Mr. Froude) as one among many proofs that the working classes in Henry
the Eighth’s time ‘enjoyed an abundance far beyond that which in general
falls to the lot of that order in long-settled countries, incomparably
beyond what the same class were enjoying at that very time in Germany or
France. The laws secured them; and that the laws were put in force, we
have the direct evidence of successive acts of the Legislature,
justifying the general policy by its success: and we have also the
indirect evidence of the contented loyalty of the great body of the
people, at a time when, if they had been discontented, they held in their
own hands the means of asserting what the law acknowledged to be their
right. ‘The Government,’ as we have just shown at length, ‘had no power
to compel injustice . . . If the peasantry had been suffering under any
real grievances we should have heard of them when the religious
rebellions furnished so fair an opportunity to press them forward.
Complaint was loud enough, when complaint was just, under the Somerset
Protectorate.’
Such broad facts as these—for facts they are—ought to make us pause ere
we boast of the greater liberty enjoyed by Englishmen of the present day,
as compared with the tyranny of Tudor times. Thank God, there is no lack
of that blessing now: but was there any real lack of it then? Certainly
the outward notes of a tyranny exist now in far greater completeness than
then. A standing army, a Government police, ministries who bear no love
to a militia, and would consider the compulsory arming and drilling of
the people as a dangerous insanity, do not look at first sight as much
like ‘free institutions’ as a Government which, though again and again in
danger not merely of rebellion, but of internecine wars of succession, so
trusted the people as to force weapons into their hands from boyhood.
Let us not be mistaken: we are no hankerers after retrogression: the
present system works very well; let it be; all that we say is that the
imputation of despotic institutions lies, _primâ facie_, rather against
the reign of Queen Victoria than against that of King Henry the Eighth.
Of course it is not so in fact. Many modern methods, which are despotic
in appearance, are not so in practice. Let us believe that the same was
the case in the sixteenth century. Our governors now understand their
own business best, and make a very fair compromise between discipline and
freedom. Let us believe that the men of the sixteenth century did so
likewise. All we ask is that our forefathers should be judged as we wish
to be judged ourselves, ‘not according to outward appearance, but with
righteous judgment.’
Mr. Froude finds the cause of this general contentment and loyalty of the
masses in the extreme care which the Government took of their well-being.
The introductory chapter, in which he proves to his own satisfaction the
correctness of his opinion, is well worth the study of our political
economists. The facts which he brings seem certainly overwhelming; of
course, they can only be met by counter-facts; and our knowledge does not
enable us either to corroborate or refute his statements. The chief
argument used against them seems to us, at least, to show that for some
cause or other the working classes were prosperous enough. It is said
the Acts of Parliament regulating wages do not fix the minimum of wages,
but the maximum. They are not intended to defend the employed against
the employer, but the employer against the employed, in a defective state
of the labour market, when the workmen, by the fewness of their numbers,
were enabled to make extravagant demands. Let this be the case—we do not
say that it is so—what is it but a token of prosperity among the working
classes? A labour market so thin that workmen can demand their own price
for their labour, till Parliament is compelled to bring them to reason,
is surely a time of prosperity to the employed—a time of full work and
high wages; of full stomachs, inclined from very prosperity to ‘wax fat
and kick.’ If, however, any learned statistician should be able to
advance, on the opposite side of the question, enough to weaken some of
Mr. Froude’s conclusions, he must still, if he be a just man, do honour
to the noble morality of this most striking chapter, couched as it is in
as perfect English as we have ever had the delight of reading. We shall
leave, then, the battle of facts to be fought out by statisticians,
always asking Mr. Froude’s readers to bear in mind that, though other
facts may be true, yet his facts are no less true likewise; and we shall
quote at length, both as a specimen of his manner and of his matter, the
last three pages of this introductory chapter, in which, after speaking
of the severity of the laws against vagrancy, and showing how they were
excused by the organisation which found employment for every able-bodied
man, he goes on to say:—
‘It was therefore the expressed conviction of the English nation that
it was better for a man not to live at all than to live a profitless
and worthless life. The vagabond was a sore spot upon the
commonwealth, to be healed by wholesale discipline if the gangrene
was not incurable; to be cut away with the knife if the milder
treatment of the cart-whip failed to be of profit.
‘A measure so extreme in its severity was partly dictated by policy.
The state of the country was critical; and the danger from
questionable persons traversing it, unexamined and uncontrolled, was
greater than at ordinary times. But in point of justice as well as
of prudence it harmonised with the iron temper of the age, and it
answered well for the government of a fierce and powerful people, in
whose hearts lay an intense hatred of rascality, and among whom no
one could have lapsed into evil courses except by deliberate
preference for them. The moral sinew of the English must have been
strong indeed when it admitted of such stringent bracing; but, on the
whole, they were ruled as they preferred to be ruled; and if wisdom
can be tested by success, the manner in which they passed the great
crisis of the Reformation is the best justification of their princes.
The era was great throughout Europe. The Italians of the age of
Michael Angelo, the Spaniards who were the contemporaries of Cortez,
the Germans who shook off the Pope at the call of Luther, and the
splendid chivalry of Francis I. of France, were no common men. But
they were all brought face to face with the same trials, and none met
them as the English met them. The English alone never lost their
self-possession, and if they owed something to fortune in their
escape from anarchy, they owed more to the strong hand and steady
purpose of their rulers.
‘To conclude this chapter, then.
‘In the brief review of the system under which England was governed,
we have seen a state of things in which the principles of political
economy were, consciously or unconsciously, contradicted; where an
attempt, more or less successful, was made to bring the production
and distribution of wealth under the moral rule of right or wrong;
and where those laws of supply and demand, which we are now taught to
regard as immutable ordinances of nature, were absorbed or superseded
by a higher code. It is necessary for me to repeat that I am not
holding up the sixteenth century as a model which the nineteenth
might safely follow. The population has become too large, and
employment too complicated and fluctuating, to admit of such control;
while, in default of control, the relapse upon self-interest as the
one motive principle is certain to ensue, and, when it ensues, is
absolute in its operations. But as, even with us, these so-called
ordinances of nature in time of war consent to be suspended, and duty
to his country becomes with every good citizen a higher motive of
action than the advantages which he may gain in an enemy’s market; so
it is not uncheering to look back upon a time when the nation was in
a normal condition of militancy against social injustice—when the
Government was enabled, by happy circumstances, to pursue into detail
a single and serious aim at the well-being—well-being in its widest
sense—of all members of the commonwealth. There were difficulties
and drawbacks at that time as well as this. Of Liberty, in the
modern sense of the word—of the supposed right of every man “to do
what he will with his own,” or with himself—there was no idea. To
the question, if ever it was asked, “May I not do what I will with my
own?” there was the brief answer, “No man may do what is wrong,
either with what is his own or with what is another’s.” Producers,
too, who were not permitted to drive down their workmen’s wages by
competition, could not sell their goods as cheaply as they might have
done, and the consumer paid for the law in an advance of price; but
the burden, though it fell heavily on the rich, lightly touched the
poor and the rich consented cheerfully to a tax which ensured the
loyalty of the people. The working man of modern times has bought
the extension of his liberty at the price of his material comfort.
The higher classes have gained in wealth what they have lost in
power. It is not for the historian to balance advantages. His duty
is with the facts.’
Our forefathers, then, were not free, if we attach to that word the
meaning which our Transatlantic brothers seem inclined to give to it.
They had not learnt to deify self-will, and to claim for each member of
the human race a right to the indulgence of every eccentricity. They
called themselves free, and boasted of their freedom; but their
conception of liberty was that of all old nations, a freedom which not
only allowed of discipline, but which grew out of it. No people had less
wish to exalt the kingly power into that specious tyranny, a paternal
Government; the king was with them, and always had been, both formally
and really, subject to their choice; bound by many oaths to many duties;
the minister, not the master of the people. But their whole conception
of political life was, nevertheless, shaped by their conception of family
life. Strict obedience, stern discipline, compulsory education in
practical duties, was the law of the latter; without such training they
thought their sons could never become in any true sense men. And when
they grew up, their civic life was to be conducted on the same
principles, for the very purpose of enabling them to live as members of a
free nation. If the self-will of the individual was curbed, now and
then, needlessly—as it is the nature of all human methods to caricature
themselves at times—the purpose was, not to weaken the man, but to
strengthen him by strengthening the body to which he belonged. The
nation was to be free, self-helping, self-containing, unconquerable; to
that great purpose the will, the fancy—even, if need be, the mortal life
of the individual, must give way. Men must be trained at all costs in
self-restraint, because only so could they become heroes in the day of
danger; in self-sacrifice for the common good, because only so would they
remain united, while foreign nations and evil home influences were trying
to tear them asunder. In a word, their conception of life was as a
warfare; their organisation that of a regiment. It is a question whether
the conception of corporate life embodied in a regiment or army be not,
after all, the best working one for this world. At least the problem of
a perfect society, howsoever beautiful on paper, will always issue in a
compromise, more or less perfect—let us hope more and more perfect as the
centuries roll on—between the strictness of military discipline and the
Irishman’s _laissez-faire_ ideal, wherein ‘every man should do that which
was right in the sight of his own eyes, and wrong too, if he liked.’ At
least, such had England been for centuries; under such a system had she
thriven; a fact which, duly considered, should silence somewhat those
gentlemen who, not being of a military turn themselves, inform Europe so
patriotically and so prudently that ‘England is not a military nation.’
From this dogma we beg leave to differ utterly. Britain is at this
moment, in our eyes, the only military nation in Europe. All other
nations seem to us to have military governments, but not to be military
themselves. As proof of the assertion, we appeal merely to the existence
of our militia. While other nations are employing conscription, we have
raised in twelve months a noble army, every soul of which has volunteered
as a free man; and yet, forsooth, we are not a military nation! We are
not ashamed to tell how, but the other day, standing in the rear of those
militia regiments, no matter where, a flush of pride came over us at the
sight of those lads, but a few months since helpless and awkward country
boors, now full of sturdy intelligence, cheerful obedience, and the
manhood which can afford to be respectful to others, because it respects
itself, and knows that it is respected in turn. True, they had not the
lightness, the order, the practical ease, the cunning self-helpfulness of
the splendid German legionaries who stood beside them, the breast of
every other private decorated with clasps and medals for service in the
wars of seven years since. As an invading body, perhaps, one would have
preferred the Germans; but only because experience had taught them
already what it would teach in twelve months to the Berkshire or
Cambridge ‘clod.’ There, to us, was the true test of England’s military
qualities; her young men had come by tens of thousands, of their own free
will, to be made soldiers of by her country gentlemen, and treated by
them the while as men to be educated, not as things to be compelled; not
driven like sheep to the slaughter, to be disciplined by men with whom
they had no bond but the mere official one of military obedience; and
‘What,’ we ask ourselves, ‘does England lack to make her a second Rome?’
Her people have physical strength, animal courage, that self-dependence
of freemen which enabled at Inkerman the privates to fight on literally
without officers, every man for his own hand. She has inventive genius,
enormous wealth; and if, as is said, her soldiers lack at present the
self-helpfulness of the Zouave, it is ridiculous to suppose that that
quality could long be wanting in the men of a nation which is at this
moment the foremost in the work of emigration and colonisation. If
organising power and military system be, as is said, lacking in high
quarters, surely there must be organising power enough somewhere in the
greatest industrial nation upon earth, ready to come forward when there
is a real demand for it; and whatever be the defects of our system, we
are surely not as far behind Prussia or France as Rome was behind the
Carthaginians and the Greeks whom she crushed. A few years sufficed for
them to learn all they needed from their enemies; fewer still would
suffice us to learn from our friends. Our working classes are not, like
those of America, in a state of physical comfort too great to make it
worth while for them to leave their home occupations; and whether that be
a good or an evil, it at least ensures us, as our militia proves, an
almost inexhaustible supply of volunteers. What a new and awful scene
for the world’s drama, did such a nation as this once set before itself,
steadily and ruthlessly, as Rome did of old, the idea of conquest. Even
now, waging war as she has done, as it were, ἐν παρεργᾷ, thinking war too
unimportant a part of her work to employ on it her highest intellects,
her flag has advanced in the last fifty years over more vast and richer
tracts than that of any European nation upon earth. What keeps her from
the dream which lured to their destruction Babylon, Macedonia, Rome?
This: that, thank God, she has a conscience still; that, feeling
intensely the sacredness of her own national life, she has learned to
look on that of other people’s as sacred also; and since, in the
fifteenth century, she finally repented of that wild and unrighteous
dream of conquering France, she has discovered more and more that true
military greatness lies in the power of defence, and not of attack; not
in waging war, but being able to wage it; and has gone on her true
mission of replenishing the earth more peacefully, on the whole, and more
humanely, than did ever nation before her; conquering only when it was
necessary to put down the lawlessness of the savage few for the
well-being of the civilised many. This has been her idea; she may have
confused it and herself in Caffre or in Chinese wars; for who can always
be true to the light within him? But this has been her idea; and
therefore she stands and grows and thrives, a virgin land for now eight
hundred years.
But a fancy has come over us during the last blessed forty years of
unexampled peace, from which our ancestors of the sixteenth century were
kept by stern and yet most wholesome lessons; the fancy that peace, and
not war, is the normal condition of the world. The fancy is so fair that
we blame none who cherish it; after all they do good by cherishing it;
they point us to an ideal which we should otherwise forget, as Babylon,
Rome, France in the seventeenth century, forgot utterly. Only they are
in haste (and pardonable haste too) to realise that ideal, forgetting
that to do so would be really to stop short of it, and to rest contented
in some form of human society far lower than that which God has actually
prepared for those who love Him. Better to believe that all our
conceptions of the height to which the human race might attain are poor
and paltry compared with that toward which God is guiding it, and for
which he is disciplining it by awful lessons: and to fight on, if need
be, ruthless, and yet full of pity—and many a noble soul has learnt
within the last two years how easy it is to reconcile in practice that
seeming paradox of words—smiting down stoutly evil wheresoever we shall
find it, and saying, ‘What ought to be, we know not; God alone can know:
but that this ought not to be, we do know, and here, in God’s name, it
shall not stay.’
We repeat it: war, in some shape or other, is the normal condition of the
world. It is a fearful fact: but we shall not abolish it by ignoring it,
and ignoring by the same method the teaching of our Bibles. Not in mere
metaphor does the gospel of Love describe the life of the individual good
man as a perpetual warfare. Not in mere metaphor does the apostle of
Love see in his visions of the world’s future no Arcadian shepherd
paradises, not even a perfect civilisation, but an eternal war in heaven,
wrath and woe, plague and earthquake; and amid the everlasting storm, the
voices of the saints beneath the altar crying, ‘Lord, how long?’ Shall
we pretend to have more tender hearts than the old man of Ephesus, whose
dying sermon, so old legends say, was nought but—‘Little children, love
one another’; and who yet could denounce the liar and the hater and the
covetous man, and proclaim the vengeance of God against all evildoers,
with all the fierceness of an Isaiah? It was enough for him—let it be
enough for us—that he should see, above the thunder-cloud, and the rain
of blood, and the scorpion swarm, and the great angel calling all the
fowl of heaven to the supper of the great God, that they might eat the
flesh of kings and valiant men, a city of God eternal in the heavens, and
yet eternally descending among men; a perfect order, justice, love, and
peace, becoming actual more and more in every age, through all the
fearful training needful for a fallen race.
Let that be enough for us: but do not let us fancy that what is true of
the two extremes must not needs be true of the mean also; that while the
life of the individual and of the universe is one of perpetual
self-defence, the life of the nation can be aught else: or that any
appliances of scientific comforts, any intellectual cultivation, even any
of the most direct and common-sense arguments of self-interest, can avail
to quiet in man those outbursts of wrath, ambition, cupidity, wounded
pride, which have periodically convulsed, and will convulse to the end,
the human race. The philosopher in his study may prove their absurdity,
their suicidal folly, till, deluded by the strange lull of a forty years’
peace, he may look on wars as in the same category with flagellantisms,
witch-manias, and other ‘popular delusions,’ as insanities of the past,
impossible henceforth; and may prophesy, as really wise political
economists were doing in 1847, that mankind had grown too sensible to go
to war any more. And behold, the peace proves only to be the lull before
the thunderstorm; and one electric shock sets free forces unsuspected,
transcendental, supernatural in the deepest sense; forces which we can no
more stop, by shrieks at their absurdity, from incarnating themselves in
actual blood, and misery, and horror, than we can control the madman in
his paroxysm by telling him that he is a madman. And so the fair vision
of the student is buried once more in rack and hail and driving storm;
and, like Daniel of old when rejoicing over the coming restoration of his
people, he sees beyond the victory some darker struggle still, and lets
his notes of triumph die away into a wail,—‘And the end thereof shall be
with a flood; and to the end of the war desolations are determined.’