'WARE POLITICIANS
I
When a man enlisted during the war he found himself living the life of
the common man in a Communist State. Once inside he had no more choices
to make than a Russian under the Soviet. His work, his pay, his food,
his place and mode of living were fixed from on high. He might not even
decide whether he should remain a soldier or be turned, say, into a
miner. If the wisdom that sat up aloft put him down for a draft to a
tunnelling company, to earth he went. He had ceased to be Economic Man,
the being whom we were brought up to regard as causing the world to go
round by making a bee-line to the best pay available. Now he was
ex-Economic Man, or Economic Man popped off all the hooks that had
fastened him into a place in the system called capitalistic by those who
least admire it. No one was left to say of a job any longer that you
might "take it or leave it," for leaving was barred. You could not be
called a wage-slave, for you got no wages to speak of. You had become a
true "proletarian" under a pretty big-fisted dictatorship. It might not
be a dictatorship of the proletariat, but a dictatorship smells about as
sweet by one name as another when it levers you out of bed before dawn
or ties you up to the wheel of a gun for cutting a job that irks you.
Dr. Johnson declined to attempt to settle degrees of precedence between
a flea and a louse. It is as hard to decide between the charms of a
"sanitary fatigue" when done for our War Office and when done for Mr.
Lenin.
In a sense, no doubt, the average man liked it all--the sense in which
men like to break the ice in the Serpentine for a swim. He had willed
it. He felt that when it was over it would be a good thing to have done.
But he also saw, perhaps with surprise, that there were many men who
liked it wholly, without any juggling with future and pluperfect tenses.
They liked to have their hours of rising and going to bed settled by
colonel or Soviet rather than face for themselves this distracting
problem in self-government. They liked meals which they did not choose,
and which might not be good, but which came up of themselves, in their
season, like grass. They liked quarters which they might perhaps have to
share with brethren too weak to carry their liquor and not too wise to
essay great feats of the kind, but which, anyhow, did not have to be
sought for, rented, furnished, and, on every Monday, paid for with a
separate pang. They liked, at any rate as the lesser evil, work which
was no subject of either collective or individual bargain, but came out
of the sky, like the weather, usually open to objection, but sometimes
not.
Perhaps you concluded, after a time, that there must be some
temperaments communistic or socialistic by nature, like the "souls
Christian by nature" of the theologians. You might even have suspected
that in all this wide field of dispute the most fundamental difference
is not between the intrinsic and absolute merits of the individualistic
and of the communistic State, but between two contrasted human
types--the type which is actually happiest in communal messes and
dormitories and playgrounds and forced labour and State-fixed pay in a
State-chosen career, and the type which exults in even the smallest
separate cottage and garden, as a lion rejoices in his own den; the type
which cooks its mutton with a special rapture in an exclusive oven,
however imperfect, and sallies forth rejoicing, as the bridegroom goeth
out from his chamber, to angle for the dearest market for the labour of
its hands and the cheapest for its victuals. So that the only ideal
solution might be to cut up the world, or each of its States, into two
hemispheres, as trains are divided into "non-smoking" and "smoking." A
little difficult, perhaps; but then it is difficult to make either breed
be happy in the other's paradise.
II
Other speculations were apt to visit your mind if, later on in the war,
as a New Army officer, you watched, open-mouthed, the way that much of
the Regular Army's business was done. In civil life you might have had
wild dreams of what business life would be like if its one great, black,
ruling, quelling possibility were for ever removed, if the last Official
Receiver had gone the way of the great auk, and the two-handed engine of
bankruptcy stood no longer at the door, its place being taken by a genie
carrying countless Treasury notes and ready to come in and "make it all
right" as soon as you gave the slightest rub to the electric lamp on
your desk. How nobly free you would be from the base care of overhead
charges! How pungently you would keep in his proper place any large
customer whose tone displeased you! How handsomely, when in a generous
mood, you would cast away the sordid preoccupation of getting value for
money and indulge yourself with a sight of the smile-wreathed face of a
friend to whom you had given the bargain of a lifetime! How dignified a
leisure you would enjoy after all those years of answering letters on
the day you got them! Or, if that were your line, how high you would
wave the banner of an ideal precision, stooping to none of the slavish,
supple complaisances of competitive commerce, but making everyone who
wrote a letter to you mind his P's and Q's, and do the thing in form,
and go on doing it until he got it right, as long as the forests of
Scandinavia held out to supply you both with stationery!
In the throes of a great war, and within sound of its guns, the genius
of our race achieved, at any rate in some minor departmental Edens, this
approach to a business man's heaven. To the rightful inhabitants of
these paradises the intrusion of an ordinary fallen business man, with
his vulgar notions of efficiency, gave something of a shock. He seemed
cold and clammy--a serpent in the garden. "At the War Office," an old
Staff officer plaintively said to one of these kill-joys, "we never used
to open the afternoon letters till the next day." He felt that life
would lose its old-world bloom if he had to do things on the nail.
"After all, it won't kill the British taxpayer"--that was another golden
formula.
III
Returned from these illuminating experiences the victorious soldier
finds the British taxpayer--not, indeed, killed, but rubbing his wounds
and groaning and being advised by several different kinds of friends to
try if a hair, or perhaps the whole skin, of the dog that bit him will
make him feel better. "Put your trust," say the august political
authoritarians, "in your natural rulers, from Lord Chaplin and the Duke
of Northumberland down to about as low as Sir Eric Geddes; scrap all the
outworn and discredited humbug of democracy and parliamentarism;
recognize that only a governing class with ample traditions of skill and
devotion can govern to any effect."
"Rats!" observe the Extreme Left; "all that ramp was exposed long
ago--ruling class and Parliament, and all of it. Turn down aristocracy
and democracy, too, and put your money on the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat and----" At which the poor tax-paying proletarian looks up
with a gleam of hope and asks if he may begin dictating now. With a
pitying smile the Extreme Left explains that it is to be named his
dictatorship, but that it will be exercised not by him but by the Proper
Persons. Will he elect them? he asks. Oh, no; that would be mere
_bourgeois_ Liberalism, quite out of date. Well, he asks, how is he to
feel sure that they will do what he wants? Can he doubt it?--he is
reproachfully asked. Does he not see that men ruling only as dictators
for the whole nation, men serving only their country and no grubby
individual employer or caucus, will and must be fired, at once and for
ever, with a new spirit of devotion, wisdom, purity, humanity, and love
such as was never yet seen on earth--indeed, could not be seen on it
while its surface was defaced with Houses of Parliament and joint-stock
mills?
At this point the demobilized business man is likely to go out
sorrowfully, reflecting that thanks to the war he has known, in turn,
what it is to be one of the rulers, and what it is to be one of the
ruled, in a community where the people below have no hold on the people
above, and where the people above are pricked by no coarser spur than
their own pure zeal for the best of causes in the sorest of its straits.
Communism delights him not, nor Toryism either.
Nor, indeed, any other political creed of all those that he knows.
Liberals he has, perhaps, come to figure as sombre and dry, all-round
prohibitors, humanitarians but not humanists, people with democratic
principles but not democratic sympathies, uncomradelike lovers of man,
preaching the brotherhood of nations but not knowing how to speak
without offence to a workman from their own village. The Labour Party,
indeed, he may feel to be, as yet, not wholly damned, but chiefly
because it has never been tried at the big job. Its leaders have not,
like the Liberal and Conservative chiefs, to answer for any grand public
triumphs of incapacity like the diplomacy that gave Bulgaria and Turkey
to Germany. Labour has not the name of Gallipoli to wear on its party
colours; the _Goeben_ and the _Breslau_ did not escape with it at the
Admiralty; none of its leaders intrigued with any general against his
superiors; it did not turn Ireland's offered help into enmity in the
hour of need. What of that, though? Liberals and Conservatives, too,
might not have failed yet if they had not been tested. As likely as not
that the Labour chiefs, too, would show, at a pinch, the old vice of the
others--live and act in a visionary world of their own, the world as
they would have liked to have it, not the world in which rough work and
fighting and starving go on and the people who make it go round are not
politicians.
IV
A century of almost unbroken European peace--unbroken, that is, by wars
hugely destructive--had built up insensibly in men's minds a
consciousness of an unbounded general stability in the political as well
as in the physical world. The crust of the political globe seemed to
have caked, on the whole, almost as hard and cool as that of the elderly
earth. It felt as if it were so firm that we could safely play the fool
on it, as boys jump on the ice of a pond and defy it to break under
them. So an immense tolerance of political rubbish had grown up. On
decade after decade of indulgence the man of booming phrases and
grandiosely noble professions had swelled into a marvel of inflation
surpassing any barking frog at the Zoo. That doing of hard and plain
work well, which is the basis of all right living and success in men or
nations, had grown almost dull in the sight of a people who took too
seriously the trumpetings and naggings of the various fashionable
schools of virtuosi in political blatancy. It would not be common sense
to suppose that no psychological change of any moment would, in any
case, have been wrought by a passage from that substantially stable
world into a world in which the three great empires of Continental
Europe have been ground to dust like Ypres. Anyhow, the adventure of
finding our cooled and solid earth turning once more into a ball of fire
under the foot would not have left the state of our minds quite as it
had been. They are all the more changed now that most of us feel we have
pulled through the scrape, scorched and battered, by our own sweat, and
not by the leadership of those to whom we had too lazily given the
places of mark in that rather childish old world before the smash came.
Some of the chief ingredients in the new temper are a more vigilant
scepticism; a new impatience of strident enunciations of vague,
venerable, political principles; a rough instinctive application of
something like the new philosophy of pragmatism to all questions; and an
elated sense of the speed and completeness with which institutions and
powers apparently founded on rock can be scoured away. Great masses of
men have become more freely critical of the claims of institutions and
political creeds and parties which they used to accept without much
scrutiny. It is not a temper that need be regarded with terror or
reprobation. In itself it is neither good nor bad. It is the raw
material of either good or evil, accordingly as it is guided--of barren
destruction or of bold repair and improvement. But it is formidable. For
men who have seen cities pounded to rubble, men who with little aid or
guidance from their own rulers have chased emperors from their thrones,
are pretty fully disengaged, at last, from the Englishman's old sense of
immutable fixity in institutions which he may find irksome or worthless.
"There's comfort yet. They are assailable." If the Holy Roman Empire has
been knocked into smithereens, what public nuisance need remain?