who should admit that the legions had been

withdrawn from Britain or from Parthia, but would feel it as

fundamentally natural that they should have been there, as in Sicily or

Southern Gaul. I would not assert that the aged Francis Joseph imagines

that he is Emperor of Scotland or of Denmark; but I should guess that he

retains some notion that if he did rule both the Scots and the Danes, it

would not be more incongruous than his ruling both the Hungarians and

the Poles. This cosmopolitanism of Austria has in it a kind of shadow of

responsibility for Christendom. And it was this that made the difference

between its proceedings and those of the purely selfish adventurer from

the north, the wild dog of Pomerania.

It may be believed, as Fox himself came at last to believe, that

Napoleon in his latest years was really an enemy to freedom, in the

sense that he was an enemy to that very special and occidental form of

freedom which we call Nationalism. The resistance of the Spaniards, for

instance, was certainly a popular resistance. It had that peculiar,

belated, almost secretive strength with which war is made by the people.

It was quite easy for a conqueror to get into Spain; his great

difficulty was to get out again. It was one of the paradoxes of history

that he who had turned the mob into an army, in defence of its rights

against the princes, should at last have his army worn down, not by

princes but by mobs. It is equally certain that at the other end of

Europe, in burning Moscow and on the bridge of the Beresina, he had

found the common soul, even as he had found the common sky, his enemy.

But all this does not affect the first great lines of the quarrel, which

had begun before horsemen in Germanic uniform had waited vainly upon the

road to Varennes or had failed upon the miry slope up to the windmill of

Valmy. And that duel, on which depended all that our Europe has since

become, had great Russia and gallant Spain and our own glorious island

only as subordinates or seconds. That duel, first, last, and for ever,

was a duel between the Frenchman and the German; that is, between the

citizen and the barbarian.

It is not necessary nowadays to defend the French Revolution, it is not

necessary to defend even Napoleon, its child and champion, from

criticisms in the style of Southey and Alison, which even at the time

had more of the atmosphere of Bath and Cheltenham than of Turcoing and

Talavera. The French Revolution was attacked because it was democratic

and defended because it was democratic; and Napoleon was not feared as

the last of the iron despots, but as the first of the iron democrats.

What France set out to prove France has proved; not that common men are

all angels, or all diplomatists, or all gentlemen (for these inane

aristocratic illusions were no part of the Jacobin theory), but that

common men can all be citizens and can all be soldiers; that common men

can fight and can rule. There is no need to confuse the question with

any of those escapades of a floundering modernism which have made

nonsense of this civic common-sense. Some Free Traders have seemed to

leave a man no country to fight for; some Free Lovers seem to leave a

man no household to rule. But these things have not established

themselves either in France or anywhere else. What has been established

is not Free Trade or Free Love, but Freedom; and it is nowhere so

patriotic or so domestic as in the country from which it came. The poor

men of France have not loved the land less because they have shared it.

Even the patricians are patriots; and if some honest Royalists or

aristocrats are still saying that democracy cannot organise and cannot

obey, they are none the less organised by it and obeying it, nobly

living or splendidly dead for it, along the line from Switzerland to the

sea.

But for Austria, and even more for Russia, there was this to be said;

that the French Republican ideal was incomplete, and that they

possessed, in a corrupt but still positive and often popular sense, what

was needed to complete it. The Czar was not democratic, but he was

humanitarian. He was a Christian Pacifist; there is something of the

Tolstoyan in every Russian. It is not wholly fanciful to talk of the

White Czar: for Russia even destruction has a deathly softness as of

snow. Her ideas are often innocent and even childish; like the idea of

Peace. The phrase Holy Alliance was a beautiful truth for the Czar,

though only a blasphemous jest for his rascally allies, Metternich and

Castlereagh. Austria, though she had lately fallen to a somewhat

treasonable toying with heathens and heretics of Turkey and Prussia,

still retained something of the old Catholic comfort for the soul.

Priests still bore witness to that mighty mediaeval institution which

even its enemies concede to be a noble nightmare. All their hoary

political iniquities had not deprived them of that dignity. If they

darkened the sun in heaven, they clothed it with the strong colours of

sunrise in garment or gloriole; if they had given men stones for bread,

the stones were carved with kindly faces and fascinating tales. If

justice counted on their shameful gibbets hundreds of the innocent dead,

they could still say that for them death was more hopeful than life for

the heathen. If the new daylight discovered their vile tortures, there

had lingered in the darkness some dim memory that they were tortures of

Purgatory and not, like those which Parisian and Prussian diabolists

showed shameless in the sunshine, of naked hell. They claimed a truth

not yet disentangled from human nature; for indeed earth is not even

earth without heaven, as a landscape is not a landscape without the sky.

And in, a universe without God there is not room enough for a man.

It may be held, therefore, that there must in any case have come a

conflict between the old world and the new; if only because the old are

often broad, while the young are always narrow. The Church had learnt,

not at the end but at the beginning of her centuries, that the funeral

of God is always a premature burial. If the bugles of Bonaparte raised

the living populace of the passing hour, she could blow that yet more

revolutionary trumpet that shall raise all the democracy of the dead.

But if we concede that collision was inevitable between the new Republic

on the one hand and Holy Russia and the Holy Roman Empire on the other,

there remain two great European forces which, in different attitudes and

from very different motives, determined the ultimate combination.

Neither of them had any tincture of Catholic mysticism. Neither of them

had any tincture of Jacobin idealism. Neither of them, therefore, had

any real moral reason for being in the war at all. The first was

England, and the second was Prussia.

It is very arguable that England must, in any case, have fought to keep

her influence on the ports of the North Sea. It is quite equally

arguable that if she had been as heartily on the side of the French

Revolution as she was at last against it, she could have claimed the

same concessions from the other side. It is certain that England had no

necessary communion with the arms and tortures of the Continental

tyrannies, and that she stood at the parting of the ways. England was

indeed an aristocracy, but a liberal one; and the ideas growing in the

middle classes were those which had already made America, and were

remaking France. The fiercest Jacobins, such as Danton, were deep in the

liberal literature of England. The people had no religion to fight for,

as in Russia or La Vendée. The parson was no longer a priest, and had

long been a small squire. Already that one great blank in our land had

made snobbishness the only religion of South England; and turned rich

men into a mythology. The effect can be well summed up in that decorous

abbreviation by which our rustics speak of "Lady's Bedstraw," where they

once spoke of "Our Lady's Bedstraw." We have dropped the comparatively

democratic adjective, and kept the aristocratic noun. South England is

still, as it was called in the Middle Ages, a garden; but it is the kind

where grow the plants called "lords and ladies."

We became more and more insular even about our continental conquests; we

stood upon our island as if on an anchored ship. We never thought of

Nelson at Naples, but only eternally at Trafalgar; and even that Spanish

name we managed to pronounce wrong. But even if we regard the first

attack upon Napoleon as a national necessity, the general trend remains

true. It only changes the tale from a tragedy of choice to a tragedy of

chance. And the tragedy was that, for a second time, we were at one with

the Germans.

But if England had nothing to fight for but a compromise, Prussia had

nothing to fight for but a negation. She was and is, in the supreme

sense, the spirit that denies. It is as certain that she was fighting

against liberty in Napoleon as it is that she was fighting against

religion in Maria Theresa. What she was fighting for she would have

found it quite impossible to tell you. At the best, it was for Prussia;

if it was anything else, it was tyranny. She cringed to Napoleon when he

beat her, and only joined in the chase when braver people had beaten

him. She professed to restore the Bourbons, and tried to rob them while

she was restoring them. For her own hand she would have wrecked the

Restoration with the Revolution. Alone in all that agony of peoples, she

had not the star of one solitary ideal to light the night of her

nihilism.

The French Revolution has a quality which all men feel; and which may be

called a sudden antiquity. Its classicalism was not altogether a cant.

When it had happened it seemed to have happened thousands of years ago.

It spoke in parables; in the hammering of spears and the awful cap of

Phrygia. To some it seemed to pass like a vision; and yet it seemed

eternal as a group of statuary. One almost thought of its most strenuous

figures as naked. It is always with a shock of comicality that we

remember that its date was so recent that umbrellas were fashionable

and top-hats beginning to be tried. And it is a curious fact, giving a

kind of completeness to this sense of the thing as something that

happened outside the world, that its first great act of arms and also

its last were both primarily symbols; and but for this visionary

character, were in a manner vain. It began with the taking of the old

and almost empty prison called the Bastille; and we always think of it

as the beginning of the Revolution, though the real Revolution did not

come till some time after. And it ended when Wellington and Blucher met

in 1815; and we always think of it as the end of Napoleon; though

Napoleon had really fallen before. And the popular imagery is right, as

it generally is in such things: for the mob is an artist, though not a

man of science. The riot of the 14th of July did not specially deliver

prisoners inside the Bastille, but it did deliver the prisoners outside.

Napoleon when he returned was indeed a _revenant_, that is, a ghost. But

Waterloo was all the more final in that it was a spectral resurrection

and a second death. And in this second case there were other elements

that were yet more strangely symbolic. That doubtful and double battle

before Waterloo was like the dual personality in a dream. It

corresponded curiously to the double mind of the Englishman. We connect

Quatre Bras with things romantically English to the verge of

sentimentalism, with Byron and "The Black Brunswicker." We naturally

sympathise with Wellington against Ney. We do not sympathise, and even

then we did not really sympathise, with Blucher against Napoleon.

Germany has complained that we passed over lightly the presence of

Prussians at the decisive action. And well we might. Even at the time

our sentiment was not solely jealousy, but very largely shame.

Wellington, the grimmest and even the most unamiable of Tories, with no

French sympathies and not enough human ones, has recorded his opinion of

his Prussian allies in terms of curt disgust. Peel, the primmest and

most snobbish Tory that ever praised "our gallant Allies" in a frigid

official speech, could not contain himself about the conduct of

Blucher's men. Our middle classes did well to adorn their parlours with

the picture of the "Meeting of Wellington and Blucher." They should

have hung up a companion piece of Pilate and Herod shaking hands. Then,

after that meeting amid the ashes of Hougomont, where they dreamed they

had trodden out the embers of all democracy, the Prussians rode on

before, doing after their kind. After them went that ironical aristocrat

out of embittered Ireland, with what thoughts we know; and Blucher, with

what thoughts we care not; and his soldiers entered Paris, and stole the

sword of Joan of Arc.

IV--_The Coming of the Janissaries_

The late Lord Salisbury, a sad and humorous man, made many public and

serious remarks that have been proved false and perilous, and many

private and frivolous remarks which were valuable and ought to be

immortal. He struck dead the stiff and false psychology of "social

reform," with its suggestion that the number of public-houses made

people drunk, by saying that there were a number of bedrooms at

Hatfield, but they never made him sleepy. Because of this it is possible

to forgive him for having talked about "living and dying nations":

though it is of such sayings that living nations die. In the same spirit

he included the nation of Ireland in the "Celtic fringe" upon the west

of England. It seems sufficient to remark that the fringe is

considerably broader than the garment. But the fearful satire of time

has very sufficiently avenged the Irish nation upon him, largely by the

instrumentality of another fragment of the British robe which he cast

away almost contemptuously in the North Sea. The name of it is

Heligoland; and he gave it to the Germans.

The subsequent history of the two islands on either side of England has

been sufficiently ironical. If Lord Salisbury had foreseen exactly what

would happen to Heligoland, as well as to Ireland, he might well have

found no sleep at Hatfield in one bedroom or a hundred. In the eastern

isle he was strengthening a fortress that would one day be called upon

to destroy us. In the western isle he was weakening a fortress that

would one day be called upon to save us. In that day his trusted ally,

William Hohenzollern, was to batter our ships and boats from the Bight

of Heligoland; and in that day his old and once-imprisoned enemy, John

Redmond, was to rise in the hour of English jeopardy, and be thanked in

thunder for the free offer of the Irish sword. All that Robert Cecil

thought valueless has been our loss, and all that he thought feeble our

stay. Among those of his political class or creed who accepted and

welcomed the Irish leader's alliance, there were some who knew the real

past relations between England and Ireland, and some who first felt

them in that hour. All knew that England could no longer be a mere

mistress; many knew that she was now in some sense a suppliant. Some

knew that she deserved to be a suppliant. These were they who knew a

little of the thing called history; and if they thought at all of such

dead catchwords as the "Celtic fringe" for a description of Ireland, it

was to doubt whether we were worthy to kiss the hem of her garment. If

there be still any Englishman who thinks such language extravagant, this

chapter is written to enlighten him.

In the last two chapters I have sketched in outline the way in which

England, partly by historical accident, but partly also by false

philosophy, was drawn into the orbit of Germany, the centre of whose

circle was already at Berlin. I need not recapitulate the causes at all

fully here. Luther was hardly a heresiarch for England, though a hobby

for Henry VIII. But the negative Germanism of the Reformation, its drag

towards the north, its quarantine against Latin culture, was in a sense

the beginning of the business. It is well represented in two facts; the

barbaric refusal of the new astronomical calendar merely because it was

invented by a Pope, and the singular decision to pronounce Latin as if

it were something else, making it not a dead language but a new

language. Later, the part played by particular royalties is complex and

accidental; "the furious German" came and passed; the much less

interesting Germans came and stayed. Their influence was negative but

not negligible; they kept England out of that current of European life

into which the Gallophil Stuarts might have carried her. Only one of the

Hanoverians was actively German; so German that he actually gloried in

the name of Briton, and spelt it wrong. Incidentally, he lost America.

It is notable that all those eminent among the real Britons, who spelt

it right, respected and would parley with the American Revolution,

however jingo or legitimist they were; the romantic conservative Burke,

the earth-devouring Imperialist Chatham, even, in reality, the jog-trot

Tory North. The intractability was in the Elector of Hanover more than

in the King of England; in the narrow and petty German prince who was

bored by Shakespeare and approximately inspired by Handel. What really

clinched the unlucky companionship of England and Germany was the first

and second alliance with Prussia; the first in which we prevented the

hardening tradition of Frederick the Great being broken up by the Seven

Years' War; the second in which we prevented it being broken up by the

French Revolution and Napoleon. In the first we helped Prussia to escape

like a young brigand; in the second we helped the brigand to adjudicate

as a respectable magistrate. Having aided his lawlessness, we defended

his legitimacy. We helped to give the Bourbon prince his crown, though

our allies the Prussians (in their cheery way) tried to pick a few

jewels out of it before he got it. Through the whole of that period, so

important in history, it must be said that we were to be reckoned on for

the support of unreformed laws and the rule of unwilling subjects. There

is, as it were, an ugly echo even to the name of Nelson in the name of

Naples. But whatever is to be said of the cause, the work which we did

in it, with steel and gold, was so able and strenuous that an Englishman

can still be proud of it. We never performed a greater task than that

in which we, in a sense, saved Germany, save that in which a hundred

years later, we have now, in a sense, to destroy her. History tends to

be a facade of faded picturesqueness for most of those who have not

specially studied it: a more or less monochrome background for the drama

of their own day. To these it may well seem that it matters little

whether we were on one side or the other in a fight in which all the

figures are antiquated; Bonaparte and Blucher are both in old cocked

hats; French kings and French regicides are both not only dead men but

dead foreigners; the whole is a tapestry as decorative and as arbitrary

as the Wars of the Roses. It was not so: we fought for something real

when we fought for the old world against the new. If we want to know

painfully and precisely what it was, we must open an old and sealed and

very awful door, on a scene which was called Ireland, but which then

might well have been called hell.

Having chosen our part and made war upon the new world, we were soon

made to understand what such spiritual infanticide involved; and were

committed to a kind of Massacre of the Innocents. In Ireland the young

world was represented by young men, who shared the democratic dream of

the Continent, and were resolved to foil the plot of Pitt; who was

working a huge machine of corruption to its utmost to absorb Ireland

into the Anti-Jacobin scheme of England. There was present every

coincidence that could make the British rulers feel they were mere

abbots of misrule. The stiff and self-conscious figure of Pitt has

remained standing incongruously purse in hand; while his manlier rivals

were stretching out their hands for the sword, the only possible resort

of men who cannot be bought and refuse to be sold. A rebellion broke out

and was repressed; and the government that repressed it was ten times

more lawless than the rebellion. Fate for once seemed to pick out a

situation in plain black and white like an allegory; a tragedy of

appalling platitudes. The heroes were really heroes; and the villains

were nothing but villains. The common tangle of life, in which good men

do evil by mistake and bad men do good by accident, seemed suspended for

us as for a judgment. We had to do things that not only were vile, but

felt vile. We had to destroy men who not only were noble, but looked

noble. They were men like Wolfe Tone, a statesman in the grand style who

was not suffered to found a state; and Robert Emmet, lover of his land

and of a woman, in whose very appearance men saw something of the eagle

grace of the young Napoleon. But he was luckier than the young Napoleon;

for he has remained young. He was hanged; not before he had uttered one

of those phrases that are the hinges of history. He made an epitaph of

the refusal of an epitaph: and with a gesture has hung his tomb in

heaven like Mahomet's coffin. Against such Irishmen we could only

produce Castlereagh; one of the few men in human records who seem to

have been made famous solely that they might be infamous. He sold his

own country, he oppressed ours; for the rest he mixed his metaphors, and

has saddled two separate and sensible nations with the horrible mixed

metaphor called the Union. Here there is no possible see-saw of

sympathies as there can be between Brutus and Caesar or between Cromwell

and Charles I.: there is simply nobody who supposes that Emmet was out

for worldly gain, or that Castlereagh was out for anything else. Even

the incidental resemblances between the two sides only served to sharpen

the contrast and the complete superiority of the nationalists. Thus,

Castlereagh and Lord Edward Fitzgerald were both aristocrats. But

Castlereagh was the corrupt gentleman at the Court, Fitzgerald the

generous gentleman upon the land; some portion of whose blood, along

with some portion of his spirit, descended to that great gentleman,

who--in the midst of the emetic immoralism of our modern politics--gave

back that land to the Irish peasantry. Thus again, all such

eighteenth-century aristocrats (like aristocrats almost anywhere) stood

apart from the popular mysticism and the shrines of the poor; they were

theoretically Protestants, but practically pagans. But Tone was the type

of pagan who refuses to persecute, like Gallio: Pitt was the type of

pagan who consents to persecute; and his place is with Pilate. He was an

intolerant indifferentist; ready to enfranchise the Papists, but more

ready to massacre them. Thus, once more, the two pagans, Tone and

Castlereagh, found a pagan end in suicide. But the circumstances were

such that any man, of any party, felt that Tone had died like Cato and

Castlereagh had died like Judas.

The march of Pitt's policy went on; and the chasm between light and

darkness deepened. Order was restored; and wherever order spread, there

spread an anarchy more awful than the sun has ever looked on. Torture

came out of the crypts of the Inquisition and walked in the sunlight of

the streets and fields. A village vicar was slain with inconceivable

stripes, and his corpse set on fire with frightful jests about a roasted

priest. Rape became a mode of government. The violation of virgins

became a standing order of police. Stamped still with the same terrible

symbolism, the work of the English Government and the English settlers

seemed to resolve itself into animal atrocities against the wives and

daughters of a race distinguished for a rare and detached purity, and of

a religion which makes of innocence the Mother of God. In its bodily

aspects it became like a war of devils upon angels; as if England could

produce nothing but torturers, and Ireland nothing but martyrs. Such

was a part of the price paid by the Irish body and the English soul, for

the privilege of patching up a Prussian after the sabre-stroke of Jena.

But Germany was not merely present in the spirit: Germany was present in

the flesh. Without any desire to underrate the exploits of the English

or the Orangemen, I can safely say that the finest touches were added by

soldiers trained in a tradition inherited from the horrors of the Thirty

Years' War, and of what the old ballad called "the cruel wars of High

Germanie." An Irishman I know, whose brother is a soldier, and who has

relatives in many distinguished posts of the British army, told me that

in his childhood the legend (or rather the truth) of '98 was so

frightfully alive that his own mother would not have the word "soldier"

spoken in her house. Wherever we thus find the tradition alive we find

that the hateful soldier means especially the German soldier. When the

Irish say, as some of them do say, that the German mercenary was worse

than the Orangemen, they say as much as human mouth can utter. Beyond

that there is nothing but the curse of God, which shall be uttered in

an unknown tongue.

The practice of using German soldiers, and even whole German regiments,

in the make-up of the British army, came in with our German princes, and

reappeared on many important occasions in our eighteenth-century

history. They were probably among those who encamped triumphantly upon

Drumossie Moor, and also (which is a more gratifying thought) among

those who ran away with great rapidity at Prestonpans. When that very

typical German, George III., narrow, serious, of a stunted culture and

coarse in his very domesticity, quarrelled with all that was spirited,

not only in the democracy of America but in the aristocracy of England,

German troops were very fitted to be his ambassadors beyond the

Atlantic. With their well-drilled formations they followed Burgoyne in

that woodland march that failed at Saratoga; and with their wooden faces

beheld our downfall. Their presence had long had its effect in various

ways. In one way, curiously enough, their very militarism helped England

to be less military; and especially to be more mercantile. It began to

be felt, faintly of course and never consciously, that fighting was a

thing that foreigners had to do. It vaguely increased the prestige of

the Germans as the military people, to the disadvantage of the French,

whom it was the interest of our vanity to underrate. The mere mixture of

their uniforms with ours made a background of pageantry in which it

seemed more and more natural that English and German potentates should

salute each other like cousins, and, in a sense, live in each other's

countries. Thus in 1908 the German Emperor was already regarded as

something of a menace by the English politicians, and as nothing but a

madman by the English people. Yet it did not seem in any way disgusting

or dangerous that Edward VII. should appear upon occasion in a Prussian

uniform. Edward VII. was himself a friend to France, and worked for the

French Alliance. Yet his appearance in the red trousers of a French

soldier would have struck many people as funny; as funny as if he had

dressed up as a Chinaman.

But the German hirelings or allies had another character which (by that

same strain of evil coincidence which we are tracing in this book)

encouraged all that was worst in the English conservatism and

inequality, while discouraging all that was best in it. It is true that

the ideal Englishman was too much of a squire; but it is just to add

that the ideal squire was a good squire. The best squire I know in

fiction is Duke Theseus in "The Midsummer Night's Dream," who is kind to

his people and proud of his dogs; and would be a perfect human being if

he were not just a little bit prone to be kind to both of them in the

same way. But such natural and even pagan good-nature is consonant with

the warm wet woods and comfortable clouds of South England; it never had

any place among the harsh and thrifty squires in the plains of East

Prussia, the land of the East Wind. They were peevish as well as proud,

and everything they created, but especially their army, was made

coherent by sheer brutality. Discipline was cruel enough in all the

eighteenth-century armies, created long after the decay of any faith or

hope that could hold men together. But the state that was first in

Germany was first in ferocity. Frederick the Great had to forbid his

English admirers to follow his regiments during the campaign, lest they

should discover that the most enlightened of kings had only excluded

torture from law to impose it without law. This influence, as we have

seen, left on Ireland a fearful mark which will never be effaced.

English rule in Ireland had been bad before; but in the broadening light

of the revolutionary century I doubt whether it could have continued as

bad, if we had not taken a side that forced us to flatter barbarian

tyranny in Europe. We should hardly have seen such a nightmare as the

Anglicising of Ireland if we had not already seen the Germanising of

England. But even in England it was not without its effects; and one of

its effects was to rouse a man who is, perhaps, the best English witness

to the effect on the England of that time of the Alliance with Germany.

With that man I shall deal in the chapter that follows.

V--_The Lost England_

Telling the truth about Ireland is not very pleasant to a patriotic

Englishman; but it is very patriotic. It is the truth and nothing but

the truth which I have but touched on in the last chapter. Several

times, and especially at the beginning of this war, we narrowly escaped

ruin because we neglected that truth, and would insist on treating our

crimes of the '98 and after as very distant; while in Irish feeling, and

in fact, they are very near. Repentance of this remote sort is not at

all appropriate to the case, and will not do. It may be a good thing to

forget and forgive; but it is altogether too easy a trick to forget and

be forgiven.

The truth about Ireland is simply this: that the relations between

England and Ireland are the relations between two men who have to travel

together, one of whom tried to stab the other at the last stopping-place

or to poison the other at the last inn. Conversation may be courteous,

but it will be occasionally forced. The topic of attempted murder, its

examples in history and fiction, may be tactfully avoided in the

sallies; but it will be occasionally present in the thoughts. Silences,

not devoid of strain, will fall from time to time. The partially

murdered person may even think an assault unlikely to recur; but it is

asking too much, perhaps, to expect him to find it impossible to

imagine. And even if, as God grant, the predominant partner is really

sorry for his former manner of predominating, and proves it in some

unmistakable manner--as by saving the other from robbers at great

personal risk--the victim may still be unable to repress an abstract

psychological wonder about when his companion first began to feel like

that. Now this is not in the least an exaggerated parable of the

position of England towards Ireland, not only in '98, but far back from

the treason that broke the Treaty of Limerick and far onwards through

the Great Famine and after. The conduct of the English towards the Irish

after the Rebellion was quite simply the conduct of one man who traps

and binds another, and then calmly cuts him about with a knife. The

conduct during the Famine was quite simply the conduct of the first man

if he entertained the later moments of the second man, by remarking in a

chatty manner on the very hopeful chances of his bleeding to death. The

British Prime Minister publicly refused to stop the Famine by the use of

English ships. The British Prime Minister positively spread the Famine,

by making the half-starved populations of Ireland pay for the starved

ones. The common verdict of a coroner's jury upon some emaciated wretch

was "Wilful murder by Lord John Russell": and that verdict was not only

the verdict of Irish public opinion, but is the verdict of history. But

there were those in influential positions in England who were not

content with publicly approving the act, but publicly proclaimed the

motive. The _Times_, which had then a national authority and

respectability which gave its words a weight unknown in modern

journalism, openly exulted in the prospect of a Golden Age when the kind

of Irishman native to Ireland would be "as rare on the banks of the

Liffey as a red man on the banks of the Manhattan." It seems

sufficiently frantic that such a thing should have been said by one

European of another, or even of a Red Indian, if Red Indians had

occupied anything like the place of the Irish then and since; if there

were to be a Red Indian Lord Chief Justice and a Red Indian

Commander-in-Chief, if the Red Indian Party in Congress, containing

first-rate orators and fashionable novelists, could have turned

Presidents in and out; if half the best troops of the country were

trained with the tomahawk and half the best journalism of the capital

written in picture-writing, if later, by general consent, the Chief

known as Pine in the Twilight, was the best living poet, or the Chief

Thin Red Fox, the ablest living dramatist. If that were realised, the

English critic probably would not say anything scornful of red men;

or certainly would be sorry he said it. But the extraordinary avowal

does mark what was most peculiar in the position. This has not been the

common case of misgovernment. It is not merely that the institutions we

set up were indefensible; though the curious mark of them is that they

were literally indefensible; from Wood's Halfpence to the Irish Church

Establishment. There can be no more excuse for the method used by Pitt

than for the method used by Pigott. But it differs further from

ordinary misrule in the vital matter of its object. The coercion was not

imposed that the people might live quietly, but that the people might

die quietly. And then we sit in an owlish innocence of our sin, and

debate whether the Irish might conceivably succeed in saving Ireland.

We, as a matter of fact, have not even failed to save Ireland. We have

simply failed to destroy her.

It is not possible to reverse this judgment or to take away a single

count from it. Is there, then, anything whatever to be said for the

English in the matter? There is: though the English never by any chance

say it. Nor do the Irish say it; though it is in a sense a weakness as

well as a defence. One would think the Irish had reason to say anything

that can be said against the English ruling class, but they have not

said, indeed they have hardly discovered, one quite simple fact--that it

rules England. They are right in asking that the Irish should have a say

in the Irish government, but they are quite wrong in supposing that the

English have any particular say in English government. And I seriously

believe I am not deceived by any national bias, when I say that the

common Englishman would be quite incapable of the cruelties that were

committed in his name. But, most important of all, it is the historical

fact that there was another England, an England consisting of common

Englishmen, which not only certainly would have done better, but

actually did make some considerable attempt to do better. If anyone asks

for the evidence, the answer is that the evidence has been destroyed, or

at least deliberately boycotted: but can be found in the unfashionable

corners of literature; and, when found, is final. If anyone asks for the

great men of such a potential democratic England, the answer is that the

great men are labelled small men, or not labelled at all; have been

successfully belittled as the emancipation of which they dreamed has

dwindled. The greatest of them is now little more than a name; he is

criticised to be underrated and not to be understood; but he presented

all that alternative and more liberal Englishry; and was enormously

popular because he presented it. In taking him as the type of it we may

tell most shortly the whole of this forgotten tale. And, even when I

begin to tell it, I find myself in the presence of that ubiquitous evil

which is the subject of this book. It is a fact, and I think it is not a

coincidence, that in standing for a moment where this Englishman stood,

I again find myself confronted by the German soldier.

The son of a small Surrey farmer, a respectable Tory and churchman,

ventured to plead against certain extraordinary cruelties being

inflicted on Englishmen whose hands were tied, by the whips of German

superiors; who were then parading in English fields their stiff foreign

uniforms and their sanguinary foreign discipline. In the countries from

which they came, of course, such torments were the one monotonous means

of driving men on to perish in the dead dynastic quarrels of the north;

but to poor Will Cobbett, in his provincial island, knowing little but

the low hills and hedges around the little church where he now lies

buried, the incident seemed odd--nay, unpleasing. He knew, of course,

that there was then flogging in the British army also; but the German

standard was notoriously severe in such things, and was something of an

acquired taste. Added to which he had all sorts of old grandmotherly

prejudices about Englishmen being punished by Englishmen, and notions of

that sort. He protested, not only in speech, but actually in print. He

was soon made to learn the perils of meddling in the high politics of

the High Dutch militarists. The fine feelings of the foreign mercenaries

were soothed by Cobbett being flung into Newgate for two years and

beggared by a fine of £1000. That small incident is a small transparent

picture of the Holy Alliance; of what was really meant by a country,

once half liberalised, taking up the cause of the foreign kings. This,

and not "The Meeting of Wellington and Blucher," should be engraved as

the great scene of the war. From this intemperate Fenians should learn

that the Teutonic mercenaries did not confine themselves solely to

torturing Irishmen. They were equally ready to torture Englishmen: for

mercenaries are mostly unprejudiced. To Cobbett's eye we were suffering

from allies exactly as we should suffer from invaders. Boney was a

bogey; but the German was a nightmare, a thing actually sitting on top

of us. In Ireland the Alliance meant the ruin of anything and

everything Irish, from the creed of St. Patrick to the mere colour

green. But in England also it meant the ruin of anything and everything

English, from the Habeas Corpus Act to Cobbett.

After this affair of the scourging, he wielded his pen like a scourge

until he died. This terrible pamphleteer was one of those men who exist

to prove the distinction between a biography and a life. From his

biographies you will learn that he was a Radical who had once been a

Tory. From his life, if there were one, you would learn that he was

always a Radical because he was always a Tory. Few men changed less; it

was round him that the politicians like Pitt chopped and changed, like

fakirs dancing round a sacred rock. His secret is buried with him; it is

that he really cared about the English people. He was conservative

because he cared for their past, and liberal because he cared for their

future. But he was much more than this. He had two forms of moral

manhood very rare in our time: he was ready to uproot ancient successes,

and he was ready to defy oncoming doom. Burke said that few are the

partisans of a tyranny that has departed: he might have added that fewer

still are the critics of a tyranny that has remained. Burke certainly

was not one of them. While lashing himself into a lunacy against the

French Revolution, which only very incidentally destroyed the property

of the rich, he never criticised (to do him justice, perhaps never saw)

the English Revolution, which began with the sack of convents, and ended

with the fencing in of enclosures; a revolution which sweepingly and

systematically destroyed the property of the poor. While rhetorically

putting the Englishman in a castle, politically he would not allow him

on a common. Cobbett, a much more historical thinker, saw the beginning

of Capitalism in the Tudor pillage and deplored it; he saw the triumph

of Capitalism in the industrial cities and defied it. The paradox he was

maintaining really amounted to the assertion that Westminster Abbey is

rather more national than Welbeck Abbey. The same paradox would have led

him to maintain that a Warwickshire man had more reason to be proud of

Stratford-on-Avon than of Birmingham. He would no more have thought of

looking for England in Birmingham than of looking for Ireland in

Belfast.

The prestige of Cobbett's excellent literary style has survived the

persecution of his equally excellent opinions. But that style also is

underrated through the loss of the real English tradition. More cautious

schools have missed the fact that the very genius of the English tongue

tends not only to vigour, but specially to violence. The Englishman of

the leading articles is calm, moderate, and restrained; but then the

Englishman of the leading articles is a Prussian. The mere English

consonants are full of Cobbett. Dr. Johnson was our great man of letters

when he said "stinks," not when he said "putrefaction." Take some common

phrase like "raining cats and dogs," and note not only the extravagance

of imagery (though that is very Shakespearean), but a jagged energy in

the very spelling. Say "chats" and "chiens" and it is not the same.

Perhaps the old national genius has survived the urban enslavement most

spiritedly in our comic songs, admired by all men of travel and

continental culture, by Mr. George Moore as by Mr. Belloc. One (to

which I am much attached) had a chorus--

"O wind from the South

Blow mud in the mouth

Of Jane, Jane, Jane."

Note, again, not only the tremendous vision of clinging soils carried

skywards in the tornado, but also the suitability of the mere sounds.

Say "bone" and "bouche" for mud and mouth and it is not the same.

Cobbett was a wind from the South; and if he occasionally seemed to stop

his enemies' mouths with mud, it was the real soil of South England.

And as his seemingly mad language is very literary, so his seemingly mad

meaning is very historical. Modern people do not understand him because

they do not understand the difference between exaggerating a truth and

exaggerating a lie. He did exaggerate, but what he knew, not what he did

not know. He only appears paradoxical because he upheld tradition

against fashion. A paradox is a fantastic thing that is said once: a

fashion is a more fantastic thing that is said a sufficient number of

times. I could give numberless examples in Cobbett's case, but I will

give only one. Anyone who finds himself full in the central path of

Cobbett's fury sometimes has something like a physical shock. No one who

has read "The History of the Reformation" will ever forget the passage

(I forget the precise words) in which he says the mere thought of such a

person as Cranmer makes the brain reel, and, for an instant, doubt the

goodness of God; but that peace and faith flow back into the soul when

we remember that he was burned alive. Now this is extravagant. It takes

the breath away; and it was meant to. But what I wish to point out is

that a much more extravagant view of Cranmer was, in Cobbett's day, the

accepted view of Cranmer; not as a momentary image, but as an immovable

historical monument. Thousands of parsons and penmen dutifully set down

Cranmer among the saints and martyrs; and there are many respectable

people who would do so still. This is not an exaggerated truth, but an

established lie. Cranmer was not such a monstrosity of meanness as

Cobbett implies; but he was mean. But there is no question of his being

less saintly than the parsonages believed; he was not a saint at all;

and not very attractive even as a sinner. He was no more a martyr for

being burned than Crippen for being hanged.