MR. BELLOC AND ENGLAND
Mr. Belloc is a democrat. He is politically democratic in the sense in
which the French Revolution was democratic, and he is spiritually
democratic in the sense in which the Church of Rome is democratic. What
is common to all men is to him infinitely more important than the
accidents by which men differ. The same may be said of his view of the
nations of Europe. He does not view these great nations separately, but
in their relation one to another. That in its history which each nation
has in common with the other European nations is infinitely more
important than that which is peculiar to itself alone.
Mr. Belloc said of Danton that he possessed a singularly wide view of
the Europe in which France stood. We may say that in Mr. Belloc's view
England juts out from Europe in a precarious position. England forms an
integral part of Europe, but her position to-day, owing mainly to the
accidents of her peculiar history, is as unique as it is perilous.
There are two books written by Mr. Belloc which deal exclusively with
different aspects of the England of to-day. Of these, the first is _The
Servile State_, in which Mr. Belloc is writing to maintain and prove the
thesis that industrial society, as we know it, is tending towards the
re-establishment of slavery. In this work he is concerned with an
analysis of the economic system existing in England to-day, and with
sketching the course of development in which that system came into
being. In the other book, _The Party System_, in which Mr. Cecil
Chesterton collaborated, he is concerned with an analysis of our present
methods of government.
With _The Party System_ and the views contained in it we shall deal in a
later chapter. Here we are concerned solely with Mr. Belloc's view of
the development of England and especially with that most startling and
original view which he expounds in _The Servile State_ as to the origin
of our present economic system.
Whether in Mr. Belloc's view, or the view of any other historian, the
cardinal point in the history of England is that England was Britain
before it became England: though Mr. Belloc would probably add the
reminder that England was Britain for as long a period as from the time
of Henry VIII to the present day. England was once as much a province of
the Roman Empire as was France. This fact, of course, is commonly
recognized. Where Mr. Belloc differs from other historians, so far as
can be gathered by piecing together hints and allusions from his various
writings, is in emphasizing the fact that the successive hosts of
barbarian invaders were repeatedly brought under the influence of that
Christian civilization which had inherited the magnificent institutions
of the Empire. Thus the Angles and Saxons came under the influence of
St. Augustine and the later missionaries, who, as they became
ecclesiastics and Christianity was recognized as the national religion,
introduced pieces of Roman Law into the Witenagemot and preserved in the
Benedictine foundations the learning and experience of bygone centuries.
In the monastic institution of the sixth and seventh centuries Mr.
Belloc sees the power which re-created North and Western Europe.
This institution [he says] did more work in Britain than in any
other province of the Empire. And it had far more to do. It found a
district utterly wrecked, perhaps half depopulated, and having lost
all but a vague memory of the old Roman order; it had to remake, if
it could, of all this part of a Europe. No other instrument was
fitted for the purpose.
The chief difficulty of starting again the machine of civilization
when its parts have been distorted by a barbarian interlude,
whether external or internal in origin, is the accumulation of
capital. The next difficulty is the preservation of such capital in
the midst of continual petty feuds and raids, and the third is that
general continuity of effort, and that treasuring up of proved
experience, to which a barbaric time, succeeding upon the decline
of a civilization, is particularly unfitted. For the surmounting of
all these difficulties the monks of Western Europe were suited in a
high degree. Fixed wealth could be accumulated in the hands of
communities whose whole temptation was to gather, and who had no
opportunity for spending in waste. The religious atmosphere in
which they grew up forbade their spoliation, at least in the
internal wars of a Christian people, and each of the great
foundations provided a community of learning and treasuring up of
experience which single families, especially families of barbaric
chieftains, could never have achieved. They provided leisure for
literary effort, and a strict disciplinary rule enforcing regular,
continuous, and assiduous labour, and they provided these in a
society from which exact application of such a kind had all but
disappeared.[12]
In this way the just heritage of "our own kind" was preserved for us.
The great monasteries suffered severely in the Danish invasions, "the
pagan storm which all but repeated in Britain the disaster of the Saxon
invasions, which all but overcame the mystic tenacity of Alfred and the
positive mission of the town of Paris"; but they re-arose and were again
exercising a strong civilizing influence "when civilization returned in
fullness with the Norman Conquest."
The Conquest, in Mr. Belloc's view, is "almost as sharp a division in
the history of England as is the landing of St. Augustine ... though ...
the re-entry of England into European civilization in the seventh
century must count as a far greater and more decisive event than its
first experience of united and regular government under the Normans in
the eleventh." But it did not change the intimate philosophy of the
people:
The Conquest found England Catholic, vaguely feudal, and, though in
rather an isolated way, thoroughly European. The Normans organized
that feudality, extirpated whatever was unorthodox or slack in the
machinery of the religious system, and let in the full light of
European civilization through a wide-open door, which had hitherto
been half-closed.[13]
The organization of feudal government by the Normans brings us to a
consideration of the territorial system of England which can be traced
certainly from Saxon and conjecturally from Roman times.
In making the study of history, as does Mr. Belloc, living and organic,
it is of capital importance to seize the fact that the fundamental
economic institution of pagan antiquity was slavery. Before the coming
of the Christian Era, and even after its advent, slavery was taken for
granted. Mr. Belloc says:
In no matter what field of the European past we make our research,
we find, from two thousand years ago upwards one fundamental
institution whereupon the whole of society reposes; that
fundamental institution is Slavery.... Our European ancestry, those
men from whom we are descended and whose blood runs with little
admixture in our veins, took slavery for granted, made of it the
economic pivot upon which the production of wealth should turn, and
never doubted but that it was normal to all human society.[14]
With the growth of the Church, however, the servile institution was for
a time dissolved. This dissolution was a sub-conscious effect of the
spread of Christianity and not the outcome of any direct attack of the
Church upon slavery:
No dogma of the Church pronounced Slavery to be immoral, or the
sale and purchase of men to be a sin, or the imposition of
compulsory labour upon a Christian to be a contravention of any
human right.
Mr. Belloc traces the disappearance of this fundamental institution
rather as follows. He says:
The sale of Christians to Pagan masters was abhorrent to the later
empire of the Barbarian Invasions, not because slavery in itself
was condemned, but because it was a sort of treason to civilization
to force men away from Civilization to Barbarism.[15]
The disappearance of slavery begins with the establishment as the
fundamental unit of production of those great landed estates which were
known to the Romans as _villae_ and were cultivated by slaves. In the
last years of the Empire it became more convenient in the decay of
communications and public power and more consonant with the social
spirit of the time, to make sure of the slave's produce by asking him
for no more than certain customary dues. In course of time this
arrangement became a sort of bargain, and by the ninth century, when
this process had been gradually at work for nearly three hundred years,
what we now call the Manorial system was fairly firmly established. By
the tenth century the system was crystallized and had become so natural
to men that the originally servile character of the folk working on the
land was forgotten. The labourer at the end of the Dark Ages was no
longer a slave but a serf.
In the early Middle Ages, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, at the
time, that is, of the Crusades and the Norman Conquest, the serf is
already nearly a peasant. As the generations pass he becomes more and
more free in the eyes of the courts and of society.
We see then that Saxon England, at the time the Conqueror landed, was
organized on the Manorial system. This arrangement, with its village
lords and their dependent serfs, was common to the whole of the West,
and could be found on the Rhine, in Gaul and even in Italy; but the
Manorial system in England differed from the Manorial system of Western
Europe in one fatally important particular.
In Saxon England [says Mr. Belloc] there was no systematic
organization by which the local landowner definitely recognized a
feudal superior and through him the power of a Central
Government.... When William landed, the whole system of tenure was
in disorder in the sense that the local lord of the village was not
accustomed to the interference of the superior, and that no groups
of lords had come into existence by which the territorial system
could be bound in sheaves, as it were, and the whole of it attached
to one central point at the Royal Court.
Such a system of groups _had_ arisen in Gaul, and to that
difference ultimately we owe the French territorial system of the
present day, but William the Norman's new subjects had no
comprehension of it.[16]
The order introduced by William was not strong enough to endure in face
of the ancient customs of the populace and the lack of any bond between
scattered and locally independent units. A recrudescence of the early
independence of the landowners was felt in the reign of Henry II, while
under John it blazed out into successful revolt. Throughout the Middle
Ages we may see the village landlord gradually growing in independence
and usurping, as a class, the power of the Central Government.
What the outcome of this state of affairs would have been had events
been allowed to develop without interruption, it is impossible to say.
Whether or not the peasant would have acquired freedom and wealth, at
the expense of the landlord; whether then a strong Central Government
would have arisen; whether property would have become more or less
equally distributed and the State have been composed of a mass of small
owners, all possessed of the means of production--these are things we
can only guess. What we do know, and what Mr. Belloc has made abundantly
clear, is that "with the close of the Middle Ages the societies of
Western Christendom, and England among the rest, were economically
free." In England the great mass of the populace was gradually becoming
more and more possessed of property; but at the same time there existed
a very considerable class of large landowners, who were not only wealthy
and powerful, but incapable of rigid control by the Crown.
This, then, was the state of England when an immediate and overwhelming
change occurred. "Nothing like it," says Mr. Belloc, "has been known in
European history." An artificial revolution was brought about which
involved a transformation of a good quarter of the whole economic power
of the nation. If we are to understand Mr. Belloc's view of the England
of the present day, it is essential that we should grasp clearly his
view of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, for from this operation, he
says, "the whole economic future of England was to flow."
Mr. Belloc analyses the effect of the Dissolution of the Monasteries
thus:
All over England men who already held in virtually absolute
property from one-quarter to one-third of the soil and the ploughs
and the barns of a village, became possessed in a very few years of
a further great section of the means of production which turned the
scale wholly in their favour. They added to that third a new and
extra fifth. They became at a blow the owners of _half_ the
land![17]
The effect of this increase in ownership was tremendous. The men of this
landowning class, says Mr. Belloc, "began to fill the universities, the
judiciary. The Crown less and less decided between great and small. More
and more the great could decide in their own favour."
The process was in full swing before Henry died, and because Henry had
failed to keep the wealth of the monasteries in the hands of the Crown,
as he undoubtedly intended to do, there existed in England, by about a
century after his death, a Crown which, instead of disposing of revenues
far greater than that of any subject, was dominated by a wealthy class.
"By 1630-40 the economic revolution was finally accomplished and the new
economic reality thrusting itself upon the old traditions of England was
a powerful oligarchy of large owners overshadowing an impoverished and
dwindled monarchy."
And this oligarchy, which was originally an oligarchy of birth as well
as wealth, but which rapidly became an oligarchy of wealth alone--Mr.
Belloc cites as an example the history of the family of Williams (alias
Cromwell)--not only so subjugated the power of the central government as
to reduce the king, after 1660, to the level of a salaried puppet, but
also, in course of time, ate up all the smaller owners until, by about
1700, "more than half of the English were dispossessed of capital and of
land. Not one man in two, even if you reckon the very small owners,
inhabited a house of which he was the secure possessor, or tilled land
from which he could not be turned off."
Such a proportion [continues Mr. Belloc] may seem to us to-day a
wonderfully free arrangement, and certainly if nearly one-half of
our population were possessed of the means of production, we should
be in a very different situation from that in which we find
ourselves. But the point to seize is that, though the bad business
was very far from completion in or about 1700, yet by that date
England had already become capitalist. She had already permitted a
vast section of her population to become _proletarian_, and it is
this and _not_ the so-called "Industrial Revolution," a later
thing, which accounts for the terrible social conditions in which
we find ourselves to-day.[18]
It is perhaps Mr. Belloc's most valuable contribution to the study of
modern English history that he has destroyed piecemeal that
unintelligent, unhistorical and false statement, found in innumerable
textbooks and taught so glibly in our schools and universities, that
"the horrors of the industrial system were a blind and necessary product
of material and impersonal forces"; and has shown us instead that:
The vast growth of the proletariat, the concentration of ownership
into the hands of a few owners, and the exploitation by those
owners of the mass of the community, had no fatal or necessary
connection with the discovery of new and perpetually improving
methods of production. The evil proceeded in direct historical
sequence, proceeded patently and demonstrably, from the fact that
England, the seed plot of the industrial system, was _already_
captured by a wealthy oligarchy _before_ the series of great
discoveries began.[19]
We see then that the slave of the Roman villa, a being both economically
and politically unfree, developed throughout North-Western Europe, in
the course of the thousand years or more of the uninterrupted growth of
the Church, first into the serf and then into the peasant, a being both
economically and politically free:
The three forms under which labour was exercised--the serf, secure
in his position, and burdened only with regular dues, which were
but a fraction of his produce; the freeholder, a man independent
save for money dues, which were more of a tax than a rent; the
Guild, in which well-divided capital worked co-operatively for
craft production, for transport and for commerce--all three between
them were making for a society which should be based upon the
principle of property. All, or most--the normal family--should own.
And on ownership the freedom of the State should repose.... Slavery
had gone and in its place had come that establishment of free
possession which seemed so normal to men, and so consonant to a
happy human life. No particular name was then found for it. To-day,
and now that it has disappeared, we must construct an awkward one,
and say that the Middle Ages had instinctively conceived and
brought into existence the Distributive State.[20]
By the mishandling of an artificial economic revolution which was so
sudden as to be overwhelming, namely, the Dissolution of the
Monasteries, an England which was economically free, was turned into the
England we know to-day, "of which at least one-third is indigent, of
which nineteen-twentieths are dispossessed of capital and of land, and
of which the whole industry and national life is controlled upon its
economic side by a few chance directors of millions, a few masters of
unsocial and irresponsible monopolies."
Thus Mr. Belloc traces the growth and development of our economic
conditions. In _The Servile State_ he goes further and shows what new
conditions are rapidly developing out of those now in existence.
At the present time, we know, the economic freedom of
nineteen-twentieths of the English people has disappeared. Will their
political freedom also disappear?
To this question Mr. Belloc's answer is as decided as it is startling.
He does not argue that the political freedom of the proletariat may
possibly disappear. He says that it has _already begun_ to disappear.
The Capitalist State, he argues, in which all are free but in which the
means of production are in the hands of a few, grows unstable in
proportion as it grows perfect. The internal strains which render it
unstable are, first, the conflict between its social realities and its
moral and legal basis, and, second, the insecurity to which it condemns
free citizens; the fact, that is, that the few possessors can grant or
withhold livelihood from the many non-possessors. There are only three
solutions of this instability. These are, the distributive solution, the
collectivist solution, and the servile solution. Of these three stable
social arrangements the reformer, owing to the Christian traditions of
society, will not advocate the introduction of the servile state, which
Mr. Belloc defines as "that arrangement of society in which so
considerable a number of the families and individuals are constrained by
positive law to labour for the advantage of other families and
individuals as to stamp the whole community with the mark of such
labour." If this arrangement be not advocated, there remain only the
distributive and the collectivist solutions. Collectivism being to a
certain extent a natural development of Capitalism and appealing both to
capitalist and proletarian, is apparently the easier solution. But, says
Mr. Belloc--and this is the kernel of his whole thesis--the Collectivist
theory _in action_ does not produce Collectivism, but something quite
different; namely, the Servile State. There is only one way, according
to Mr. Belloc's argument, in which Collectivism can be put into force,
and that is by confiscation. The reformer is not allowed to confiscate,
but he is allowed to do all he can to establish security and sufficiency
for the non-owners. In attaining this object he inevitably establishes
servile conditions.
In the last chapter of this extraordinarily valuable book Mr. Belloc
points to various examples of servile legislation, either already to be
found on the Statute Book or in process of being put there. He is
convinced that the re-establishment of the servile status in industrial
society is already upon us; but records it as an impression, though no
more than an impression, that the Servile State, strong as the tide is
making for it in Prussia and in England to-day, will be modified,
checked, perhaps defeated in war, certainly halted in its attempt to
establish itself completely by the strong reaction which such free
societies as France and Ireland upon its flank will perpetually
exercise.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 12: _Historic Thames_, p. 91.]
[Footnote 13: _Historic Thames_, p. 101.]
[Footnote 14: _Servile State_, p. 31.]
[Footnote 15: _Ib._, p. 41.]
[Footnote 16: _Historic Thames_, p. 141.]
[Footnote 17: _Servile State_, p. 64.]
[Footnote 18: _Servile State_, p. 68.]
[Footnote 19: _Ib._, p. 62.]
[Footnote 20: _Servile State_, p. 49.]