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ARTHUR BRYANT

ENGLISH SAGA

( I 840- 1940)

Collins

14 ST. JAMES’S PLACE LONDON

THIS BOOK IS SET IN FONTANA, A NEW TYPE FACE HESIONED
FOR THE EXCLUSIVE USE OF THE HOUSE OF GOUJNS, AND
PRINTED BY THEM IN GREAT BRITAIN

First Impression
Second ,,
Tliird „
Fourth „
Fifth

Sixth „
Seventh „
Eighth „
Ninth „
Tenth „
Eleventh ,,
Twelfth ,,

- December, 1940

- January, 1941

- February, 1941

- Jtoly, 1941

- October, 1941

- May, 194a

- January, 1943

- May, 1943

- November, 1943

- November, 1944

- November, 1945

OOLUNS CL3CAS-TYPE PRESS : LONDON AND CUASOOW
COPYRIGHT

LORD QUEENBOROUGH,
Englishman

Their children also shall be as aforetime, and their
congregation shall be established before me, and I will
punish all that oppress them. And their nobles shall be

of themselves, and their governor shall proceed from the
midst of them; and I will cause him to draw near, and
he shall approach unto me. . . . And ye shall be my
people, and I will be your God.”

Jeremiah xxx.

CONTENTS

CSAFISB PAOX

Preface xi

1. Green Land Far Away i

2. Dark Satanic Mills 51

3. Iron Horse 79

4. The Fighting ’Fifties 106

5. The March of the Caravan 153

6 . Shooting Niagara 187

7. Lest We Forget 231

8. Battle in the Mud 274

9. Crumbling Heritage 298

£0. Way of Redemption 315

PREFACE

T hose fighting have a right to the answer to a question
now forming in millions of minds. What is gmy to happen
after (he War ? For we know what happened after the last
In a wartime broadcast Mr. J. 6. Priestley, contrasting a visit to a
deserted Margate with one taken a few years ago, asked himself
whether, had he a magician’s power, he would bring back that
happier peacetime scene in place of the grisly present And he
answered. No. For by making such a choice he would forego the
r^ht to make a better future—a Margate and an England which
no man can at present even visualise.

The key to a nation’s future is in her past A nation tiiat loses
it has no future. For moi’s deepest desires—the instrument by
which a continuing society moulds its destiny—spring from their
own inherited experience. We cannot recreate the past, but we
cannot escape it It is in our blood and bone. To underst^d the
temperament of a people, a statesman has first to know its history.

This record of a hundred years of crowded social evolution has
been written at a turning point in England’s existence. At the
time it opens an old society was dying largely through its inability
to adapt itself to revolutionary change. The new nation which
took its place never understood it The England of the rationalists
and the money-makers had no time to consider the England of
the ‘‘yeoman and the ale house on the heath.” It thus lost the
key to its own past and future. Its divided postmty has been
seeking it ever since.

The social conditions of that older England—Christian, rural,
half-democratic and half-authoritarianr-were the outcome of
centuries of evolution. They combined diversity with great
cohesion and strength. Within their strong but narrow coi^es
the English had devdoped the capacity for compromise, ordered
freedom and toleration which is the core of modem democracy,
defeated the attempts of the Spanish and French Empires to
dominate the world by force and established, with the aid of sister
kingdoms, the British Empire in their stead. Th^ left posterity,
the English village and counti^de, the parliamentary

PREFACE

xii

the geniiis of Shakespeare and Newton and the London of
Wren. The present may still have something to learn from a
community that could achieve so much out of so little.

Its virtues sprang from nature, but also from conscioiis will.
The English were what they were because they had long wished
to be. Their tradition derived from the Catholic past of Europe.
Its purpose was to make Christian men—gentle, generous,
htmible, valiant and chivalrous. Its ideals were justice, mercy
and diarity. Shakespeare was not writing fantasy when he put
into the mouth of John of Gaimt his vision of a

“land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land;

Dear for her reputation through the world.”

He was merely defining the character of his country.

Her institutions were moulded to make it easier for her people
to attain that character. Within their framework they could live
Christian lives vrithout denying human needs and without
constant conflict between their conscience and their circumstance.
A sqiAe or merchant who treated his neighbours with a sense of
responsibility could still prosper. As a result of long and un¬
broken Christian usage, it became native to the English to live
and work in a society in which moral responsibility existed. And
when England broke with the Catholic past—partly out of a
critical sense of its human imperfections—she still cherished the
old ideal of a nation dedicated to the task of breeding just and
gentle men. All that was best in Puritanism was an attempt to
restate it. Without justice and charity there can be no England.
That is the historic and eternal English vision.

A nation, unlike a man who is subject to death, can get what it
wants if it wants it long and strongly enough. With her un¬
broken island tradition, England more than any other Christian
nation consistently tried to make hersdf a land of decent men
and women esteeming justice, honesty and freedom. Her success
in the fulness of time brought her imparallded prosperity. The
virtues of her people gave them opportunities of wealth and power
greater than, men had ever known before.

They were only human and they in part misused them. Thdr
very sense of the value of liberty and of the significance of the
individual for a time tempted them to condone selfishness and to
forget the historic purpose of their commonwealth. This book
is the story of what happened when they did so.

CHAPTER ONE

Green Land Far Away

“A’ babbled of greea fields.”

Shakespeare .

A Sundkkd years ago, within the life*time of a few old
men and women still living, the population of England
and Wales, now more than forty million, scarcely exceeded
fifteen. That of Scotland numbered another two and a half
millioi^ and Ireland—a restless subject state—a further eight
millions , or very nearly twice what it is to-day. Of these twenty-
six millions, two million lived in London and another million and
a half in seven cities of over 100,000 inhabitants. Scarcely more
than a quarter of the population lived in towns of over
20,000. The rest dwelt, as their fathers before them, among the
fields or in towns from which the fields w^ only a few minutes
■walk. At least half the British race were engaged in rural or
semi-rural pursuits. The overwhelming majority were the sons
or grandsons of farmers, yeomen, peasants and craftsmen.

This comparatively small community comprised the wealth¬
iest, most vigorous and most powerful national unit in the world.
Its rule was acknowledged by more than a tendi of the earth’s
twelve hundred million inhabitants. In less than a century
England had conquered an Asiatic peninsula of 1,800,000 square
miles, thirty-four times- her size, subjecting nearly half of its
two hundred million to her dominion and the remainder to her
virtual control, a still vaster tract of land in North America
inhabited by a sprinkling of British and French settlers and
indigenous Red India^, and at the far side of the world, separated
from her ports by a sea voyage of six months, an entirdy new
continent nearly forty times her own size. Scattered about the
world were other countries, islands and ports which flew the
British flag and acknowledged the sovereignty of the King of
England.

In all this vast dominion 'overseas, there were only two
million men and women of British race, apart from the profes-

ENGLISH SAGA

sional army whidi was fer smaller than that of any other major
power. They inled by measure of their complete mastery over the
seas, won for them in a scries of seven great European and world
wars which, covering sixty-seven out of a hundred and twenty-
six years between 1689 and 1815, had culminated in the defeat and
exhaustion of a rival with a population nearly, three times as great.
Since then, apart firom punitive expeditions against the heathen,
the British had lived in peace with their fellow Christians.

The continent of Europe, of which Britain was geographically
a part, consisted of thirteen Christian nations, the Mahomedan
and partially Asian Ottoman Empire, and forty-one minor Ger¬
man and Italian states which, though enjoying sovereign
independence, lacked national status in the modem sense.
Four only were major powers; the still semi-revolutionary
French kingdom with thirty-five million inhabitants—a source
of perpetud fear to its neighbours; the old multi-racial Empire
of Austria with a slightly smaller population; the parvenu
north German Kingdom of Prussia with about sixteen millions;
and the barbaric Empire of Russia with more than sixty millions
of whom seven millions inhabited the Siberian plains. The once
powerful Kingdom of Spain and the Ottoman Empire, still
exercising an uneasy and despotic sway over the semi-Christian
tribesmen of the Balkans, no longer played any part in the
coimcils of Europe.

Of the other continents, Africa was a savage terra incognita
with a fringe of decadent Mahomedan states littering its
Mediterranean shore, one of which, Algiers, had recently been
annexed by France, and a few scattered British, Dutch and Portu¬
guese outposts along its ocean coasts. Round the latter passed
the ships which carried the trade of Europe to the East. Asia, with
more than two-thirds of the world’s population, had become a
European trading preserve, though still mainly unexploited, with
its southou peninsula British, its vast northern deserts Russian,
and only the moribund Empire of China preserving a semblance
of loose independence while British traders and gunboats injected
western commerce and culture into her eastern ports and creeks.
Japan was a group of dreamy islands, stiU tmopened to
Europe trade and innocent alike of western idealism and
material progress.

Only in North America was there any civilisation comparable
to that of Europe. Here seventeen vigorous millinna of British

GREEN LAND FAR AWAY

descent, who had broken with the too rigid rule of Westminster
sixty years before, were furiously engaged in developing and
throwing open to European emigration an uninhabited con¬
tinent. In central and southern America, seventeen scantily
populated and ramshackle Latin states, recently revolted from
Spanish and Portuguese rule, oflFered an almost illimitable field •
to the exploiter. Here also Britain with her sea power and her
growing manufacturing and banking supremacy was first among
her trading rivals.

• •••••••

Such was the planet in which for that moment in time
rustic England held vigorous but kindly mastery. Her capital,
London was the symbol of that supremacy. With its two milli on
inhabitants it was by far the largest and richest city in the world
and like the nation itself had more than doubled its size since
the beginning of the century. Stretching from Shadwell and
Wapping in the east it extended along both banks of the Thames
as far as outer Chelsea and Battersea: thence a double line of
villas ensconced among trees and large gardens continued almost
to Hampton Court. For the first time in its history the city was
venturing away from the river; houses, skirting the new
Regent’s Park, strayed into the fields and farms of Primrose HiU
where children still gathered the flowers which gave it its name.
Everywhere bricks and mortar were rising: the removal of the
Court from St James’s to Buckingham Palace had stimulated an
outburst of building on the marshy fields and market gardens of
Pimlico, soon to be renamed after its Cheshire owners, Belgravia.
The red brick of which Wren and his successors had re-created
London after the great fire was giving place to white and poten¬
tially grimy stucco:

“Augustus at Rome was for building renowned
And of marble he left what of brick he had found;

But is not our Nash, too, a very great master,

He finds us all brick and leaves us all plaster.”

Standing on top of thef Duke of York’s column on an early
summer day of 1842, the downward-glandng eye lighted on a
jumble of old houses and red-tiled roofs mingling with the
foliage and blossom of Spring Gardens. Along the Mall the trees
still straggled anyhow, imregimented into their modem columns.

ENGLISH SAGA

while cows thrust their‘homed heads over the wooden palings
of Carlton House Terrace. Trafalgar Square was building on the
recently cleared site of the old Royal Mews, where untidy adver¬
tisement-pasted hoardings concealed the stump of Nelson’s
slow-rising column and the Percy lion, with ite straight poker
tail, roared defiance above the Tudor brick palace of the Dukes
of Northmnberland.^ Farther afield loomed the great Pantech¬
nicon in Bdgrave Square, and Apslqr House, with its world-famous
inhabitant and its ferruginous shutters defying reform and
revolution, standing solitary against the coimtry setting of Hydq__
Park. Bq^ond lay Kensington village and the first rising mansions
of Bayswater. Southwards towards the river were the Abbey and
the long straight line of Westminster Hall, but Barry’s Houses of
Parliament were still only rising from the scaffolded ashes of
old St. Stephen’s. Opposite that empty spot stood the eighteenth-
century houses of Bridge Street and Westminster Bridge; bqrond
tall chimneys, bespeaking the industrial employments of the
dwellers in the Lambeth and Southwark suburbs, and the virgin
heights of woody Penge and Norwood.

This dty, multiplying itself in every generation, was still
governed on the rustic model of its own past. Side by side with
the medieval Lord Mayor and Corporation were three hundred
parish and other authorities, mostly Vestries, whose functions
overlapped in the most inextricable manner and whose members, .
self-elected or holding office for life under no less than 250 Acts of
Parliament, interpreted democra<y in their own jovial way by
almost ceaseless entertaimnent at the public expense. The
hamma:ing and plastering that daily enlarged London’s circum¬
ference went on without control or interference: except for the
new west-end squares which 'Cubitt was raising for the Marquis
of Westminster, the small speculating builder built as he felt fit
It was the age of “superior Dosset,” carrying his yeoman frugality
and peasant notions of propriety into the building of a new. Rome.
Nobody had time or money to plan: there were no broad aveniies
or boulevards: the town,free from continental fortifications, grew
outwards not upwards and on the principle that the best place to
bmld was the nearest available space. The brand new suburbs
winch housed the City clerks over the former village pastures and

^Thirty .years later, it was still there, standing high above Landseer’s lions in the
Square, and was reputed by mothers in their nursery tales to wag its tail as Big Ben
struck midnight

GREEN LAND FAR AWA 7 5

gardens of Islington, Hoxton and Camberwell, were monotonous
agglomerations of mean streets and terraces marked by pathetic
Cockney attempts at gentility and country ways of living wherever
there was room for a vine, a carpet-sized flower garden or a fan¬
light over the narrow hall.

That was the new London; it was still overshadowed by the
old. -Past the great w'hite invitations to “Try Warren’s” or “Day
and Martin’s Blacking” and the castellated summer houses and
villas of the outer bourgeoisie, the traveller entering London felt
the shock and heard the roar of the cobble stones and saw elm
trees and vsdnkle stalls giving way to continuous lines of houses
and gas lamps. The narrow streets through which the coaches
and drays forced their way were thronged with the human
material from which Dickens and Cruikshank derived their
inspiration. Women in fringed shawls and straw boimets, pock¬
marked and ragged beggars and pickpockets, clean-shaven and
tightly-stocked young men vtith mutton-chop whiskers and tall
flufiy beaver hats, clerks, also crowned with the universal stove¬
pipe, flovsdng inwards to the counter or back to suburban villages
—“preceded by a ripple of errand boys and light porters and
followed by an ebb of plethoric elderly gentlemen in drab gaiters”
—and, as one reached the fashionable squares and roadways of
Mayfair, a wealth of coloured and gilded liveried servants with
stuffed White calves, cockaded hats and gold aigulets, emulating
prize cattle in their rotund solemnity. These not onlyimixed
with the crowds on the pavements and appeared sunning them¬
selves at innumerable doorways but flowed majestically along
the streets at a higher level, as they sat red-nosed on the draped
boxes or stood erect with tall silver-crowned canes on the svsdng-
ing platforms of crested coaches. And behind the double doors
of the great houses of Grosvenor Square and Piccadilly were
their brethren, the hall porters, sitting in vast hooded chairs,
sometimes with a foot-rest and a foaming tankard as witness of
their master’s absence in the country.

These were the rank and file of the private armies of the
privileged, sleeping in truckle beds in tiny dusty attics or dark
basement pantries but sharing their master’s glory and living
on the cream of the land. At the great routs of High
Society and at the Levies of St. James’s, the populace crowding
about the flambeau-lit doorways could see them in all their
magnificence, enacting their well-rehearsed parts in the cavalcade
B.S. B

ENGLISH SAGA

of the last age in which the English rich expended their wealth on
public pageantry instead of on personal comfort. The bedizened
flunkeys and the elegant, disdainful beings they attended never
lacked spectators: a nimbus of ragged wide-eyed urchins, some¬
times jeering, always half-admiring, attended them wherever
they went—gamin school and spawn of the true Cockney with his
love of splendour and his delight in derision.

Here the ages mingled—the past and the future. The great
country houses of Piccadilly behind their high stone walls,
ignoring London and dreaming of the shires from which the rosy
country-bred lords and legislators who governed England
hailed, were washed by the ceaseless tides of the London
of commerce. Jogging past those tall brocaded eighteenth-
century windows, the fathers of the Forsytes sat crowded and
upright within or sprawled, long-legged and check-trousered, on
the narrow knife-edged roofs of the little sixpenny buses that,
driving a resolute Way among the crested barouches, chariots and
landaus of the fashionable west-end, plied between the Bank and
outer Paddington and Brompton or the Yorkshire Stingo close by
leafy Lisson Grove. At the back, straw in his mouth and ribaldry
on his lips, stood the outrageous cad, loudly touting for pas¬
sengers against the conductors of rival machines and pushing his
clients, through the narrow door into his hot, swaying straw-
strewn pen.^ There they sat, six aside on the dirty plush cushions,
glaring suspiciously while their thoughts ranged ahead of the
steaming horses on schemes of money-making which never
troubled the fine pates of die great lords and ladies whose
residences they were humbly passing. For in the first days of the
young Queen new England was on the make and old England was
on the spend. The nation’s growing wealth offered scope for both.

Looking back across the first forty years of our own century
and the long prosperous reign that preceded it, we know how
vigorously and inevitably that young England was advancing to
victory, how doomed was the antique pomp and stately polity it
supplanted. At the time the battle seemed undecided: the founda¬
tions of the old world looked firm and brassy and the busy,,
vulgar confusion of the new rootless and evanescent. The teeming

May 1842 the stipendiary magistrate at the Marlborough Street Police Court
sentenang the conductor of one of Powell’s Brentford omnibuses for an assault on a
pa^^ger, “observed in very in^gnant tones that it was necessary to protect the public
and females in particular against the ruffianly conduct of omnious conductors.**
-^JUusbrated London News^ /, 46.

GREEN LAND FAR AWAY J

legions of tlie money-makers were there on sufferance: back in
the shires from which they or their fathers came, they paid the
common immemorial tribute to the lords of hereditary status
and acre. Down in his native Wessex by the sea, superior Dosset,
master of London bricks and mortar, touched Lis cap with his
yeoman cousinry to the squire of Lulworth or Osmington, Here
in London he fought for a footing in a crowded hurly-burly from
whiclvstatus was lacking for all but the richest. Even for his
place in the omnibus—the advancing chariot of democracy—he
had to rise betimes and struggle: for in the race for money,
many were called and few chosen and the prize was only to the
assiduous, the pertinacious and the thrifty. In 1837 London only
boasted 400 narrow, three-windowed, two-horse buses and 1200
dirty hooded gigs or cabs, with a total carrying capacity of less
than ten thousand.

Other public conveyances there were none. The river, whose
scourings the tides could no longer cleanse, had ceased to be the
city^s waterway: the watermen who had ferried the generations
of the past between the stone stairs were dying out. Mostly.
London tramped over the cobbles to its labour, nearly a hundred
thousand pedestrians daily crossing London Bridge. In those
narrow crow^ded streets Shanks’s pony generally proved the
swiftest mount: with long swinging strides the Londoner
covered his morning and evening miles and went abroad for
country rambles after his midday Sunday dinner. The studious
Macaulay thought nothing of walking for recreation from his
chambers in the Albany to New Cross or riverside Greenwich.

It was a London that still had a country appetite. It ate not
because it wanted vitamins but because it was hungry. At midday
the new London sat down in a panelled steaming chop-house—at
Cock, Rainbow or Chesliire Cheese and many a humbler horse-box
hostlery—to devour steaks, joints, chops and porter, cheese,
potatoes and greens, usuall]^' with hot spirits and water to follow.
Off liver and bacon at lod., a pint of stout at 4i-d., potatoes, bread,
cheese and celery one could dine very comfortably for 2/- and
leave- a pile of coppers for that loquacious piece of old England,
the waiter. Men whose immediate forebears had been hale and
hearty* farmers would think nothing of tackling at a sitting a
boiled leg of mutton with carrots, turnips and dumplings,
black pudding of pigs’ and sheeps’ trotters, tpipe and faggots and
pease pudding. In their appetites the gentry were at one with the

ENGLISH SAGA

rising commercial classes: at Lord Grey’s house Creevey sat down
with five or six others to a luncheon of two hot roast fowls, two
partridges, a dish of hot beef steaks and a cold pheasant, and to a
“double” ^nner of two soups, two fishes, a round of beef at one
end of the table and a leg of mutton at the other with a roast
turkey on the sideboard, followed by entrees of woodcocks,
snipes and plovers, with devilled herring and cream cheese to lay
the last despairing stirrings of appetite. Dinner was followed,
after due time allowed for the gentlemen’s port, by tea, and,
where late nights were in contemplation, by the supper
tray—Melton pie, oysters, sandwiches and-anchovy toast with
sherry, bottled stout and Seltzer-water and the usual mahog¬
any case with its four cut-glass decanters labelled Rum, Brandy,
Whisky, Gin. The London poor, few of whom tasted butcher’s
meat more than once a week, had to content, themselves with
envying the well-filled forms and rosy faces of their betters.

The poor—the flotsam and jetsam of casual labour and the
ne’er-do-wells who lacked the status and solider fare of the skilled
artisan class—were somewhat of a problem in that great dty, and
the bigger it grew the more of them there were. The magnet of
wealth seeking more wealth drew them from the dissolving world
of status and the hedgerow, and from the old trades which the
new were paralysing. To house them the jerry builders worked
ceaselessly, raising innumerable straight streets of plain two-
storied houses with slated roofs, the cheapest that could be built.
Here, and in the regions where older and grander buildings had
decayed to verminous tenements, they lived and died and multi¬
plied, for despite filth and cholera and typhus life proved stronger
than death. Even the down-and-outs and the homeless urchins,
sleeping in their thousands imder the arches of the Adelphi and
Waterloo Bridge, lived.

Many of the worst slums jostled the dwellings of the rich and
the haunts of fashion. There were rookeries of thieves and
prostitutes imder the very Hoses of the lawyers in the Temple and
the legislators in Westminster, and close behind the fine new
plate-glassed shops of Regent and Oxford Streets the urban
poor squatted in worse than farmyard filth and squalor. But
few troubled much about the poor who were left to the
Vestries ^d Providence: every one was too busy making money
or spending it. Only sometimes a wretched creature, rising
from the shadowy recesses of London or Waterloo Bridge,

GREEN LAND FAR AWAY 9

would mount the parapet and, sliding into the water, take swift
dramatic leave of a world that knew small pity for failures.

Strangely contrasted, the life of rich and poor yet mingled.
In Tothill fields, the scholars of Westminster took almost daily
part in gigantic battles against gangs of young roughs from the
adjoining slums. And the street walkers on their promenade from
Temple Bar to Westminster Hall knew more of the good and
great who ruled the aristo-democracy of England than the good
and great would have cared to admit. Many of the traditions of
the Regency died hard, paying tardy deference to the more
squeamish and frugal morals of the money makers. Fine
gentlemen of the shires, accustomed of ancient use and lusty
living to take their pleasure of the willing wives and daughters
of their tenantry—and no one, in their estimation, the worse in
thought or fact—kept dual establishments in town: a house in
Portland Place or Berkeley Square for family and haut ton and a
pretty box for some charmer, promoted from ballet or millinery
shop, in one of the little Chelsea or Brompton Squares that were
ever rising on the sites of the western market gardens. At night
the young bucks and their hangers-on would assemble at the
Cavendish or some neighbouring Piccadilly hostlery. When the
white damask was strewn with empty jugs of Chateau Margaux
and broken decanters of port, they would sally out to wrench off
the knockers and bell handles of Sackville Street and Vigo Lane^
make merry with the blackguard democracy of the London under¬
world on comic songs, roast kidneys, cigars and gin and water
in the smoky haunts of Leicester Fields and the Haymarket,
and finish the night in riotous harmony amid the dishevelled
Cyprian delights of the Piccadilly Saloon, or at Vauxhall gardens,
watching the fireworks and the dances in the Rotunda from a leafy
grotto and lingering long into the morning over sliced ham and
bowl of arrack with the nymphs of the place. The sleepy
turnpike men on the Bridge and the newly-formed Metropolitan
Police, in their tall hats and clumsy belted coats, treated such
privileged revellers with respect so long as they kept their amuse¬
ments from assuming too dangerous a shape. The “Peelers” had
been brought into the world not to molest but to protect
property and its owners. For on the untrammelled use of
property, it was held, the nation’s liberties depended.

A rough natural democracy governed by an aristocracy and
landed gentry was the English model with plenty of scope for

ENGLISH SAGA

folk who wished to be free and easy. But already the shades of a
more prim and decorous age were falling: the new police and
the new passion for making laws had .begun to trace on the
nation’s ruddy face the sober lineaments of a more formal society.
In Oxford Street the first wood blocks had already taken the place
of the cobbles, and in the larger thoroughfares the stone posts on
the pavements were being crowned with spikes to discourage the
urchins of the streets from their interminable leapfrog. The day¬
long music of the London street cries was beginning to grow
fainter.

Within the club-houses of Pall Mall and St. James’s, a new
life for the rich, based on decorum and silqat comfort, was
taking the place of the noisy gambling and- drinking of the
unregenerate past. By 1837 there were twenty-five of these great
institutions from behind whose windows warm men with broad
acres or- money in the Funds could sit over their Quarterly or
Edinburgh Review and watch a safer and remoter world than their
fathers had ever known. Here the old and the new were already
learning to mingle, and the successful man of commerce who had
negotiated the terrors of the black ball might hope to strike an
acquaintance with the quieter sort of lord or squire. There was
even a special dub dedicated to Reform with the most famous
chef in London installed among tin-lined copper pots and gas
ovens to teach old England the way to live after a new French
model.

• • • • « « • •'

At night the march of progress was symbolised by the lighting
of the London streets. Gas lighting had come in a couple of
decades back, and was now being slowly extended front the
main thoroughfares into the courts and alleys of the older London
that besieged them. The great gasometers rose like fortresses
above the drab rows of working-class dwellings, and from dusk till
dawn the flaring gas jets made a peculiar hunaming that was the
musical background to the nocturnal activities of the Londoner.
Judged by modem standards the light they gave was dim and
little difFused: to om rustic forefathers it seemed a prodigious
illumination. Yet four years were to elapse befor? the main
road from Hyde Tark Comer to Kensington was lit by a single
lamp.

The essential services of life were still supplied to the Londoner
after a country model. Donkeys carried vegetables to Covent

GREEN LAND FAR AWAY .-II

Garden and colliers or “Geordies” brought their “best Wall^^id*^
from Tyne and Wear by sail: a prolonged west wind could ca^e*
a fuel shortage in the capital. And the wintry streets were p^^
ambulated by tall-hatted coalheavers peddling their wares. Here,
too, the old cries of London were still heard: in winter crossing-
sweepers sat by braziers to gather toll of familiar clients for
keeping their pitcli clean. In her rough white cottage in Hyde
Park opposite Knightsbridge, old Ann Hicks sold gilt gingerbreads
and curds and whey and took her modest toll, won by half a
century of prescription, of Park brushwood and hurdles to make
her fire. In the new Bayswater road one could watch haymakers
in the open fields to the north: a little farther on, where the gravel
Oxford turnpike fell into Netting Dale, the pig-keepers who
supplied the London hotels squatted in rustic confusion. In the
cellars of Westminster as well as in the suburbs Londoners still
kept cows: the metropolis’ milk supply was mainly home-made
with, so it was hinted, liberal assistance from the pump.^ And.
on any Monday morning herds of cattle were driven by drovers
armed with cudgels and iron goads through the narrow streets
to Simthfield: pedestrians were sometimes gored by the poor
beasts. In Smithfield Tellus kept his unsavotuy rustic court: a
nasty, filthy, dangerous country Bastille in the heart of London
and a great offence to sensitive and progressive persons. Vested
interests defended it stubbornly against all assaults: Punch
depicted a proprietary Alderman taking his wife and family
for a walk there. “OhI how delicious,” he declares, “the
drains are this morning I”

How rustic London still was could be seen from its summer
greenery. The west-end was full of trees and green squares and
courts. The fields were half-a-mile away from Buckingham
Palace and Grosvenor Square, and snipe were occasionally shot
in the Pimlico marshes. In St. James’s Park long rough im-
trimmed grass ran down to the water’s edge, and there were no
railings to keep people from wandering on it. Sometimes on
wintry evenings the scarlet of a huntsman’s coat could be seen in
the fading light ascending the slope of Piccadilly or entering the
Albany courtyard. In Chelsea, where the old brown roofs and
twisted high chinmeys of the houses almost tumbled into the un-

^^Cymes sometimes went further. “ A great fall of chalk occurred at Merstham on the
Brighton Railway . . .; a corresponding faU of milk took place in London on the
following day.”—PttncA, /, 6th iVbt?., jSfr.

ENGLISH SAGA

embanked river, the sage Carlyle rode down eighteenth-century
lanes to improve his digestion. Here on Saturdays would come
bowling by many “a spicy turn-out and horse of mettle and
breed,” with the little liveried top-hatted tiger swinging on the
footboard behind and his gay baclielor master smoking his
cheroot and flicking his wliip as he sped to his riverside villa, with
its fairy-like grounds, cellar of recherche wines, pictures, statues,
and “many a gem of vertue.”

Elegant London of royal Victoria’s virgin da}^ where Jullien,
the Napoleon of Quadrille, “saucily served Mozart with sauce-
piquant” .ziadt. Tagliom danced like a spirit in Rossini’s newest
ballet! For all its ragged hungry urchins, its fever-stricken
alleys and crushing poverty, there was still music and gaiety in
it. In August, 1842, Mozart’s Costfan tutte was being sung at His
Majesty’s and Rossini’s Semiramide at Covent Garden under the
direction of Benedict, while Purcell’s King Arthur was rehearsing
at Drury Lane and Spohr’s new opera. The Fall of Babylon, at
the Hanover Rooms.

***•••••

There was a pastoral quality about the amusements of our
great-grandparents. The great summer regattas on the Thames
between London Bridge and Hammersmith were attended by
paddle steamers with brass bands and boats full of fluttering
flags and pretty girls giggling in the sunlight under painted
a.wnings, while the banks were thronged with runners and riders
and convivial parties watching from the festooned balconies and
gardens of riverside pubs. At Putney Fair were Fat Ladies and
Learned Pigs, much “firing of cannon, jollity, shouting, jangling
of street pianos and popping of ginger beer,” and many a pull at
Finch’s ale. Every Whit Tuesday the Cockneys went en masse to
Greenwich, cargo after cargo going down the river singing and
cheering and devouring stout and sandwiches, to sample the
traditional delights of the great fair—^its rows of booths himg
with dolls, gilt gingerbreads and brandy balls, its raree-shows and
performing pigs, its giants and its dwarfs. Here prentices and
shop boys pushed about with whistles, penny trumpets, false
noses and rolled twopenny scrapers—in sound simulating tearing
material—down the backs of their elders. And the park was filled
■with young people and hoydens—^playing at kiss-in-the-ring,
riding donkeys, or, more simply, tumbling head over heels down
the hill.

GREEN LAND FAR AWAY I3

For though London was the greatest city in the world its
people still had their roots in the country or were separated only
by a generation or two from country ways. They were scarcely
yet sophisticated. The poorer streets were frequented by gigantic
brown dancing bears led by picturesque, seedy-looking Italians.
Barry, the clown at Astley’s Circus, went down the Thames in a
washing tub drawn by geese, and a lady rider at Vauxhall could
draw all London. For children the chief sights of the town were
the Tower, the Elgin Marbles and Mr. Cross’s Surrey Zoo,
recently moved from the old Royal Mews to make way for
Trafalgar Square. Here in the grounds of Walworth Manor
lions and tigers perambulated in a circular glass conservatory
more than a hundred yards wide and a giant tortoise carried
children on his back. Another popular treat was the Panorama.
At the Colosseum on the east side of Regent’s Park one could
view the Fire of London with canvas scenery and fireworks and
the Alps with a real Swiss and a real eagle. Athens and the
Himalayas were also shown for a shilling—" the Ganges glittering
a hundred and fifty miles off, and far away the snowy peak of the
mountain it rises from.” A little later a new Royal Panorama
was opened in Leicester Square, where scenes from England’s
contemporary colordal wars were presented in the maimer of a
modem news reel. The battle of Waterloo—the chief title-deed,
with Trafalgar, of an Englishman’s iimate superiority to all
foreigners—^was a permanent exhibit.

For sport the well-to-do Londoner affected the pastimes of
squires and farmers. Cricket was already established at Lord’s
suburban ground and was played vigorously in top-hats; but
shooting parties, steeplechases, hunting with the Queen’s, the Old
Berkeley or the Epping Hunt, and fishing up the river were far
more widely patronised. At Richmond the well-to-do merchant
and shopkeeper, arrayed in top-hat, white tie and long tail coat,
would sit in a punt of a Saturday afternoon perched on a chair
with rod and line, dining afterwards at the Star and Garter and
calling on the way home at the pastrycook’s to buy his wife six-
penniworth of Maids of Honour. The Englishman, though
immersed in low commerce, liked above all to think of himself
as a man of potential acres—a yoimger son who might one day
come into his heritage. His, as Mr. R. H. Mottram has written,
was “that almost divine snobbery of very strong motive power
that keeps the Englishman from being content ever to be classed as

ENGLISHSAGA

a workman or labourer, a priest or soldier or scholar, as men of
other dvilisations are, and makes him always desire to be a
gentleman, a word without equivalent in any other lan¬
guage.”^

The old Chelsea bun house, the ale-house standing solitary in
the Kensington road between Hyde Park Comer and the royal
gardens, the ox that was roasted whole in the park on Coronation
Day, were all raninders that the capital of a great empire had not
wholly shaken off the village. So were the established bad
characters who frequented its shady gambling-houses and saloons,
the imitation bucks and dandies, the bankrupts, bullies and half¬
pay captains who still, in the last age before the railway came in,
sometimes emulated Macheath and Turpin by robbing the be¬
nighted traveller in Epping Forest'or on the Surrey heaths. On
an execution morning at Newgate one saw the rough old London
of the landless squatter—greasy, verminous and grimy—gathered
outside the gaol; ribaldry, coarse jokes, reckless drinking and
unashamed debaucheiy continued uproariously until the chimes
of St. Sepulchre’s striking eight and the tolling of the prison bell
brought a momentary hush as the prisoner mounted the stq)s and
the sickly jerk of the rope gave the signal for an unearthly yell
of exeaation. For countrymen deprived of their land and status
soon degenerated.

So rough and ill-disciplined was that London that until
Home Secretary Peel had established his Metropolitan Police in
1829, St. James’s Park had been patrolled by Household Cavalry.
Many still living could remember the terrible week when the
mob, emerging from its filthy lairs in the cellars and crazy
tenements of Blackfriars and St. Giles’s, had surrounded Parlia¬
ment and all but burnt the capital. When in the winter before her
coronation the little Queen, with pretty pink cheeks and pouting
mouth, drove behind her emblazoned guards through the streets,
the crowd gaped but scarcely a hat was raised or a cheer heard.
“The people of England,” wrote Greville, “seemed inclined to
hurrah no more.” Even at Ascot in the following summer only a
few hats were raised as the royal barouche drove down the
course.

There were some in that age who thought England was
driving to a republic, for a hundred and fifty years the innate
English loyalty to the monarchic principle had been undetr

Victorian England {Edited G. M. Toung) /, idg*

GREEN LAND EAR AWAY

mined by the iconoclastic Whig contempt for royaltyi and its
pomps and gewgaws, by a race of foreign rulers on the throne and
during the last four decades by the vagaries and indecorums, of
the royal family. These had reached their climax in 1821 in the
spectacle of a stout, vulgar and hysterical German Queen vainly
attempting amid the plaudits of the mob to force an entry into
the Abbey at the coronation of her adulterous and bigamous
spouse. Since the death of Charles H. the royal Ku glan H of
Ehzabeth and the Plantagenets had been transformed almost
unknowingly into oligarchy. A sovereign sat on the throne
and went through ancient forms, but an aristocracy governed.
.Though the dignity with which the young Queen bore her part
in the ceremonies of coronation in the summer of 1838 did some¬
thing to stir deeper and latent national instincts®, the general
feeling was expressed by William Dyott when he wrote, “A very
young Queen coming to the throne of this mighty empire (just
eighteen years of age) brought up and subject to the control of a
weak and capricious mother, surrounded by the parent’s chosen
advisers . . . gives token of impropitious times to come.”

The real rulers of England were still the greater squires, in the
course of a century and a half of monopoly and splendid, unblush¬
ing corruption they had inch by inch pared the powers both of the
Crown and of the smaller squirearchy.- In the latter eighteenth
century, ih their hunger for ever more land, they had even
destroyed the English peasantry. They were the most accom¬
plished and cultured aristocracy the world has ever seen: by their
great houses and avenues, their libraries and noble possessions and
their likenesses limned by Re3molds or Gainsborough, one can see
the manner of men they were. They left their mark on English
literature and art as the Athenian aristocracy did on that of
ancient Greece—a mark that was both lovely and imperishable.
They increased the wealth and power of their coimtry beyond
measure, extended her dominions into every sea, gave her arts and
industries that enriched the human race for generations, and
confronted by superior force, htimbled by their inspired use of
English courage and manhood the tyranny alike of Grand

^“Is it true,” Queen Victoria is reported to have asked the last great Whig, Lord
John Russell, “that you hold that a subject is justified in certain circumstances in dis¬
obeying his Sovereign?” “Speaking to a soverei^ of the House of Hanover, your
Majesty,” he replied, “I can only say that I suppose it is.”

^When, pale and tremulous, she took her sceptre and declared before the crowded
Abbey, “I have it and none shall wrest it from me,” even the xnisanthropic Jeremialf,
Carlyle, uttered a grudging blessing.

ENGLISH SAGA

Monarque, Revolutionary Tribune and Military Empire.

They had almost imtrammelled power; they gambled,
hunted, drank and whored, they feared no man, they did what
was good in their own eyes, yet they did it with some measure of
moderation and restraint. In this they differed from other
t3Tants and were like the ancient Athenians. By the time our
chapter of English history begins, they were already past their
p rim p and starting to decline. One sees them in the tell-tale
pages of Mr. Creevey: with their rentals multiplied out of all
measure by improved agriculture and urban expansion,^ but
already divorced by their staggering wealth from that close
contact with reality and their humbler fellow citizens which
had enabled their forebears to obtain power. Their ruling passion
was the chase. Their tragedy was that they were getting spoilt
by their own excessive wealth and power. Such a one was the
great Lambton of Durham—a man who in his lightning moods
beat his footmen, insulted his guests and declaimed against the
very privileges which enabled him to do these things with
impunity. He was called King Jog having once remarked that a
man could always “jog along” on 5^70,000 a year.

At its best the ruling caste was exemplified in the Duke of
Wellington. The younger son of a music-loving, dilettante lord,
a colonel at twenty-four and a major-general at thirty-three,
privilege—unasked and unsought—had enabled him To turn a
forlorn Iberian adventure into one of the most glorious chapters
of British military history, to fling back the hordes of advancing
Revolution and humble Napoleon himself on the field of Water¬
loo. All this had happened before his forty-seventh year; since
then he had served his country as selflessly in the senate as in the
field. Now at the age of seventy-one he was the greatest public
figure in the nation. Without any of the arts that sway popular
opinion—^which he unreservedly despised—^he had accustomed
himself from his earliest years to a fearlessness in speech that took
the form of a literal and uncompromising truth on every occasion.
Eight years before at the time of the Reform Bill—a measure he
had opposed in the teeth of popular frenzy on the groimds that
sooner or^ later it must lead to a suicidal scramble for power—^he
had had his windows broken by the very mob who a little while
before had acclaimed him as the victor of Waterloo. But he was

^Those of the Shakerleys, a typical north coirntry family, increased tenfold between
1760 and 1830.

GREEN LAND FAR AWAY I7

equally indifferent to the adulation and the abuse of the multi¬
tude: his steady heart valued only the respect of his fellow
aristocrats, the preservation of the national heritage which he had
fought for, and the understanding and society of lively and beauti¬
ful women. He liked only the best. For the second-rate and
the unformed he had nothing but disdain. Even the hard¬
bitten, hard-used men who had fought under his command on
the battlefields of Spain and Flanders he sometimes spoke of as
the scum of the earth.

Over himself and all he did he exercised an iron mastery, long
rendered second nature by proud tradition and unceasing practice.
He devoted that mastery without reserve to the service of his
country. He had one political principle: that the Edng’s govern¬
ment must at all costs be carried on. He had one unfailing rule;
that the work of the day must be done in the day. Despite the
radical Brougham’s ill-tempered remark that Westminster
Abbey was yawning for him, the lingering final act of his long
life w^ one of unbroken glory. When he appeared at the Hullah
choral concert at Exeter Hall in 1842, the choir stopped singing
and the whole audience rose, cheering and waving handkerchiefs
to salute “the great old man . . . now the idol of the people. It
was grand and affecting,” wrote an onlooker, “and seemed to
move everybody but himself.”

Such men were cold in their Olympian calm and detachment;
passionate like all their countrymen in their robust vitality and
the intensity of their personal feelings. Aristocratic statesmen
reproaching one another on the floor of the House did not at
times restrain their tears: and a burst of momentary indignation
could create life-long and xmappeasable enmities. In 1828,
Wellington, then Prime Minister, fought a duel because a fellow
peer in the heat of political controversy had charged him with
Popery. Lord George Bentinck was reported to have lost £27,000
in a single race: Jack Mytton—climax of English aristocratic
eccentricity—went out for a bet stark naked on a winter’s
night to shoot duck and drank a bottle of port before breakfast.
The breed was as vigorous in its loves as in its hates and wagers:
another Prime Minister was cited as co-respondent in the
Divorce Courts when approaching the age of sixty. A great
lady in her eighties, asked by her son-in-law when a woman
ceased to fed passion, replied, “You must ask a woman older than
I am.” Intellects were as tough as passions; strength, natural

l8 ENGLISH SAGA

and quite unconscious, was the distinguishing mark of the race.

Even at its worst—and sometimes in men like the Marquis of
Hertford, Thackeray’s Lord Steyne and Disraeli’s Monmouth, it
was very bad indeed—the standard of that aristocracy was bound
up with a sense of noblesse oblige. They were landowners and
they were hereditary legislators, and as both they had traditional
duties to perform which they fdt they could not leave undone
without shaming themselves and their caste. “ The Duke of
Rutland,” wrote Greville, “is as selfish a man as any of his class
—that is, he never does what he does not like, and spends his
whole life in a round of such pleasures as suits his taste, but he
Ss neither a foolish nor a bad man ; and partly from a sense of
duty, partly from inclination, he devotes time and labour to
the interest and welfare of the people who live and labour
on his estate. He is a Guardian of a very large Union, and he
not only attends regularly the meetings of the Poor Law Guard¬
ians every week or fortnight, and takes an active part in their
proceedings, but he visits those paupers who receive out-of-door
relief, sits and converses with them, invites them to complain to
him if they have anything to complain of, and tells them that
he is not only their firiend but their representative at the
assembly of Guardians, and it is his duty to see that they are
nourished and protected” His fellow Duke of Richmond made
it his business to visit the sick room of the Workhouse of which
he was Guardian when cholera and typhus were raging among
the inmates: he had been in the army, he said, and did not fear
these contagions.

The English aristocracy and the country gentry ruled by
virtue of the fact that they were the focus on which the national
society centred. Wherever they were so—in the village, in the
small country town, in London—^their position seemed strong
and assured. Wherever that focus was lacking—in the great
industrial cities and on the absentee estates of dispossessed Ireland
—aristocracy was already in eclipse and decay. But it still kqit
a substantial measure of its ancient hold on the mind of England.
In its salons in London the intelligentsia were still welcome:
middle-class Mr. Macaulay might talk like ten parrots and a
- chime of bells but he took his place by right of intellect among
the beeches and princely patronage of Bowood and in the rooms
of Holland House. “The world has never seen and never will
see again,” wrote Greville, “anything like Holland House.” In

GREENLANDFARAWAY I9

that society almost everybody who was conspicuous, remarkable
or agreeable was expected automatically to bear a- part.

The instrument of authority through which the landed classes
governed was the House of Commons. Since the seventeenth
century, the greater landowners had preferred to rule through the
lower House in preference to their own. In this they showed
unconscious wisdom, since those set in authority over the English
usually in the end provoke their jealousy and incorrigible sense
of independence. The power of the nobles, established over the
Crown in 1688, had been preserved by being concealed. Through¬
out the eighteenth century the Lords did little more than
record the decisions of the Commons.. But they exercised their
authority by their control of the electoral machinery of the old
unreformed Parliament and by the presence of their relations and
dependents in the lower House. Thus before the Reform Bill, the
Duke of Buckingham alone is said to have controlled the votes of a
dozen members of the House of Commons. Such a man had as
much parliamentary power as a great city like Manchester to-day.

The Reform Bill of 1832, long delayed by the struggle with
revolutionary France, broke this power. Henceforward it was
not the landed magnates of England who controlled its urban
franchise. They still continued to wield considerable interest,
both through their presence in successive governments and
through their family and social ties in the House of Commons.
In Lord Melbourne’s Whig Cabinet of 1835, eleven out of fourteen
members were Lords or the sons of Lords: in its Tory successor
of 1841 nine. But ultimate power was soon to pass into other
hands—to the voters of the growing cities and towns of industrial
England.

Not that anyone yet realised it. The £10 householders enfran¬
chised in 1832 scarcely constituted a revolutionary body. They
were a respectable and to those of superior station who troubled
to approach them rightly, an even deferential body, as Macaulay,
deprived of Lord Lansdowne’s rotten borough of Caine by the
Reform Bill, discovered when he contested Leeds in 1832. “My
leading friends,” he wrote to his sister, “are very honest, sub¬
stantial manufacturers. They feed me on roast-beef and York¬
shire pudding: at night they put me into capital bedrooms; and
the only plague which they give me is that they are always
begging me to mention some food or wine for which I have a

ENGLISH SAGA

fancy, or some article of comfort and convenience which I may
wish them to procure.” The wealth, power and culture of an
andent and complex community continued to be represented
by those who possessed them. In 1840 nobody in Parliament, and
few outside, would have questioned the propriety of this.

But, though this attitude to the „ art of Government was
subconsdously held by almost every member of the two ruling
assemblies, they were far from all of them admitting to it. The
prevailing majority in the House of Commons was Whig, and it
was the unspoken philosophy of the Whigs that property should
be maintained and their own importance preserved by a liberal
advocacy of advanced and popular sentiments. Ten years before
they had brought to an end a long period of Tory predominance
by championing'the cause of parliamentary reform, which they
had represented as the sure cure for the grave social and economic
troubles from 'which the lower orders in the new industrial
towns were suffering. As a result, after a brief period of furious
agitation, an electorate of 300,000 had been discreetly widened
into a slightly less submissive one of about 800,000.

Though to many timorous folk the Reform Bill of 1832
seemed the prelude to bloody revolution, the new electors, like
the old, continued to return men of substance to the House of
Commons. Nor had the change in the system of rqireseniation
brought about any improvement in the condition of the poor.
The popular force of the Whigs was therefore expended, and they
remained in office with the cynical support of a small body of
Radical reformers for no better reason than that the Tories were
not quite strong enough to turn them out. Neither party bad
any strong basis of support in the country, which tended to dis¬
trust them both, the Tories because they were supposed to oppose
all change—a view which their opponents lost no chance of
fostering—and the Whigs because they were popularly suspected
of using office to feather their ovra nests. “What son, what
brother, what nephew, what cousin, what remote unconjectural
relative in the genesis of the Greys,” 'wrote a contemporary of
the family of the Premier who had carried the Reform Bill, “has
not fastened his limpet to the rock of the national expenditure?”
The d'vil service, such as it was, was still staffed almost exclu¬
sively by the fortunate nominees of high political personages,
and opportunities for nepotism were considerable. They were
almost universally taken.

GREEN LAND FAR AWAY

As put by one of their supporters, the object of the Whigs was
to remain in office, keep down their dangerous Radical allies and
gradually and safely bring about such reforms as should end—
though no one was clear how—the discontent of the industrial
working-classes. The only object of the Tories seemed to be to
turn out the Whigs, though they had little really to gain save
office by doing so. Every few years a general election took place,
and the party battle was then. transferred to the constituencies.
Here it took on a form peculiarly English, with mobs processing
through the streets with flags and banners, with party devices
and mottos and special tunes—“Bonnets of Blue” for the Tories
and “Old Dan Tucker” for the Whigs—with companies of hired
boxers and cabmen and paid toughs to intimidate the electors,
with free beer and breakfasts at the expense of the candidate in
every tavern, with the wooden hustings on which fine gentlemen
who sought the suff^rages of a free people grinned and suffered,
while rotten eggs, oranges and rude shouts wliizzed over, under
and sometimes at them. This popular saturnalia, vrhich was the
special prerogative of the poorest and roughest elements of tlie
community, served no apparent electoral purpose, for only a
comparatively few quiet and well-conducted persons possessed the
vote, and elections w^ere decided mainly by local territorial
influence and the state of current opinion among the reading
classes.^ But it served the ancient English purpose of letting off
steam in a rough human way, and it helped to give uneducated
people a sense that they were taking part in the government of
the country without any of the disturbing consequences of their
actually doing so. It gave a great deal of happiness and
excitern,.ent, not to the rich and discreet, but to the uncalculating
majority. It was becoming an increasing annoyance to respect¬
able citizens of a liberal and reforming turn, wffio took every
opportunity of attacking its abuses and trying to do away with
it in the name of purer and more rational politics. For this
reason, despite all its noise, roughness and drmikenness, it was
already a dying institution.

From the bacchic tumult of the unenfranchised multitude
which attended its election, Parliament itself was far removed.
No boisterous breath of democracy would have been tolerated

^Bribery, though universally practised, had a far smaller effect on eighteenth and
eaUy nineteenth century elections than is popularly supposed. For one thing, the
bribes of the rival candidates tended to cancel each other out.

E.S.

ENGLISH SAGA

in the House of Commons which was still almost the most
exclusive club in England. A number of northern manufacturers
and eccentrics with radical hobby horses were tolerated with
humorous or contemptuous resignation by the well-groomed
majority, who viewed them as they would have viewed the few
odd slovens and cranks at a fashionable public school. The House
was a place where the gentlemen of England sat or lolled at their
ease, with feet stretched out before them, arms akimbo, and top
hats tilted over their eyes or pushed comfortably to the back of
their heads while papers and blue books were strewn idly on the
floor before them. 'V^en, as often happened, the course of debate
flowed languidly, many would stretch themselves out on the
benches and sleep or watch the familiar proceedings of their
House with half-closed eyes, some face downwards, others -with
legs in the air. Honourable Members could not see anything
incongruous in such a method of conducting their business: the
House was as much their property as their own library or dub,
and to have questioned what they did there would have been the
highest presumption. Only within the last few years had the
right of the public to read &st-hand reports of its debates in the
press been tadtly admitted by the provision of a press gallery.
Centuries of struggle and, more recently, of unchallenged
supremacy had given the House its arrogant and serene assurance:
the government was upon its shoulders and it carried the burden
with nonchalance.

On its benches sat many men of talent and one or two of
genius, for any male member of the governing dass who pos¬
sessed ability could if he wished be sure of a seat. The system put
him there and kept him there without effort on his part. He was
thus able to apply all the powers of his mind, fortifie<J*by the
most cultured and scholarly education afforded on earth, to the
art of politics and the parliamentary game. Of such was Lord
John Russell, a cadet of the great Whig House of Bedford, who,
in the absense of the Prime Minister in the Lords, led the
Commons. He was a sharp, delicate little man with a mild voice
and great dignity of maimer, who somehow contrived to appeal
to the imagination of the middle classes. This was the more
curious because he was a scholar of distinction with a taste in
epigram^ and like all his race something of a crank. His particular
political hobby was reform of the franchise, which his colleagues
liked to think had been settled for all time by the measure of

. GREEN LAND FAR AWAY 23

1832 but which retained for John Russell a personal and almost
mystical fascination. Whenever this subject came before a reluc¬
tant House, he would rise to considerable heights of fervoxir:
those were the hours when “languid Johimy glowed to glorious
John,” He was never, however, a master orator: indeed since the
death of Canning ten years before, parliamentaiy eloquence,
which had reached its zenith in the days of Fox and Pitt, had been
in something of a decline.

The first parliamentarian in the House, though his greatest
triumphs were still ahead of him, was Robert Peel, the leader of
the Tories. The son of a famous cotton manufacturer, he had
graduated into the legislative class by way of Harrow and
Oxford. For twenty years he had made it his business to master
the legislative requirements of the new industrial interest, which
still remained so much of a mystery to the country gentlemen
who formed the bulk of his fellow-members. In doing so he had
made himself indispensable to the Tory Party whose captaincy he
had taken over from the Duke of Wellington. His name
was already identified in the public mind with the smart new
constabulary force which he had given to London during his
tenure of the Home Oflice. He was a fine if rather uninspiring
speaker, who occasionally repelled by his lack of aristocratic
grace but who always spoke from a profound and well-digested
knowledge of his subject. In this respect he had no equal in the
House. Outside in the country his bluntness was well liked: it
was said that when Minister to King George IV, that master of
courtly etiquette, repelled by his awkward manners, had addressed
him with a “Damn you, sir, don’t stand there pawing the air, put
3^ur hands in yom: podkets,” only to be answered with a netded
“Damn you, sir, I have no pockets!”

At Peel’s^ide on the front Opposition Bench was his lieutenant
and successor, Lord Stanley. The eldest son of the House of Derby,
he was htir to one of the greatest fortunes in the world, created
almost automatically in half a century through the fabulous rise
in the land values of industrial Lancashire. He bdohged to a
family which, it was said, did not marry but only contracted
alliances, and he was by universal acclaim die second orator in the
Home of Commons—the “Rupert of Debate”—and a classical,
translator of no mean order. But in his native Lancashire, or in
the betting-room at Newmarket, chaffing and shouting among a
crowd of jockeys and blacklegs, he was, with the eccentric perver-

ENGLISH SAGA

sity of the English, a good deal of an overgrown schoolboy—“a
lively, rattling sportsman apparently devoted to racing and rabbit
shooting, gay, boisterous, almost rustic in his manners, without
refinement.’’ Seeing and hearing him among his coimtry friends
and neighbours, it was difficult to believe oneself in the presence
of the haughty aristocrat and scholar who, at his Peel’s side,
marshalled the gentlemen of England against the Whigs and
Radicals.

In contrast was Lord Melbourne, the Whig Prime Minister.
Of all who had held supreme office, none was ever so thoroughly
a man of the world. He never dined at home, talked with a rollick¬
ing laugh and refused to take any thing—even his own loss of office
—too seriously. It was his creed that it was best to try to do no
good and then one could do no harm: his favourite remark,
“Why not leave it alone?” He had been a great rou6 in his day
and was still a favourite with the ladies: the escapades of his wife,
Lady Caroline Lamb, had once set the whole kingdom talking.
But in his old age he had reformed his manners and curbed his
speech—^which was of the old English School—to suit the tastes
and needs of a bread and butter miss promoted from the governess
room to the throne.^ Under his easy and accomplished teaching
his little sovereign had developed with almost startling rapidity.
Her marriage to Prince Albert in 1840 transferred her education
into other hands. It was characteristic of aristocratic England
that the Prince’s painstaking German ways met at first with little
favour. It was freely noted that the royal couple rose early on
the first morning of their honeymoon: “strange that the bridal
night should be so short,” wrote the Clerk of the Council, “I told
Lady Palmerston that this was not the way to provide us with a
Prince of Wales.”^

To express criticism of what one did not approve, and in no
unmeasured terms, were the prerogative and habit of an English
aristocrat. The genus held strong views on a great variety of
subjects and never hesitated to voice them. They had their own
standards, many of them eccentric and peculiar, but such as they
were they seldom modified them. They saw no reason why they
should. “They are bom wicked and grow up worse,” was a
Whig lady’s uncompromising reply when asked by her children

^ , a.little tit of 18 made all at once into a Queeiu” Creevey to Miss Ord,

5th Aug., 1837. Crecv^^s Lift and Times (erf. Gore), 497^

*GTevillt,

GREEN LAND FAR AWAY 25

whether Tories were born wicked or merely grew up that way.
Passionate, instinctive and, when action was demanded, un¬
reflecting, such beings never doubted themselves or their right
to do and say whatever they thought proper.

The gentlemen of England carried the same downright and
frank assurance into their administration of public affairs.
“Goose! goose! goose!” wrote Palmerston across a diplomatic
despatch. The great Foreign Secretary treated what he regarded
as the literary lapses of his country’s representatives abroad like
an outraged schoolmaster: one received back a despatch with an
injunction that it was “to be re-written in blacker ink,” while
another was forbidden to use the un-English gallicism “corps
diplomatique” and reminded that the expression “to resume”
did not mean “to sum up” or “to recapitulate” but to “take back.”
“Sentences,” he wrote on another occasion, “should . . . begin
with the nominative, go on with the verb and end with the
accusative.”^ Such men were accustomed to leave no doubf as to
what they meant in the minds of those they ruled. -

In all this they represented, not inadequately, the people of
rural England whose homely lands gave them their titles and
wealth. They were rough and ready in their ways, brave and
independent. Cock fights and cock-shies, dog fights, bull and bear
baiting—though these were already dying out in most parts of
the country—“ purring” matches in Lancashire where men and
women vied in kicking each other with clogs, bespoke the love of
contest for its own sake that ran right through the nation. At
Oxford sporting undergraduates, in ancient rooms lined with
pictures of prize-fighters, race-horses . and dogs, would amuse
themselves by opening a cageful of rats for their terriersr to
worry.

Boxing was the national sport in excelsis. Boys were brought
up on tales of the classic exponents of the Science—of Tom Cribb,
Gentleman Jackson, Gully who rose to the House of Commons,
Mendoza and Molineux the negro. Young noblemen had their
pet prize-fighters: every village its “best man,” who had won his
title in some homeric contest with his predecessor. There were
no Queensberry rules and naen fought with their bare,fists,
sometimes to the death. In June, 1830, the Irishman, Simon
Byrne, and the^ Scottish champion, Sandy McKay, met in the

W. C. F, Belli Lord Falmerstont I, js6i.

ENGLISH SAGA

Buckijighamshire village of Hanslope: in the forty-seventh
round the Scot fell unconsicious to the ground never to rise again.
His victor perished in the ring a few years later at the end of
ninety-nine rounds.

Game to the death, such men bore little malice. Bad blood
was not allowed to grow rancid: it was let after the fashion of
the day on the green sward. A “mill” brought all the neighbours
running to see fair play and courage: afterwards the combatants
were ready enough to be friends. There was something intensely
good-humoured about that open-air, fighting England. It was
rough but it was healthy. Borrow has left us a picture of an old
prize fighter, his battles over, keeping open house in his “public”
down Holbom way, “sharp as winter, kind as spring . . .
There sits the yeoman at the end of his long room, smrounded
by his friends. Glasses are filled and a song is the cry, and a song
is sung well suited to the place; it finds an echo in eveiy heart—
fists are clenched, arms are waved, and the portraits of the mighty
fighting men of yore, Broughton and Slack and Ben, which
adorn the walls appear to smile grim approbation, whilst many
a manly voice joins in the bold chorus:

*“ Here’s a health to old honest John Bull,

■ When he’s gone we shan’t find such another,

And with hearts and with glasses brim full,

We will drink to old England his mother.’”

The independence of the national type matched its pugnacity.
For all the deference of traditional England to its superiors, it
was a deference strictly based on established right and custom.
It pelded little to claims based on anything else. A man owed
certain duties to Church, state and society to be performed
according to his station: when they had been fulfilled, he owed
no others. Lord Palmerston, in attendance as Foreign Secretary
at Windsor Castle, rode as befitted his office beside her Majesty’s
carriage: when, however, she embarked on Virginia Water he
did not accompany her but left the royal barge to row about in
a dinghy, not choosing to miss his daily exercise. The skilled
craftsmen of Birmingham disposed of their hours of labour in a
similar spirit: when they had earned enough, they would take a
day or even a week off to drink. Even the clerks of the Bank of
England—though the new powers that were beginning to rule

GREEN LAND EAR AWAY 27

English society were fast taming them’—^insisted on their ancient
rights of private trading and of receiving tips from clients, kept
shops and pubs and drank spirits in office hoxirs. For according to
the old English reckoning a man who did his duty had a right to
do it as he pleased.

Any interference by the State not established by prescription
was viewed with abhorrence. This explains the ease with which
the urban and radical doctrine of hissez-Jaire captured the
mind of the older England. A magistrate told some poor
pavement vendors, arrested by an officious policeman for
selling water-cress in Marylebone High Street, that they had
as good a right to sell their wares as other people to dispose of
an3rthing else. When Income Tax, abolished ^ter the .Napoleonic
Wars amid the loudest cheering ever recorded in the history of
the House of Commons, was reintroduced in 1842 at yd. in the
^ it was regarded as an almost intolerable inquisition which
struck at the freedom and privacy of every respectable English-
naan. “Private affairs must be divulged,” commented a news¬
paper, “private feelings outraged—^malidom curiosity gratified
—^poor shrinking pride, be it never so honest, humbled and put to
the bltish—deceit and the meanness of petty trickery, encouraged
in evasion—and much appalling immorality spread with the
abandonment of truth. Many a gentleman sicken over the
forms he has to bear with; and many a tradesman will become
either ruined or a rogue.”

The more rustic the scene, the stronger this almost exaggei>
ated passion for independence. Fred Bettesworth, farmer’s boy,
wishing to see the world, left a master with whom he was per¬
fectly happy without a word and waited on Staines Bridge till he
found a carter to give bi-m new employment. A year or two later,
sooner than be tied, and feeling he had “a kind o’ roamin’ com¬
mission,” he left another master and tramped forty miles into
Susse3f to see the country.® Every summer for many years he did
the same. In the villages of Whittlebury Forest, almost every
householder was a poacher: a decade or two back when the game-
keepers of the enclosing lords had failed in the face of local
opinion to make an arrest for nutting in the forest, the whole
village of Silverstone turned out armed with staves to repel

‘Thdr ttaditional holidays, forty-two a year in 1830, were reduced by 1834 to four.
-^Early Victorian England i, J7&

* JVoicstcin, English Folk 4 ^*

ENGLISH SAGA

the Bow Street ninners in pitched battle and assert their ancient
privileges. A yeoman farmer of the same place left a sum of
money to cover his grave with spikes pointing upwards, swearing
that he had never been trodden on when alive and would not be so
when dead.

Such a type was well content with its own forms of life: it
had no wish to oppress others but had small use for foreigners or
their ways. At the Egham races William IV called out to Lord
Albemarle to tell him the name of a passing dandy whose face was
unfamiliar. Albemarle replied that it was Count D’Orsay.- “I had
no notion it was,” replied the King: then, mustering all his
energy, gave vent to tlie natural feelings of an honest English
sailor in a loud “Damn him.” “If the French attempt to bully
and intimidate us,” wrote the Foreign Secretary to the Prime
Minister in 1840, “the only way of meeting their menaces is by
quietly- telling them we are not afraid, and by showing them,
fet, tihat we are stronger than they are and, secondly, that they
have more vulnerable points than we have.” And to the British
Ambassador in Paris, the same organ voice of England spoke
more expressly, “If Thiers should again hold to you tie language
of menace . . . convey to him in the most friendly and in¬
offensive manner possible, that if France . . . begins a war, she
will to a certainty lose her ships, colonies and commerce before
she sees the end of it; that her army of Algiers will cease to
give her amdely and that Mehemet Ali”—the French prot6g6—
“will just be chucked into the Nile.”^

To a man like Palmerston—and his very Englishness made
him the idol of England—abuse of the foreigner was no more than
a national prerogative which only a scoundrelly trouble-seeker
would take amiss. When he favoured his Devonshire constituents
with his views on French colonisation he was cheered to the echo.

“There is a contrast of which we may have reason to be
proud, between the progress of our arms in the East, and the
operations which a neighbouring power, France, is now
canning on in Africa. The progress of the British Army in
Asia has been marked by a scrupulous reference to justice,
an inviolable respect for property, an abstinence from any-
thmg which could tend to wound the feelings and prejudices '
of the people . . . The different system pursued in Africa

Balmmten, /,

GREEN LAND FAR AWAY

by the French has been productive of very different results;
there the French army, I am sorry to say, is tarnished by the
character of their operations. They sally forth unawares on
the villagers of the country; they put to death every man
who cannot escape by flight, and they carry off into captivity
the women and children (shame ! shame /). They carry away
every head of cattle, every sheep, and every horse, and they
bum what they cannot carry off. The crop on the ground
and the com in the granaries are consumed by the fire.’’^

The leading article of a popular weekly commented even more
freely, as was its right and duty, on the glaring delinquencies of
the foreigner.

“Selfishness, inconsistency, tyranny, caprice, and insolence
characterise the whole bearing of France. . . . We have the
half consolation, half disgust of knowing that France arro¬
gates herself, whenever selfishness dictates, the false pride
and the bad principle of being always in the wrong.”®

Yet though often absurd and offensive in expression, the proud
imperialism of England was founded on a very real love of
liberty and on a certain innate if vigorous humanity which the
Englishman, and the English gentleman in particular, possessed
as his distinguishing trait. The nation whidb had led the world
in abolishing the slave trade and forbidding slavery in its dom¬
inions, which had produced the pioneers of prison reform and of
every branch of humanitarianism, had at least diprima facie right
to Icctmre othdis. When English statesmen rebuked harassed
foreign rulers,with a tithe of their wealth, security and opportun¬
ity, for agression towards their weaker neighbours or oppression
of their subjects, it was because the English of all classes thorough¬
ly disliked aggression and oppression. They might in their rough
and vigorous way indulge in a certain amount of it themselves
but it was nearly always unconscious. If the already vast empire
of Britain continued to expand, it was more than arguable that in
a world where all virtue is comparative the outward march of
the Union Jack brought enduring benefits that easily compensated
for any temporary suffering and injustice. Palmerston, in a speech
in the House in 1841, well expressed this feeling.

Palmerston^ /, ^Illustrated London Ntws^ /, Dec,^ 1849)*

ENGLISH SAGA

“As long as England shall ride pre-eminent on the ocean
of human affairs, there can be none whose fortunes shall be
so shipwrecked, there can be none whose condition shall be
so desperate and forlorn that they may not cast a look of hope
towards the light that beams from hence; and though they
may be beyond the reach of our power, our moral support
and our sympathy shall cheer them in their adversity. . . .
But if ever by the assault of overpowering enemies, or by the
errors of her misguided sons, England should fall,. . . for
a long period of time, would the hope of the African . . .
be buried in the darkness of despair. I know well that in
such case. Providence would, in due course of time, raise up
some other nation to inherit our principles, and to imitate
Otar practice. But ... I do not know any nation that is now
ready in this respect to supply our place.”^

• •'«•••*«

It was because it had so strong a sense of its own strength,
sanity and inherent decency that the England of character and
tradition felt it had so littie to learn of foreigners. Gladstone
loved to tell the story of the dying Admiral who, when assured
by his spiritual pastor of the glories of Heaven, cried out, “Aye,
aye—it may be as you say—but ould England for me!” The
patriotism of the English was founded on their unbroken past.
They felt themselves to be an historical people, “generation linked
with generation by ancestral reputation, by tradition, by
heraldry.” In-the remoter parts of the cotmtry all shared in this
feeling: the first Lord Redesdale in his Memoirs recalled an old
peasant couple who lived in the tower of a ruined manor house at
Mitford. “Their beautifully chiselled features, no less than their
proud bearing and dignified manners, might have befitted the
descendants of crusaders. She was always dad in an old-fashioned
lilac print gown, with the square of shepherd’s plaid crossed over
the bosom. Her delicate, high-bred face, widi blue eyes, still
bright and beautiful, was-framed in the frills of an immaculate
mutch covering her ears and almost hiding the snow-white
hair: her small feet were always daintily cased in grey worsted
stockings and scrupulously blacked shoes. She must have been
nearly eighty years old when I used to sit with her in her kitchen
—the aged dame on one side of the hearth, the little boy on the
other, listening to her old-world tales of the past glories of

C. F. Beltf Lord Fakmston^ L ^3^*

GREEN LAND FAR AWAIT

Mitford. There were always a few old-fashioned flowers in the
kitchen parlour, and she herself sweetly reminded one of lavender.
The good soul was always stout for the rights and honour of the
family.”^

Such folk, like the old England they belonged to, were living
on the momentum of a past tradition. It was now dying and in
many places already dead. Its purpose had been to produce
virtuotis men and women. It had been rooted in the Christian
morality of the medieval church which, believing that the
purpose of life was to save and prepare man’s soul for Heaven,
taught that worldly laws and institutions should be based as far
as possible on the gospel of Christ. The medieval state—though
its practise fell far short of its theory—^had therefore condemned
usury, forbidden divorce and offences against the family, and
endeavoured to fix a “just” level of wages and prices and an
“honest” standard of workmanship. It had done so not only to
protect the public from greedy egotists but because it was bdieved
that the practise of anti-sodal activities debased the htunas soul.

A society founded on such principles did not, of course,
succeed in establishing the rule of righteousness on earth. But it
made it easier for the ordinary citizen to live a Christian life and
taught him to revere just and honest dealing. When the corrup¬
tions inherent in the medieval ecclesiastical s3Tstem resulted in the
Reformation, the island English—more conservative than their
fellow protestants of the Continent—carried the old ideal into
the secular organisation of the new state. The idea of moral
justice continued to haimt the English mind. The king as head
of the national church at his coronation still swore to “do
justice, stop the growth of iniquity, protect the Holy Church of
God, help and defend widows and orphans, restore things that
are gone to decay, maintain the things that are restored, punish
and reform what is amiss and confirm what is in good order.”
For nearly three hundred years after the repudiation of papal
authority, a protestant but Christian Parliament, though with
diminishing faith and vigour, continued to enact moral and
sumptuary laws, to forbid ustiry, regulate labour and fix prices.
For it was held that the business of the statesman was to make
England strong, healthy and content by rendering her people so.
His first consideration was the devation and mamtenance of the
national character.

'^loird Rsdtsdakt Memoirs^

ENGLISH SAGA

Yet the momentum behind such paternal legislation had long
been running down. Among tlie intellectual leaders of the nation,
faith in a divinely appointed order was giving way to a new belief
in the unaided power of human reason. Men, it was felt, could
live best, not by adherence to traditional standards of aggregate
■wisdom and justice, but by their own sharp wits. And with the
weakening of the authority of the central government that
followed the defeat of the Crown by the aristocracy, the rich
and powerful grew restive at any interference with their free¬
dom of action. In every place where the old forms of orgEmised
life were giving place to new—in the capital, in the ports and
the industrial towns—the vigorous and stubborn Anglo-Saxon
temperament, so tenacious for personal rights and jealous of free¬
dom, responded to appeals to shake off the trammels of the’
feudal and priestly past.

Thus over an ever-widening circle the will and interest of the
individual came to be regarded as more important than
Christian justice and the community. The profit motive super¬
seded the communal conscience as the ultimate arbiter of national
policy. The consequence was quickly reflected in legislation and
administration. Yet in the countryside where the old forms of an
ordered life still lingered, there was an instinctive conviction, or
prejudice, as some called it, that man was more important than
money and moral health than reason. The state might divest
itself of moral authority: but the indi'vidual conscience, moulded
by the xmbroken centuries of Christian rule, remained. Whatever
bagmen might practise and economists preach, the ordinary
Englishman clung to an ideal that had nothing to do with
profit-making and little with abstract reason—that of a “gentle¬
man.” He most valued the man whose word was as good as his
bond, whose purse was ever open to the needy, whose heart was
above calculation and meanness, and who was fearless toward
the strong and tender and chivalrous towards the weak—in other
words a Christian. When Squire Bro'wn sent his son to Rugby,
he asked himself before giving him his final injunctions what he
wanted of him:

“Shall I tell him to mind his work, and say he’s sent to
school to make himself a good scholar? Well, but he isn’t sent
to school for that—at any rate, not for that mainly. I don’t
care a straw for Greek particles, or the digamma, no more

GREEN LAND FAR AWAY

does his mother. ... If he’ll only turn out a brave, helpful,
truth-telling Englishman, and, a gentleman and a Christian,
that’s all we want.”^

A few years later, Tom, unconsciously answering his father’s
question, defined his scholastic ambition as being, “I want to
leave behind me the name of a fellow who never bullied a little
boy or turned his back on a big one.” It was still that of nine
Englishmen out of ten.

• ••••••*

The forms of an organised religion, though increasingly
neglected in the towns, helped to keep alive this noble temper in
the country. In most villages the Church was still the centre of
communal life, its Sunday service, with its gathering of the
rustic hierarchy, duuchyard gossip and interchange of news,
the chief social event of the week. Until the old string and
brass choirs were superseded by the new-fangled organs and
harmoniums, the village played as great a part in the exercise of
communal worship as the parson. Standing each Sunday in the
west gallery these rustic instrumentalists, with their copper
key-bugles, trombones, clarionets, trumpets, flutes, fiddles and
bass viol, represented a folk tradition that was older than squire
or clergy. Yet for all their tenacious clinging to old forms and
ritual—“it alius has bin sung an’ stmg it shall be”—the string
choir was doomed and the conservative democracy of the English
village with it. It was suppressed by the reforming vicarjust as
the landed peasantry of the old tmendosed parish had been by the
reforming squire a generation or two before. The effects of this
iconodasm were not yet fully perceived; it took long to trans¬
form the habits and character of a tenadous people. But the chain
once broken could not be repaired.

Already in many villages the established church had lost its
hold on the rustic heart. Pluralism, though recently abolished
by ecdesiastical reformers, had long accustomed cotmtry folk to
the spectade of neglected diurches,^ perfunctory services and
dergymen who seemed more interested in foxes and sometimes
in the bottle than the cure of souls. An old man living at the end
of the last war could recall a dergyman who was so drunk at a

^T, IfuffheSi Tom Brown’s Schooldays*

•Edward Fitzgerald told Tennyson in 184J that he always wore his thickest great¬
coat in his parish church as the f^gi jprew in great numbers about the co min u n ion
table.— and Remains of Edward Fitzgerald^ /, np.

ENGLISH SAGA

funeral that he had to be held by his coat-tails to prevent him
falling into the grave: another who dropped heavily asleep on
the cushion in the middle of his ovm sermon. Left to themselves
the parishioners of such men lapsed into a strong native paganism
that the Church, even in the age of faith, had never wholly
eradicated. A heathen folk-lore and tradition that died hard took
the place of a half-hearted theology. More than one eighteenth-
century church was clandestinely dedicated to the Devil by the
local morris-dancers. If many through the apathy of their
spiritual pastors had ceased to believe in Christ, they had not
ceased to believe in his great adversary: “Old Scraper ” could
almost be heard by the imaginative on moonlight nights patter¬
ing through the undergrowth. Every village had its tales of
ghosts and witches, of bygone murders and haunted cross¬
roads and gibbets. Many of these old wives’ tales had a ring
that went back to the past of fairy-lore and border ballad:

“One lonely night, as I sat high.

Instead of one there two passed by.

The boughs did bend, my soul did quake,

To see the hole that Fox did make.”

In such an atmosphere, no country child could grow up wholly
lacking in a sense of poetry.

Christian as apart from pagan faith among humbler folk was
by 1840 more often to be found in the Methodist congregations
which had spread like wildfir^e through the countryside since
Wesley’s missionary journeys of the previous century as well as in
the Baptist and Independent congregations of the older noncon¬
formity. It was often of a somewhat primitive and uncritical
kind but made up in fervour and homely force what it lacked in
subtlety. Incidentally it had a stimulating effect on the Estab¬
lishment, provoking a strong rivalry hetween “Church and
King” and “Dissent.” To the adherents of the former the
“Methodies” were “long eared ’uns,”—ignorant and cantankerous
fanatics—^while to the Methodists, churchgoers seemed little
better than damned. Yet even the most enthusiastic adherent
of the meeting-house still preferred to be buried like his father
in the churchyard. The historic community of the village was
not quite dead.

Its dying flame burnt brightly at the traditional festivals of
the Christian and pastoral year still kqit in the countryside. At

GREEN LAND FAR AWAY 35

Christmas the mummers came round to hall and farm-house
with their age-long drama and unchanging characters—

** A room, a room, for me and my broom,

And all my merry men beside,

I must have room and I wull have room
All round this Christmastide.’’

On Oak Apple Day the inns were decorated with oak boughs and
the village lads wore oak apples in their buttonholes and cried
‘‘Shickshack” to those who wore none. There were morris-
dancers in duck trousers and white ribboned shirts and handker¬
chiefs at Whitsun, the summer Sunday School Treat when the
gifts of home-brewed wine were divided by the teachers into two
classes, the less alcoholic to be drunk by the children and the
stronger by themselves when the children had gone to bed.
Many villages had their amual Feast—a relic of the old pagan
Whitsun Ale—when the la&and lasses out on service came home,
the travelling fiddler appeared, the inns were crowded and the
Feast Ale tapped. Akin to it was the farm Harvest Home, eagerly
looked "forward to by many a hungry labourer, with its lit bams
^and^ gmaning tables, its “churchwardens” and beer jugs, its
traditional songs—“The Jolly Ploughman,” “The Fox has gone
throught.the Town 01”, “Poor old Horse”—and its crowning
*toast,.^“iJere*s health to master and missus, the foimders of this
feast I”; \

' The pride and patriotism that sprang from these things,
however^aive and evm pathetic they may appear to modem
minds, attached not only to England but to every separate part of
it. A countryman was thrice citizen of his country, of his shire,
of his native town or village. All three were steeped in accumu¬
lated tradition and custom. Seldom has England been more rich
in the proud consciousness of her history than in 1840. Every
country place had its own peculiar memorials and celebrations
and every place thought its own the best, yet recognised the
validity of its neighbours’. The provincial capitals—^York,
Norwich, Exeter, Shrewsbury, Bristol—each had its own peculiar
society, dvic lore and culture: its spedal crafts, domestic indus¬
tries and style of architecture, its cherished monuments and
legends, its theatre, assembly rooms and musical festival, its
.hereditary merchant and professional class and ndghbouring
gentry, in some places such as Norwich its own school of art*

ENGLISH SAGA

3<5

The smaller towns and villages of England were as marked
in their distinguishing differences. At Abbot’s Bromley in Staf¬
fordshire on the first Monday after September 4th, the Deer Men
with their hobby horses danced the Horn Dance in painted rein¬
deer heads and ancient costumes of red and green. In May, at the
Furry Festival at Helston, any person who would not join the
dance and remained at work was set astride a pole and carried to
the river there to leap or compoimd in cash for the good of the
community.

“Where are those Spaniards
That made so great a boast, O?

They shall eat the grey goose feather,

And we will eat the roast, 01”

There was a wonderful wealth and diversity in the local manner
of celebrating the great Christian, and still older than Christian
feasts. On Christmas Eve in the villages of the New Forest
libations of spiced ale were poured out to the orchards and
meadows: at Huddersfield the children on their wassailing bore
evergreens hung with oranges and apples:

“We are not daily beggars
That beg from door to door.

But we are neighbours’ children
Whom you have seen before.

“Call up the butler of this house.

Put on his golden ring;

Let him bring us a glass of beer.

And the better we shall sing.”

And after service on Christmas morning in many parts of the
north country the whole people ran through the streets crying—

“Ulel Ule! Ulel Ule!

Three puddings in a pule,

Crack nuts and cry Ule.”

In Wiltshire Shrove Tuesday was kept by bands of cliildren
marching three times about the chm'ches with joined hands.

GREEN LAND FAR AWAY

In Suffolk the farm lass who could bring home a branch of haw¬
thorn in full blossom on May Day received a dish of cream for
breakfast. At Polebrook, Northamptonshire, during the last days
of April, the May Queen and her attendants gathered posies in the
meadows and begged the loan of ribbons, handkerchiefs and dolls
from their neighbours to carry on garlanded hoops round the
village to a song that came out of the depths of antiquity. In
other places they sang:

“The life of man is but a span
It flourishes like a flower.

We are here to-day and gone to-morrow.

And are dead in an hour.

“The moon shin^ bright and the stars give a light
A little before it is day,

So God bless you all, both great and small,

And send you a jo3rful May.”

All this betokened a culture that was not founded on Courts
and cities but on the green fields and the growing earth. Like a
tree it spread upwards. Walking among the water meadows at
Bemerton one could see its roots: .the spire of Salisbury Cathedral
tapered skywards out of the cup of the downs and the cottage folk
spoke of a pious man named George Herbert whose grave was
forgotten bttf whose books they still read. In men’s hearts there
dwelt a novel called the Past: its diapters were their own earliest
memories, hallowed by repetition and loving association, and the
tales their fathers and the old wives of the village had told them.

Like bees the country English gathered honey from the
flowers of their own history. Ihe combs in which they stored
it were the manifold institutions in which they expressed their
social life. Church and State were only the greatest of these—
prototjrpe and symbol of all the others. Every parish was an
institution—a living organism from which successive generations
derived purpose and inspiration. When the parish bounds were
beaten each year the whole community attended in witness of
its own existence: the beer-laden wagons, the rough practical
jokes,'the nncbanging rituals and chants were the shrew-bread
on the altar of Christian neighbourhood, A diary-keeping
parish clerk records these homely pieties: “stopt on the mount
E.S. D

ENGLISH SAGA

in the lane and cut X cross, put Osgood oh end upon his head, and
done unto him as was necessary to be done by way of remembrance
. . . Old Kit Nation was turned on end upon his head and well
spanked in the comer of Northcroft and upon the Wash.”^ *

So, too, were schools and charities, walking by ancient beacons
lit by the piety of men of old and tended by a long procession of
successors. The Blue Coat boys of Christ’s Hospital passed
through the London streets in the belted gown of Edward Vi’s
England and in the knee-breeches and shining shoe buckles of that
of George I: the children of the parish school of St. Botolph’s
Bishopsgate still wore silver badges and muffin caps. At Eton,
under elms planted in the days of Charles I, the boys, celebrating
the martial heroes of antiquity, kept the old feast of Montem—
the tenure by which the College held its domains. All that
human courage, quixotry and goodness had achieved in the long
sordid struggle of man against the stubborn forces of nature was,
however crudely and imperfectly, treasured and commemorated
as though to remind the successive generations of their continu¬
ing heritage and nobler destiny. Few could see unmoved the
heroic pageantry of the Trooping of the Colour or. the great
annual spectacle of six thousand London Charity children assem¬
bled under the dome of St. Paul’s, singing with that “honest old
English roughness that no man need feel ashamed of ” while their
eyes shone with the thought of the feast before them. As after
the prayers thousands of glossy aprons fell simultaneously, it
seemed to one watching like the fall of snow.

It was not only its own tradition that England celebrated, but
those of the two great peoples of the ancient world—the Hebrew
and the Greek. Those who stood Sunday after Sunday in the
parish church identified the songs and faith of Zion with their
own rustic life. The manger in which Christ was bom stood in
the byre where the friendly beasts of the field crowded on wintry
nights: the green pastures into which the Good Shepherd led his
flock were the meadows of home. Men who could not write
their names but whose memories were unimpaired, knew every
collect in the prayer book by heart and were as familiar with the
Bible names as with those of their own fields. So for the more
sophisticated the images of the classics were superimposed on
those of their own England: an Eton boy recalled his first May
Day walking by Fellow’s Pond through a half-Gredan haze, “the

^ W, £. AdamSf Memoirs of a Social Aiom^ /, 5^-5.

GREEN LAND FAR AWAT 39

fairies tripping in rings on the turf, the dryads tempt^ out of
their barken hiding-places, the water-nymphs making high
festival on the silver flood.”

Knowledge of the classics was still a universal passport. It
opened the doors of intellectual society. On that solid foundation
of common effort and allusion, the cultxire of a gentleman rested.
Statesmen quoted Latin in the Commons and even on the
hustings: and busy men of the world found relaxation in the
evenings or on holiday in re-reading the authors of the old pagan
world whom they had first encoimtered at school or college.
Macaulay defined an independent scholar as one who read Plato
with his feet on the fender. In the characters of the ancient world
such men recognised themselves, their own failings and virtues.
“I am reading Plutarch’s lives,” wrote Edward Fitzgerald, “one
of the most delightful books I have ever read: he must have been
a gentleman.” The common experiences of life constantly recalled
to such readers the reflections of their fellow men who had passed
the same way under other skies many hundreds of years before.

“I took down a Juvenal,” one of them wrote to a friend, “to
look for a passage about the Loaded Wagon rolling through the
Roman streets. I couldn’t find it Do you know where it is?”^
The absorption of their degenerate descendants in cross-word
puzzles and detective novels is a faint and attenuated reflection of
this bygone passion. Sometimes the incongruity of it struck
them with a glow of pleasure: “think,” wrote one, “of the
rococodty of a gentleman studying Seneca in the middle of
February, 1844, in a remarkably damp cottage.” The pleasure
once acquired never deserted them, and death foimd fbem with
their thumbed Homer or Horace by their side. Forty years later
-an English poet who had grown up with the century, crossing
Lake Garda on a summer’s evening, put into his native verse the
innate love of his generation for the classical learning of his
youth:

“Row us out irom Desenzano, to your Sirmione row!

So they row’d, and there we landed —^ 0 veimta Sirmio *—

There to me thro’ all the groves of olive in the summer
glow.

There beneath the Roman ruin where the purple
flowers grow,

^Zxtters and lAteraty Semains qf Eduiarii Fitegendd, I, z88.

ENGLISH SAGA

Came the * Ave atque Vak ’ of the Poet’s hopeless woe,
Tenderest of the Roman poets, nineteen hundred years
ago,

‘ Prater Ave atque Vale ’—^as we wandered to and fro
Gazing at the Lydian laughter of the Garda Lake below
Sweet Catullus’ all-but-island, olive-silvery Sirmiol”!

The great country houses with the classical colonnades and
porticos and their parks recalling some gentle Sicilian or
Thracian scene were a natural setting for these gentlemen
scholars. Here the law of primogeniture alForded a nursery for
the higher branches of the national culture. Their library walls
were lined with the golden volumes of two centuries of F.nglisli
and more of classical thought and learning: the child who grew
up in those stately rooms knew, subconsciously, that he was heir
to the ages. Even when, as often happened, the eldest son abjured
books for the superior charms of horse, rod and dog, it was
almost certain that one or other of his numeroiis younger
brothers would acquire in the freedom of his father’s library the
sdiolarly tastes that he would carry with him into a wider
world.

• •••••••

Here in the country-house was the accumulated tradition not
only of cultme but of order. The life of a great country-house
aflForded a microcosm of the state: no fitter training groxmd
could have been devised for those called upon by birth and wealth
to rule. An English landed estate in the first half of the nineteenth
century was a masterpiece of smooth and intricate organisation
■with its carefully-graded hierarchy of servants, indoor and out¬
door, and its machinery for satisfjdng most of the normal wants
of communal life—farms, gardens, dairies, brewhouses, gran¬
aries, stables, laimdries and workshops; carpenters, ironmongers,
painters, masons, smiths and glaziers; its kitchens, larders, and
sculleries, beer and "wine cellars, gunrooms and stores. At Wo¬
burn the Duke of Bedford directly employed nearly 600 persons,
300 artificers being regularly paid every Saturday night, and his
bill for domestic pensions alone amoimted to over ^£2000 a year.
Here, Greville reported, “is order, economy, grandeur, comfort
and general content . . . with inexhaustible resources for every
taste—a capital library, all the most ciuious and costly books;

^ Tem^son^ Catullus Ode,

GREEN lAND EAR AWAY

pictures, prints, interesting portraits, gallery of sculpture,
gardens, with the rarest exotics, collected and maintained at a
vast expense,” Almost every county had at least one Woburn and
a dozen or score of hereditary mansions on a smaller but com¬
parable scale.

Such houses were the headquarters of what was stiU the
chief industry of England—agriculture. From their estate
offices a great national interest was directed. During the past
eighty years its productivity had been immeasurably increased.
New and revolutionary methods of farming and stockbreeding
had been introduced and nearly seven million acres of waste
land reclaimed by endosure. A German traveller in the eighteen-
twenties was amazed on each successive visit to England to see
vast tracts of formerly uncultivated land transformed into fine
corn-bearing fidds. It was during these years that Tennyson’s
northern farmer was engaged on his long and manly task of
stubbing of “Thuimaby waaste.” It was all part of a tremendous
national achievement. Though the population had doubled itsdf
since 1760 and England had ceased to be a com exporting country,
more ffian three-quarters of its total wheat and nearly aU its
barley consumption were being met by the home producer.

By their agricultural activity and inventiveness the English
had not only given an example to the world but saved them¬
selves. The new methods of breeding stock, the inaease of
grazing, the use of fodder aops on lands formerly left fallow,
fencing, building and draining, contributed as much to the defeat
of a militant and revolutionary France as the broadsides of
Trafalgar and the stubborn squares of Waterloo, Without them
the rising populations of the new manufecturing towns could
never have been fed nor the power of Napoleon humbled. The
accumulated experience of all this mighty effort had now been
elevated into a science; the annual gatherings at Holkham to
toast the great Coke of Norfolk who had turned thousands of
acres of rabbit warren iiito a smiling countryside, the ceaseless
output of books on improved methods of farming and the
foundation of the Royal Agricultural Society in 1838 were among
its many symptoms.

One best saw the industry in its corporate capacity on market-
day in any country towit—the old market hall, the country
women’s stalls and baskets spread about the roadway, the gentry
and tenant farmers in their John Bull top-hats, loose open frodi-

4 a ENGIISH SAGA

coats, vast collars, white waistcoats and breeches and heavy top
boots. One saw it, too, in the great fairs that sprang up annually
throughout the countryside, where a whole neighbourhood of
peasant and farmer folk would assemble to buy, gossip and junket
and when those who wished to be hired for service for the
rnming year proudly carried the symbols of their trade—the
carter his whip, the milkmaid her pail and the cook her ladle.
The lads or lassies hired received a shilling as testimony of accep¬
tance and stuck a ribbon in cap or hair in honour of the bargain.
“I took the shilling, put a bit of ribbon in mi’ hat to show as I
were hired like ’tuthers,” said an old farm labourer recalling the
days of his strength and pride, “ and went and spent the rest of the
day at the pleasure fee-ar.” And as night fell and the drums and
bugles outside the painted, lit booths sounded over lonely down
and far watching valley, title rustic fun waxed fast and furious.
A national industry was relaxing.

It had its statelier moments. When Queen Victoria and her
young husband came to Stowe in i845> the farmers of the Bucks
Yeomanry escorted the royal carriage from the Wolverton
terminus, a cavalcade of five hundred of the Duke’s motmted
tenantry awaited them in Buckingham and six hundred more
in white smocks and green ribbons lined the avenue to the
Corinthian Arch. That night delegations from all the neighbour¬
ing villages and from the coimty Friendly Societies waited on
their’sovereign With banners and torches, while the church bells
pealed for twenty miles round.and two thousand rosy-cheeked
diildren sat down to feast in Buckingham to’wn hall.

If the apex of the agricultural community and of its ordered
industry and cultme was the coimtry house, its basis was the
cottage. It was here that those who reaped and sowed were bom
and bred. Their homely virtues were as vital to their country’s
splendid achievement as the genius and assurance of the hereditary
aristocrats who led them. On the field of Waterloo the great Duke
gave his calm orders, and with equal calm and fortitude the
rustics who manned the battered squares obeyed.

Of the 961,000 families engaged in agriculture in 1831,686,000
were those of labourers who worked the land for others’. The
recent enclosures of the co mmo n lands had increased their
numbers with many small-holders who, finding their hereditary
tenures less valuable through loss of common rights or more
onerous through heavy charges for enclosure or drainage, had

GREEN LAND FAR AWAY

disposed of them to their riciier neighbours. In other ways the
enclosures had operated against the interests of the labourer who,
by legal processes little understood by him, had been deprived of
certain prescriptive rights which had never had the formal
recognition of law. As Arthur Yoimg put it, “The poor in these
parishes may say, Parliament may be tender of property; all I know is
I had a cow, and an Act of Parliament has taken itfrom meP More
often the cow* was only a mangy donkey or a few straggling
geese, but the right to keep them on the common and to gather
firewood there had been an important item in a poor country¬
man’s budget.

Yet if partially deprived, particularly in the southern counties,
of his former and inadequately recognised stake in the land,
robbed of his share in the dwindling wild food supply of the open
countryside by cruel Game Laws and of a market for the products
of his domestic handicrafts by the new machines, the peasant
still climg to his hereditary standards and virtues. An
intense confidence in his skill and capacity for work sustained
him through a life of hardship—that and love of the land he
tended. He was never so happy as when working regularly under
a good master. Such men were neither the fantastic and passion¬
ate creatures of modem regional novelists nor the down-trodden
puppets of sentimental social historians. Their intellects were
naively elementary, their passions (as proper to those who worked
hard on the soil) unobtrusive, their instinctive feelings profoimd.
They conformed to the natural rhythm of life, and in this lay
their enduring strength. Love of the soil, love of food—“bee-acon
wi’ fat about three inches thick, tha’s the tackul I’’—pride in their
own strength and skill—“I ’eeant very big but.1 can carry a sack
of whait ur wuts tu: beeans wi’ anybody”^—and unshakable
integrity, and conservatism were the attributes of the English
peasantry.

“Wurken an the land is lovely wurk,” was the ungrudging
verdict of an old Buckinghamshire labourer after a life of cease¬
less labour, “and in mi time I wurked furteen and fifteen hours a
day, but that was afuur the machines come about. We sowed by
hand, ripped by hand, and threshed wi’ the thraiul. It was lovely
wurk, and that was how it done when I was a yoxmg man. We
used to dibble the sayd in,and Ia’,dibbled many a aiacre of wheeat,
beeans, wute and b^ley. Sometimes we used to sow bradcast.

Harman, Sketches of the Bucks Comiryside*

ENGLISH SAGA

At harvist we cut wi’ a sickle.” At times tlie same witness spoke
in the language of poetry of his feeling for the land.

“ Some people think they can git summut out a nauthing—
but they can’t, and niwer wull. All me life I a noaticed that
land wi’ no dress gis very poour craps—short straa, little
eeurs, and little kumuls; but land well dressed always gis
good craps—long straa, long eeurs, and big kurnuls; and I
niwer yit sin big eeurs wi’ fat kurnuls an thin short straa,
and nobody else niwer did. When cam is sold by weight,
ant it beeter to taiak a peck out a tlie sack, than put a peck
in? That’s the difference atween good and bad farmin’. You
must a cleean land, plenty a dress, and plenty a laiabour to
git th’ increeas and when ye a got these, the increeas comes.

Such a man when his time to die came could look round on an
entire countryside which he had helped to cultivate.

A rough, simple, pastoral people, of great staying power,
invincible good humour and delicate natural justice, such were
the labourers of rural England. “Here lies,” runs a Gloucester¬
shire epitaph,

“John Higgs

A famous man for killing pigs,

Por killing pigs was his delight
Both morning, afternoon and night.”

Set against the background of their industry, their homely
pleasures assume an almost epic dignity. One loves to think of
them in the taproom of the tliatched ale house in the evening
over their modest pint of mild when their day’s work was done—
the high settles in the chimney comer, the bacon rack on the oaken
beam, the sanded floor, the old brightly-wom furniture gleamjpg
in the flickering firelight.

Higher in the economic scale than the labourer was the small¬
holder. He still represented a substantial element in the rural
community. With the village craftsman—a numerous class—he
constituteci the social and moral backbone of the parish. In 1831
one countryman in three possessed a stake in the land. One in
seven worked his own land without hiring labour. Such a

Harman^ BuckinghamshiTe Dialect^ xio-iii.

GREEN LAND FAR AWAY 45

man—often a yeoman who held his tenure for life—was still
the standard rustic Englishman.

The old cottage folk of England were very tenacious of the
good things of life they had been brought up by their fathers to
honour. They liked to keep a bright fire burning on the hearth, _
choice old china on spotless shelves, smoked flitches of bacon
and ham hanging from the ceiling and home-brewed wine to
offer their neighbours. They took pride in their mastery of oven
and vat: in their skill in keeping garden: in raising poultry and
bees. Above all they valued the virtues of decent living and good
neighbourhood—^lionesty, truth and purity of word and life.

Though the process was a more gradual one than has been
generally realised, the yeoman type was slowly disappearing. It
was too conservative to compete successfully with the more
ruthless and greedier values set by urban and industrial commerce.
And the tendency of landlords was to allow the old temures for
life—a rustic economy based not on accountant’s statistics but on
the rhythm of the human heart—to expire when they fell in. In
their place they off^ered annual or determinable leases. The
number of lifehold properties and copyholds of inheritance was
therefore every year diminishing.

The older, smaller type of squire was also departing—^killed
by the violent fluctuations which followed in the wake of the
Napoleonic wars and by the rising standard of social expense set
by rich neighbours.^ But he was still to be found in considerable
numbers in the remoter parts of the coimtry—^particularly in
Devonshire, Wales and Clun Forest, in the Fens and in the York¬
shire and Cumberland dales. Like the old hero of Scawen Blunt’s
poem he liked the hunting of the hare better than that of the
fox, spoke in dialect, dined at six and spent his evenings over a
long pipe and a tankard in the village inn. The pride of his house
was the gun-room which he called his hunting parlour. In white
breeches and buckled shoes, fawn-coloured leathers, tight double-
breasted, brass-buttoned, bright blue coat, buff vest and low top
hat—for he inclined to the “old Anglesey school of dressers”—
he was still an essential part of the English landscape.

To him and his kind, defying the sombre black of the encroach¬
ing towns, that landscape owed at least a part of its enchantment.
He supplied it with pageantry. The lovely primary colours of

^“The French Revolution produced a war which doubled the cost and trebled the
difficulty of gented living.”— The, Ladfs Keepsake and Maternal Monitor

ENGLISH SAGA

the English past that to-day only survive in the dress uniform of
the Guards and the huntsman’s coat shone in front of the vivid
greenery of May or glowed through the mists of autumn. So,
too, long afterwards when England had grown drab and urban,
old men recalled with a thrill of pleasure the sight of the coaches,
thirty or forty a day in any fair-sized main-road tovra: “the
dashing steeds, the fanfaronades on the horn, the scarlet coats of
the coachmen and the guard.”

• • • • • •

Down by the coasts the country looked out on the sea. In
white Jane Austen houses along the Solent one could see through
the vistas in the trees the great battleships with their bellying
sails and the stately West Indiamen “sailing between worlds
and worlds with steady wing.” Here was the watery highway
from which the new l^gland drew its ever expanding wealth,
with clippers bringing tribute from Pagoda Bay and the far ends
of the earth, and the rough, passionate sailors whom coastwise
England bred, singing as they pulled on the ropes how soon they
would

“be in London dty.

Blow my bully boys blow!

And see the girls all dressed so pretty.

Blow! boys, blow!”

Such men, by modem standards, lived lives of almost indescrib¬
able hardship, spending years afloat before they set foot on shore
and, cleaned out by a single gargantuan and open-handed
debauch, signing on again a few days later for another voyage.
They were ready, like their fathers who fought under Nelson, to
dare and do almost anything, and the safety and wealth of
England rested on their rude, unconscious shoulders. For tb<»m
the great shipbuilding yards on the Thames still turned out
wooden ships of a quality immatched throughout the world, maHp
by men who had learnt their aaft—part of England’s hereditary
wealth—from their forebears. “His father’s name before him
was Chips, and his father’s name before him was Chips, and they
were all Chipses.”

Pnde in craftsmanship and skill handed down the generations
were the attributes that made the products of English manufac¬
ture sought and honoured throughout the earth. Their hall¬
mark was quaUty, and they bore the unmistakable stamp of a

GREEN LAND FAR AWAY 47

nation of aristocrats. In the Lancashire cotton milk and the
London slums a proletarian labouring class w^ fast emerging,
but its significance was still hidden from contemporaries by the
multitude of skilled craftsmen who constituted the rank and file
of British industry. Except for cotton, no textile trade had been
radically affected by machinery before 1830; wool-combing was
still governed by skill of hand as was the hardware industry of
the Midlands and the cutlery of Shefiield. The old trades were
still more extensive than the new: at the time of the Reform Bill,
there were more shoemakers in England than coal-miners. The
unit of industry was very small: apprentices frequently lived with
their employers over their own workshop, and every craftsman
nodght aspire to be a master. The Spitalfields weavers of London,
who on summer evenings could be seen seated in the porticos of
their houses enjoying their pipes or digging their allotments in
Saunderson’s Gardens, the 200,000 bricklayers, masons, carpenters,
house-painters, slaters, plumbers, plasterers and glaziers who made
up the dose corporation of the building trade, the serge and doth
workers of the West Coimtry, Gloucestershire and East Anglia,
the bootmakers of Northampton, the blanketers of Witney, the
chair-turners of the southern Chiltems and the cabinet makers
and clock makers of almost every country town were—for all the
threat of themew machines to their employment and standards of
living—men with a status in the country based on personal skill
and character.

So were the rural handicraftsmen—^blacksmiths, whed-
wrights, carpenters, millers, cobblers—the fishermen and sailors
of the coast towns and the engineers who were coming into
existence to make and tend the new machines of steel and iron.
North of the border in Lanarkshire, a French travdler found the
Scottish craftsmen the best educated in Europe, “well-informed,
appredating with sagadty the practice of their trade and judging
rationally of the power of their tools and the effidency of thdr
machinery.”^ Sudi men—even the Durham miners whose work¬
ing conditions so distressed Cobbett—enjoyed solid houses, sub¬
stantial fare and fine sturdy furniture made by craftsmen worthy
of themselves. Pride in their domestic establishment was the
hall-mark of the British artisan and his wife: the Handloom
Weavers’ Commissioners’ Reports of 1838 speak of the Midland
weavers’ cottages as' good and coinfortable and much superior

^Baron Dupin, The. Commercial Bower of Great Britain^ i 32 ^, //, 557*

ENGLISH SAGA

to those of the surrounding agricultural labourers, with a solid
dower of nice clocks, beds and drawers and ornamented with
prints. Within was cleanliness, good order and fine frugal
cooking.

Such was the old English system. It was based on the home,
and home spelt contentment. Here was the seat of man’s love—
of his birth and his continuance. Here, too, he did his work. For
the cottage, so long as the old economy persisted, was often both
home and factory. Yarn was spun and woven tmder a single roof:
“the wife and daughter spun the yam and the father wove.”
Cottage laboiur for the womenfolk, such as the beautiful lace
industry of old Buckinghamshire, supplemented the household
income and gave an additional pride and interest to family life.
In his leisure hours the good man, home from farm or smithy,
cultivated his own little piece of land. “He was no proletarian,
he had a stake in the country, he was permanently settled and
stood one step higher in society than the English workman of
to-day.” Such men, as Engels wrote in the changed world of
1844, “did not need to overwork; they did no more than they
chose to do, and yet earned what they needed.”

They were rooted fast in their own soil. They had faith, they
had home and they had love. They were freemen, for within their
narrow bounds they had freedom of choice. “But intellectually,
they were dead; lived only for their petty private interest, for
their looms and gardens, and knew nothing of the mighty move¬
ment which, beyond their horizon, was sweeping through man¬
kind. They were comfortable in their silent vegetation and but
for the industrial revolution they would never have emerged
from this existence, which, cosily romantic as it was, was never¬
theless not worthy of human beings.” For to the pure but root¬
less intellect of the German radical, Engels, they did not seem
human beings,^

For those who were fortunate enough to inherit a share in
that vanished rural England—^for all not imprisoned in the great
industrial towns or disinherited by the poverty that followed the
enclosures—ffiere was a sober joy in it. It came from healthy
living, from quietude begotten of continuity, from the perceiving
eye and the undulled sense. In the letters of Edward Fitzgerald

^“In truth they were not human beings.” i?*, Engels^ Tht Condition of the WorJting Class
in Englcmdy in 18^, 3,

GREEN LAND FAR AWAY 49

one sees green England smming herself in her immemorial peace
—“the same level meadow with geese upon it ... the same
pollard oaks, with now and then the butcher or the washer¬
women trundling by in their carts.’’ “I read of mornings the
same old books over and over again,” he writes, “walk with my
great dog of an afternoon and at evening sit with open window,
up to which China roses climb, with my pipe while the black¬
birds and thrushes begin to rustle bedwards in the garden.”
“We have had,” he wrote on another occasion, “glorious weather,
new pease and young potatoes, fresh milk (how good!) and a cool
library to sit in of mornings.” Down in his native Suffolk this
gentle patriot found the heart of England beating healthily:
whenever he returned from sophisticated London he was amazed
at “the humour and worth and noble feeling in the country.”
Fishing in “the land of old Bunyan . .. and the perennial Ouse,
making many a fantastic winduig ... to fertilize and adorn,”
he stayed at an inn, “the cleanest, the sweetest, the civillest, the
quietest, the liveliest and the cheapest that was ever built or
conducted. ... On one side it has a garden, then the meadows
through which winds the Ouse: on the other the public road,
with its coaches hurrying on to London, its market people halting
to drink, its farmers, horsemen and foot travellers. So, as
one’s humour is, one can have whichever phase of life one pleases:
quietude or bustle; solitude or the busy hum of men: one can
sit in the principal room with a tankard and a pipe and see both
these phases at once through the windows that open upon either.”^

To such a one the changing seasons only brought new content¬
ment—spring “Tacitus lying at full length on a bench in the
garden, a nightingale singing and some red anemones eyeing
the sun manfully,” and autumn “howling winds and pdting
rains and leaves already turned yellow” with a book before a great
fire in the evening. “In this big London,” Fitzgerald wrote to
Bernard Barton, “all full of intellect and pleasure and business,
I feel pleasure in dipping down into the country and rubbing
my hand over the cool dew upon the pastures, as it were. . . .
I should like to.live in a small house just outside a pleasant
English town all the days of my life, making myself useful in a
humble way, reading my books and playing a: rubber of whist

^“Through all these delightful places they talk of leading railroads; a sad thmg, I
am sure; quite impolitic. But Mammon is blind.” Letters and Literary Remains oj
Edward Fitzgerald^ I, 69,

ENGLISH SAGA

at night. But England cannot expect long such a reign of inward
quiet as to suffer men to dwell so easily to themselves.”

For he knew that it could not last. The portents of change
were already blazing in the northern and midland sky. ‘^The
sun shines very bright, and there is a kind of bustle in these
clean streets, because there is to be a grand True Blue dinner
ill the Town Hall. Not that I am going: in an hour or two I
shall be out in the fields rambling alone. I read Biirnefs History —
ex pede Herculeni, Well, say as you will, there is not, and never
was, such a country as old England—never were there such a
gentry as the English. They will be the distinguishing mark
and glory of England in history, as the arts were of Greece, and
war of Rome. I am sure no travel would carry me to any land so
beautiful as the good sense, justice, and liberality of my good
countrymen make this. And I cling the closer to it, because I
feel that we are going down the hill, and shall perhaps live
ourselves to talk of all this independence as a thing that has
been.”

CHAPTER TWO

J)ark Satanic Mills

“We have game laws, com laws, cotton factories,
Spitalfields, the tillers of the land paid by poor rates, and
the remainder of the population mechanised into engines
for the manufactory of new rich men; yea the machinery
of the wealth of the nation made up of the wretchedness,
disease and depravity of those who should constitute the
strength of the nation.”

S. T. Coleridge.

I N May, 1842, four men—Southwood Smith a doctor, Thomas
Tooke an economist, and R. J. Saunders and Leonard Homer,
factory inspectors—^published a document which profoundly
troubled the conscience of England. It was called the First Report
of the Children’s Employment Commission. It dealt with the
conditions of labour of children and young persons working in '
coal mines. The commission had been set up two years before
by Lord Melbourne’s government, largely through the per¬
tinacity of Lord Ashley, an inconveniently well-connected young
Tory^ of strong evangelical tendencies who had taken up the
cause of the north-country factory operatives with an enthusiasm
which seemed to some of his contemporaries to border on the
hysterical.

Everybody knew that the conditions of life and labour in the
new factory tovms of the north and midlands, until now a remote,
barren and little visited part of the country, were of a rough and
primitive character. There had always been rough and primitive
Englishmen, and in these smoky and unsavoury districts they
were undoubtedly on the increase. It was part of the price that
had to be paid for the nation’s growing wealth. But the revela¬
tions of the Commissioners’ pages took the cotmtry by surprise.

From this document it appeared that the emplojnment of
children of seven or eight years old in coal mines was almost
universal. In some pits they began work at a stiU earlier age:
a case was even recorded of a child of three. Some were employed
as “trappers,” others for pushing or drawing coal trucks along
^He was Palmerston’s son-in-law.

ENGLISH SAGA

the pit tunnels. A trapper^ who operated the ventilation doors
on which the safety of the mines depended^ would often spend
as many as sixteen hours a day crouching in solitude in a small
dark hole. Although this ciiiployinent scarcely deserves the
name of labour/’ ran the Commission’s report, ^^yet as the
children engaged in it are commonly excluded from light and
are always without companions, it would, were it not for the
passing and repassing of the coal carriages, amount to solitary
confinement of the worst order.”

Those who drew the trucks were ^Tiarnesscd like dogs in a
go-cart” and crawled on all-fours down passages in some places
only eighteen inches high. Other children worked at the pumps
in the under-bottom of the pits, standing ankle deep in water
for twelve hours. One who was cited, only six years of age,
carried or dragged half a hundredweight cvciy day up a distance
equivalent to the height of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

What struck the conscience of early Victorian England with
especial horror was the fact that girls as well as boys were
employed in these tasks. Naked to the waist, and with chains
drawn between their legs, the future mothers of Englishmen
crawled on all-fours down tunnels under the earth draw¬
ing Egyptian burdens. Women by the age of 30 were old and
infirm cripples. Such labour, degrading all who engaged in
it, was often accompanied by debauchery and sickening cruelty:
one witness before the Commission described how he had seen
a boy beaten with a pick-axe. Lord Ashley in a speech in the
Commons mentioned another whose master was in the habit
of thrashing him with a stick through which a nail had been
driven: the child’s back and loins were beaten to a jelly, his arm
was broken and his head covered with the mark of old wounds.
To add to its horrors the Report was illustrated with pictures.

tiere was something never contemplated by Church and
State. ‘'We in England,” wrote a leading journal, “have put
ourselves forward in every possible way that could savour of
ostentation as champions of the whole human race; and we are
now, on our own showing, exhibited to the world as empty
braggarts and shallow pretenders to virtues which we do not
possess. . . . We have listened to the cries of the slave afar off,
but we have shut our ears to the moaning of the slave at our
feet.” When Ashley, striking while the iron was hot, rose in
the Commons a month later to introduce a Bill excluding all

DARK SATANIC MILLS 53

womai and girls from the pits and boys undo? thirteen, he
found himself almost a national hero.

Yet there was nothing new in what the Report revealed or
Ashley described: these things had been going on for years.
They had been defended, as they were even defended on this
occasion, with all conscientiousness by many honourable men
in positions of responsibility on the ground that they were
the unavoidable result of die laws of supply and demand.
Since the publication of Malthus’ treatises, serious minds had
been haunted by a fear that the staggering increase of
population rendered possible by the advance of machinery
and medical science would outgrow the earth’s productive
capacity and culminate in famine. They were equally possessed
of the belief so brilliantly propounded by Adam Smith more
than half a centxiry before and revered by every living
economist that the wealth of men and nations depended on
the unimpeded operation of economic law. “ It is not from the
benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker,” he wrote,
‘‘ that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own
self interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but
to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities,
but of their advantage.” Only by leaving every man free to
pursue his own interest could production in such a revolu¬
tionary age keep pace with the rise in consumption. The more
the population increased and the greater the consequent
suflfeiing of the poor, the more incumbent it became on
those who governed to refrain from any interference with
economic processes. For it could only end in calamity. The most
one could hope for, in the view of the professors of “the dismal
science,” was that the poor should be fed at all. Hardships suffered
by them in the course of obtaining food were in reality blessings,
since without them they and all mankind would starve.

This belief was widely held by humane and enlightened
reformers who were passionately anxious to eradicate ancient
abuses, of which there were many, and to mitigate human
suffering. The English individualists who subscribed with such
uncritical zeal to the doctrine of laissez-faire in economic matters
were among the world’s greatest humanitarians. They
led a reluctant mankind in every philanthropic crusade: ;by
their unfl agging efforts they had abolished slavery in the British

ENGLISH SAGA

dominions, removed from the statute book the barbarous laws
that condemned men to the pillory and women to the lash,
reduced from more than a hundred and fifty to six the crimes
p unis h ab le by death and rendered illegal the cruel sports of cock-
fighting and bull-baiting. These humanitarians rigidly opposed
the infliction of all needless pain except in the factories and minps
of England. For here, in their view, it could not be avoided.

This melancholy and fatalistic attitude towards industrial
suffering was bound up with the high hopes which had been
formed of human nature by the idealists of the eighteenth
century. It was this that made it so formidable. The age of
reason saw the birth of a belief that challenged the older notion
of revealed religion and morality. By the light of the untram¬
melled mind, man would be able to attain to perfection. Only two
things were necessary: that he should strictly observe natural
law and be freed from every antiquated legal shackle, supersti¬
tion and custom that prevented him from following his will
according to the light of his own reason. The emancipation
of the individual reason was the key to a new era of happiness
and perfection. Man was bom free: he had only to rid hims elf
of his chains to enter into' his heritage.

In France this theory, first preached by philosophers and
later accepted as a social truism, had resulted in the storming
of the Basdlle,. the Declaration of the Eights of Man
and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies. In sober
commercial England it had taken a more prosaic form.
Expounded for more than half a century by a rich and
respectable philanthropist of genius, the promotion of “the
greatest happiness of the greatest ntunber” had become the polite
faith of nine “enlightened” English reformers out of ten. It
was Jeremy Bentham’s belief that that happiness could most
readily be realised by the free exercise on the part of every
individual of enlightened self-interest. Complete freedom of
contract was the very core of the utilitarian creed. Any denial
of it by the State could only delay and perhaps defeat the bene¬
ficent purposes of Providence.

A theory, running counter to the whole course of English
social history, was thus employed both by members of the
government and by manufacturers, as well as by academic
economists, to justify almost any suffering or inhumanity.
Employers and employed must be left free to make whatever

DARK SATANIC MILLS

bargains they chose: -legislative interference could only make
confusion worse confounded. Nine years before the Report of
1842, when Ashley had been struggling to get a bill through
Parliament limiting the hours of children in tfextile mills to ten
a day, he was opposed on the ground that the measure would
hamstring one-sixth of the nation’s producing power and, by
weakening British industry in competition abroad, react fatally
on the wages and employment of the adult worker. Even so
humane a man as Lord Althorp, then leader of the Commons,
argued it would make famine inevitable. Cobbett’s common-
sense remark that the House had discovered that the stay and
bulwark of England lay, not as was hitherto supposed in her navy,
maritime commerce or colonies, but in the labour of 30,000 little
factory girls, was regarded as perverse nonsense.

For the English being bad theorists,though masters of practice
and adaptation, overlooked the fatal error in the logic of laissez-^
faire^ which accorded so readily with their own stubborn hatred
of tyranny and love of independence. That liberty was a sacred
blessing never to be lightly infringed and that every man should
be free were propositions tiiat appealed to their deepest instincts.
What in their passion for liberty they failed to see was that men
were not rendered free merely because they ought to be, or by
the removal of artificial legal restrictions on trade and contract.
A child, a cripple, a pregnant woman, an epileptic or a neuras¬
thenic was not free but was the slave of circumstances over which
he or she had no control. The theory that the economic price
for services and commodities could only be determined by the
unimpeded bargaining of buyer and seller assumed a different
aspect when the buyer was a rich man in no hurry to buy and the
seller a hungry wretch with a sick wrife and family. Unfortunately
the English could not grasp this in theory: it was only after they
had been brought face to face with its cruel 2ind degrading
consequences that they reacted against it. Even then, they failed
to detect the cause of the effect they deplored. |

That the ruling classes Were so slow to perceive the evil that
was sapping the nation’s health and unity was due to a com¬
bination of causes unique in history. The social changes wrought
by the English inventions of the eighteenth and early nineteenth
century—themselves the product of a glorious vitality, ingenuity^
and disciplined activity of mind—^were so far-reaching that men
already absorbed by tibe problems of an ancient, vigorous and

ENGLISH SAGA

intricate society had some excuse for not grasping their signifi-
cance. For they happened with bewildering rapidity. They took
place in remote and little frequented parts of the country wliich,
having formally been scantily populated, were without parlia¬
mentary representation. And at first they only aflFected.an
insignificant minority. At the beginning of the century factory
and mine-workers formed only a small fraction of the population.
The speed at which their numbers increased upset all normal
calculations of statecraft.

But the chief cause for the failure of the English government
—aggravated as it was by the prevailing laissez-faire theory—^was
the overwhelming pressure of external events. From tlie outbreak
of the French Revolution—itself following only six years after
the disastrous war with the American colonies—to the fall
of Napoleon, England had no time for reflection. It was
in circumstances of continual peril and while facing a
dangerous revolutionary tlieory abroad and bewildering changes
at home that the hideous problem, which came to be called the
Condi tion-of-England question, arose in the new manufacturing
areas. What the menace of Nazi ideology and aggression is to-day,
that of French Jacobinism seemed to our stubborn forefathers as
they fotxght for their threatened homes and the liberties of
Europe. To them every sign of discontent was a sjnmptom
of revolutionary terror and the most legitimate criticism tlae
bla^est treason, Witli all the obstinacy of Eng lishmen in time
of dttress, the rulers of George IIL’s England damped down
the hatches of the ship of state against change. For more than
a quarter of a century reform was driven under ground and
a new population, growing up amid unprecedented sodal
phenomena, was deprived of leadership. Humane and kindly
men, at their wits’'en<k how to feed a besieged island and taught
by the economists that in such^ matters sentiment would prove
fatal, accepted as inevitable’thespcdacleof women’ 9 {dth blackened
faces and tears coursifl^ down their eyes as they dragged their
loads up pit ladders, of work-dizzy cotton spiimers mangled in
the shafts of unfenced machinery, of workhouse children rented
by frugak-minded overseers to rough north country naillowners
who treated them like beasts of burden. They treated them worse,
for while only ii fool wotsJd matereSTt his horse, a manufac¬
turer could always'r^lace^Tsai|ipled cnr jtt«amaturelysejri human
workers byfuft£,asuppli«s of cheapTahour thafeost him nothing

DAJRK SATANIC MILLS

but their keep. An American cotton planter who bought and bred
his own slaves had an interest in being careful of his "Labour.”
A Lancashire cotton manufacturer only hired his; his responsi¬
bility for it began and ended at the factory gates. ^ He was
merely concerned with paying as little for it and getting as
much out k of it as possible. And this was precisely what the
economists—the "feelosophers” of Cobbett’s indignant phrase—
told him to do. Selfishness had been elevated by the theorists of'
the study into a public virtue.

There were many manufacturers whose consciences were
repelled by these methods of conducting business. But not only
were they told by those learned in such matters that to question
economic law was folly, but the competition of rivals who had no
such scruples about underpaying and overworking their wretched
employees compelled them under pain of bankruptcy to do the
same. A kind of Gresham’s law operated to debase the standard
of the best employer to that of the lowest. Among the small
millowners—and even in capitalist Lancashire the unit of
emplo5anent was still by modem standards very small—^were
many of humble origin who had achieved wealth by their talent
for using their elbows. Though men often of splendid vigour,
courage and independence, they were without the ruling tradition
of responsibility and noblesse oblige^ and the professors of economic
science told them that such scruples were in any case antiquated
and useless. They had one main concern, to get rich, and by
every legitimate method available. As is often the way with ser¬
vants turned master, they tended to confuse discipline with terror.
Their own maimers and habits were rough and brutal,^ and they
saw no reason to soften them in their relations with employees.

Machinery gave them their chance. Every new invention by
simplifying the processes of manufacture and multiplying the
rate of output increased their opportunities for growing rich.
They took them with all the boisterous energy of their race. All
* that was needed by the new "manufacturer,” working not
by his own hand but by machine and proxy, was capital enough

A man may assemble five hundred workmen one week and dismiss them the next,
without having any further connection with them than to receive a week’s work for a
week’s wages, nor any further solicitude about their future fate than if they were so
many old shutdes.” Sir W. Scotty Farraliar Vol. //, igtk May^ 1830. The practice

still seemed shocking to any one nursed in the older social system.

®ln the early years of the nineteenth century the publican of a famous Manchester
tavern patronised by the town’s leading manufacturers used to expel his customers at
closing time with the help of a lash, A. F, FremantU^ England in the Ninetisenth Cntftfiy,

ENGLISH SAGA

to buy or hire a roomful of power looms, a resolve to keep his
expenses and consequently his prices down against all rivals and
a plentiful supply of cheap labour. The machine took the place
of the domestic craftsman whose hereditary skill it rendered
useless, whose price it undercut and whose ancient markets it
captured. If continued unemployment did not drive him to
lower his wage demands, women and children could be hired
for the factories at half or a third of his price. So could
filthy, barefooted Irish paupers who were always ready to leave
their own overcrowded and half-starving island at almost any
wage. They were shipped into Liverpool and Glasgow in
tens of thousands to feed the mills. By a curious nemesis, their
ways of life—little better than those of the pigstye—still further
depressed the wages and social standards of England and
Scotland.

• ••••• •

The first great surge of invention affected the textile trade
and principally the manufacture of cotton goods. It was in the
humid valleys of south Lancashire that the factory system
appeared. The earliest cotton mills, worked by water power
though later by steam, were largely operated by apprentice
pauper children from the urban slums who, consigned by the
Guardians to the millowners in cartloads, were housed or rather
packed in barrack-like ’prentice houses (where they slept in
shifts) and kept more or less continuously at work until they
either died or reached an age at which their labour ceased to be
profitable. The working hours of one mill in 1815 were from
5 a.m. till 8 p.m. with half an hour’s grace for breakfast and
dinner. There were no Saturday half-holidays, and Sundays
were partly devoted to cleaning the machinery. One instance is
recorded of unwanted children being taken when the mill was
idle to a neighbouring common and turned loose to shift for
themselves.^

The early factory reformers—a little minority of humane
men, several of them millowners like the first Sir Robert Peel—
concentrated their efforts on regulating the worst abuses of
indentured child labour in the cotton mills. Later they were
able to extend their tentative reforms to what was ironically

^The proprietors denied that the children were ‘‘turned adrift”; they were merely
“set at liberty.” “ To be sure, they would not be well off; they would have to beg their
way or something, of that sort.” Report on Children in Manufacturies^ i8i6 iPeefs Conh
mit^f cit y. L. Bf H. Hammond^ The Town Labourer^

DARK SATANIC MILLS 59

termed “free” child labour and to other branches of manufacture.
But they received small encouragement from the bulk of their
well-to-do countr3mien who in a stay-at-home age were not
given to trips to smoky and remotely situated factory towns
and were unable to imagine what they had not seen. The
isolation of the industrial areas before the co min g of the
railways created a deep gulf between one-part of the nation and
the other. The only reforms philanthropists could smuggle on
to the Statute Book were of the most rudimentary kind, such as
the prohibition of the employment of children under nine in
cotton mills and the limitation of hours of labour for young
persons under sixteen to twelve a day. Even these were avoided
in practice. The Factories’ Inquiry Commission of 1833 showed
that many manufacturers were still employing cliil<6en of six
and seven and that the hours of labour were sometimes as high
as sixteen a day. Flogging was regarded as a necessary part of
the process of production. Harassed parents, with their eye on
the family budget, accepted all this as inevitable and even
desirable: many fathers acted as sub-contractors for the employ¬
ment of their own children.

Nor did the reforms, such as they were, keep pace with the
growth of the system. The victims of the factory—at first only
an insignificant fraction of the population—^increased by leaps
and bounds. Every year new inventions widened the scope of
machinery, oflFered new opportunities for growing rich and
forced more hungry craftsmen to seek emplo3nment for their
wives and children in the factory towns. What had hitherto
been a localised evil became a national one.

During the period of transition from cottage to factory
labour, the course of nature was reversed. The breadwinner was
left idle in the home, the wife and* her little ones driven by want
to the mill. In 1833 the cotton mills employed about 60,000 adult
males, 65,000 adult females, and 84,000 yoimg persons of whom
half were boys and girls of under fourteen. By 1844, of 420,000
operatives less than a quarter were men over eighteen and
242,000 were women and girls.

The result was appalling. A wife who worked twelve or
thirteen hours a day in a factory had no time to give to her
children who grew up, in Engels’ tragic words, like wild weeds.
Put out to nurse with some half-savage creature for a few pence
a week until old enough to become wage-earners, they learnt

ENGLISH SAGA

nothing from their mothers of the arts of domestic life and little
of its charities. Even immediately after confinement women were
forced out of sheer necessity to return to the mills. Lord
Ashley made English gentlemen in the House of Commons
listen to evidence that revealed their misery: “H. W. has tliree
children, goes away Monday morning at five o’clock afld comes
back Saturday evening: has so much to do for the cliildren then
that she caimot get to bed before three o’clock in the morrdng;
often wet through to the skin, and obliged to work in that state.
She said: ‘ My breasts have given me the most frightful pain,
and I have been dripping wet with milk.’ ”

The efi^ect on the children can be imagined. The home to
which they returned at night, often too weary even to eat, was an
untended hovel. The machines to which they hurried back before
dawn never tired as they did. In the country which had abolished
slavery and was vigorously opposing the slave trade in every
comer of the world, “strappers” were kept to flog drowsy factory
children lest they dropped asleep at their work, and groups of
pallid roites could be seen supporting each other home as they
dragged their limbs up tlie dark cobbled lanes of the Lancashire
and Yorkshire valleys.

Many were crippled for life: few grew to mature and healthy
manhood or womanhood. Long, monotonous and unnaturd
working positions resulted in permanent curvature of the limbs.
Whole families went about with crooked legs or twisted shoulders,
.Knees bent inwards and backwards, ankles were thickened and
deformed and spinal columns pressed forward or to one side.

• Every street had its company of cripples, of prematurely aged
and arthritic youths bent double and limping, of hag-like
girls with deformed backs and hips. Constitutions were per¬
manently enfeebled: long hours in hot, damp, crowded rooms
and foul and vitiated air left debilitated bodies and listless minds.
The factory population of Lancashire and the West Riding was
discoloured and stunted and seemed more like some ill-fated race
. of pigmies than normal human beings, A Leeds surgeon testified
that but for the constant new recruits from healthy country
stock, the race of mill-hands would soon be wholly degenerate.

On no one did the tragedy of factory life fall more heavily
than on the old craftsmen class of northern England—the finest
artisans in the world. Accustomed to independence, to the
regulation of thdr own hours of labour, to a solid standard of

DARK SATANIC MILLS

comfort and to the environment of the coimtryside, they foimd
themselves through causes beyond their ken deprived of their
wonted markets, undersold by cheap machine-made wares and
finally driven in desperation into the close air and foetid lanes of
the new towns where their wives and children could sell their
labour. The bottom had fallen out of their world. In a letter to
Oastler, the factory reformer, a Yorkshire workman described
how a fellow artisan, tramping Lancashire in search of work,
had come across an old acquaintance of his in a cellar in St.
Helens.

“There sat poor Jack near the fire, and what did he,
think you? why he sat arid mended his wife’s stockings
with the bodkin; and as soon as he saw his old friend at
the doorpost he tried to hide them. But Joe had seen it, and
said: ‘Jack, what the devil art thou doing? Where is the
missus ? Why, is that thy work? ’ and poor Jack was ashamed,
and said: ‘ No, I know this is not my work, but my poor
missus is i’ the factory; she has to leave at half-past five
and works till eight at night, and then she is so knocked up
that she cannot do aught when she gets home, so I haye to
do everything for her what I can, for I have no work, nor
had any for more nor three years, and I shall never have any
more* work while I live; ’ and then he wept a big tear. Jack
again said: ‘ there is work enough for women folks and
childer hereabouts, but none for men; thou mayest sooner
find a hundred pound on the road than work for men—^but
I should never have believed that either thou or any one
else would have seen me mending my wife’s stockings, for
it is bad work. But she can hardly stand on her feet; I am
afraid she will be laid up, and then I don’t know what is to
become of us, for it’s a good bit that she had been the man
in the house and I the woman; it is bad work, Joe; ’ and he
cried bitterly. . . - Now when Joe heard this, he told me
that he had cursed and damned the factories, and the masters,
and the Government, with all the curses tlmt he had learned
while he was in the factory from a child.”i

When such simple Englishmen, feeling themselves cheated
and lost, turned for relief to their rulers they received little

ENGLISH SAGA

comfort. It had formerly been regarded as part of the duty of
society to ensure at the expense of its principal beneficiaries a
“fair wage” to every Englishman willing to labour. But a
cold and alien philosophy now ruled the conduct of those
in power. A Realm of England that denied the validity of its
own authority announced that it could no longer help the People
of England to preserve their traditional rights and status. Those
who were submerged in the factory towns responded by forgetting
that they had any-part in the tradition of the realm. There was
nothing to remind them that they had.

The new spirit informed the Poor Law which was enacted in
1834 to remedy the disastrous effects of the well-intentioned but
makeshift system—^known as Speenhamland—of subsidising
wages out of rates. It bore the cold impress of the mathematical
mind. It was based on the principle that the smaller the burden
placed by the relief of poverty on the taxpayer the greater the
country’s wealth. Itself a contradication of the strict letter of
that economic law, it adhered as closely to it as was compatible
with the traditional and obstinate English dislike of allowing
a man to die of hunger. Outdoor relief, with all its kindly
charities, was sternly discouraged: in its place the Workhouse,
built witli sombre economy by the administrative Unions of
parishes formed under the new Act, offered to the needy poor
the maximum of deterrent with the minimum of subsistence.

It was-this austere form of charity that was doled out to the
dispossessed weaver, the hungry handcraftsman deprived of his
emplo3nment and the agricultural labourer who had simul¬
taneously lost his grazing rights on the common and the
supplementary earnings of the traditional home industries
which the machines had destroyed. To men and women nursed
in a kindlier tradition it seemed an outrage tliat old folk who
had laboured all their lives and had become destitute through
no fault of their own should be torn from their homes, separated
from each other’s company and herded in sexes into prison-like
institutions.

For the economists did not see Labour as a body of men and
women with individual needs and rights but only as a statistical
abstraction. Labour was a commodity of value on wliich the
man of Capital, with whom all initiative lay, could draw as the
state of the market demanded. And as that market—a world
oitc—^was at the mercy of accident and fluctuated unpredictably,

DARK SATANIC MILLS 63

a “reserve^ of labour was indispensable. In exceptionally good
times the whole "reserve” could be quickly absorbed by produc¬
tive industry: in normal or bad ones, it must remain unemployed
and subsist on poor relief or beggary.^ Engels writing in 1844,
reckoned the surplus in England and Wales at a million’ and
a half or about a tenth of the entire population.

The economic justification of all this was that the factories
were giving to the country a wealth she had never before possessed
and bringing within the purchasing power of the poor articles
which had hitherto been available only to princes. The evils
that were inseparable from that system were merely transitional;
the nation had only to be patient, to refrain from palliative and
wasteful measures and observe the laws of supply and demand,
and all would be well. The general body of the middle class
accepted this comforting proposition. To any one with capital
the mechanical multiplication of productive processes offered
xmprecedented opportunities: never had there been such a chance
for the far-seeing investor. The same processes by cheapening
the price and multiplying the quantity of goods must surely
benefit labour too. The ^ march of progress was irresistible.
"Our fields,” declared Macaulay, voicing the buoyant sentiment
of his class, “are cultivated with a skill unknown elsewhere,
with a skill which has extracted rich harvests from moors and
morasses. Our houses are filled with conveniences which the
kings of former times might have envied. Our bridges, our
canals, our roads, our modes of commimication fill every stranger
with wonder. Nowhere are manufactures carried to such per¬
fection. Nowhere does man exercise such a dominion over
matter.”

The spirit of the age—that is, of the readers and writers of
books, newspapers and journals—was preoccupied with the
getting of material wealth and a purely mechanical organisation
of society. It preferred a quantitative to a qualitative ideal of
production. It was opposed to that older and more catholic con-

1 “* At the gates of all the London docks,’ says the Rev. W. Champney, preacher of
the East End, * hundreds of the poor appear every morning in -winter before daybreak, in
the hope of getting a day’s work. They await the opening of the gates; and, when the
youngest and strongest and best kno-wn have been engaged, hundreds, cast do-wn by
disappointed hope, go back to their wretched homes.’ When these people find no work
and will not rebel against society, what remains for them but to beg? And surely no
one can wonder at the great army of beggars, most of them able-bodied men, with
whom the police carries on perpetual war ** F. Engels^ The Qmdition of the Working
Class in England iv, 1844^ ^6-7.

ENGLISH SAGA

ception in which rural and traditional England still lingered.
It was pragmatic, vigorous and vocal. The other England was
passive and unthinking. The few who set its ancient and forgotten
philosophy against the spirit of the age were dismissed by the
intellectuals as dreamers and mischievous meddlers.

That those few included some of the profoundest minrlg ©f
the time was not realised. No one heeded Coleridge’s warning
that the price of neglecting human health, breeding and character
for the sake of profits would have to be paid with heavy interest
in the future. “You talk,” he wrote, “about making this article
cheaper by reducing its price in the market from 8d. to 6d. But
suppose in so doing, you have rendered your country weaker
against a foreign foe; suppose you have demoralised thousands
of your fellow-countrymen and have sown discontent between
one class of society and another, your article is tolerably dear,

I take it, after all.” Persons were not “things.” The latter
found their level, as the economists maintained, but after starva¬
tion, loss of home and employment, “neither in body nor in
soul does man find his level.” Man was not an unchanging and
measurable commodity but a variable and acative creature
intensely sensitive not only to his immediate environment but
to that of his progenitors from whom he inherited many of his
attributes.

The wealth and power of Britain to which the economists
and their middle-class disciples loved to draw attention was
not merely the result of machinery and the laws of supply and
demand. It was based on the skill, discipline, industry and social
cohesion of the British people—qualities which they had derived
from generations of healthy living and sound social organisation.
It was these invisible assets that enabled British manufacturers,
to sell their goods in every comer of the world. To destroy them
by ignoring human rights and needs for the sake of ap excessive
and impatient expansion of material wealth was to deprive
coming generations of the very advantages ±ey had enjoyed and
exploited. Such improvidence could only end in killing the goose
that laid the golden eggs. The early Forsytes for all tlicir private
integrity and frugality never comprehended this, and, unknow¬
ingly, committed waste on the national estate.

• * • • » m m *

The new England they built was housed not so much in towns
as in barracks. These were grouped round the new factories,

DABK SATANIC MILLS 65

on the least expensive and therefore most congested model
attainable. Unrestrained individualism was the order of the day.
Since the rate of profits was not affected if their inhabitants
died prematurely no consideration was paid to matters of sanita¬
tion and health. The dwellings which housed the factory
population were run up by small-jerry builders and local car¬
penters, who like the millowners were out for the maYiTmiTn of
profit with the minimum of responsibility. They were erected
back to back and on the cheapest available site, in many cases
marshes. There was no Ventilation and no drainage. The
interv^s between the houses which passed for streets were
unpav^ and often followed the line of streams serving a conduit
for excrement.

The appearance of such towns was dark and forbidding.
Many years had now passed since the first factories appeared
among the northern hills. Now the tall chimneys and gaimt
mills had been multiplied a hundredfold, and armies of grimy,
grey-slated houses had encamped around them. Overhead hung
a perpetual pall of smoke so that their inhabitants groped to
their work as in a fog. There were no parks or trees: nothing
to reniind men of the green fields from which they came or to
break the squalid monotony of the houses and factories. From
the open drains and ditches that flowed beneath the shade of
sulphurous chimneys and between pestilential hovels arose a
foetid smell. The only symbols of normal human society were
the gimshops. Here on the rare da3rs of leismre the entire popula¬
tion Vtould repair, men, women and children, to suck themselves
into uiserBibility on “Cream of the Valley” or Godfrey’s Cordial.

In a; terrible passage in one of his novels of the ’forties,
Disraeli described such a town. “Wodgate had the appearance
of a vast squalid submrb. As you advanced, leaving behind you
long lines of little dingy tenements, with infants lying about
the r 3 Sd, you expected every moment to emerge into some
streets^'aiid encounter buildings bearing some correspondence,
in theif^size and comfort, to the considerable population swarm¬
ing anfl busied aroimd you. Nothing of the kind. JThere were
no public buildings of any sort; no churches, chapels, town-hall,
institute, theatre; and the principal streets in the heart of the
towif^ whicK'V'ere.atuated the coarse and grimy shops . . .
were'^^qi^j^ narrow, and if possible more dirty. At every
fourth_;dr Mth house, alleys seldom above a yard wide, and

ENGLISH SAGA

Streaming ■with filth, opened out of the street. . . . Here, during
the days of business, the sound of the hammer and the file never
ceased, amid gutters of abomination, and piles of foulness, and
stagnant pools of filth; reservoirs of leprosy and plague, whose
exhalations were sufficient to taint the atmosphere of the whole
of the kingdom and fill the coimtry with fever and pestilence.”

Reality was more terrible than art. Disraeli did not exaggerate
but, out of deference to Victorian proprieties, toned down the
horror of his picture. The official reports of the Royal Health
of Towns Commission of 1845 were more graphic for they were
more exact. In 442 dwellings examined in Preston, 2400 people
slept in 852 beds. In 84 cases four shared a bed, in 28 five, in
13 six, in 3 seven, and in i eight. The cellar populations of
Manchester and Liverpool, nearly 18,000 in the former and more
in the latter, were without any means of removing night-soil
from the habitations. Even for those who lived above ground
water-closets were unknown' and the privies, shared in common
by hundreds, were generally without doors. A doctor in his
report on the Lancashire towns testified:

“I have known instances where the wall of a dwelling-
house has been constantly wet with foetid fluid which has
filtered through from a midden and poisoned the air with
its intolerable stench: and the family was never free from
sickness during the six months they endured the nuisance.
Instances in which foetid air finds its way into the next
dwelling-house are not infrequent. I know an instance (and
I believe there are many such), where it is impossible to
keep food without its being tainted for even a single night
in the cupboards on the side of the house next the public
necessary, and where the foetor is offensively perceptible
always and oppressive in the morning before the door is
opened. In this instance the woman of Ithe house told me
she had never been well since she came to it, and the only
reason she gave for her living in it was, the house was 6d.
a week* 5 ieaper than others free from the nuisance.”^

Such horrors, intolerable to modem minds, must be judged
in proper proportion: it was only the unprecedented rapidity

^on Playfair^ Health of Towns Commission^ L PUporton the State of Large Towns in
Lancashire^ x8g:y.

DARK SATANIC MILLS

and extent of their growth which made them seem terrible to
contemporaries. There had always been filthy slums in the
small, semi-rural cities of the older England; nobody had dreamt
of regulating them. Nor was sanitary carelessness confined to the
poor of the new towns. Even at royal Windsor the footmen in
the pantry suffered perpetually from sore throats until 1844
when more than fifty unemptied cesspits were discovered under
the castle. A people still rustic regarded bad drains as a joke
in the same category as high cheese and “old grouse in gunroom,”
and even welcomed^ their stench as a useful warning of bad
weather. But those of the better-to-do classes who had to pass
through the new factory towns found the nuisance there beyond
a joke. It had become, as Disraeli later reminded the House of
Commons, not a matter of sewerage but a question of life and
death.

In Little Ireland, Ancoats, Engels, seeking material for his
great work on the proletariat of south Lancashire, described the
standing pools, full of refuse, offal and sickening filth, that
poisoned the atmosphere of the densely populated valley of the
Medlock. Here “a horde of ragged women and children swarm
about, as filthy as the swine that thrive upon the garbage heaps
and in the puddles. . . . The race that lives in these ruinous
cottages behind broken windows maided with oilskin, sprung
doors and rotten door-posts, or in dark wet cellars in measureless
filth and stench . . . must really have reached the lowest stage
of humanity. ... In each of these pens, containing at most
two rooms, a garret and perhaps a cellar, on the average twenty
human beings live. . . . For each one hundred and twenty
persons, one usually inaccessible privy is provided; and in spite
of all the preachings of the physicians, in spite of the excitement
into whidi the cholera epidemic plimged the sanitary police by
reason of the condition of Little Ireland, in spite of everything, in
this year of grace, 1844, it is in almost the same state as in 1831.”^

But Engels encountered worse. Groping along the maze
of narrow covered passages that led from the streets of the
old town of Manchester into the yards and alleys that lined the
south bank of the Irk, he found a courtyard at whose entrance
there stood a doorless privy so dirty that the inhabitants could
only pass in and out of the court by wading through stagnant
pools of exaemenL In this district, where one group of thirty

^£n0eUt da

ENGLISH SAGA

hovels housing three hundred and eighty people boasted not
even a single privy, the joint founder of modern Communism
obtained his famous view of the Irk from Dude Bridge:

“The view from this bridge, merdfully concealed from
mortals of small stature by a parapet as high as a man, is
characteristic for the whole district. At the bottom flows,
or rather stagnates, the Irk, a narrow, coal-black, foul¬
smelling stream full of debris and refuse which it deposits
on the shallower right bank. In dry weather, a long string
of the most disgusting, blackish-green," slime pools are left
standing on this bank, from the depths of which bubbles
of miasmatic gas constantly arise and give forth a kench
unendurable even on the bridge forty or fifty feet above
the surface of the stream. ... It may be easily imagined,
therefore, what sort of residue tlie stream deposits. Below
the .bridge you look upon the piles of debris, the refuse,
filth, and offal from the courts on the steep left bank; here
each house is packed close behind its neighbour and a piece
of each is visible, all black, smoky, crumbling, ancient, with
broken panes and window frames. . . . Here the background
embraces the pauper burial-grotmd, the station of the
Liverpool and Leeds Railway, and in the rear of this, the
Workhouse, the * Poor-Law Bastille ’ of Manchester, which,
like a citadel, looks threateningly down from behind its
high walls and parapets on the liilltop upon the working
people’s quarter below.

To comprehend the dual nature of early nineteenth century
Britain and the legacy of discontent and social division we still
inherit from its tragic dualism, this picture drawn by Engels
from Ducie Bridge must be set against Wordsworth’s sonnet
written on its fellow English bridge at Westminster.

As Engels justly asked, how could people who were compelled
to live in such pigstyes, and who were dependent for their water
supply on this pestilential stream, live natural and human lives
or bring up their children as anything but savages? And what
kind of posterity was England, in her feverish search for wealth,
breeding to preserve and enjoy that wealth? It was a question
to which economists gave no answer.

DARK SATANIC MILLS'

There were more urgent ones to answer which concerned not
posterity but the present. If reflection could not teach the
intellect that men who, inhabited the same country were
dependent on one another, germs could. Typhus and putrid
fever took a less individualist view of man’s nature than the
economists. The microbes of infection never acknowledged the
law that every man could find and maintain his own separate
level. Asiatic cholera in 1831 and typhus in 1837 and 1843 from
their strongholds in the industrial towns defied every effort of
hastily improvised sanitary police and chloride of lime to dis¬
lodge them and threatened to devastate the whole country.

There were other warnings that a nation could not neglect
a substantial part of its population without endangering its
safety. A sullen and savage proletariat, growing in numbers,
was turning against the rest of the community, its symbols
and traditions. Carlyle, with his poet’s sensitiveness, felt from
the seclusion of his Chelsea study the imminence of some terrible
explosion among the northern workers. "Black, mutinous
discontent devours them. . . . English commerce, with its
\!WM^-wide, convulsive fluctuations, with its immeasurable
1^^^‘is steam demon^ makes all paths uncertain for them, all
life a bewiderment; society, steadfastness, peaceable continuance,
the first biasings of man are not theirs. This world is for them
no home, but a dingy prison-house, of reckless unthrift, rebel¬
lion, rancour, indignation against themselves and against all

In such a soil the orator of social revolution and the agitator
could look for speedy returns. In the year of Victoria’s accession
a People’s Charter was put forward by a small group of radical
members of Parliament, dissenting ministers and Irish and
Cornish orators. It demanded the immediate transfer of electoral
power from the middle-class electorate of 1832 to the numerically
superior labouring class through universal franchise, the ballot,
annual parliaments, the abolition of the property qualification,
payment of members and equal electoral districts.

The Charter, which was submitted to mass meetings in
Birmingham and London in the following year, caught on like
wildfire in the industrial towns. The agitation soon assumed
an alarming aspect. At meetings arms were called for by excited

g c Carly^i Chartisnu F

ENGLISH SAGA

Celtic orators, and forests of oak saplings were brandished by
grimy sons of toil. Stories were whispered about the country
of how the master workmen of Birmingham—the savage bishops
of heatheri Midland tradition—were manufacturing pikes which,
•smuggled out in the aprons of StajSFordshire chain and nail
makers, were being sold to honest revolutionaries at 1/8 a piece
or 2/6 polished. Men spoke of kidnapping the wives and children
of the aristocracy and carrying them into the northern towns as
■ hostages, of the seaet manufacture of shells and hand grenades
and caltrops for strewing in the path of the hated yeomanry.
Newcastle was to be reduced to ashes: “if the magistrates
Peterko us,” the cry went round, “we will Moscow England.”
In 1839 the principal town of Monmouthshire was attacked by
miners with muskets and pitchforks. Here and in riots at
Birmingham many lost their lives.

The ruling class ignored the movement The violence of
its spokesmen^ rendered it ridiculous in the eyes of responsible
persons. The. House of Commons, with its hatred of

exaggeration, refused to receive its petitions. During the debate
on one, purporting to bear the signatures of millions of
operatives, the House was half empty: though a Tory b?-'’"..
bencher, who one day as Prime Minister was to take more^&'
one step towards the fulfilment of the People’s Charter, cojjitoded
that the rights of labour were as sacred as those ef'^property.
Those within the movement who advocated violence were corre¬

spondingly strengthened. For it seemed that the rulers of England
had no interest in the sufferings of its disinherited people.

The climax came in 1842, the year which saw the publication
of the Report on the employment of children in the coal mines.
One of those prolonged and periodic depressions that attended
industrialisation had culminated in almost unbearable hardship
in the midlands and north: factories were closing and the families
of the operatives starving. Through the previous winter stories

. ‘ P’Coimor, the Chartist leader, -who claimed to be descended from the

insn Kmra, thus addressed his followers in Palace Yard, Westminster. “It was said the
WOTtog claves were dirty fellows, and that among them they could not get six hundred
ana n^-eight who were fit to sit in the House or Commons. Indeed 1 He would soon
wter that He woind pick out that number from the present meeting, and the first he
ci^e he wtmld ^e down to Mr. Hawes’s soap factory; then he would take them
where mey should reform their tailors’ bills; he would next take them to the hairdresser
where they should be anointed with the fashionable stink; and having
one that by way of pMparaUon, he would quickly take them into the House of Com-
would be the best six hundred and fifty-eight that ever sat within its

DARK SATANIC MILLS

had been reaching the breakfast tables of the well-to-do and
respectable of the suflFerings of their human brethren in such
remote places as Bolton and Paisley. The growth of the news¬
paper-reading habit and the introduction of the penny post,
was beginning to open the eyes of the middle class to what was
happening in other parts of the coxmtry. That year the first
illustrated weekly appeared in London and the pages of its
earliest issues were full of sombre pictures of the distress of the
manufacturing districts.

In the spring Sir Robert Peel’s Conservative government,
faced by a serious budget deficit, resorted to its revolutionary
device (for peacetime) of an income tax of sevenpence in the
pound on all incomes of over £150 a year. At Buckingham
Palace that May a Bal Masque was held in the hope of stimulating
trade. The Queen, who was dressed as Queen Philippa, accom¬
panied by Prince Albert in the costume of the chivalrous
Edward III., wore a pendant stomacher valued at £60,000. Several
nobles, inspired by the Gothic revival, commissioned suits
of full armour for the occasion. Another hired £10,000
worth of jewellery for the night from Storr and Mortimer.
Under the soft glare of five htmdred and thirty gas jets the
spectacle continued till long after three in the morning. A few
days later, as the Queen returned down Constitution Hill from
ho: afternoon drive in Hyde Park, a crazy youth tried to assas¬
sinate her with a pocket pistol. As he was seized by the police
he was heard to cry out: “Damn the Queen; why should she
be such an expaise to the nation!”^

Meanwhile the news from the north grew worse. At Burnley
the Guardians, with a quarter of the population destitute, were
forced to appeal to the government for help. Here the weavers
were workmg for 7|d. a day. Idlers with faces haggard with
famin e stood in the streets their eyes wearing the fierce and
uneasy expression of despair. A doctor who visited the town in
June found in eighty-three houses, selected at hazard, no furniture
but old boxes, stone boulders (for chairs) and beds of straw and
sacking. The whole population was living on oatmeal, water
and sldmmed milk.

Revolution was in the air. The workers were talking openly
of burning down the mills in order to enforce a nation-wide
strike. In Colne and Bolton hands were clenched, teeth set and

^lUusirated London News^

ENGLISH SAGA

fearful curses uttered. Haggard orators bade starving audiences
take cheer, for soon “Captain Swing” would rule the manufac¬
turing districts. At a Chartist gathering on Enfield moor npa r
Blackburn, a speaker announced that the industrial North would
soon be marching on Buckingham Palace ; if the Queen refused
the Charter, every man would know what to do.^

Across St. George’s Channel, Ireland—^herself the mother of
many an English factory operative—starved and rioted. In
Eimis the mob attacked the flour mills; at Cork, growing weary
of a diet of old cabbage leaves, it stormed the potato markets.
Dear com—^popularly believed to be the price of the time-honoured
Corn Laws which protected the landowner at the expense of the
poor—the new machines and the middle-class franchise were
alike indicted by bitter and angry men as the cause of their
suflterings. As the uneasy parliamentary session of the summer
of 1842 drew to a close, the authorities reinforced the troops in
the industrial areas. . '

The first rumblings of the storm came from Staffordshire.
Here towards the end of July the colliers, following a reduction
of their wages to 2/6 a day, turned out and, marching on every
works in the neighbourhood, compelled their comrades to do
likewise. Those who refused were flung into tlie canals, plugs
were hammered out of the boilers and furnaces extinguished.
The word went round that all labour was to cease until the
Charter had become the law of the land. The markets in the
towns of the western midlands were deserted and every work-
house besieged by vast queues of gaunt woman and children and
idle men.

The Lord Lieutenant, sitting with the magistrates at the
Dartmouth Hotel, West Bromwich, called out the county
yeomanry. The 3rd Dragoon Guards, stationed in Walsall,
endeavoured to restore order. Shopkeepers and farmers were
enrolled as special constables, and the old England was pitted
against the new. But in the industrial areas the dispossessed
had the advantage of numbers aftd they were desperate. At
Wolverhampton strikers surrounded the workhouse and estab¬
lished virtual mob-law. Farther north a procession of 6000
workmen surged down on collieries, iron-works and potteries
until every chimney in the district had ceased to smoke. There

' ^Another spealur on Pendldbill refereed to the Queen as "'a dawdling usdess thing.*
' Uaaml Register, ^une, xBgg.)

DARK SATANIC MILLS 73

was little physical violence for only in a few places was there
any resistance. Under threat of crowbar and torch, the owners
of bakeries, groceries and public houses distributed provisions
with the best face they could. Bills appeared on the walls calling
the “Toiling Slaves” to monster demonstrations; others, issued
by alarmed authorities, threatened transportation to those who
destroyed machinery or used intimidation.

Such was the position as the parliamentary session of 1842
drew to a close and Ministers, who doubted their ability to keep
the peace for more than a few days longer, prepared after the
bnperturbable manner of England for the customary Cabinet
fish dinner at the Crown and Sceptre tavern, Greenwich. In
the seaports there were signs of a slight improvement in trade.
But the reports that poured in from every manufacturing
district continued menacing. The whole population was in a
state of intense excitement. It was difficult to say whether the
cause was himger, wage reductions. Chartism or the popular
demand for cheap bread and repeal of the Com Laws.

The explosion came on August 4th at Staleybridge, where
the employees of Messrs. Bayley’s mill had received notice of a
further reduction in wages. The strikers, as though acting on
prearranged orders, turned out the workers at every factory in
Ashton and Oldham. Next morning they marched on Man¬
chester. For a few noisy hours the main body was held up by
a small detachment of police and troops at Holt Town. But
other rioters swarming out from the streets on either flank,
the authorities were forced to fall back leaving factories and
provision shops at their mercy. At Messrs. Birley’s mill, where
momentary resistance was encountered, the roof was stormed,’
every window broken, and two policemen and an onlooker
killed. On Saturday, 6th, while Sir Robert and his fellow
Minis ters were embarking at Hungerford Pier on the Prince of
Wales steam packet for their outing at Greenwich, riots were
raging in every district of Manchester. Police stations were
demolished and more officers killed.

The great “Turn Out,” long threatened by heady orators and
whispered among the people, had come at last. The workers
were on the marcL On Simday the rioting spread to Stockport
and other parts of Cheshire. Mills were attacked, bakeries looted
and the police pelted with stones. At Preston the mob attacked
. the military, and several lost their lives. In the Potteries some

^4 englishsaga

colliers arrested by the police were rescued by their fellow
miners who subsequently stormed the Burslem Town Hall, burnt
its records and rate books, and sacked the George Inn and the
principal shops. Afterwards the town looked as though an
invading army had passed through it.

The scene of the insurrection would not have been England
had its grim and starving landscape not been lightened by flashes
of humour. At one place where a band of marauding Amazons
fr om the cotton mills threatened to bum down a farai, the
farmer turned the tables by loosing his bull. In another—it was
at Wigan—the local miners insisted oil keeping guard round
Lord Crawford’s park against their fellow strikers so that, as
one of them put it, the old Lord could drink his port in peace.*

Work throughout the industrial north was now at a complete
standstill. In Manchester all the shops were shuttered and the
streets thronged with thousands of workmen who besieged the
sidewalks demanding money and food from passers by. Similar
scenes were enacted in almost every industrial town from
Leicester to Tyneside, and in western Scotland. At Stoke-on-
Trent the mob gutted the Court of Requests, the Police Station
and the larger houses; at Leeds the Chief of Police was seriously
wounded, and fatal casualties occurred at Salford, Blackburn
and Halifax. The wildest rumours circulated: that in Manchester
the police had been cut to pieces with volleys of brickbats; that
the redcoats, welcomed by the hxmgry populace as brothers, had
risen against their officers; that the C^een who had “set her face
against gals working in mills” was ready to grant the Charter
and open the ports to cheap com.

The alarm of the well-to-do classes in the adjacent rural
areas was by now intense, hi the factory towns of Lancashire
6ooo.millowners and shopkeepers enrolled as special constables
to defend their menaced interests. The Government decided to
act with vigour. In every northern and midland county the
yeomanry were called out, and farmers’ sons sharpened sabres
on the grindstone at the village smithy before riding off to patrol
the grimy streets of a world they did not understand. Tall-
hatted magistrates rode beside them ready to mumble through
the Riot Act and loose the forces that had triumphed at Peterloo
over the urban savagery their own ne^ect had created. .

On Saturday, August 13th, tliere was fierce rioting in

^Communicated by the present Earl of Crawford and Balcarres.

DARK SATANIC MILLS 75

Rochdale, Todmorden, Bury, Macclesfield, Bolton, Stockport,
Burslem and Hanley. At the latter place 5000 strikers marched
on a neighbouring country mansion and left it blazing. Hordes
of rough-looking men in fur caps carrying clubs and faggots
patrolled the squalid unpaved roads around the idle mills; others
attempted to hold up the mail and tear up the permanent way
on the Manchester-Leeds railway. Next morning, though
Simday, the Cabinet met and issued urgent orders to the Guards
and the Artillery at Woolwich to hold themselves in readiness
for Manchester. That evening as the 3rd battalion of the
Grenadiers debouched with band playing through the gates of
St. George’s Barracks into Trafalgar Square, vast numbers of
working men and boys closed in and tried to obstruct its
progress. In Regent Street the crowd became so menacing that
the order was given to fix bayonets; all the way to Euston Square
Station, which was packed with police, hisses and groans con¬
tinued. The 34th Foot, summoned in haste from Portsmouth,
was also continuously hooted on its march across London.

By the evening of the i6th, Manchester was held by three
regular infantry battalions, the rst Royal Dragoons and artillery
detachments with howitzers and six-pounders. A few miles away
the streets of Bolton were patrolled by companies of the 72nd
Highlanders. Other troops poured in by the new railroads with
such rapidity that the rebellion quickly began to lose its dangerous
appearance. All that week the magistrates and police, protected
by the military, were busy arresting ringleaders and detachments
of rioters, and every main road and railway was watched by
moTinted constables and dragoons.

After that the insurrection crumbled. Further resort to force
was useless. Hxmger did the rest. Anger and hectic excitement
gave place to weakness and despair. The shops were guarded and,
with the mills closed, even the miserable wages of the past year
of want ceased. The poor rates in every Lancashire town soared
as pale, famished multitudes besieged the workhouses, and
ruined householders, unable to pay their rent, abandoned their
homes. In November Engels saw gaunt, listless men at every
street comer in Manchester, and whole streets of houses in
Stockport standing empty.

Gradually the factories reopaied and a defeated people
crept back to work. The insurrection had failed. Yet, like the

ENGLISH SAGA

Report on the employment of children in coal mines, it had done
something to awaken the conscience of England. It had added
to pity fear, and, as is the way with the English in times of trial,
a sober resolve to remove the cause of the evil. So long as the
rioting continued, worthy and peace-loving folk set their faces
resolutely against the rioters. But when it was over they took
counsel of their consciences.^

Many, particularly the manufacturers and the new middle-
class, who had nothing to gain by the protection of agriculture
and much by the cheapening of provisions, laid the blame on
the Corn Laws. Others, like the country landowners, condemned'
the inhumanity of the millowners, who retaliated by pointing
to the low wages and neglected hovels of the agricultural workers
in the southern counties. As Ashley, the factory reformer, knew
to his misery, none were worse than those on the Dorset estate
of his father, Lord Shaftesbury. The economists and the states¬
men who subscribed to their theories continued to reiterate the
importance of non-interference with the laws of supply and
demand.

But with the general thinking public the view gained ground
that there were limits to the efficacy of laissez-foire^ where public
health and the employment of children were concerned. Sanitary
reform and factory regulation began for the first time to be
taken seriously. Early in 1843 Ashley was able to carry without
opposition an address to the Crown for the diffusion of moral
and religious education among the working classes. In the
following year a new Factory Bill became law limiting the
hours of children under sixteen to six and a half a day and
establishing further regulations for the fencing of machinery
and the inspection of industrial premises. In the same year a
commission on the Health of Towns was appointed. Its Report
written by Edwin Chadwick revealed that of fifty large towns
examined, only six had a good water supply and not one an
adequate drainage system.

Public opinion was by now far ahead of parliamentary

is certainly a very dismal matter for reflection, and well worthy of the considera¬
tion of the profoundest political philosophers, that the possession of such a Constitution,
all our wealth, industry, ingenuity, peace, and that superiority in wisdom and virtue
which we so confidently claim, are not sufficient to prevent the existence of a large
mountain of human misery, of one stratum in society in the most deplorable state, both
moral and physical, to which mankind can be reduced, and that all our advantages do
not secure us against the occurrence of evils and mischiefs so great as to threaten a
mighty sr^cial and political convulsion," GreviUc Memoirs^ Part 11^ Vol //, xi^sto.

DARK SATANIC MILLS 77

action. During the middle and latter forties the novels of
Dickens, Disraeli and Charles Kingsley, the pamphlets of Carlyle
and the poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning educated the
reading classes in the Condition of the People question and
stimulated their desire for social reform. Intelligent England
had become conscious of the new towns. Even Tennyson turned
from his dreams of a remote chivalry to confront the inescapable
problem of his age:

“Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion creeping nigher.
Glares at one that nods and w inks behind a slowly dying fire.”

The thought of a new generation was crystallised in Ashley’s
unanswerable question, “Let me ask the House, what was it
gave birth to Jack Cade? Was it not that the people were writhing
under oppressions which they were not able to bear? It was
because the Government refused to redress their grievances that
the people took the law into their own hands.”

So inspired by pity and purged by the fear of some new and
more terrible arising, the conscience and commonsense of
England addressed themselves to the redress of great wrongs.
They received little direction from the responsible rulers of the
nation who were blinded by a theory.^ The urge for social
reform was spontaneous and its first fruits were mainly volimtary
and unofficial. It took the form of numberless remedial activities
of a private or only semi-public nature, from feverish church
building and the foundation of industrial schools for the waifs
and strays of the urban slums to the “poor peopling” which
became so fashionable an occupation for well-to-do young
ladies in the late ’forties: it was in this work that Florence
Nightingale began her life of volimtary service. All over
England and Scotland isolated individuals began to tackle self-
imposed tasks, each striving to cleanse his or her own small
local comer of the Augean stable. Such were provincial doctors
who faced fever and vested interest in a tireless campaign against
insanitary conditions, devoted clerg3maen' and non-conformist
ministers, dty missionaries and temperance workers, and young
men and women of comfortable circumstances—often evangeli-

^In later years men like Sir James Graham, the Home Secretary, and John Roebuck,
the Radical economist, admitted that they had been wrong in their fear that the limita¬
tion of hours of labour would ruin the country.

ENGLISH SA GA

cals or quakers—who gave up their leisure hours to teach in
ragged schools or to organise clubs, sports and benefit societies
for their poorer neighbours. In this way, not for the first time
in England’s history, the destruction wrought by her own
tumultuous vitality was redeemed in part by the operation of
her own generous conscience.

But the evil was deeply rooted, and the remedy, for all the
energy and enthusiasm behind it, so ill-co-ordinated and tardy
that those who prophesied revolution and social chaos^ might
have been proved right had it not been for one over-riding factor.
The social maladies that provoked revolt were not destroyed
though they were henceforward slowly but steadily mitigated.
On the other hand, while diminishing in intensity, they con¬
tinued to grow in extent through further urbanisation. Revolu¬
tion was avoided by extending the area of exploitation. But
the very factor which most hastened that process ended the isola¬
tion of the industrial areas from the rest of the community.
The railways had already been decisive in the suppression of the
rebellion: an express train had brought a critical appeal for help
from Preston to Manchester, and the Guards had been transferred
from London to Lancashire in the course of a single night.
Rapid internal communication and a new habit of travel, born
of cheap transport, was within a few years to transform England
and give her a new unity and orientation.

CHAPTER -THREE

Iron Horse

“And along the iron veins that traverse the frame of
our country, beat and flow the fiery pulses of its exertion,
hotter and faster every hour. All vitality is concentrated
through those throbbing arteries into the central cities;
the country is passed over like a green sea by narrow
bridges, and we are thrown back in continually closer
crowds on the city gates.”

"^ohn Ruskin, fht Seoen Lamps of Architectm.

T o TURN OVER the pages of the early volumes of the lUustrated
London News, which was founded in 1842, is to experi¬
ence a social revolution. The first volume depicts an
England that, apart from the capital, is mainly rural—a land
of cathedral spires embowered in trees ; fairs and markets; fat
cattle, gaitered' farmers and squires and smocked peasants.
Where the manufacturing districts appear they do so as an
almost savage terra incognita, with rough unpaved roads, grim
gaol-Hke factories and men and women of sullen and brutish
appearance. Even here one feels the country has only been
occupied by a horde of nomad invaders: on the outskirts of
the Manchester of 1842 there were still sloping wooded valle3rs
with girls keeping sheep a stone’s throw from the flat slate
roofs and tall smoking chimneys,

Yet before the end of the ’forties the scene has completely
changed. It is an urban England that is engraved on the crowded
page. The stress is now on paved streets, vast Gothic town halls,
the latest machinery, above all the railroad. The iron horse,
with its towering, belching funnel and its long load of roaring
coaches plunging through culvert and riding viaduct, had
spanned the land, eliminating distance and redudng all men to
a common denominator. And the iron horse did not go from
village to village: it went from industrial town to town. The
England of Winchester and Canterbmy and Chester was a thing
of the past The England of smoking Rotherham and Hull and
colonial Crewe had arrived.

This revolution in transport came with an exfraordinaiy
rapidity. In 1830, and in most places in 1840, a man who wanted

8 o

ENGLISH SAGA

to take a journey did so on the roof of a stage coach. Tom Brown
went to Rugby of all places in the old Tally-ho 1 To travel by
the London Tantivy mail to Birmingham along the macadamised
turnpike, a distance of 120 miles, took twelve hours; to Liverpool
another eleven. One left London shortly before eight in the
morning, changed in the course of ten minutes into the Bir-
mingham-Liverpool Mail at the same hour in the evening, and
reached one^s destination, bleary-eyed and exhausted, at seven
next day. •

That was the very fastest travel. And what travelling it
was! On a cold, damp, raw December morning one waited in
the dark at the posting-house for the Highflyer or Old True
Blue Independent coach “coming hup ” and,when the muddied,
steaming horses drew up in the courtyard, took one’s “preference”
seat in the hot, suflFocating, straw-strewn box. There one sat in
cramped darkness for many hours of creaking, lumbering and
jolting until the “many-coated, brandy-faced, blear-eyed guard
let in a whole hurricane of wind” with the glad tidings that the
coach had reached another inn “wot ’oss’d it,” where the com¬
pany was allowed half an hour’s grace to dine. The only alter¬
native was to travel on the roof, in dust and glare in summer,
and muffled to the nose in a frozen eternity in winter. It had
its romantic side, of course, but no man would undertake such
travel lightly. And what with the fare of sixpence a mile for
inside accommodation, the cost of meals at the posting inns,
and the tips to ostler, boots, guard, post-boy and waiter, it was
beyond the means of all but a small minority.

In what seemed to our ancestors only a few years all this
was changed. The first tentative^ steam railway from Stockton
to Darlington had been opened in 1825, Liverpool and

Manchester line had followed in 1830. A year after Queen
Victoria’s accession there were only 500 miles of operating
railway in the British Isles. The first railway boom in 1830-9,
following a run of good harvests and financed mainly by
provincial money, added another 5,000 miles of projected track.
Of these 1,900 miles were open by the summer of 1843. They
included the lines from London to Birmingham, Manchester,
Brighton and Bristol.

^For long it was an open question whether horses or steam engines should draw
railed traffic, and, after the final triumph of steam, whether the new engines would be
most serviceable on iron tracks or as unrailcd coaches on the turnpike road. y. if, Clajh
harnt An Mconomic History of Modem Britain^ /, ySjty

IRON HORSE

Travellers, once they had got over the first shock of noise,
sulphur and speed, were entranced by the railroad. Greville in
1837 travelled in four and a half hours from Birmingham to
Liverpool to the races, sitting in a sort of chariot with two
places and finding nothing disagreeable about it but the whiffs
of stinking air. His first sensation, he admitted, was one of
slight nervousness and of being run away with, but a feeling
of security soon supervened and the velocity was delightful.
“Town after town, one park and chateau after another are left
behind with the rapid variety of a moving panorama,’’ At every
stop all heads appeared at the windows, while the platform
resounded with astonished cries of “How on earth came you
here?” The most surprising feature of it all, apart from the
speed^ and smoothness of motion, was the wonderful pimctuality.
It gave to man something of the precision and power of the
machine.

At first, of course, xmtil people got used to the idea, there was
a certain amount of opposition. Landowners, corporations and
venerable Cathedral clergy and dons were at pains to keep the
vulgar, snorting intruders away from their domains, thus both
impoverishing and inconveniencing their successors. Gentlemen
resented their noisy intrusion on their parks and himtsmen on
their favourite gorses. Poets like Wordsworth thought them
hideous, and farmers complained of frightened horses and
cattle; keepers of posting-houses, stage coachmen and canal
proprietors also naturally hated the puflSng billies. “I thought
likewise,” wrote Jasper Petulengro, “of the danger to which
one’s family would be exposed of being run over and severely
scorched by these same flying fiery vehicles.” Such opponents
found a doughty champion in the Tory M.P. for Lincoln,
Colonel Sibthorpe, who “abominated all railroads soever” and
made it his business to oppose every bill for their promotion.

These efforts could not avert the march of progress. The
taste for railway travel once acquired continued to grow. In
1842 the linking of England by rail was still very incomplete.
When a Chartist agitator was arrested in Northumberland for
a seditious speech at Birmingham, he was taken by hackney
coach to Newcastle, by ferry across the Tyne to Gateshead, by

lOne ** engmcer” on the Hveipool-Binningham line in 1837 reached the astonishing
rate of 45 miles an hour, after which he was promptly dismiMW by a prudent company.
Gtmlk Fart //, VoL /,

ENGLISH SAGA

rail to Carlisle, by stage coach over Shap Fell to Preston, and
thence by what was soon to become the North-Western Railway
to Birmingham. In this fashioii a man could travel from Euston
to Glasgow in twentyrfour hours—^by rail to Fleetwood, by
steamer to Ardrossan and by rail on to Glasgow. "What more
can any reasonable man want?” asked the Railway Times. Yet
the reasonable man and the railroad speculators who catered for
his needs wanted more.

Of the latter the most famous was George Hudson, the York
linen-draper. Under his dynamic and sanguine leadership a
railway mania developed that rivalled the South Sea Bubble.^
During the period of cheap money after 1843 nearly ten thousand
miles of new railway were sanctioned by private parliamentary
acts. Much speculative money was lost in the process—the
sudden slump of 1847 was a minor social calamity—^but amalga¬
mation of the smaller and more hare-brained ventures by the
larger resulted in ultimate stabilisation. By 1849 the railway
system of England had taken on the general form we know
to-day.

All this involved a revolution in English life and organisation.
For many years the country was covered by armies of "navi¬
gators” or "navvies,” whom contractors employed to translate
the grandiose dreams of the railway projectors and the capital
of their shareholders into solid cutting, embankment, tunnel
and permanent way. In 1848 nearly 200,000 labourers, many of
them Irish, were engaged in this vast task. With their rough
habits and speech, high wages—^pay day was usually a brutal
debauch—and their generous taste in steak, plush waistcoats and
whisky,^ they uprooted ancient ways of living in every place
where they encamped. To many of the older skilled workers in
the country districts their square-tailed coats of velveteen, their
soiled white felt hats and spotted scarlet vests symbolised the
“accursed wages of savagery and sin”: for the younger villagers
their sojotim had an exciting, unsettling quality that in after
years caused many to follow them to the great cities along
the gleaming lines they had laid.

In 1840 England was still regional in its outlook; by 1850
it was national. Save in the remoter shires where there was

Punch depicted a crowd of citizens throwing themselves and their money-bags in
front of an iron “puj05ne billy** while parliamentary lawyers in the shape of crocodiles
waited hiingriW in the foreground and gulls hovered ovcarhead. Pmch IX. iiSds)* 47 .

•Theycj2l^it“wHtebeer.**. '

IRON HORSE.

. 83

Still no puff of smoke in the valleys to mar the soft horizons,
it had become the common lot of an Englishman to live near
a railroad. And the new travel had been made accessible to the
poorest. In 1845 Gladstone, then President of the Board of Trade
in Sir Robert Peel’s Conservative administration, brought in a
measure compelling every railway company to run at least one
train daily over its system with covered third class accom¬
modation at a penny a mile. Within a few years the receipts of
such cheap travel had become almost the most valuable part
of the companies’ revenue. With the railroad came also cheap
coal and cheap food, linking mine, port and countryside to the
all-consuming town, and the creation of a vested interest carrying
the capital of thousands of shareholders and employing a growing
multitude of workers. All these were henceforward dependent
on the continued industrialisation of their coimtry.

In other ways England had become more closely knit in¬
ternally, as well as better connected with the outer world. The
first electric telegraph was tried in 1838; eight years later the
Electric Telegraph Company was formed to exploit it com¬
mercially. Within two years there were nearly 2,000 miles of
public telegraph with offices open day and night. Meanwhile
the Penny Post, introduced by Rowland Hill in 1840, had led to
a far-reaching change in social habit: in three years the weekly
delivery of letters in the United Kingdom rose from a million
and a half to nearly four millions. Correspondence, hitherto an
activity of the weU-to-do class^ alone, became common to all
who could read and write. The prepaid adhesive stamps, affixed
to the new paper bags or envelopes which took the place of
folded sheets and wafers, were the symbols of a new conception
of life, less local and more universal.

So were the trails of smoke that marked every sea-coast
horizon. The first British steamboat had been launched on the ,
Clyde in 1811: in the next thirty years over six hundred were
built. In 1838 the first iron sailing vessel crossed the Atlantic.
Four years later the Great Western steamship arrived One June
morning in King’s Road,. Bristol, from New York, having per¬
formed in twelve and a half days a passage which until then
had normally taken a month. The world of which industrial
Britain was the centre was daily growing smaller.

To grasp it she stretched out eager and vigorous hands.
Despite trade slumps and periodic fluctuations with all their

ENGLISH SAGA

attendant miseries, the exports of the country were rising fast.
History had never recorded such an expansion of wealth and
opportunity as came to island Britain in the first half of the
nineteenth century: even the golden Spanish discoveries in the
Americas three centuries before paled beside it.* Exports of xm-
manufactured iron soared from under 30,000 tons in 1815 to
five times as much in 1830, ten times in 1840, and nearly twenty
times in 1850. In tlie first half of the century coal exports were
mtiltiplied fifteen-fold. Between 1839 and 1849 alone the exports
of mixed wool and cotton fabrics from the West Riding expanded
from 2,400,000 to 42,115,000 yards. It was so in almost everything
else.

In that torrent of opportunity notliing seemed to matter but
getting rich. Whoever could do so was honoured: whoever
failed was passed by and trampled imder foot. In Merthyr Tydfil,
where an army of iron-workers lived, sleeping sometimes sixteen
in a room, there were no drains, the water supply came from
the open gutters and the filthy streets were unpaved. At the
palace of Cyfartlifa Castle a few miles away stood,, in Mr. and
Mrs. Hammond’s significant phrase, “the home and monument
of the man who had started life on the road to London with all
his fortune in his stout arm and his active brain, and had died
worth a million and a half.” “Persons in humble life,” wrote
the editor of the Mechanic's Magazine “should be the last—
though, we regret to say, they arc the first—to speak disrespect¬
fully of the elevation of individuals of their own class, since in
nine cases out of ten the individual is the architect of his own
good fortime, and the rise of one man by honest means furnishes
a ground of hope to all that they may by a proper exertion of
the powers which Nature has given than be equally successful.”^
It was the model which the early Victorian moralist held out to
his countrymen. Self-help was almost divine.

• •••■•»•

Of all avenues to individual wealth—as well as to misery,
pauperism and degradation—the chief was cotton. In the late
dghteen-twenties Britain imported annually an average of
100,000 tons of cotton, ten years later of 260,000 tons, and in 1849
of nearly 350,000 tons. Cotton came to represent nearly a third
of the nation’s trade. It seemed to many that tlie national centre
of gravity must shift from London to Manchester. The railways

^C* Wilkins, Sist^ tht Iron, Steel and Tinplate Trades qf Wales,

IRONHORSE 85

underlined the change. What cotton, in other words Lancashire
needed, England could no longer deny.

That which cotton needed it asked for. Even in adversity
Lancashire was wont to speak out its mind: and Lancashire
with brass in its pocket spoke it very loud. And what was in
its vigorous mind—^in that, that is to say, of its many capitalists
great and small—^was the wish to make more and ever more
money. Everything that stood in the way of its doing so was
bad: everything that hastened the process, even by a day, was
good.

What Lancashire needed most was to import and export more
cotton. Any policy that tended, for whatever reason, to check
its imports of raw cotton was opposed to its interests. For
centuries the policy of England had been based on the protection
of the industry on which the health, social well-being and safety
of the bulk of its people depended—agriculture. But to Lanca¬
shire the corn-laws which afforded this protection were an
impediment and an affront. By restricting imports, they re¬
stricted the growth of the industries which manufactured for
export. They blocked the channel of expanding profits for
Lancashire.

What Manchester thought to-day, it was said, England
would think to-morrow. As the power of Lancashire grew, a
nation-wide campaign was begxm for the abolition of the corn-
laws. It^ enlisted the services of two cotton-spinners of genius,
both of whom entered Parliament, Richard Cobden and John
Bright. They and the sturdy middle-class voters whose inter^ts
they so brilliantly championed held that the proper organisation
of human society was one in which Britain devoted herself to
the production of manufactured goods, and the rest of mankind
supplied her with food and raw materials in exchange. The
cheaper the latter, the cheaper and therefore the larger the
quantity of goods sold. In this view, the maintenance of duties
on foreign corn was a form of national insanity. For they
restricted the foreign sales of Lancashi r e cotton. They could
only be explained by the.power of monopoly possessed by a few
effete and reactionary landowners.

The case for the repeal of the com laws received new strength
from the misery of the industrial proletariat and the rural
worker caused by industrial change. Both, confronted by the
refusal of the authorities to relieve their sufferings, felt a sense

ENGLISH SAGA

of grievance. The fine gentlemen in Parliament and the land-
owners on the Board of Guardians who refused outdoor relief
and ignored the promptings of common humanity in the name
of laissez-faire, themselves enjoyed a protection that was the
antithesis of laissezfaire. In the shape of a tax on food, pro¬
tection wore its most odious and therefore most vulnerable
form. Wages being low and employment uncertain, the obvious
remedy was to remove the impost and cheapen the workers’
bread. A Tudor statesman, viewing the interests of the nation
as a whole, might have deemed it tviser to seek the same end
through minimum wage rates and political action stabilising
markets and trade. But to a student of laissezfaire such a course
could only seem a flagrant breach of immutable economic law.

The cry for cheap bread, therefore, had a triple force. It
respected hallowed and eternal truths. It appealed to the needs
of the hungry and the hearts of the charitable. It offered en¬
hanced industrial profits. Instead of having to pay higher wages,
the north-country manufacturer could reasonably expect,
through a fall in the cost of living, to pay lower, and at the
same time, by selling more, to increase his returns. That this
gain would be at the expense of the landed interest did not
trouble him. In the view of Manchester^and as Manchester
grew richer, its social consciousness became almost aggressively
acute—the landed interest was composed of stupid and anti¬
quated feudal snobs. The sooner they could be swept away to
leave room for the unhampered rule of progressive talent, the
better.

But despite the Reform Bill of 1832 the benches of Parliament
were still mainly occupied by country gentlemen. The Whig
aristocrats who had passed the Reform Bill were landowners like
the Tory squires who had opposed it. Neither were yet ready
to dispense with a principle on which their own wealth and
power, and as they therefore believed, the security of the con¬
stitution depended. The Conservative majority which supported
Sir Robert Peel had pledged itself to maintain the existing agri¬
cultural duties. The most the Government of 1841 would con¬
cede to the reformers was a modification of the sliding scale of
i8a8 and the fixing of a maximum duty of 20/- a quarter. Even
this, to many of its back-bench supporters, seemed too much.
A corn-law reformtt’s motion for total repeal was rejected in
1842 by a majority of more t^n four to one.

IRONHORSE 87

But when Lancashire made up its mind, it took more than
a Parliament of squires to stop it. If the House would not see
its duty, the electorate would teach it. The power of the vote
should be mobilised to destroy the vested interest of the past
and, incidentally, to create a new and better one in its place.
From its MaiJShester headquarters, the Anti-Corn Law League
had already started on its famous eight-year campaign to arouse
the voting middle-class against the protective system and the
“com law monopolists.” The agitation was brilhantly successful.
In 1841 “Free Trade” was still a panacea of a minority of radical
idealists. In 1846, in the face of ever-growing clamom, it was
officially adopted by the Conservative Government which had
pledged itself to oppose it. By 1850 it had become the classic
creed of the country.

There were many reasons for this. The chief were the spirit
of the age and the underlying economic dogma which had so
curiously captured the imagination, of the educated classes.
Free Trade was the logical application of Benthamite hisses
faire. In the past the English had been little given to abstract
speculation: the descendants of farmers, peasants and sailors
who had tilled the earth and sailed the seas with an adaptable
eye for ever cocked at their changing island skies, they had dis¬
trusted logical theories and based their lives on constant and
instinctive improvisation—an art in which they excelled all
others.

But in the latter eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
the most vigorous elements in Britain had deserted the land.
Divorced from the traditional forms of rustic social life of
which by long practice they had become past masters, and cut
off as it were by the pavements from their own instinctive.roots,
the English “progressives” fell an easy prgr to theory. Before
abstract ideas th^ were as helpless as South Sea islanders before
a new disease.. TTiey absorbed them uncritically and enthusi¬
astically. Many of liiem.they borrowed from their neighbours,
the Scots, whose long training in Calvinism had given them a
liking for logic. A Glasgow professor’s book, fTXe Wealth of
Nations, formed the English economic outlook for more than a
century.

The early Forsytes, fresh from generations of thought-free
and instinctive living in country loam, and their northern
prototypes, the Lancashire and West Riding capitalists, were

ENGLISH SAGA

particularly susceptible to the beguilements of abstract political
theory, provided it was put to them in a simple form and one
likely to benefit their pockets. It was England’s fate that the
leader of her great traditionalist party during the second quarter
of the nineteenth century was himself a man of tliis class. For
all his Harrow and Oxford gloss of classicaHeaming, the
leader of the gentlemen of England in the fatal crisis of their
history was a Lancashire millowner’s son. Sir Robert Peel was
a man of splendid talents and industry but, like those from
whom he sprang, he was not at home with original ideas. And
finding himself in an age of rapid and revolutionary change
called upon to steer a course in which his. instinct would give
him little guide, he was compelled periodically to borrow ideas
from others. He did so unconsciously and for that reason with
uncritical zeal.

His betrayal of the traditional system he had been elected to
defend was as unconscious as it was gradual. Because of his
English incapacity for grasping theoretical principles, Peel
never saw the corn laws and Ae protective system of which
they were the core as anything but a collection of fiscal in s uni-
ments. That underlying them might be an enduring principle
of government giving continuity to national life, and strength
and security to unborn generations, never occurred to his mind.
Like most of his countrymen, he began by accepting the com laws
as a matter of course, and ended by swallowing whole the doctrine
that destroyed them. The theory of Free Trade was novel, easy
to understand and ably and persistently expounded: the ancient
principle of state it ignored remained unstated.

I Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century the
coxmtry, largely as a result of the anarchy created by its own
feverish pursuit of quick profits in foreign markets, suffered
from a series of commercial crises. These increased in intensity
with the growth of the system. Various attempts were made
to explain them. At one time they were attributed to the unre¬
presentative nature of the unrefbrmed House of Commons.
After the Reform Bill a new scapegoat was sought. It was on
the Com Laws, now assailed by the brilliant oratory and
pamphleteering of the League, that the blame was laid. The
same simple explanation was held to cover every suffering
endured by the industrial masses. Cheap bread was the open
sesame wHch would solve all difficulties. The s elfis h and stupid

IRONHORSE 8p

landlord with his antiquated com laws alone stood between the
nation and perpetual peace and prosperity.

In 1842 Peel, faced by an acute trade slump and the threat
of a revolution in the starving north, met the situation by
reducing the sliding scale duties on corn. During the trade
revival of the next three years he left matters as they were. But

llts while the doctrine of the Anti-Corn Law League w^as
gaining on his mind,^ and though he continued dutifully to
regard himself as bound by his electoral pledge to maintain the
existing duties and even denounced Cobden as a dangerous
agitator, he was already his unconscious disciple. When in the
autumn of. 1845—one of the wettest and most miserable in
human memory—the Irish potato crop was affected by disease,
he was ready to adopt immediate repeal as the only remedy.

For to feed Ireland, England would have to import surplus
corn from abroad, and neither the English nor the starving
Irish could be expected to pay duty on it. Yet as was pointed out
by Stanley—the only leading member of Peel’s cabinet not to be
carried away—abolition of the corn laws only took from the
starving Irish peasant with one hand what it gave with the other.
Having by an act of God been robbed of the first of his two
staple crop, potatoes, he could only be further injured by a
reduction in the price of the second, oats. In the cliniax of their
own industrial revolution the political rulers of Britain, now
suddenly and almost wholly obsessed by an urban viewpoint,
forgot that the people of Ireland were country, not towm
producers. For the remedies they offered were calculated to
relieve the latter at the expense of the former.

Peel, like so many of his countrymen, was in the grip of an
economic theory. He saw the corn laws as a challenge to that
theory and wished to remove them. Having given his electoral
pledge to maintain them, he had regretfully decided that they
would have to stay on the Statute book until the election of a
new Parliament. But the “potato cholera,” with its threat to
the Irish food supply, gave him, the first public servant of
Britain, the chance to effect the great change himself—one
which, as he now fervently believed, would set his country and
the world on the path to lasting economic prosperity. It gave
him not a reason for his action—he needed none—^but a pretext.

^As early as 18421 Peel told Gladstone “ that in future he questioned whether he could
undertake the defence of the Corn Laws on principle.”

ENGLISH SAGA

For he was seeking not a mere suspension to meet the emergency
of the moment, but permanent repeal. It was not, as the Duke
of Wellington thought, ‘‘rotten potatoes” that put “Peel in his
damned fright!” Peel was not in a fright at all, but having
been subjugated, as public, men in a democracy are apt to be,
by continuous pressure and propaganda, he was able to use
the Irish calamity to carry a measure in which he now profoundly
believed.

It is one of the purposes of a parliamentary constitution to
render government sensitive to the larger changes of popular-
opinion. Before the Reform Bill that of Britain, as a result of
a long and gradual redistribution of population, was not suffi¬
ciently so. But when the history of our age can be seen in its
final perspective, it may come to be held that after the Reform
Bill, British parliaments became too sensitive not to the
permanent convictions of the nation but to the ephemeral
opinion of the hour. For public opinion is not infallible in its
pursuit of popular interests. In the early nineteenth century it
was assumed by many learned and hopeful persons that it was.
The thesis of Bentham and the Utilitarians tliat the object of
all government was the greatest good of the greatest number,
was accompanied by the more dubious assumption that that
good could always be achieved by the popular decision of the
moment. The Reform Bill of 1832, however imperceptibly,
began the slow and unconscious transformation of British
statesmen from representatives into delegates. Henceforward
instead of leading public opinion they tended increasingly to
seek votes by following it.

For public opinion, being sxisceptible of leadership, needs to
be wisely led. If it is not led by wise men, it may be led by fools
or knaves. Its greatest weakness is that, being imperfectly in¬
formed on the complicated issues of government, it is too easily
swayed by the specious—^by the plausible pretender and the man
of limited vision. Cobden, though, possessing genius and high
integrity, was a man of very short views. He offered his
coimtrymen, in the throes of great and bewildering changes, a
panacea for their immediate ills. He explained with brilliant
clarity that Free Trade would bring growing wealth to all
men and the reign of peace. By removing the cause of discord
between nations, it would abolish war. Cobden offered an
economic proposition—within certain limits a sotmd and

IRON. HORSE

beneficient one—as an unchanging principle of government
But this no economic proposition can ever be, for economics are
governed by the rules of mathematics, and politics by those of
inconstant human nature.

. It is the highest function of the parliamentary statesman to
correct the volatile tendency of public opinion to fall a prey to
the ephemeral. To do so he must possess a mind wliich is proof
against plausible fallacy and the clamour of the hour. He must
possess the courage of his convictions, the prudence and patience
necessary to translate them into achievable policies and the
genius to expound them to his countrymen. The more demo¬
cratic a constitution and the more sensitive its machinery to
the changing gus.ts of popular feeling, the greater becomes the
necessity for true leadersWp and the harder its exercise. It was
the misfortune of Britain that at a crisis of her history she did
not possess a leader of such calibre. In 1846 she stood, breath¬
less and eager to proceed, at a turning of the'road. Without
reflection she took what at that moment in time seemed the
easiest,

The change in Britain’s historic policy came with startling
suddenness. Early in November, 1845, Peel proposed in Cabinet
that the ports should be opened by immediate Order of Council
and that a bill for the permanent modification of the com lav^
should be introduced in the new year. Before this decision
became public, the leader of the Opposition, Lord John Russell,
fearing that the Tories by reversing their policy would steal the
electoral tide to power a second time, issued a hasty manifesto
to his constituents abandoning the old Whig principle of a fixed
duty on com and declaring for total repeal. This was capped
in early December by a Cabiuet decision for immediate repeal
and an unauthorised announcement in next day’s which
precipitated such a crisis in the betrayed Tory ranks that the
Government resigned and the Queen sent for Russell. But the
latter, prevented from forming an administration by party
intrigues centring round the stormy personality of Palmerston,
was unable to make use of his opportunity. Instead he “handed
back with courtesy the poisoned chalice to Sir Robert.”

Peel took it gratefully. He was convinced that he, as the
most experienced administrator in the country and the leader’
of its strongest party, was the proper man to carry the measure.
That he had been acaedited by the dectorate and his own

ENGLISH SAGA

followers to pursue a contrary policy did not trouble his con¬
science. For like many other zealous and over-worked public
servants, he had never understood the nature of the English
constitution. lie had forgotten that its essence is that a politician
should identily him.self with a principle and resign when that
principle is defeated or out of favour. In a speech in which
he declared that he would no longer resist the inference that
employment, low prices and abmidance contributed to the
diminution of crime—“as if any human being ever resisted the
inference”!—Peel made known his intention to the House when
it reassembled in January. His prestige was such, and the popular
agitation against the Corn Laws so bitter, that a sufficient
number of his own betrayed and shattered Party followed him
with the Opposition into the lobbies on May 15, 1846, to secure
a majority of 98 for repeal. When two months later rising Tory
anger culminated in the fall of his government, he justified
himself in a speech which has gone down to history;

“I shall leave a name execrated, I know, by every mono¬
polist. ... But it may be that 1 shal 1 be sometimes remembered
with expressions of goodwill in those places which are the
abodes of men whose lot it is to labour and earn their daily
bread by the sweat of their brow; in such places, perhaps,
my name may be remembered with expressions of good¬
will when they who inhabit them recruit their exhausted
strength with abundant and untaxed food, the sweeter
because no longer leavened with a sense of injustice.”

_ It takes a great man to oppose the tide of his age. Benjamin
Disraeli was a great man. Alone among statesmen of his genera¬
tion he perceived the fallacy of th.c Manchester School and of
the departure in national policy which it had initiated. The
immediate inteiests of the factory owner, the worker and the
investor might be served by a free trade policy. But in the long
run he knew that the policy must leave the nation at the mercy
of world-wide forces beyond its conti'ol.

^ A back-bencher when the agitation for the repeal of the
Corn Laws began, a Jew with brilliant but flashy literary ante¬
cedents and for that reason denied oflice in Peel’s Government,

^Disraeli, Lord George Bcntinck, Ch. 3.

IRON HORSE

a parvenu without territorial or conunercial influence, Disraeli
nevertheless saw with the superior vision of genius the flaw in
the logic of the Manchester School—“a body of men... eminent
for their eloquence, distinguished for their energy, but more
distinguished ... for their energy and eloquence flian for their
knowledge of human nature or for the extent of their political
information.'’ The weakness of their economic reasoning, as of
all logical abstraction when applied to human affairs, lay in its
lack of elasticity. It was too doctrinaire to withstand the shodc
of time and the changes wrought by time in human ideas and
circumstances. A nation, however powerful, which staked its
future on a policy so rigid, might one day suffer a terrible
awakening.

The free traders, with their eye on the living individual,
rightly assumed that it was the present interest of the British
manufacturer and urban worker to sell manufactured goods to
a mainly agricultural world and of the world to purchase them
by sending its primary products untaxed to Britain. Th^ also
assmned that such a favourable situation, once created, would
always and automatically continue. But having the historical
sense, and not being tied to a formula like Peel and Cobden,
Disraeli realised that other nations would not always acquiesce
in a British monopoly of industry. They might wish to extend
their own industrial markets just as Lancashire had done. If
they foimd their British rivals could undersell them at home,
they would put pressure on ffieir govermnents to raise pro¬
hibitive and rmeconomic tariffs bdiind which their growing
industries could shelter.

For, as Disraeli reminded his unheeding countrymen, govern¬
ments were swayed by other considerations than the economic
gain of the living individual which Adam Smith had en¬
shrined as the wealm of nations. They might deliberately restrict
the course of commerce and limit profits to increase their
country’s strategic and military strength, safeguard its health
and social stability or advance some religious or other ideological
conception of national life to which economics were subordinate.
Swayed by such reasons, for all Cobden’s confident prophesies,
they might refuse* to follow the British lead and adopt free
trade. In place of a world liberated from commercial restrictions
and growing ever richer and more peaceable, Britain might one

''^Mor^pemy ^Biickk,Disrat&,I,j8z.

ENGLISH SAGA

day find herself confronted by “a species of Berlin decrees, more
stringent even than those of Napoleon.”

Disraeli therefore pleaded, though in vain, that his country
should hesitate before abandoning tlie ancient protective and
i reciprocal commercial principle under which she had so long
thrived for one of unrestricted imports. Her aim, he argued,

. should not be free trade, whose attainment, however desirable,
must always depend on constantly varying human factors, but
fair trade giving a just and stable reward to the producer. Pro¬
tection of native industry in the broadest sense was a permanent
duty of all rulers and should be “avowed, acknowledged and
only limited becau^ . . . protection should be practical . . .
and such as should not allow the energies of the country to
merge and moulder into a spirit of monopoly.”

Human nature being what it was, fair trade could only be
achieved through reciprocity. Hostile tariffs could not be fought
as Cobdcir supposed, with free imports. “You cannot have free
trade,” Disraeli argued, “unless*the person you deal with is as
liberal as yourself. If I saw a prize-fighter encountering a galley-
slave in irons, I should consider the combat equally as fair as
to make England fight hostile tariffs witli free imports.”^
Unlike his machine-strack contemporaries, he refused to see
cotton-spinning as the final end of British policy. Agriculture,
the source of man’s nourishment, was still the most vital of
national industries. To sacrifice it for the sake of profits,
however vast, was to mortgage the country’s future security.
Three years before the repeal of the Com Laws, Disraeli, then
38, recalled in the House of Commons the words of a Venetian
Doge and merchant prince, “who, looking out from the windows
of his Adriatic palace on the commerce of the world anchored in
the lagoons beneath, exclaimed, ‘ This Venice without terra
fixma is an eagle with one wingl ’

Many of the Com Law reformers maintained that so far from
injuring British agriculture, free trade would benefit it. By
reducing the price of bread, it would increase the demand for
wheat and so put money even into the pockets of the stupid,
reactionary farmer and landlord. It was a mere protectionist’s
bugbear to imagine that native agriculture Would be ruined by
cheap, surplus wheat from abroad since no such surpluses

tf Buckle, /, 55A
*Iiantard, Xifth Btb,,

IRON HORSE

existed. Ta king the short view, the Cobdenites were right
and fully justified by the events of the next quarter of a
century.

But Disradi was not taking the short view. Wiser than the
economists in their own wisdom, he knew that the productive
capacity of British farms could not be stimulated indefinitely
like that of machinery merely by redudng the price of their
products. The unsatisfied demand of the ever-growing towns
would increasingly have to be met elsewhere. For a time the
virgin com lands of Asia and the New World, with their vast
areas and dependable dimates, might lack capital and transport
But with a market in urban Britain for their siuplus, permanently
guaranteed by an unchanging prindple, capital would inevitably
be forthcoming to develop their farms and build railways and
ships. It would be supplied by British capitalists.

Disraeli not only believed that the decline of British agri¬
culture, at that time the finest in the world, would weaken the
country in time of war. He felt that it would undermine the
health and happiness of its people and those constitutional
liberties which, in his view, rested in the last resort on the
strength and independence of the landed interest. By this he did
not mean, as his critics supposed, the monopoly of the squires
who sat with him on the benches of Parliament. “I am looking
in that phrase,” he told the House, “to the population of our
imiinnerable villages, to the crowds in our rural towns: I mean
that estate of the poor which, in my opinion, has been already
dangerously tampered with; I mean the great estate of the
Church, which has before this dme secured our liberty, and
may ... still secure otlr civilisation... that great judicial fabric,
that great building up of our laws and manners, which is, in
fact, the ancient polity of the realm.”^

To the mind of this half-alien patriot the Com Laws were no
mere plank of fiscal policy but an outwork of an historic system
which protected a priceless civilisation. That system had based
the possession of wealth on the performance of social duty—
“the noblest principle that was ever conceived by sage or
practised by patriot.” Understanding human nature, Disraeli
knew how h^d it was “to impress upon society that there is
such a thing as duty.” “The feudal system may have worn out,”
he wrote, “but its main principle—that the tenure of property

^Mof^permy 9 Buchk^ Disradi^

ENGLISH SAGA

should be tlic fulfilment of duty—is the essence of good
government.’”^

The idea of private wealth not based on the fulfilment of
social duty was repugnant to him because it was contrary to
nature. The vice of the laissez-faire economists was that they
regarded capital as an economic commodity divorced from
political and social activity. They treated its use as a purely
private affair. Disraeli saw capital not as a commodity of
value but as political and social power: as something to be used
as a trust. He thcrelorc wished to see its possession permanently
associated with social obligations. The ownership of land was
capable of giving such association. That of stocks and shares
was not.

In all this Disraeli was a Socialist before Socialism became a
political force. He told his constituents in 1844 that he had long
been aware that there was “something rotten in the core of the
social system.” Like Coleridge, he held that the State should
have the right to invalidate trespasses on “its own inalienable
and untransferable property—the health, strength, honesty and
filial love of its children.” Rather than an England dominated
by the possessors of irresponsible capital, he declared that he
would prefer a real revolution* in the distribution of national
power.

“If there Is to be this great change, I for one hope that
the foundations of it may be deep, the scheme compre¬
hensive, and that, instead.of falling under . . .the thraldom
of capital, under the thraldom of those who, while they
boast of their intelligence, are more proud of their wealth
if we must find new forces to maintain the ancient throne
and immemorial monarchy of England, I for one hope we
may find that novel power in the invigorating energies of
an educated and enfranchised people.

But Disraeli did not want a revolution. He had not for
nothing been nursed in the beech groves of Buckinghamshire
arnid scenes dear to I-Iampden and Burke. He was deeply imbued
with the spirit of England’s history and institutions. He knew
that in the last resort the survival of liberty depended on the

^General Preface to the Novels, 1870, cit. Monypenny & Buckle, /, tfoo.

*Jiamard, goth Feb., 1846, cit. Monypenny Sf Buckle, I, 767.

IRON HORSE

maintenance of private property and on the sense of individual
responsibility which its possession could alone engender. Though
he did not want a capitalist’s England—“a sort of spinning-
jenny machine kind of nation”—he did not want a bureaucrat’s.
Therefore he used all his powers of speech and pen—and it is
his country’s tragedy that, great as they were, they were linoited
by his circumstances^to impress on a forgetful generation the
twin truths that privilege and property must never be exclusive
and that rights must always be accompanied by duties. The
greater the privileges, the greater the obligations.

Against the radical and levelling tendencies of h%age,
Disraeli reacted not because he was opposed to popular rights
and social amelioration'which he desired to extend, but because
he wished to base both on something more stable than the
despotic will of an all-powerful popular assembly and an attend¬
ant bureaucracy. At the time when almost every social activity
of government, national and local, was dormant, he foresaw
that the very abuses of irresponsible capital which he exposed
would ultimately provoke a central despotism capable of stifling
all liberty. Knowing how many nations centralisation had
enslaved and devitalised in the name of efficient administration,
he vrished to insure against it by strengthening local self-
government and restoring national institutions.^

At the back of Disraeli’s mind lay always certain ancient
English ideals—tlie one Tudor and the other medieval—of a
united nation and of a continuing commtinity composed of men
women possessing inalienable privileges and rights secured
by a strongCT tenure than that of their own lives. His conception
of society was essentially religious and humane—an ordered
hierarchy based on a universal recognition of human needs and
rights. He wished to restore .dignity, romance and personal
inflnpnre to the throne, responsibility to the nobility and gentry,
moral authority to the Church, above all, status, pride of craft
and security to the peasant and worker. In his home in the
Wycombe woods he loved to speak of the Buckinghamshire

the great struggle between popular principles and liberal opinions, which is
characteristic of our age, I hope ever to be found on the side of the people, and of the
Institutions of England It is our Institutions that Imve made us free, and <an alone keep
us so; by the bulwark whidb they offer to the insidipus cncroachm^ts of a wnvement,
yet cnverating system of centralisation, which, if left unchecked, will prove fat^ to the
national character. Therefore I have ever endeavomred to chensh our happy habit of
self-govemmei^, as sustained by a prudent distribution of loc^ authority. Mo^ptw^
&f Buckle^ /, 837^g,

ENGLISH SAGA

peasant’s right to his triple estate of the porch, the oven and the
tank. His policy, utterly misunderstood by his contemporaries
and almost as much by his successors, was defined by himself
as being;

“To change back the oligarchy into a generous aristo¬
cracy round a real throne; to infuse life and vigour into
the Church as the trainer of die nation, ... to establish a
commercial code on the principles successfully negotiated
by Lord Bolingbroke at Utrecht, and which, though baffled
at the time by a Whig' Parliament, were subscquendjt and
triumphantly vindicated by his~ political pupil and heir,
Mr. Pitt; to govern Ireland according to the policy of
Charles I, and not of Oliver Cromwell; to emancipate the
political constituency of 1832 from its sectarian bondage
and contracted sympathies; to elevate the physical as well
as the moral condition of the people, by establishing diat
labour required regulation as much as property, and all
this rather by the use of ancient forms and the restoration
of the past than by polidcal revolutions founded on abstract
ideas.”^

An England, obsessed by material wealth and the economic
formulas of Manchester, naturally did not understand what he
was talking about.

His contemporaries took the strength, assurance and vital
character of England for granted. Disraeli, a half-foreigner
viewing the land of his adoption with detachment, knew that
the virtues which made her people great and prosperous were
nourished by institutions and principles whose relinquishment
must bring about a gradual national decay and ultimate
defeat and ruin. He could not'share the easy optimism of re¬
formers who supposed that they had only to rationalise to
improve. He dist^ted human reason, knew it to be fallible
and its conclusions subject to ceaseless and unpredictable cliange.
Like Burke he preferred the instinctive wisdom and prejudice of
the older England. An intellectual himself, he fell back on instinct
and precedent: on the accmnulated reason of generations tested
by experience. “A precedent,” he once said, “embalms a principle.”
It was a rational opinion, widely held by economists, that

^Monypenny Sf Buckle^ /»5^70.

IRON HORSE

the capacity to make profits was the proper test of all etwnomic
activity. It was an ancient national principle and a popular
prejudice that a man should receive a fair price for the product
of his labour, that he should be protect^ in his employment,
his enjoyment of home and his dignity as a man, however great
the potential profits others might make in depriving hiTn of
these. In this Disraeli joined vital issue with the Free Traders.
For they were not concerned with the social consequences of the
system of trade they advocated, believing that those consequences,
through the unimpeded- operation of economic law, would
always look after themselves.

It was Disraeli’s lot to see his counsel neglected and his country
adopt the policy he deplored. Until the Corn Laws were repealed
he was only a back-bencher. On the very day that the fatal
measure finally passed the Lords, he became a leader of the Tory
rump which Peel had betrayed. For twenty years, with two
short breaks, he remained in the political wilderness—the derided
mentor of “a fat cattle opposition” which had lost touch with
the spirit of the age. Like a wise man who realised the strength
of his countryman’s infatuation, he accepted their decision and
warned his bucolic followers that they must allow a fair chance
to the experiment on which Parliament and the nation had
resolved. “You are in the position of a man who has made an
improvident marriage,” he told them. “You have become united
to Free Trade, and nothing can divorce you except you can prove
the charmer to be false. Wait, then, till that period has arrived;
when you find that you have been betrayed, then will be "Ihe
time to seek a divorce from that pernicious union. You have
become united to the false Duessa, and you must take the con¬
sequences; and the consequence, I venture to predict, will be
that the House of Commons, after a fair, full and ample trial
of this great measure, will be driven to repeal it from absolute
necessity, though at the termination of much national suffering;
but that that suffering will be compensated for by the bitterness
and the profundity of national penitence.”^

That the question of Protection was not dead but merely
sleeping, was the recurring theme of Disraeli’s argument
“Protection to native industry is a fund^ental principle.” “It
may be vain now,” he said in another speech, “in the midn ight
of their intoxication, to tell them that there will be an awakening

'^l^onypenny Sf Buckk^ /,

100

ENGLISH SAGA-

of bitterness; it may be idle now, in the springtide of their
economic frenzy, to warn them that there may be an ebb of
trouble. But the dark and inevitable hour will arrive. Then,
when their spirits are softened by misfortune, they will recur
to those principles that made England great and which, in our
belief, will only keep England great.”^ Punch, at a loss on whom
to bestow the dunce’s cap for the year’s most ridiculous member
of Parliament, hesitated between Disraeli who championed
Protection, and Smith O’Brien who advocated Irish self-
government.

■ •••••••

There was a final tableau to be played before the curtain fell
on the drama of the middle ’forties. It was one incidental to
the main theme, but of peculiar horror and tragedy. The scene
was Ireland. It turned on the mysterious sickness of the potato
root which in the wet autumn of 1845 had given Peel his chance
to insist on the opening of the ports.

The people of Ireland, as a result of the curiously irresponsible
policy which their English rulers—partly through fear and partly
from religious hatred—^had adopted towards them for two
centuries, were ignorant, poor and degraded. To Disraeli, wi th his
conviction that the welfare of a nation depended on the social
happiness of its people, the Irish question was a plain one—
“a starving population, an absentee aristocracy and an alien
Church and . . . the weakest executive in the world.”* It could
be solved by the application of certain unchanging political
principles. “The moment you have a strong executive, a just
administration and ecclesiastical equality, you will have order
in Ireland, and the improvement of the physical condition of the
people will follow—^not very rapidly, perhaps . . . but what are
fifty years even, in the history of a nation?”

The story of the great Irish famine of 1846 revealed what
could happen to a people without either social cohesion or strong
government in an hour of crisis:

“The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed.

But swollen with wind and the rank mist they draw,

Rot inwardly tmd foul contagion spread.”

^Monypemy & Buckle, /, y8y.

. That is the Irish question.** Monypenr^ SP Buchk^ /,

IRON HORSE

lOI

It was the fitting climax of a history of neglect and oppression
which went back into the mists of antiquity. Of late the F.ngTislfi,
grown kindlier and more tolerant, had endeavoured to make
amends for the wrongs they had done to Ireland by removing
the political disabilities of the Catholic majority and even by vot¬
ing small kims of money to assist their education. But the brutish
poverty of a people whom long deprival of property and oppor¬
tunity had rendered idle and improvident, remained a standing
reproach to British wealth and civilisation. Whenever in the
early issues of Pmdi it was desired to depict an Irishman, there
was drawn a poor, fierce, half-mad-looking savage with simian
features, stunted nose, low brow and matted hair, wearing
a tattored tail-coat and broken crowned hat, and squatting
with his shillelagh beside a slatternly hovel or brute-like in the
mire before the figure of a fat priest.

The English were not unacquainted with Irish misery and
degradation in the slums of their own cities. But they never
asked what had created them. The Irishnian who fied into
England from his own despoiled land carried vengeance in his
person. Nothing did so much to impoverish and debase the
F.ng 1 i.<sh urban worker as the inrush of himgry Irish labour
glad to accept the lowest wages and worst conditions offered
by the greediest millowner. ^gels reckoned that 50,000 arrived
from Ireland annually, packed like cattle into filthy boats at

a piece. By 1844 there were over a million of them in England.

The sl ums of Dublin, fouling its lovely bay, were among the
most hideous and repulsive in the world. In the twenty-eight
tiny rooms of Nicholson’s Court, 151 human beings lived in the
direst want with no other property or conveniences between
fhffm but two bedsteads and two bla^ets. These conditions and
the habits they engendered the Catholic Irish brought with
them into Protestant England and Scotland, thus unconsciously
repaying an ancient debt. In the slums of Manchester a whole
Irish family would sleep on a single bed of filthy straw. Many
cellars housed up to sixteen human occupants as well as pigs. A
few hundred yards fix)m the heart of the Empire, in the Rookery
of St. Giles, there were courtyards and alleys swarming with
Irish barbarians, the walls crumbling, the doorposts and window-
frames loose and without doors and glass, and with heaps of
garbage and excrement lying on every floor. It was by their
needs and standards that employers, buying in the dieapest
E.S. ■ H

102

ENGLISH SAGA

market according to the gospel of himz-faire, fixed the price
of British unskilled labour.

The prophet Carlyle saw the truth of it—the writing on the
wall of Britain’s splendid imperial destiny:

“The wild Milesian features, looking false ingenuity, rest¬
lessness, tmreason, misery and mockery, salute you on all
highways and byways. The English coachman, as he whirls
past, lashes the Milesian with his whip, curses him with
his tongue; the Milesian is holding out his hat to beg. He
is the sorest evil this country has to strive with. In his rags
and laughing savagery, he is there to undertake all work
that can be done by mere strength of hand and back—^for
wages that 'will purchase him potatoes. He needs only salt
for condiment, he lodges to his mind in any pig-hutch or
dog-hutch, roosts in outhouses, and wears a suit of tatters,
the getting on and ofit of which is said to be a difiicult
operation, transacted only in festivals and the high tides of
the calendar. The Saxon-man, if he cannot work on these
terms, finds no work. The uncivilised Irishman, not by his
strength but by the opposite of strength, drives the Saxon
native out, takes possession in his room. There abides he, in
his squalor and tmreason, in his felsity and drunken violence,
as the ready-made nucleus of degradation and disorder....
Thus the condition of the lower multitude of English
labourers approximates more and more to that of the Irish,
competing with them in all the markets.”

The autumn of 1846 saw a climax to the suflFering and misery
that had begotten this Nemesis. The English harvest was bad,
there was a world food shortage, and for the second season
running the Irish potato crop, ravaged by disease, failed. Wheat
and provision prices soared. The British Government, faced
with the prospect of a whole nation starving, advanced ten
million pounds to relieve distress and bought yellow maize
firom India to make broth.^

It was in vain. Through the neglected villages of the stony
west and south famine stalked. The weak hand of Dublin Castle
could not stay it.' The wages of those in work fell to M. a day.
The Unions were beseiged by applicants: by December over

^It was known in Ireland as Ped’s brimstone. Victorian England^ /, 6 g.

IRON HORSE

103

40,000 were totally dependent on poor relief in County Ros¬
common alone, while the streets of Cork were thronged with
five thousand homeless wretches in the last stages of famine. By
February the number had doubled. Men, women and children
filled their stomachs with cabbage leaves and turnip tops: hun¬
dreds died weekly in every rural union. In the remoter
villages beyond even the feeble reach of the Government, the
dead lay in the roads and ditches unburied.

In a letter that Christmas to the Duke of Wellington, a local
Justice of the Peace described a visit to the district of Skibbereen,
On reaching the village of South Reen with supplies of bread,
he was surprised to find the hamlet apparently deserted.

“I mtered some of the hovels to ascertain the cause, and
the scenes that presented themselves were such as no tongue
or pen can convey the slightest idea of.

“In the first, six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all
appearmces dead, were huddled in a comer on some filthy
straw, their sole covering what seemed a ragged horse-cloth,
and their wretched legs hanging about naked above the
knees. I approached with horror, and found by a low moan¬
ing they were alive. They were in fever—four children, a
woman and what had once been a man.

“It is impossible to go through the details. ... In a few
minutes I was surrounded by at least 200 of such phantoms,
such frightful spectres as no words can describe. By far
the greater number were delirious, either from famine 01
from fever. Their demoniac yells are still ringing in my
ears, and their horrible images are fixed upon my brain.
My heart sickens at the recital, but I must go on. In another
case my clothes were nearly tom off in my endeavours to
escape from a throng of pestilence around, when my neck¬
cloth was seized from behind by a grip which compelled
me to turn. I found myself grasped by a woman with an
infant just bom in her arms, and the remains of a filthy
sack across her loins—the sole covering of herself and babe.
The same morning the police opened a house on the adjoin- ^
ing lands which was observed shut for many days, and two
frozen corpses were found lying upon the mud floor, half-
devoured by the rats....

“A mother, herself in fever, was seen the same day to

ENGLISH SAGA

104

drag out the corpse of her child, a girl of about twelve
perfectly naked, and leave it half covered with stones. In
another house within 500 yards of the cavalry station at
Skibbereen the dispensary doctor found seven wretches
lying, unable to move, under the same cloak—one had been
dead many hours, but the others were unable to move
themselves or the corpse.”^

The English, who since the days of Lillibullero had never
been able to take the Irish seriously, did not see themselves as
responsible for these sufferings, though with their habitual
humanity they subscribed liberally to charities to relieve them.
Greville in his gossiping pages reported that the state of Ireland
was deplorable, but set it down to the people themselves, whom
he described as ‘‘besotted with obstinacy and indolence, reckless
and savage.” He thought them secretly well off, stated that
they had money in their pockets and used it to buy arms instead
of food. Punchy then a humanitarian journal, depicted the ragged
Irishman impudently begging John Bull to spare a trifle “for
a poor lad to buy a bit of a blundcrbus with.” And when Disraeli
and his die-hard friends of the Fat Cattle Opposition put forward
a project for a Treasury grant of sixteen million to build Irish
railways, it asked with amusement:

“Who would ever travel on an Irish railway? . . . Who
does not see that an Irish Great Western would run due
east—a Midland counties along the coast? A passenger
booked for Dublin would infallibly find himself at Cork.
.,. The whistle would never be sounded till after the collision
... the coals would be put in the boiler and the water under¬
neath it, and when the train came to at standstill, the engineer
would thrash the engine with his shillelagh. If the Irish
could afford to travel by them, they would certainly reduce
the population.”

In the course of one terrible winter it was believed that over
a quarter of a million Irish peasants died of starvation. The very
repeal of the Com Laws, which had been undertaken with
the object of aiding Ireland, had the contrary effect, since
by depriving her of her preferential position in the British com

^ W. 0. G*Brien^ The Great Famine, y8.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Fighting FiJUes

“Tennyson says that he and a party of Englishmen
fought a cricket match with the crew of the Belhrophm
on the Farthenopoean hills, and sacked the sailors by 90
runs. Is not this pleasant?—^the notion of good English
blood striving in worn-out Italy. I like that such men
as Frederic should be abroad: so strong, haughty and
passionate. Tliey keq) up the English diaracter abroad.”

Letters and Literary Remains of Edwcard Fitzgerald, I, yi.

T he repeal of the Com Laws did not relieve Ireland, which
continued to starve and fall in population. Nor for the
time being did it ruin English agriculture. More than a
quarter of a century was to elapse before far-seeing capital could
enable the corn-growers of other lands to enter into the heritage
reserved for them by British legislators. And the pillars which
supported the island’s supremacy were strong and to all appear¬
ance unaffected by the shifting of the foimdations. To our
father’s fathers they seenied to be growing stronger.

For Cobden’s triumph and Peel’s betrayal of his Party were
followed by a period of increasing prosperity. 1847 was a year
of violent fluctuations: com wliich touched 124/- a quarter in
Jime had fallen to 49/6 by September; com dealers and bill-
brokers were ruined; there was a crash in the railway market
and the Bank Act was suspended. But after that things began to
look up, and gloomy prophets like Croker, who had predicted
ruin at the first quarter-day after repeal, were proved wrong
as ever. The “monopolists” were confounded; there was a
sudden “awful appearance of plenty in Mark Lane,” and from
the pages of Punch a beaming Ceres with a full sack and a yd.
loaf brought consternation to a few tight-stocked old buffers in
top-hats and at least a glimpse of prosperity to every one else.^
Thereafter for the disciples of laissez-faire everything seemed
to prosper. Trade not only recovered but grew every day.
Millions in Ireland, in the industrial towms and the London
imderworld lived in dirt and poverty. But millions more were
thriving; demand was brisk and the capital laid down in

'■Pimeh, XII, i4z.

X06

THE FIGHTING FIFTIES IO7

machines was yielding quicker returns. Though in reality
repeal of the Com Laws made little difference to the price of
wheat, which averaged no less a quarter in the Free Trade ’fifties
than it had done in the protectionist ’forties, the new railways
cheapened the price of provisions, clothes and coal. Every one
seemed to have a little more to spend and there was ample room
for expansion. The hungry ’forties were over. The free-traders
to whom these blessings were attributed were felt to have earned
well of their coimtry.^ Protection, formally abandoned by the
repeal of the Navigation Laws in 1849, was a lost cause.

In the forefront of all this prosperity came in 1849 the rush
to the gold diggings in California. Two years later more gold
was found in Australia. Both America and Australia were able
to increase their imports of British goods with gold payments.
In 1852 there was more gold in the Ba^ of England than had ever
been there before. Money was plentiful and interest rates low.

With improved transport and increased purchasing power,
the capitalist organisation of industrial society entered on a
new and vaster phase. The unexploited markets of Asia and the
newer continents became accessible to the manufiicturer. A golden
era dawned for south Lancashire, the West Riding, Tyneside,
Staffordshire, the Clyde and South Wales. Industrial Britain
was becoming the workdiop of the world. The opportunity of
the greater capitalist was at hand.

As he grasped it, and trade began to boom, the lot of the
worker improved also. Employment expanded, and the larger
firms which wider markets created had no need with their larger
turnover to resort to such petty economies and merciless conduct
as their predecessors. Wages tended to rise, hours of labour to
fall, and the worst abuses of truck, sweating and child labour
to diminish. Lord Shaftesbury’s Ten Hours’ Bill and other
measures incompatible with the strictest letter of laissez-faiTe
found their way on to the statute book. The coimtry, pleased
with its growing prosperity, felt at last that it could afford them.

An England, growing rich by increasing dependence on
otbdr lands, naturally looked across the seas. She needed a
peaceful world that would afford her abundant raw materials
and ex panding markets. John Bull could less afford than
before to ignore the antics of the foreigner. He might

iWhen Fed died in 1850 Ptmch deleted his memorial as a pyramid of cheap loaves
round 'which 'were grouped a workman’s family eating plentiful bread. Punchy XIX^ 57/*

ENGLISH SAGA

I 08

disapprove of them, but they concerned his pocket and future
security.

His difficulty was to control them. Insular England could
never fatliom the cause of European events: it merely observed
their consequences in its export orders. In 1848 thqr suddenly
became exceedingly grave. On Monday, February 22nd, the people
of France enjoyed to all appearance the rule of the powerful,
peaceful and impregnable monarchy. Two days later her King
was a fugitive in England and the flag of the terrible Republic
again flew over barricaded streets. Before the summer she was
drifting into mob rule and all Europe was following her blood¬
stained example. Italy and Germany, witli their confused,
divided petty kingdoms and principalities, were in a blaze from
the Baltic to the Tyrrhenian Sea: even Vienna and the high
priest of the andm regime, Prince Mctternich, did not escape. In
Dresden, where the King of Saxony fled, the corpses were piled
up six or seven high in the streets. In all Europe, only Britain
seemed to ride out the storm. The fact gave.Englishmen con¬
siderable satisfaction: “in the midst of the roar of revolutionary
waters that are deluging the whole earth,” wrote Greville, “it
is grand to see how we stand erect and unscathed.” Punch depicted
theproprietorofMivart’s Hotel—forerunner of Claridge’s—present¬
ing his humble respects to the Crowned Heads of the Continent
and begging to inform them that his hotel in Brook Street
continued the favoured house of call for dethroned potentates.

Not that England in this year of revolutions wholly escaped
a little revolution of its own. But though prefaced by a pro¬
digious amount of noise and oratory, it was only a mock one
and did no one any harm but the revolutionaries. It was staged
by the Chartists who, relying on the general substratum of
poverty, called a monster demonstration on Kennington Common
for April loth to present a petition to Parliament. But the
government, remembering 1842, promptly fetched in the military,
put the defences of London into the hands of the aged victor of
Waterloo and swore in the City and the Whitehall clerks as
special constables. Against such preparations the mob was
helpless. The day, a fine one, ended in Fergus O’Cotmor, the
Chartist leader, shaking hands effusively with the police inspector
who forbade the procession and, after advancing on Westminster
in a cab, thanking a rather astonished Home Secretary for his
leniency. A rising in wretched Ireland later in the year fared

THE FIGHTING FIFTIES

109

even inore ignominously: here the liberator, Smith O’Brien,
was taken prisoner by a railway guard after a broil in the widow
McCormack’s cabbage patch.

It was not surprising, as the dust of the European arena
settled down and a dishevelled continent tried to return to
normal, that the English congratulated themselves. In Doyle’s
cartoons of 1849 one can see them doing so—a fat, good-
humoured, smiling English working family sitting by its own
fireside with a picture of Queen Victoria on the wall and a
newspaper on father’s knee describing the awful state of Europe;
while round the border scowl and grimace a crew of mad.

savage foreigners—Spanish peasants chasing priests with knives,
licentious and brutal soldiers charging barricades, the artill^-
men of tyrants bombarding defenceless capitals, and slavish
Frenchmen worshipping a Napoleordc hat and jackbciots on
bended knees. The liberty enjoyed by a Briton was never so
attractive as when contrasted with the slavery of his neighbours.

The truth was that the British working-class, which, though
for a time capable of popular frenzy and exaggeration, always
returns in the end to its normal state of phlegmatic good-
humour, had tired of revolutionary politics. With the aid of
the railwajrs and the 7d. loaf it was learning to accept urbanisar
tion as its lot. The improvement in trade and the growing
attempts of the middle-class to ameliorate the factory towns
assisted the change. The first effect of the repeal of the Corn
Laws was largdy psychological; it took the bitterness out of
public life. The mob orator with flashing eyes, a brogue and a
Ipaning to incendiarism was superseded by the earnest student
reading in the public library and taking minutes at small
meetings of the republican elect under a gas jet. It was the age
in whidi Karl Marx, driven from the continent by the.suppr^
sion of the German and French workers’ revolutions, settled in
furnished rooms at Camberwell and started in the fusty calm
of the British Museum to evolve his universal but apparently
harmless philosophy of hate.^

lAmong his innumerahle hates were die gods, the Chmtian
his -wife’s unde—* the hound"—his CJennan kinsfolk, his own. race-;- EamsMte is ^
of fleas and Jews”—the Prussian reactionaries, his liberal and utopian Soaahrt allies,
the labouring population—“lumpenproletariat” or nflt-raff-—democraCT— parlia-
m«tS^^^Bism”-and, of coursC tfie British loyd fairly, W

md her princely urchins,” as he called Aem. His self-impowd task he deflned as the

ruthless criticism of everything tint esdsts*”

ENGLISH SAGA

Under this sober stimulus Chartism died and was buried, and
its place taken by radicalism and academic republicanism. The
latter was not so much a practical attempt to overthrow monarchy
as a creed. It was not at all blood-thirsty; to cater for its high-tea
tastes the title of Harney’s “Red Republican” was changed to
“The Friend of the People.” It met at places like the Discussion
Hall in Shoe Lane, the Temple Forum in Fleet Street, the Cogers
tavern near St. Bride’s and the John Street Institution, Blooms¬
bury, where the chairman sat in a canopied chair with pipe and
brandy and water, and the famous Mrs. Dexter lectmred on and
in the “bloomer” costume. Its adhei'ents were eager young
artisans who had educated themselves. They were much
enamoured of foreign revolutionaries whose doings they
followed with intense and quite uncritical enthusiasm: for
them they generously subscribed their scanty pennies and when,
as destitute fugitives, the latter fled to England, they lionised
them in a humble but fervent way. In the eyes of these English
radicals Poles, Hungarians, Italians, Germans and other oppressed
minorities were all heroes and pionem of European freedom;
had they been able to see the national tyrannies into which their
faiths were to be transmuted, they would have been horrified.
Incidentally their foreign frientls with the ingratitude of their
Hnd were apt to be a good deal less enthusiastic about them.

For as these interesting exiles found to their annoyanee,
England was not a revolutionary country at heart. Given a
modicum of bread and beer and a little liberty and leisure to
enjoy himself, the sweating toiler in die classic island home of
the proletariat proved astonisliingly good-humoured. In August,
1848, the year of revolutions, a middle-class writer in a popular
journal noted in rhyming couplets how—

“Townward from Richmond, at the close of day,

Two of us were on foot returning straight,

We having dined—the fact ’tis meet to state—

A pleasure van there passed us on the road,

Which bore of honest folks a goodly load;

Holiday makers, of the class and rate
Of working people, by our estimate.

The party was obstreperously gay;

Slighdy elate, it may have been, with beer.

Joining in chorus as they roll’d along,

THE FIGHTING FIFTIES

III

* We won’t go home till morning,’ was their song.

We hailed those revellers with a gentle cheer;

And ‘ Ah! that that truly British strain,’ said we,

‘ Is livelier than, Mourir pour la patrie.’

Despite the sufferings of the factory operative and the slum-
dweller, there was something incorrigibly jolly about England.
If it was given the chance to be, it was fundamentally healthy,
kept its pores open and its heart kindly and merry. It did so
when it could, even in the new towns. With the passing of the
Factory Act in 1850 and the legal enforcement of a Saturday
half-holiday, the week-end habit began and, as wages increased,
the supply of cheap amusement arose to cater for the demand.
It was often of a rather vulgar, garish, sodden kind; there was
much drunkenness and often a good deal of brutality. But at
its core was an invincible love of good fare and of sport. In
Lancashire and the West Riding, gala days, wakes and feasts
emptied the mine and stopped the wheels of the min at customary
times each year. Excursion trains, packed with pale-faced workers
and their families with bands, banners and bottled beer, descended
armually from the cotton towns on Rock Ferry and Blackpool: it
was close by the cheap ferry from Liverpool to the Cheshire shore
that Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1853 saw a working man p ulling
from his pockets oyster after oyster “in interminable succession”
and opening them with his pocket-knife. There was whippet-
radng and pigeon-flying for miners and scarlet-vested railway
navvies, hoise-radng of a rough kind on the Yorkshire and
Lancashire moors, wrestling, boxing, quoits, bowls, and cricket
and football of an order more democratic and vigorous than
any that would be officially recognised to-day. In London the
working-class population affected the open-air gardens where
in the summer families could eat, drink and be merry at little
expense. Vauxhall, sinking rapidly lower in the social scale,
lingered on imtil 1859; Cremome in Chelsea, founded by a
uniformed Prussian baron in 1830, proffered fireworks, cascades,
balloon ascents, bad music, rather indecorous dancing, alfresco
theatrical entertainments and polar bears in white cotton trousers
to very mixed company; and there were pleasure gardens at
Chalk Farm, Hackney, Hoxton, the Eagle, Islington, the Red
House, Battersea, and many another suburban resort. In all

^ Punch XV^ 5J*

II 2 ENGLISH SAGA

this, partaking of the village from which it had so lately sprung,
the proletariat of urban England showed how little its heart
was in ideological abstraction. It was difficult to make it class
conscious. It just wanted to be comfortable and jolly and have
a good time. Its class anthem was not the Marseillaise but the
deathless song whose roaring refrain went:

“Damn their eyes
If ever they tries
To rob a poor man of his beer!”

It was the teuton Prince Albert who demonstrated to the
world how harmless and pacific the British proletariat really
was. In 1849 he and a little group of serious and cultured persons
of like mind began to prepare plans for a Royal Commission to
organise a great Exhibition of industry in London. All the
world was to be invited to contribute exhibits and to view in
turn the triumphs of British art and manufacture. Nobody at
first took the idea very seriously, but the Prince was persistent,
and in the following winter, after five thousand guarantors had
been reluctantly enlisted, the Royal Commission was set up.
Sixteen acres of land on the southern side of Hyde Park, now
used for football, were secured and a design for a monster palace
of glass accepted from Joseph Paxton who had built the con¬
servatories at Chatsworth.

For about a year the project was the joke of London. Purtch
depicted royal Albert begging from door to door in the guise
of the industrious boy, crying “Pity the sorrows of a poor young
Prina,” or pulling at Dame Britannia’s elbow with an, “Oh,
Mum, here’s a to-dol here’s all the company come the
streets full of carriages and brooms . . . and the candles isn’t
lighted and the supper ready nor the man dressed who’s to wait
nor die music nor anything!” At first nobody thought either
the money or the glass “ark as big as a warehouse” would ever
be raised, but, as the giant iron columns, some of tbpm over a
hundred fet high, appeared in the Park, laughter changed to
apprehension. With the vast concourse of visitors whom it
would draw to the West End of London from abroad and from
the dangerous working-class districts, almost anything might
happen. The park—fevourite haunt of beauty and fashion—
would be filled with East End rowdies who with their tobacco

THE FIGHTING FIFTIES II3

smoke, Waterloo crackers and practical jokes, would turn it into
another Greenwidi Fair with lousy and potentially murderous
foreigners; and, most ominous of all, with savage heathens
from the northern industrial towns. The beds would be
trampled on, the flowers picked and finally the great human
tide, leaving its scum bebiind in the devastated park, would
surge out by night to pillage Belgravia and Kensington.

The American press, even more alarmist than the English,
prophesied general massacre and insurrection. Every gloomy
prognostication was canvassed: one gentleman, possibly with his
tongue in his cheek, went so far as to write to Thi Hmts point¬
ing out that, though glass possessed certain advantages over
other materials, it suffered the disability of being liable “to
fracture from the reverberations of sound. It appears that upon
the arrival of the Queen at the Crystal Palace a Royal Salute is
to be fired, and, if as is probable the muzzles of the guns be
presented towards the glass wall of the building ... the result
will be that the officiating gunner will carry off the honours
of the day by creating a crash such as will render the loudest
tones of ffie organ utterly insignificant.”^

But the Prince was not to be turned from his purpose.
Gradually, under the hands of two thousand workmen, the
great building, over six hundred yards long, containing nearly
a million square feet of glass and affording over eight miles of
table space for the exhibitors, rose like a dazzling Aladdin’s
palace of crystal over the grass, the birds® and the trees. The
old wooden railings were removed, and Anne Hicks and her
white cottage, apples and gingerbread were ruthlessly ejected
to make way. All over London shopkeepers, anticipating the
great influx of foreigners, began to hang notices announcing
fhpjr ability to speak French, German, Italian and Spanish and
every other strange tongue.

On May Day, 1851, the Great Exhibition was formally opoied
by the Queen. The capital was prudently filled with troops: the
Riflp Brigade was moved from Dover to Woolwich, the ist Royal
Dragoons from Nottingham and the 8th Hussars from Brighton
to billets in Hampstead and Highgate, and the 4th Light Dragoons

^itnies,30ihJ6ril,i8si. ... . . . v

‘Some of the latter, dinging to their anaent haunts in the branches, were aca-
dentally endosed. Thdr droppings marking the valuable exhibits, and the use of
shotguns being out of the Question, the Queen sent for the Duke of Wellington.
The aged hero’s advioe was brief and to the point. “Try sparrow hawks, ma’m.”

ENGLISH SAGA

I14

from Dublin to Hounslow, while a strong contingent of ^tillery
was quartered in the Tower. The park itself was prote’cted by-
three cavalry regiments and seven foot battalions of the House¬
hold troops and two regiments of Lancers. In addition over
6,000 police were on duty in the capital.

Even before it was light every road leading to the park was
thronged. After long rain the sun was shining. At seven o’clock
the gates were opened and the great mtiltitude began to pour in.
All the world seemed to be wearing its Sunday best. An hour
later a reporter found a continuous traffic block from the City to
Hyde Park Comer on both sides of the river. Every kind of
vehicle had been requisitioned, many from the forgotten past;
old rickety post-chaises that had rotted for years in stable yards
blazed their faded glories for the last time in the stm. There
were spring vans, handsome phaetons and crested coaches,
donkey carts, cabs and even wagons and trucks all jumbled
together: “the proudest equipage of the peer was obliged to
fall in behind the humbl^t fly or the ugliest hansom.”^ On
Westminster Bridge many buses stuck fast, tmable to mount the
slope from their weight of passengers.

Near the gate of the park the crush of pedestrians moved
forward like si huge river: London had never kno-wn such
crowds. Many from the provinces had slept on the doorsteps
and were breakfasting in the scrum off sausages and enormous
hunks of bacon and feeding their children out of milk bottles.
Farmers, wearing unwonted tailcoats, bright-coloured waist¬
coats and -wide beaver hats, were accompanied by rosy-cheeked
wives and daughters in bonnets and stiffly starched flowered
print frocks. In Maydair the streets were packed -with the coaches
and carriages of country gentlefolk who, determined not to
miss the sight, had slept overnight in their vehicles and were
now having breakfast, the girls’ crinolines and ribbons shining
in the early sunshine while powdered footmen boiled kettles and
fried eggs and bacon on the pavement. Aroimd thsm surged
the rough multitude all vpith a single goal:

“That wondthrous thing,

The palace made o’ -windows.*

There was naturally a good deal of rough horse-play: a lady
overheard one mother eshorting her w illing son to stamp on

^Ptmch, XX, igo.

THE FIGHTING FIFTIES

IIS

the feet of those who opposed his passage, and noticed another
systematically making his way through the crowd by butting
with his bullet head.

Yet no one could deny that the crowd was astonishingly good-
humoured and appreciative. On that lovely May Day it was
out, not to stampede the police and sack London,, but to enjoy
itself. It accepted the rich in their carriages, the great ones
driving to their allocated places in the crystal palace, the Queen
and royal family as pait of the splendid show provided for its
entertainment.

At nine the doors of the Exhibition were opened for the
25,000 invited guests and season-ticket holders,^ who alone were
allowed to be inside for the opening ceremony. They were dis¬
posed throughout the great building among the eidiibits, the
ladies seated and the gentlemen standing like gallant knights
behind. Opposite the principal door on Rotten Row the trees
of the park s^med to have burst out into a crop of eager little
bo}^ whom no policeman could dislodge.

At twenty minutes to twelve the Queen, accompanied by her
two eldest children—the future Edward Vn wearing kilts and
the Princess Royal—the Prince and Princess of Prussia and
Prince Frederick William of Prussia, left Buckingham Palace
with a cortege of nine carriages. Wearing pink and glowing
with pride at her husband’s achievement, she looked out on one
continuous sea of cheering humanity all the way down Constitu¬
tion Hill and Rotten Row. It was a wonderful lesson, Pimch
thought, to t3rrants. A few drops of rain encountered at Hyde
Park Comer made the ensuing sunlight seem only the more
lovely. Presently the gigantic edifice swung Into sight with
the flags of all nations flying above its gleaming domes and
pinnacles: there was a glimpse of the north transept through
the iron gates in Rotten Row, of waving palms, flowers, statues
and cheering spectators fluttering hats and handkerchiefs from
every recess of that great crystal bow, and then to the flourish
of trumpets the royal procession advanced on foot up the long
nave towards the glittering fountain and the throne under its
blue and silver canopy. Here the Prince Consort, the Ofiicers of
State mi the Queen’s Ministers, the Foreign Ambassadors and
the Heralds and the Executive Committee and officials of the
Exhibition were waiting to pay homage.

^Gentlemen subscribed three guineas and ladies twou

ENGLISH SAGA

Il6

In this great national triumph, the dedication of the ‘‘grandest
temple ever raised to the peaceful arts,” there was a supreme
moment. After Prince Albert, standing at the head of the Royal
Commissioners, had read aloud the report that told of the com¬
pletion of their labours, and the Queen had replied and the
Archbishop prayed, the massed choirs of the Chapel Royal,
VVestminster Abbey, St. Paul’s and Windsor Chapel, supported
by the members of the Royal Academy of Music and the Sacred
Harmonic Society, and accompanied by an organ with 4,700
pipes, broke into Handel’s “Halleluiah Chorus.” Outside, where
the waiting crowd covered every available inch of the park, the
artillery beyond the Serpentine sounded welcoming salvoes.
Then the Queen w-ith her husband and children about her, and
at the head of a procession which included the aged Commander-
in-Chief and the Master General of the Ordnance,^ who thirty-
six years before had respectively commanded the British army
and cavalry on the field of Waterloo, swept down the west nave,
threading their way between lines of statuary, objects of art and
the products of industry. The sword wielded by the English
brave had been melted into ploughshares: righteousness and
peace had kissed each other.' For that ecstatic moment in time
the English were really happy.

So, in the words of the Gentleman^s Magazine^ “the delicate-
female whose tempered sway is owned by a himdred millions of
men pursued her course among the contributions of all the
civilised world.” As she passed Godfrey de Bouillon’s gigantic
armoured equestrian figure, the very personification of physical
strength, the same writer could not help reflecting “how far
the prowess of the crusader is transcended by the power of well
defined liberty and constitutional law.”® The C^een herself seemed
to realise it. That night she wrote in her diary that it had been
a day to live for for ever. “God bless my dearest Albert! God
bless my dearest country which has shown itself so great to-day!
One felt so grateful to the great God who seemed to pervade all
and bless all.”

Afterwards “the visitors dispersed themselves through the
building to gratify their curiosity without restraint.” They
vrere astonished at the wonders they saw. Here was the apotheosis

^Lord Anglesey had lost his leg on the field. “By God that was my legl* cried that
gall^t officer. “By God it was!” remarked the Duke after a glance.

GaOkmcaCs Masazim^ Fart /, Vd, XXX F, 6sj^.

THE FIGHTING FIFTIES

H 7

of free trade and the peaceful products of man’s hand and in¬
genuity. Since the days of Noah’s Ark nothing so compendious
had ever been assembled. There were four Sections. In the first
were Raw Materials and Produce. In the second were the various
kinds of Machinery, arranged in six groups; machines for
direct use such as railways and carriages, manufacturing machines
and tools, mechanical, engineering, architectural and building
contrivances, naval and military ordinance and accoutrements,
agricultural and horticultural machines and implements, and
philosophical and scientific instruments. In the third Section
were the various Manufactures divided into nineteen groups,
and in the fourth the Fine Arts. Some of the exhibits in the last
being contributed by artists and foreigners caused a certain
amount of misgiving; a marble statue of a “startled nymph,”
who from her lack of clothing seemed no better than she ought
to be, caused at least one family—a motherly-looking woman
and two apple-cheeked daughters in flounced skirts-^o come to
a sudden pause and then, blushing furiously, to vanish into the
silk department.

In the weeks that followed the humblest in the land came
to view the Great Exhibition. Throughout the stnnmer the daily
attendance at times exceeded 60,000. After the third week the
admission fee to the building was reduced to a shilling on four
days a week. The shilling days proved the wonder of the season.
Instead of the brutal behaviour and rioting which many had
expected, an endless stream of orderly, good-hmnoured working-
class folk, gaping and admiring, passed under the crystal dome.
No Communist broke the glass or seized the Koh-i-Noor. “There
is a smock-faced rustic considering among other matters rural
a Canadian plough,” wrote Puncht “that quiet, self-instructing
peasant is—one shilling. There is a fustian jaciet with a quici
critical eye examining machines; that jacket is one shilling.”^
The workman’s square cap, the decent finery, the gaping ragged
children, the humble picnic bag, the babies, the ginger beer
gave an imexpected thrill to the well-to-do and respectable. The
sight caused undemonstrative Englishmen to shake hands in
the streets and even to shed tears in public Here were the dreaded
working-class people of England and they*had come as friends.
“The great event brought to London thousands who perhaps
had never seen a train before, people speaking the strange

^Pmchf ZXf 9*

£JS.

ENGLISH SAGA

Il8

tongues of Lancashire and I)urham, and the official reports of '
their behaviour as they flocked through museums and gardens
are full of unconcealed pride. Not a flower was picked, a picture
smashed. And ten years before, the Londoners who now wel¬
comed them had stood silent in the streets to watch the guns
going north to Lancashire.”^

To the nation that fairy palace towering over the blossom
and foliage of the park symbolised a great social reunion and
the dawning of a new era of hope, based on enterprise, freedom
of trade and cheapness of production and communication. To
innocent eyes—and there were many that saw it—^it seemed a
palace of Ught glittering in the summer sun with its central
crystal fountain reflecting all the jewels of the world, an Arabian
nights’ creation “so graceful, so delicate, so aiiy that its trans¬
lucent beauty remains graven on memory as something which
must defy all rivalry.”* To the simple sons of toil from the
industrial north who had saved up their pennies to make the
first and only pilgrimage of their lives to visit it, its beauty
seemed something that was scarcely of this earth. They saw it,
not like a sophisticated posterity as something comic, but as a
dream of fairyland and, in a world which contained the slums
of Irkside and Little Ireland, and in which all things are com¬
parative, it is not surprising.

■ ••«•••«

The Great Exhibition, bom of the hopes excited by Free
Trade, was expected by its promoters to herald the dawn of
perpetual peace. It was a hope shared by every Briton. In the
past Britain had won many great prizes in war. But she had
done so because she had emerged victorious from her wars and
not because she had sought them. Her people, though redoubt¬
able fighters, were deeply impregnated by a desire to live at
peace and by a belief that wars were always caused by foreigners.

This had never seemed so true as in 1851. Increasingly de¬
pendent on imports, with a growing export trade, with a vast
empire (in which they had almost lost interest), and with
a glorious record of victories behind them, the islanders had
nothing to gain by war and everything to lose. All that was
now necessary was to persuade foreigners who were not in the
same state of blessedness to think likewise. The light of reason,

^Earfy Fictorian England^ /,

^Lord Etdcsdaky Memoirs^ /, j&g.

THE FIGHTING FIFTIES II9

the healing gospd of Free Trade and the outward and visible
sign afforded by the Crystal Palace would surely convart them.
It was to their material advantage.

The weakness of the Englishman’s attitude towards foreigners
was that he expected them to think and behave exactly like
hi ms elf. When, true to their own alien natures, they failed to
do so, he either laughed at their folly or—if their behaviour-
outraged his moral code, as it frequently did—^became justly
indignant. And as, being a free-bom Briton, he scorned to
conceal his laughter or disapproval, misunderstanding between
him and his continental neighbours was bound to arise.

The ruling principles of Britain’s foreign policy were to
preserve the balance of European power, protect the Low
Countries and the Channel coasts, keep open her trade routes
and strategic co mmuni cations, and establish the rule of righteous¬
ness on earth. The last object—that of playing St. Gleorge to the
dragon of foreign tyrants—generally coincided with the first,
since any ambitious despot with a large army who threatened
to overthrow the balance of power inevitably trampled in doing
so on the liberties of his own subjects and weaker neighbours.
In repelling such threats to her own interests, Britedn was thus
in the happy position of also fighting the battle of human free¬
dom and morality. As her statesmen and people were always
quick to emphasise this point, she was less liked by large nations
dian by small. And by making herself the unofficial patron of
every liberal or subversive movement abroad, as well as by her
generous policy of granting refuge to political exiles, she won
the sometimes embarrassing goodwill of foreign rebels but the
suspicion and resentment of their governments. This policy,
alike tmaggressive and provocative, was pursued by both political
parties—the Whigs because they lik^ foreign Liberals on
principle and the Tories because it was a cheap way of escaping
the reproach of being reactionary.

During the long forty years of peace that followed the defeat
of Napoleon, the Ghanhel shores were secured by the inter¬
national neutralisation of the Low Countries—divided after 1830
into the small pacific kingdoms of Holland and Belgium—^and
the temporary exhaustion of France. So long as the latter re¬
mained quiescent, Britain’s jealousy of despots was spasmodically
directed towards her three former allies of 1813-15—Russia,
Austria and Prussia. But these states, though governed by

ENGLISH SAGA

120

despots under very illiberal constitutions and therefore a proper
source of contempt to an English patriot, enjoyed the compara¬
tive advantage of being a long way away. Only one of them,
Russia, which was the possessor of a fair-sized navy, offered any
threat to British interests. For Russia was an Asiatic as well as a
European power, and her steady expansion towards India and
Persia caused constant uneasiness in Whitehall. Above all her
tendency to intervene in the affairs of the deca 3 dng Ottoman
empire on behalf of the Christian subjects of the Sultan was
regarded with a suspicious eye by statesmen responsible for
preserving British communications with India. If Antwerp
was a pistol pointed at London, Constantinople was one
levelled at India. Britain preferred to keep it in the palsied
hand of the Turk.

All this, however, was of much rhore interest to the serious
statesman and student of politics than to the ordinary Briton.
Russia was a long way away, ^d though its Czars were un¬
questionably tyrants and the knout and Siberian prison camp
ware horrors fhat outraged every honest heart, it was hard to
present the maintenance of the corrupt and cruel rule of Turkish
pashas over Christian subject peoples as a campaign for moral
righteousness. And even 4e protection of vital British interests
—especially such distant ones—could not arouse the public
without the stimulant of a great moral cause.

In the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign the English
therefore contented themselves with a good deal of genial abuse
of tyrants in their parliamentary speeches and newspapers with¬
out taking any very active steps to oppose them. The Emperors
of Russia and Austria and the King of Prussia were regularly
cmcatured as a trio of stupid, arrogant, absurd, qpauletted,
high-collared, tight-breeched, top-booted tyrants, and any act
of high-l^ded dealing by their minions—of which there were
plaity—^that found its way into the British press was held up
to moral obloquy. This national habit of lecturing, combined
with so much good forttme and wealth, made the Englfg}!
extremely unpopular in the greater chancelleries of Europe and
led to charges being brought ag^t them of hypoaisy,
and Machiavellian warmongering. It was particularly resented
whm, as oftm happened, it took the form of holding out the ’
British ^constitution as the modd for every other country and
intriguing, reganfless of local circumstances, against the estab-

THE fighting FIFTIES

I2I

discontented radical minoriti^
Betand the convenient cloak of parliamentary forms Bri&h

dS o'f“hr sometimes in office, did’ a good

* * * • «

In his bold, confident and even dashing behaviour towards
foreign ndem. one English statesman of the time above all othel
repiesented the moral feelings, prejudices and generous if narrow
s^ympathies of his countrymen. Palmerston, who with one brief
break was IVhig Foreign Secretaxy from 1830 to 1841, aS aiTn
from 1846 to 1852, was the pride of Britain Ind thet>S feS
of Europe. In all that he said and did, in which there was ZS
shrewdness and an incontestable love of his country and her
institutions, he was animated by a belief that he was exposing
the powers of darkness. Except for a few over-travelled and
superior persons, every Englishman shared his faith and most

were as often as not tactless, impetuous and needlessly pro¬
vocative did not trouble them. However much they pa ned fre
meticulous Prince Albert and Palmerston’s own collLu^-fr
was his rollicking practice to act first and consult afterwards-

nrnh-fT^- m England, rustic, middle-class or

pioletarian When in 1850 the honest draymen of Barclay’s

Brewey chased an Austrian general, who was reputed to have

Mrf ladies, do.vn Bankside into good

Mrs Benfields bedroom in the George public-house, and bom¬
barded him with mud pies and cries of “Gut off his beard!” they
eie only enacting m them own rough w^ay the familiar
a merstoman teclmque. They meant no harm but they wished

^ pSf Englishman thought of him.

and and scrapes only enhanced Palmerston’s popularity

and stimulated him to new outrages on the authoritLian pro-

fn mcoil° Hfrfr' '^'as irresistible

nf T?ro ^ famous Gsm J?omams sum speech in the summer
of 1850, after a vote of censure on his high-handed Don Pacifico

Inrln and made Mm°

ot for the l^t time, the hero of his country. When eighteen

months later he was forced to resign after a further outrfge on

the royal prmogative and the rights of his colleagues, the London

mSded feeling of the common people,

paraded me streets singing; ^ ^ ^

122

ENGLISH SAGA

“Small Lord John ha^ been and gone
And turned adrift Lord Palmerston,

Among^st the lot the only don
Who didn’t take care of number one;

Out spoke Home Secretary Grey,

“ I wish old Palmy was away.’

“ Aye, turn hi-m out,* they all did say,

“ For he’s the people’s darling! ’”

Whatever grave persons and a prosy German Prince Consort
might say, “the Viscount, full of vigour and hilarity and over¬
flowing with diplomatic swagger,” was the man for England.

“Let tyrants tremble!” might have been Palmerston’s motto,
and it was certainly his country’s. Yet, so long as tyrants kept
their distance, neither Palmerston nor England wished to go to
war. They merely claimed the right to speak out their mind
freely about them. But there was one species of tyrant whom
an Englishman not only hated but feared—a French tyrant.
Between the glorious Revolution of 1688 and the equally glorious
Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Britain had been at war with France
for more years than she had been at peace. Many of the Queen’s
subjects could remember a period of twenty-two years almost
continuous conflict with the revolutionary French Republic and
the Napoleonic Empire: when all Europe had’ been a camp
armed against an island fortress and watchers on the Kentish
shore on dear days could see the would-be invaders drilling on
the heights above Botilogne md Wimereux.

So long as France remain^ weak, ]toglish fears that all this
might happen again slept. But after the revolution of 1830 and
die enthronement of the revolutionary dynasty of Orleans in
Paris, andent suspidons revived. Louis Philippe—the old fox
pacing the Tuilddes terrace in his grey greatcoat and huge stapd
hat—was scarcdy in truth much of a menace to his ndghbours. -
Yet many sensible Englishmen wafched his every move with
alarm, whether towards Spain or Bdgium or the African shore,
feding they could only be attributed to “the cravings of French
vamty aai insolence” and still more to “that revolutionary
spirit which... seeks to become formidable by stimulating~the
passions and all3dng itsdf with all the vanity, pride and rest-
lesness, besides desire for plunder, which are largdy scattered
throughout the country.”^ Palmerston was never more PTigligl^

£asn of Qfieea Tictoria J, 3^9-3 (13 jritfo).

THE FIGHTING FIFTIES

123

than in his sturdy resistance to French projects and disregard of
French pride. A contemporary, who had returned from Paris
shortly after his retirement in 1841, believed that, had Palmerston
continued much longer at the Foreign Office, nothing could
have prevented war between the two countries, seeing “that he
intrigued against France in every part of the world and with a
tenacity of purpose that was like insanity.”^ Neither he nor the
public he so ably represented saw in this anything but a proper
distrust of a dangerous and slippery customer.^

*•••••••

The Revolution of 1848 made France once more a republic.
Before the year was out, worse had happened. In a violent
revulsion of popular opinion against disorder and Socialist
excesses, a nephew of the great Napoleon was elected President.
The alarm aroused in England coincided with a period of mis¬
giving about the nation’s military and naval preparedness. As
always after a long peace, the army seemed quite insufficient for
any warlike task: its most serious preoccupations were sartorial
such as the new shell jacket and the peculiar-looking shako
recently designed for its use by Prince Albert. The aged Duke
of Wellington could not sleep at night for thinkin g of the
defenceless state of the coasts. Worse, the Navy itself was grow¬
ing rusty. The greater part of the battle fleet was laid up in
harbour, “dismantled aloft and disarmed below.” And in the
new inventions which had come to revolutionise maritime war¬
fare like other human activities, the volatile and nimble-witted
French had stolen a dangerous march. In 1837 they had adopted
explosive shells in place of the solid shot that had won Trafalgar,
and their pioneer efforts with steamers in the early ’forties had
been more successful than those of the statelier and more con¬
servative British Admiralty.

All this combined with the events in France to cause a good
deal of surface alarm. Yet the sense of England’s superiority
was so innate and the general complacence and love of peace
and comfort so deep-rooted that it quickly died away. Punch

’^Gt&oiUz^ Memoirs^ Part II, Vol. II, 83,

*Lord Holland, expressing the traditional Whig minority view of friendship
to revolutionary France, remarked to Palmerston, "For Grod’s sake, if you are so full
of distrust of France, if you suspea aU her acts and all her words, put the worst con¬
struction on all she does, and are resolved to be on bad terms with her, call Parliament
together, ask for men and money, and fight it out with her manfully. Do this or
meet her in a friendly and conciliatory spirit, and cast aside all those suspicions
which make such bad blood between the two countries." GreviUc^ Memoirs^ Part //,
VoL /, $ 3 $.

ENGLISH SAGA

124

depicted a number of seasick French colonels and poodles attempt¬
ing to cross the Channel^ while a very senile Duke of Wellington
in a Field Marshall’s cocked hat vainly tried with a quill pen
to tickle up a sleeping British lion which only replied, “All
right, old boy, I shall be ready when I’m wanted.” Palmerston
confessed to Russell in 1851 that it was “almost as difficult to
persuade the people of this country to provide themselves with
the means of defence as it would be for them to defend themselves
without those means.”*

At the end of that year there came a new alarm, Louis
Napoleon, interpreting the will of the rising generation in
France, established himself in permanent power as life President
by a mili tary coup d’etat. A year later he became Emperor of
the French in fictitious succession to his famous uncle. This
arbitrary act, though accompanied by remarkably little loss of
life, aroused the utmost indignation among English radicals,
who merdy saw it as a brutal attack on their liberal and
sodalist brethren across the Channel. It outraged thdr En g lish
respectability and their most cherished democratic ideals. Th^
pictured the “man of December” as throttling the nation .he
had sworn to serve. “The soldiery had already been corrupted
by a feast of sausages and champagne. For the officers there was
gold. . . . The gutters of the boulevards ran with blood ... a
disreputable adventurer was wading through blood to the
throne.”*

The rdapse of France into imperial despotism seemed to
complete the isolation of England: the three Eastern tyrants
were now joined by a Western. Pvndi went so far as to address
a salutation to the democrats of the United States, hitherto
little liked in aristocratic England:

“Oh, Jonathan! dear Jonathanl a wretched world we see;

There?8 scarce a freeman in it now, excepting you and me.

In soldier<ridden Christendom the sceptre is the sword;

The statutes of the nation from the cannon’s mouth are
roared.

broode of Gallic cocke,

Defying rollc and rocke,

Across ye Channele sailing
"With retching and with railing.*

Fmch^ XlVt 33.

C Bel^ Palmerston, /, 403.

•IT. E. Adams, Memoirs oja Social Atom, 1,340^31,

THE FIGHTING FIFTIES

125

Ordnance the subject multitude for ordinance obey;

The bullet and the bayonet debate at once allay:

The mouth is gagg’d, the Press is stopp’d, and we remain alone
With power our thoughts to utter, or to call our souls our
own.

They hate us, brother Jonathan, those tyrants; they detest
The island sons of liberty and freemen of the West;

It angers them that we survive their savage will to stem,
A sign of hope unto their slaves—a sign of fear to them.’’^

Faced by such a situation, patriotic feeling revived.® Cobdenism
and Free Trade notwithstanding, the nation began to rearm. A
Militia Bill was brought in by a short-lived Conservative govern¬
ment in the summer of 1852, and a new note crept into national
journalism—of the first rifle dubs, of serious searchings of
heart about Navy victualling scandals and the boilers of the
new steam warships, of Admiral Napier, K.C.B. of “Little Billee”
fame, and of jolly tars in big straw hats, striped jerseys and bell-
bottom trousem getting ready to show the world that peaceful
England could still teach a presumptuous foreigner a lesson.

Yet, after all, it was not the French tyrant with whom an
awakening England was to test her strength. For it happened
that British interests, real or illusory, caused Britain to fight
beside the French tyrant instead of against him. The Eastern ,
question aopped up again, and the island victors of Trafalgar
and Waterloo, who had dedicated themselves at the shrine of the
Crystal Palace to perpetual peace, drifted into a war to safeguard
the OYCTland route to India, And in challenging those who
threatened their vital communications they challenged tyranny
too. No one could deny that Nicholas of Russia was a despot.
Though a more remote one, he was both more autocratic and
more ofiensive than Louis Napoleon.

For being an upstart, far from certain of his position and
anxious to prevent any revival of the Waterloo coalition against
France, Napoleon III sedulously courted England and did his
best to soothe her fears and susceptibilities. The despot of all
the Russias cared nothing for the English or any other public.
In his own remote and barbarous coimtry public opinion did

^Fmck^ XXIIt 15. , i- t

*“A very laudable feding is gloTOig in the hearts of . thousands of the British
people—the feeling for rifle practice. ... We hate martial instruments. Bayonets are
bad but. .. chains are worse than bayonets,* Funch, XXII, 69,

ENGLISH SAGA

126

not exist. He was accustomed to dealing only with despots like
himself. In puisuit of his imperial interests he had for some

been proposing to British statesmen and diplomats that as
the Turkish Empire was obviously dissolving through its own
inertia and corruption, Russia and Britain should forestall
competitors by anticipating the demise and dividing the carcase
between them. Russia should have its long-sought outlet to the
Mediterranean, and Britain should have Egypt and Candia.

In two momentous conversations in 1853 with the British
Ambassador at St. Petersburg this impertinent tyrant outlined
his plans for partitioning the possessions of “the sick man” of
the Porte. Had he known anything of the mind and conscience
of England, he would never have suggested making her a partner
in anything so outrageous. Had he been able to foretell the
future he would have known, too, that in another half-century
Britain would be honourably installed in Egypt, while the land-
botmd Muscovite would still be as far as ever from his Mediter¬
ranean goal and his hope of exercising suzerainty over his fellow
Christians of the Balkans. The British government returned
no answer but made it dear that it was without territorial
ambitions of any kind.

The Qzax of all the Russias was not to be turned from his
purpose by the nicety of British scruples. If Britain would not
join in hi designs, he would execute them by himsdf. Mean¬
while he had become involved in a dispute with Louis Napoleon,
whom he persisted in treating as a low upstart, over the pro¬
tection of &e Christian shrines in the Turkish dominions. Con¬
sequently when in pursuance of his great design he moved his
troops into the prindpalities of Wallachia and Moldavia—now
Romania—he was confronted with the opposition not only of
Britain but of France.

The British govermnent—a talented but uneasy coalition of
Pedites, Whigs and Radicals bound together by no other prindple
but di slik e of the Protectionists—^was in a difficulty. It had no
wish to involve the nation in a war over the ownership of remote
Syrian shrine and Balkan villages. On the other hand, a prindple
of British diplomatic policy was at stake and a fordgn despot
was openly flouting her Majesty’s government. A compromise
was therrfore sought which recognised both the independence
of the' Ottoman Porte and the Czar’s right to protect the
Orthodox Christians in Turkey.

THE FIGHTING FIFTIES

127

But it was oue thing to propose a compromise: another to
get two despotic and c unni ng orientals to accept it The Sultan
was resolved to keep his Christian provinces and to yield nothing.
The Czar was equally resolved to obtain the substance of his
ends, though, being anxious to obtain them if possible without
war, he was temporarily the more reasonable of the two. But
the Turk, seeing an opportunity of fighting a war (which he
regarded as sooner or later inevitable) with the backing of two
great Christian Powers, and, judging that such a chance might
never occur again, refuse any compromise whatever.

Stq) by step the British Prime Minister, Lord Aberdeen, was
driven into a war which he deplored and whose results he dreaded.
Most of his Cabinet were men of peace like himself, but a small
war group led by Palmerston and Russell and strongly aided by
the British Ambassador to the Porte—^Lord Stratford de ReddifFe
—drove him ever further into a position from which there was
no wiriidrawing. Public opinion, waking up to the fact that
the country was being flouted by a notorious despot, suddenly
became intensely bellicose. Aberdeen found it harder to retreat
than ever. A guarantee to the Turk, which had been intended as
provisional was imperceptiblytransformedbythat wily oriental in¬
to a document whose execution lay in Turkish, not British hands.

Without having any dear idea of what die struggle was
about except that it was against tyranny and without the govern¬
ment having made any adequate preparations to conduct it, the
British people in the spring of 1854 found themsdves, in alliance
with France and Turkey, and at war with-Russia. The coimtry,
apparently so pacific a few years before, had completdy changed
its outlook: John Morley in his free-trading, radical Lancashire
home, remembered hearing at his parental fireside heartfdt^
wishes that Cobden and Bright—still bravdy advocating peace
—should be flung together into the insanitary waters of the
Lrwell. What was even more surprising was the alignment of
England beside the French “usurper,” whose “foul lips”—^in
contemporary radical parlance—actually kissed the chedts of
Queen Victoria during a royal war-time visit to France.^ A few
far-seeing observers predicted that the war would be hard to
wage and impossible to bring to a successful conclusion, and that

When we read of this last indignity at Cherbonrg, there was not an honest
woman^s face in Britain that did not bum with shame.'’ W, E, Adams, Memoirs of a
Social Atom, II, yyo-r.

ENGLISH SAGA

128

the British people would soon be as heartily sick of it as they
were now hot in its favour. They were an insignificant minority -
and no one took the least notice of them.

The difiiculty was to find a scene of operations. Despite
universal hatred of the Russians and intense detestation of the
Czar, the first six months of the war passed without any hostilities
wordi mentioning. An Anglo-French naval expedition to the
Baltic accomplished next to nothing. A military force sent to
aid the Turk in the Balkans saw more of cholera than the enemy,
and it was not till the late autumn of 1854 that British and
French troops landed in .the Crimea peninsula and set siege to
the naval fortress of Sevastopol.

The battles that followed—^Alma, Balaclava, Inkerman—and
the long siege in the trenches proved that the English had lost
nothing of their ancient valour. They also revealed their curious
inability to plan adequately ahead. The army command, which
had neither learnt nor endeavomed to learn anything since 1815,
might have been ready for the battle of Waterloo but was certainly
not for a winter campaign in the trenches of Russia.^ In the
first few months of the campaign everything failed: transport,.
commissariat, supply and hospitals. The Government and
public which had talk^ glibly of taking Sevastopol in a few
weeks ware faced by the prospect of a long and hazardous cam¬
paign thousands of miles from home against a superior and
apparently inexhaustible enemy figh ting on his own ground.

During that winter—even in England it was one of the
coldest in human memory—the losses of the little professional
army were appalling and the foolish boastings of the summer
soon tum^ to mourning. Tales of men fighting in the frozen
, trenches without greatcoats, or packed, filthy with dysentery and
gangrmous wounds, into tmequipped hospitals built over
Scutari cesspits, aroused a wave of indignation which brought
dov^ the government and temporarily disgraced and even
imperiUed the aristocratic system of the country. But the story
of their courage and endurance also thrilled England: the
charge of the light Brigade in the vall^ of death was like
‘Ihermopylae. The national mood was reflected by Macaulay,
who told a friend in a letter how anxious he was about the
brave feUows in the Crimea, how proud for the country and

* Tfaeai& h ^mmaoder-is^Cliie^ Lord Raglan, an old Peninsula veteran invari.

aMyreferredtotheenea^B^theFiench.”

THE FIGHTING FIFTIES

129

how glad to think that the national spirit was so high and un¬
conquerable. The annals of the tough simple soldiery who stuck
to their hopeless task until the Muscovite, unable to endure
longer, abandoned Sevastopol, were remembered in after years
by one of them, a farm labourer who had enlisted at sixteen,
as cold and starvation, unremitting duty for days at a stretdi,
and what to lesser men would have been almost indescribable
suffering.

The Crimean War continued till 1856. It ended in a nominal
gain for Britain and France, though there were no fruits of
victory. But it at least produced two results: it gave time for
the Balkan peoples to achieve independence from the Turk
before the Russian could absorb them, and it awoke in the English
a growing spirit of self-examination that led to a great series
of administrative reforms of which Florence Nightingale’s
lifelong work for nursing and military hygiene was only one.
Incidentally the peace treaty that conduded hostilities—signed
at, Paris with a quiU plucked from the wing of an eagle in the
Garden des Plantes—involved a voluntary surrender by Britain
of her right to seize goods other than contraband in neutral
diips at sea.

Within a year the country was fighting again. For several
months, until the tide turned in favour of the little handful of
red-coated columns moving under a burning sun across distant
jungle and plain, England waited in suspense at the end of the
dectric cable for news of bdeaguered Cawnpore, Ddhi and
Lucknow. Of the causes and significance of the Mutiny the
English had no notion. A few among them who had spent a
working lifetime under the oriental sun among the “drums
and gaudy idols ... the black faces, the long beards, the ydlow
streaks of sect, the turbans and the flowing robes, the spears
and silver races” of an alien continent, knew something of their
country’s Eastern destiny. But to the great mass of the respectable
naiddle-dass dectors of Victorian England, India was only a
name.

This philosophical indifference to, almost unawareness ofl
the origins and nature of thdr own empire was a source of
recurring bewilderment to the EnglisL An event like the Indian
Miutiny always took, them by surprise. The Scots, a proud race
trained to poverty who had had to travd to live, and even

jjQ ENGLISH SAGA

the Protestant Irish who had the instinct for garrisoning in
thPiV blood, knew more of the empire than the English com¬
mercial classes whose wealth and power sustained it. It had
come into being almost accidentally, not as a result of conscious
national or governmental effort but as the bye-product of the
activity of iimumerable private persons. The law of primo¬
geniture, by creating in every generation a surplus of portionless
yo^ger sons educated in a standard of comfort which they could
only malnfam by going out into the world to seek their fortunes,
had had the effect of changing the status and allegiance of a
quarter of the globe. During the seventeenth century, while the
mind of England was obsessed with questions of internal govern¬
ment and religion, the first British Empire had been founded
by the private enterprise of individual Englishmen who had
been imable to secure the kind of life they wanted in the home
country. A htmdred and fifty years later, owing to the inability
of the British Parliament and people to comprehend it, it had
been lost.

Yet even while the first empire was dissolving, a second had
been growing up in the same haphazard way. The process,
though it had reached gigantic and almost unmanageable
dimpnsinrLs, still continued during Victoria’s pacific reigiL A
good example of the way in which it occurred afforded by
the life of James Brooke, the first British Rajah of Sarawak.
After an adventurous youth in the service of the East India
Company, Brooke, at the age of thirty-five invested the modest
capital left him by his father in a schooner of 142 tons in which
he sail^ on a voyage of exploration for Borneo. Here he became
beneficently involved in the unhappy internal politics of the
head-hunting county of Sarawak, and, making himself by his
tact, energy and great administrative talents indispensable both
to its rulers and people to whom—to the embarrassment of an
indifferent British government—^he became enthusiastically
attached, was within a few years appointed hereditary Rajah of
Sarawak by the Malay Sultan of Borneo. He died in 1868, ruler
of a country as large as Scotland, which his heirs in the fiillness
of time and in the teeth of “V^tehall added to the British'
Empire.

process of expansion went on, in short, without either
the initiative or the conscious will of an imperial government
which obstinately refused to recognise itself as imperial. Palmer-

THE FXGHTING FIFTIES 131

ston, himself the embodiment of the spirit that made the British
Empire, pooh-poohed the idea that his country should annex
Egypt in order to safeguard her communications with India: a
gendeman with an estate in Scotland and another in southern
England, he remarked, did not need to own the post-houses along
the Great North Road. Ini tiative was left in this, as in all things
else, to the individual: the state in its corporate capacity only
existed to protect the individual in his just gains and lawful
occasions. The continued growth of the Empire was forced on
an ever reluctant government (which, having to consider the
interests of taxpayers who were also voters, was always cautious)
by the restless energy of its private citizens. For every English¬
man, rich or poor, who had courage, a strong body, willing
hands and capital enough to buy a passage there was boimdless
opportunity and elbow room waiting in lands beyond the oceans.
Two brothers, aged nineteen and seventeen, belonging to a
family of twelve, left for New Zealand with £2,000 capital
between them and a superabundance of animal spirits prepared
for any risks and any labour. To “build, fell trees, plough, reap,
pasture cattle, shear sheep, all these with the han^!”^ was the
task they cheerfully set themselves. Within a dozen years each
looked forward to returning with a capital of at least ^£20,000
to seek a wife and found a family. And the interests rq)resented
by that new capital and its future returns would demand in due
coiuse the protection of the imperial government, whether these
interests lay in the British dominions or, as often happened, in
more populous lands un^er some other flag.

The unit of the national life was the family—the sacred
nursery of the individual. The wealth and potver of the empire
grew in ratio to the size of this homely unit. The first half of
the nineteenth century saw the population increasing more
rapidly than ever before, not because more children were bom
but because, thanks to advances in hygiene and medical science,
more survived. Between 1841 and 1861 the population of England,
Scotland and Wales rose from seventeen to twenty-three millions.
Not only in working-class homes but in those of the upper and
middle-class large families were still the rule. The Queen herself
had nine children: a Judge of the High Court twenty-four.
Strangers admitted to the sacred circle of the home would usually

^Taine, Notes on England^

132

ENGLISH SAGA

find their hostess in the family way and be greeted by the spectacle
of a flock of little boys running off to hide and little girls running
out to peep. Often the children w^ould mount in unbroken
yearly steps from the baby at tlie breast to the grown youth of
nineteen.

Around that holy of holies centred a life of the strictest
regularity and order. Paterfamilias, for all the love he bore his
family, was an awe-impiring figure, infallible in his judgments
and irreproachable in his wdiiskers and moral conduct: his
wife—a few years before a slender and clear-complexioned girl—
“a housekeeper, a nurse, a sitting hen,” as 'a distingtffshed
French critic saw her, “broad, stiff and destitute of ideas, with
red face, eyes the colour of blue china . . . spreading dresses .
stout masculine boots . . . long, projecting teeth.

In the more prosperous families the boys would start work
early with a tutor and at eight or nine leave home for the rough
republic of one of the great boarding schools which were con¬
stantly expanding and multiplying to train new rulers for a
growing commercial empire. Here sensitive children from rich
and sheltered homes \vouId rise in the small hours of the momine
to light fires and boil water for their majestic seniors, sweep
rooim, run errands and do the meanest chars, endure flogging
and bullying without a murmur, and sleep at night in Soisv
crowded dormitories subject to influences which would have
made their mothers and sisters swoon.

In contrast, the lives of girls in well-to-do families were often
Jeltered to an extent that cut them off from the roots of life
The men were trained to make wealth: the women to transmit
and form part of it. They were regarded as the cliief measure
of a husband’s or father’s opulence and social dignity: their
elegant accomplishments, their delicacy and chastity were
sources of male pnde and satisfaction. As girls they were taught

stands and do decorative gilding and crochet work. That a man’s

sTmatSafifthemselves to^ccupations
'' ""''f taat tribute to the labour and self-

it vi that sustained

5 he’s ^pSeSIS’ '' bride,

from

^Taine,

THE riCUTlNGf EIETIES

133

Young ladies, artificially kept from all knowledge of the
seamy or even normal side of life, grew up, in tight waists and
voluminous skirts, like flies in amber. The pursuit of wealth
to the exclusion of almost every other worldly object was affect¬
ing changes in every department of English life but in none
more than its tendency to rob the English gentlewomen of
useful occupation and of knowledge of the domestic arts and
of the world in which she lived. • The process was gradual and,
so long as large families remained the fashion, tempered by the
discipline and give-and-take of communal home life. With the
growth of commercial wealth and of the mechanical means of
multiplying comforts and luxuries, its effects became ever more
insidious. For in the end it deprived many women of the upper
and middle class of the natural sources of vitality and strength
and the instinctive feeling for wise and balanced living which,
as mothers, it should have been their lot to transmit to future
generations. More of the ills of our present epoch of reckoning
may be due to this cause than is yet realised.

The strong, imitative instinct and desire to excel of the
English led to a constant approximation of the lower types of
social life to the higher. On a simpler and more spartan scale
the family life of the north-country manufactmer followed
that of the lawyer in Kensington and the banker in Bayswater.
Often he still lived on the premises of his own works in the sha de
of the smoke and within earshot of the hammering that created
his wealth. In other cases he had moved out to one of the suburbs
of gardened, gothic villas that were growing up on the outskirts
of places like Manchester and Bir ming ham. His daily round
and social habits were less leisured than those of the Londoner: he
still went to the mill at six, dined in the middle of the day and
went early to bed after a hot meat supper and family prayers.
Sometimes his working day would last sixteen or more hours.
He sent his sons into the works in their early teens instead of
to public school and college which, he held, unsettled, the mind
for commercial pursuits.

Though many of those engaged in trade were men of culti¬
vation-buyers of pictures and founders of Libraries and Colleges
—the bulk of the provincial merchants tended, like their richer
Forsyte brethren in London, to be Philistines, valuing all
worldly things by the sterling standard, ignoring and despising
art and having little truck with intellect which they left to

E.S. If

ENGLISH SAGA

134

the leisured and endowed landed gentry. The spiiiraal side of
their natures would have been stifled but for their feeling for
religion. This was like themselves: downright, undiscriminating
and practical. Its dominant note was a militant Protestantism,
whidi comprised a great readiness to criticise, a strong sense
of self-righteousness, a very real respect for integrity and
sound moral conduct and an unreasoning distrust of the Pope
anfi of aU fordgn fal-lals. It foimd vigorous expression in
the busy black-coated, white-tied unction of Exeter Hall—the
League of Nations Union of the day—where middle-class
opinion was ceaselessly mobilised in favour of missionary,
pacifist and humanitarian ventures, all of a strongly Protestant
trend. Its antithesis was the Puseyite movement which, spreading
out from Oxford—still the home of lost causes—was filling long-
neglected, sober Hanoverian parish churches with painted
chancels, niches, candles, altars. Popish-looking rails to keep off
the profane laity, and painted windows bearing the idolatrous
image of the Virgin Mary.^

This drift to Rome, as it seemed to many of our great-grand
parents, aroused all the Protestant pugnacity of the British
people. In 1850 an attempt by the Pope to create English metro¬
politan rifles for Catholic bishops ^ but brought down (he
government, who were suspected of being lukewarm in their
opposition to this outrageous art of “invasion.”* Mobs pro¬
cessed through the streets of quiet provincial towns, smashing
Catholic shop windows, tearing up chapel railings and bearing
effigies of the offending Pope and his Cardinals (previously
exhibited in some local tailoris window) to the bonfire. In hb
public letter repudiating what Punch described as “an insolent
papal brief,” the Premier, Lord John Russell, assured an anxious
nation that “no foreign prince or potentate will be permitted
to fasten his fetters upon a nation which has so long and nobly
vindicated its right to freedom of opinion, civil, political and
religious.... I will not bate a jot of heart or life so long as the
glorious principles and the immortal ma rt y r s of the Reformation
shall be held in reverence by the great mass of a nation which
looks with contempt on the mununeries of superstition.” This,
and a great deal more like it, was the kind of language the serious

wanted Oliver and liis dragoons to march in and put tm ena to it alL" Ijettcrs ond
liiaaiy Semiiis Edward Fitzgendd, /, jSo.

*S»ae NewLcOmofEdward Etizssnddifd. E. R. Bmtm)

THE PIGHTINO PIETIES

13s

middle class of the eighteen-Hfties liked to hear. To sdll its
honest fears the Government brought in an Ecclesiastical Titles
Bill, as a “slap in the face”—it was little else—“to papal aggres¬
sion.” There was an eternal child in the English heart, and a
little, make-believe, so long as it vras kept out of business hours,
was necessary from time to time.

There was no make-believe in the genuine piety of the English
middle-class home. Occasionally tyrannical and more than fre¬
quently oppressive—for the English seldom did things by halves
—it was none the less the central core of life for a great body of
men and women who represented between them the major
portion of the wealth, power and activity of the world. It gave
tiiem regularity of habit, a rule of sober conduct that made them
invincible in their narrow achievement and a certain intensity
of purpose that lent dignity and even beauty to their otherwise
monotonous and ugly lives. Over the frieze of one of the chief
London banks were written the words, “Lord direct our labours”:
the very railway terminuses provided bibles chained to readmg-
' desks for the waiting business man to consult.

The Frenchman, Taine, in his Notes on England, has left a
picture of the head of an English family conducting prayers in
the sheltered bosom of his household. “On Simday evening he
is their spiritual guide, their chaplain; they may be seen entering
in a row, the women in front, the men behind, with seriousness,
gravity, and taking their places in the drawing-room. The
family and visitors are assembled. The master reads aloud a
short sermon-next a prayer; then every one kneels or bends
forward, the face turned towards the wall; lastly, he repeats the
Lord’s Prayer and, clause by clause, the worshippers respond.
Tills done, the servants file off, returning in the same order,
silently, meditatively ... not a muscle of thdr countenances
moved.

One saw the full intensity of diat spirit of worship on the
Sabbath. The English kept this day holy and unspotted from
the world: that is to say, they did no work on it, avoided travel,
attended church or chapd and stayed at home. Here the frmily
virtues were intensively cultivated. An old man who once
taught the writer of this book has recalled his childhood’s Sunday
round in mid-Victorim days. At eight the elder children break¬
fasted as a Sabbath treat with their parents, and after breakfast

Notes on England^ zii.

ENGLISH SAGA

136

and family prayem setded down quiedy until it was time for
chapel over some special illustrated Sunday magazine: Good
Words, The British Workman, The Band of. Hope, The Sunday
Magazine. These works were not quite as heavy reading as
their titles suggested, for, interspersed with moral sermons
and excerpts from the Scriptures, were serial stories by approved
writers which, published elsewhere, might have been set down
as frivolous and pernicious novels but which, between sacred
covers, took on an almost privileged guise. In the afternoon
the programme of devotional reading and instruction was
repeated: a missionary narrative read aloud by moth er after
dinner, Sunday School in the nursery conducted by a nurse, a
Bible lesson fixim father at four, family tea followed by hymns
evening -chapel for the elder children and family prayers again
after supper.

Such was the kind of day of which Macaulay was thinking
when he appealed in the House for proper wedc-end leisure for the
factory worker. “We are not poorer but richer because we have,
through many ages, rested from our labour one day in seven. That
day is not lost. While industry is suspended, while the plough lies
in the furrow, while the Exchange is silent, while no smoke
ascends from the factory, a process is going on quite as important
to the wealth of nations as any process which is performed on
more busy <feys. Man, the machine of machines, the
compa^ with which all the contrivances of the Watts and the
Arkvmghts are worthless, is repairing and winding up, so that
he returm to hk labours on the Monday with clearer intellect,
with Kvelier spirits, with renewed corporal vigour.”^ He cer¬
tainly needed it in that age of strenuous endeavour. Gaining-so
much fixim the Sabbath rest itself, the respectable middle dass,
whose votes now swayed the legislature, naturally wished to
assure the same blessings for the rest of the populatiori. It was
prepared to use its political power to enforce

Sunday observance was one of the salient peaks of the mid-
Virtorian scene. On that day over a busy nation there fell an
awfid calm. Any attrapt to relieve it was met by the full terrors
of ^ canalised English forces of moral righteousness. In 1856
^ ^ort ^ made by certain scholarly aristocrats to open the
Nationd Gallery and the British Museum on Stmday. The
Storm this aroused in a House of Commons assailed by all the

^Sir G. 0, Tfevefyan^ Macauk^ //, 176-7.

THE FIGHTING FIFTIES

137

propagandist powers of Exeter Hall caused them quickly to
withdraw. A proposal in the same year to provide Sunday bands
in the dreary Manchester and Salford parks met with a like repulse.

At midmght on Saturday—a noisy drunken evening in any
working-class district—all movement and soxmd suddenly ceased.
As Big Ben’s new clock chimed its last stroke a solemn hush
announced that the Sabbath had begun. Next morning the food
shops opened for a few hours, but at eleven, the time for divine
service, every shutter went up. For those with large houses and
affectionate families, the quiet scene had a familiar and reassuring
air: to those who lived in tiny tenement rooms and had no
playground but the drab streets it was less pleasing. Taine,
visiting England in i860, foimd the prospect almost more than
he could bear:

“Sunday in London in the rain: the shops are shut, the
streets almost deserted; the aspect is that of an immense
and a well-ordered cemetery. The few passers-by under their
umbrellas, in the desert of squares and streets, have the look
of tmeasy spirits who have risen from their graves; it is
appalling.

“I had no conception of such a spectacle which is said
to be frequent in London. The rain is small, compact,
pitiless; looking at it one can see no reason why it should
not continue to the end of all things; one’s feet chum
water, there is water everywhere, filthy water impregnated
with an odour of soot A yellow, dense fog fills the air,
sweeps down to the ground; at thirty paces a house, a
steamboat appears as spots upon blotting-paper. After an
hour’s walk in the Strand especially, and in ftie rest of the
City, one has the spleen, one meditates suicide.”^

• ••«•••*

The virtuous middle class had the franchise: the working-
dass majority had not. It was the middle dass, therefore, that
enforced the new urban English Sabbath in conformity
with its own frugal virtues. But there was one point on which
the rough majority insisted: Jewish Sabbath or no, it would
drink when it pleased. Beer and gin, and plenty of them, were
the unspoken price with which the busy Gradgrinds and
Bounderbys recondled the proletariat to the sodal chaos and

' Notes on England^ g.

ENGLISH SAGA

138

vacuum of laissezjaire. When, in 1856, an evangelical peer
brought in a bill to close the pubs on the Lord’s Day, the church
parade of high society in Hyde Park was interrupted for three
successive Sundays by an angry multitude who booed every
rider and carriage on the first Simday, pelted them with showers
of turf and stones on the second, and on the third made the few
daring survivors ride for their lives till the police, in long lines,
raining blows on rioters and spectators alike, cleared the park.
After that the bill was withdrawn and the pious aristocrat left
the country.

At midnight on Sunday the Sabbath gloom lightened. The
respectable classes, replete from their devotional exercises and
anticipating an early start to the new week of labour and lawful
gain, slept the sleep of the just. But the dancing saloons and the
all-night haunts of vice in the metropolis turned on their lights
and began to revel again openly.^

• «••••••

This was of a piece with the national taste. England kept
its more austere moments with great solemnity and decorum, but
it liked to do itself well and knew how. The Forsytes carried
their love of good living from the country to the town, and with-
flieir new wealth, were the better able to gratify it. They loved
to take the summer steamer to Blackwall or Greenwich and
dine in Lovegrove’s great room or at the Ship or Trafalgar off
piled plates of whitebait, salmon and India pickle, spitchcocked
eels and stewed carp, followed by roast duck and haunch of
mutton, tarts and custard, iced punch, hock, champagne and port,
while the river shimmer®! in the rays of the setting sun and the
white sails passed against the twilight. Toasts, pipes and good
stories rounded off the feast, and singing in the train all the
way home, and a draught of soda and a purge of pills before
negotiating the stairs to join one’s sleeping partner.®

They did thansdves as well at home. The merchantry and
the s®ni-commercial professional classes were making money
Hand over fist and they disposed of it, partly in ever growing
invcstmente but partly in comfortable living. They spent little
on splendour, art and travel; they left these to the aristocracy
and gentry. They concentrated on dinner parties. In this there
was much competitive expoiditure. A man and his wife

Wey. A IraiAmia sees Engiad in the

*Pmik,XVU, log. J i 3 •

THE FIGHTING FIFTIES I39

measured their status by the weight of their table silver—vast
6pergnes, massive salvers, tureens and candlesticks—the fineness
of their table damask, cut glass and china, above all on the
quantity of dishes served. Vast saddles of mutton and sirloins
of beef, whole salmons and turbots, interminable courses of
potages, fishes, removes, entremets and removes of the roast,
ware helped out by vegetables boiled in water, pastries and
enormous Stilton and Cheshire che^es. The wines followed
each other in equal profusion until the table was cleared for
further orgies of dessert, preserved fruits, nuts, port, madeira
and sherry. All this suggested to a foreigner that the race would
soon eat itself to a standstill. Taine reckoned that to the one
and a half sheep consumed in a year by a Frenchman, an English¬
man ate four. In England, an American noticed, even the
sparrows seemed fat.

The circumference took its standards from the centre. The
larger industrial tovras were begi nning to evolve a social life
for the well-to-do modelled on that of the metropolis, with
their own clubs, fashionable places for promenade and recreation
and assembly and ball-rooms. In Liverpool, the most aristocratic
city of the industrial north, the meriant princes wore white
cravats and evening dress coats on Change, and in Manchester’s
Athenseum and at its world-famous Hall6 concerts, first estab¬
lished in 1848, well-to-do quakers could be seen soberly con¬
versing in broad-brimmed hats, neat grey or mulbeiry-coloiired
coats, frilled shirts and knee breeches. The urban sporting world,
familiar to the twentieth century, was beginning to take shape:
the i. Zingari was instituted in 1845 and a regular All F.T1 g^3 ^ ^(^
cricket eleven began to play a few years later, travelling the
country in billycock and checked shirt and arousing widespread
enthusiasm for the game, soon to bear fruit in the first coimty
matches. Rugby football was also evolving from a local into
a national sport, with its own customs and rules: the famous
Blackheath Qub was fotmded by a little group of old Rugbeians
and Blackheath boys in 1858.

For though England was turning urban and the old field
sports could no longer suffice, the strong national love of pleasure
reasserted itself as soon as the first rush for wealth was over.
A new form of recreation, first tentatively essayed at Weymouth,
Scarborough and Brighton in the days of George III., foimd
especial favour with the well*to-do merchant and professional

ENGLISH SAGA

140

classes. The annual seaside holiday had the supreme advantage
of catering for the whole family, and its healthful properties
gave a fillip to business. Many London families emigrated for the
summer to Margate, the breadwiimer coming down the river
.for the week-end on Saturday night on the “husbands’ boat.”
The place was already an institution before the middle of the
century, with its trim houses and spired church, its famous
pier and fishermen, arbours and seats, its old ladies in deck-chairs
and gentlemen in straw hats and its rows of horse-drawn
bathing-boxes and bottle-nosed bathing women wading through
the water in great bonnets.

Though newer resorts of quality like Folkestone and Hastings
were winning favour, Brighton was still the first seaside town
in England with many survivals of its Regency heyday, including
“old, wicked-looking gentlemen with thin faces, long noses and
quaint hats who had drunk Regent punch with King George
the Fourth at the Pavilion.” These mingled, a little incongru¬
ously but in the English mode, with demmre young ladies in
curls and boimets, armies of children in jadtets and knicker¬
bockers, and fanatic-looking preachers in tall hats and white
ties who attempted to hold prayer meetings on the beach. The
normal costume of the seaside holiday-maker was a loose-fitting
check suit and a bowler. It was fun, after days in counting-house
and office, to stroll along the windy pier (where the French were
pmodically expected to land) and watch the gulls and fishing-
boats and the old salts in jerseys and straw hats, to dine off turtle
and strawberry ices at Mutton’s, to drive in an open fly from
one cliff to the other, eyeing the “gals” as they passed to and
fro in their crinolines and parasols before the rows of
white houses with green blinds and sun-blistered verandas, to
hear the fisherwomen hawking their prawns with shrill “Yeo
Ho’s!” and, in the cool of the evening, to listen to the negro
melodists singing “I would I were in Old Virginny” and the
band playing the Overture to Zampa. or the March from Athalie.

Evffi Victorian decorum relaxed a little by the g^aside.
Monsieur Wey, a Fre n ch m an of delicacy, noted with astonish-
ment how bathing took place in full view of a front swarming
with idlers of both sexes: at Brighton men bathing alone went
into the water stark n a ke d. Never, he wrote, would he forget
his bathe there in 1856. It was on a Sunday at the time at which
worshippers returned from church. He had been assigned a

THE FIGHTING FIFTIES

I4I

cabin in which to undress. It was a wooden construction on
wheels placed at the water’s edge with its steps half-submerged.
He committed himself to the waves. When he was ready to
return a fearful thing happened. Three ladies, a mother with
her daughters, settled themselves on camp stools in his direct
line of approach. They seemed very respectable females, and
the girls, he noted, were both pretty. There was no possibility
of reaching his cabin without passing in front of them. They
each held a prayer book and watched him swimming about with
serene imconcem. The Frenchman’s feelings can be imagined.
To give them a hint without offending their modesty he advanced
cautiously on all fours, raising himself by degrees as much as
decency permitted.^

English notions of propriety were always hard for a foreigner
to appreciate, for strict as they were, they seemed founded on
no principle and were often a matter of words. A Frenchman
noted that the more respectable islanders would sooner die than
mention the human posterior by name, yet in mixed company
would roar with laughter at the story of the lady who said she
had plenty to sit on but nowhere to put it. Mr. Roget in his
famous Thesaurus of English words and phrases, published in
1852, classified all concept and matter except the human body,
which was discreetly scattered about the book, the stomadh
concealed under the general title of “receptacle,” the genitals
under that of production. Yet physical rough and tumble,
often of the crudest kind, was the essence of the national humour.

For unlike the older territorial aristocracy to which in its
power and wealth it was afteady beginning to give tone, the new
English middle class was only half civilised, and its advance in
manners, rapid as it was, coifid not keep pace with its fortunes.
The moment it relaxed its puritanical decorum, the rude native
Adam, so full of rustic nature and vitality, emerged. In its
pleasures, urban England still smacked of the earth. When it
went on the spree, it left its prudery at home. It sat top-hatted,
eating devilled kidneys, drinking aqua vitae and joining in the
roaring choruses of the smoky Cider Cellar in Maiden Lane:
it kicked up its floimces and heels and stamped them on
the grotmd in the rhythmic surge of the polka. All the
vulgarity and vitality of the nation burst out in such annual
institutions as the Christmas pantomime, when even the family

M Frenchman sees England in the Fifties^ ag/6.

englishsaga

split its sides in uninhibited and unashamed laughter at the
gargantuan jests and antics of the Dame and goggled its eyes
at the dght-laced, broad-bosomed, ample-flanked Principal Boy.
The pantomime had full licence to be coarse, and respectable
fathers and mothers who took their families to revel in its rich
spectacle would have been gravely disappointed had it been
otherwise. The aowded house rocked at the broad jests, gaped
with delight at the tinsel scenes in which fairies and genii floated
before ethereal landscapes of gold, crystal and diamonds, and
uproariously applauded the brutal, noi^ but good-humoured
parody of the Harlequinade.^ ^

To see Victorian England really enjoying itself, no spectacle
compared with the Derby. With the growth of London it had
become the diief sporting event of the year. On the way to
Epsom all the world mingled, fours-in-hand with rakish young
gentlemen sm nking dgais and wearing check trousers and muslin
shades on their top-hats; ladies with parasols in open carriages;
crowded family brakes; pearl-buttoned costers in donkey carts;
cabs, barouches, droskies. Every one was laughing, chaffing and
shouting, with only a single thought and destination. The
windows and balconies of the mellow, shaded Gteorgian houses
along the road to the Dovras were alive with smiling faces, the
walls were crowned with cheering schoolboys and on every
village green stood groups of pretty girls with new ribbons and
finery fluttering under the tender, sun-kissed leaves of the chest¬
nut trees. Every gM who acknowledged the waving hands and

^Thcre is a descriptkm of one in Monsieur Wey’s account of a visit to the Surrey
Theatre in the dosing year of the Crimea War :

•AH the diaracters join in a rough and-tumble, and the pantomime commences in
real earnest. Blows are freely exchanged with any available instruments^ the actors kick,
laugh, yell, jest, roar and rollick in an indescribable pandemonium. TTiereupon mock
pohcemen intervene and are roughly handled by the actors. Meanwhile the background
lepr ya ting the different London districts moves slowly past Then comes a scene of
politicai saSre. The General Staff of the British Army dbrag themselves in on crutches;
Gobden and his adherents are dogged like schoolboys; food adulterers are belaboured by
the people. Suddenly the scene changes to a market-place and is swarming with live
chickeos, turkeys, pigeons, ducks.

•Meanwhile Admiral Napier had appeared in full-dress uniform, ordered a few
Cossacb to be put in irons, maken the editor of the Times by the hand, been chaired,
then discarding his uniform danced a frantic jig with Harlequin. It all ended by a
scene in an enchanted island lit by multi-coloured Roman candles. From the centre
rose an enormous spray of flowers, supporting the figures of Queen Victoria and
Nap^eon m, standing hand-in-hand. These parts were taken by small children in
consideration of the demands of perspective. The Prince of Pearls and the Queen of
Grapes crowned them'with laurd wreaths, the young ladies of the ballet grouped them-
sdves around with their legs in the air, Columbine and the down fell on their knees,
Richard IIFs soldiers presented arms, and the curtain fell to the majestic strains of
* God Save the Queen.’* A ^rmchaum sees the English in the ^Fifties^ 2i4’‘Zi,

THE FIGHTING FIFTIES

143

kisses blown to her was greeted with a cheer. Among the sweet-
williams and Canterbury bells sat old gentlemen at their cottage
doors smoking long pipes and giving as good as they took from
the wags on the passing brakes. At each successive turnpike
there was a jam, and here and at the roadside pubs the noise
was like all England speaking at once.

On the course itself the colours of the rainbow, and many
more crude, mingled. Round the carriages and coaches bare¬
footed, hungry-looking beggars, gipsies and children swarmed
seeking food. The world of fashion and the workaday City
rubbed shoulders with comic negro singers, hucksters selling
trinkets and red-haired Scottish lassies dandng to the sound of
bagpipes. On vehicles overlooking the course sat jolly old boys
from Change or counter in top-hats with side whiskers, high
stocks and massive gold chains suspended across monumental
waistcoats, drinking champagne out of long glasses and eating
game pie, sandwiches and melon. Behind them were painted
booths and bookies’ stands, and all the fun of the great day—
boxers and banjos, thimble rigs and knock-em-downs, shooting
and archery g^leries, skittle alleys and dirty, bright-coloured,
bawling vendors of every kind.

Towards evening, when the races were over and swarms of
carrier pigeons had borne their news of triumph or disaster
into every corner of England, the carnival entered on its final
stage. Bacchus and the old Saxon gods of horn and mead seemed
to have descended on to the packed, twilit downs. The astonished
Frenchman, Taine, tried to describe the*scene:

“Twenty-four gentlemen triumphantly range on their
omnibus seventy-five bottles which they have emptied.
Groups pelt each other with chicken bones, lobster-^shells,
pieces of turf. Two parties of gentlemen have descended
from their omnibuses and engaged in a fight, ten against
ten; one of them gets two teeth broken. There are humorous
incidents: three men and a lady are standing erect in their
carriage; the horses move on, they all tumble, the lady
with her legs in the air; peals of laughter follow. Gradually
the fumes of wine ascend to the heads; these people so
proper, so delicate, indulge in strange conduct; gentlemen
approach a carriage containing ladies and young girls, and
stand shamefully against the wheels; the mother tries to

144 .englishsaga

drive them away with her parasol. One of our party
remained till midnight saw many horrors which I cannot
describe; the animal nature had full vent.”!

A drunken land at times the old fighting England of the
urban ’fifties was: the right to empty his can of beer 'whenever
he pleased was the first clause of Magna Carta which the Ene-
lishman took -with him from the country to the to'wn. In
Manchester, with its 400,000 inhabitants, had 475 “publics” a^
1,143 houses. Every night the eternal revelry would begin
outside their flare-lit doors: the tip-tapping of the wooden clogs
the tangled hair and dirty, sodden faces swaying, s-winging, and
leaping to the music of fiddle or seraphine. In the casinos or
music saloons, where a man might pay id. or 3J. for aflTm’cc.f nn
eat apples and oranges and afterwards sup on tripe and trotters
drink and harmony went hand in hand, as, amid a strong flavour
of gin, corduroy and tobacco smoke, the rough audience joined
in the chorus of the last music-hall ditty. On Saturday night,
after the workman’s weddy pay had been taken, it was a revolting
sight for a sensitive man to witness the ghastly scenes at the
tavern doors. Drunken women by the htmdred lay about
higgledy-piggledy in the mud, hollow-eyed and purple<hedted,
their ragged clothing plastered with muck.® Occasio nall y one
would stagger up to fight or to beat off some whimpering -wife
come with her bedraggled babes to seek a drunken husband
before the coming week’s housekeeping money was all spent

• • • • •

For though the worst days of hunger, destitution and low
wages were over, and the industrious, frugal artisan, like- the
i«ourc^ manufacturer, was enjoying better times, the more
the nation became industralised, the more squalid became tbe
te^und of the bulk of its people. The greater towus-
several rf them now nearmg the half-million miark—were still
or^nised on the parish model that had sufficed when they were
^rural: flat is t« say they were without efficient local govem-
mmt, ^muon or communal amenity. Even the capkal the
^ bv^Sid^^ national culture and fashion,

“^“°^bably filthy. Here, as ever?:.
^ mansion had outgrown the dvic in-

organisation of the past, £d the result was

THE FIGHTING FIFTIES

145

pandemonium.. London was increasing at the rate of 2,opo
houses a year. Efforts of public-spirited individuals to cleanse
it were always defeated by the flow of fresh immigrants from
Ireland and the country. Even the new fashionable districts of
Belgravia and Pimlico w^e unpaved and almost without
illumination. Footmen carried lanterns at night in front of
their .masters, and the highway down the centre of Eaton Square
was a sea of rute with islands brickbats and rubbish.

For the new London as it grew outwards rose on the muck
of the old. Its Medical Officer of Health, in a report issued in
1849, described the subsoil of the City as “ 17 million cubic feet
of decaying residuum.” Belgrave Square and Hyde Park Gardens
rested on sewers abotmding in the foulest deposits which blocked
the house drains and emitted disgusting smells, spreading
purulent throats, typhus, febrile influenza, t3q)hoid and cholera
among the well-to-do and their servants. As late as the middle
of the century a summer’s evening walk by the waters of the
Serpentine sometimes ended in fever and death brought on by
the morbid stench of the stream-bome drainage of Paddington,
Even the Queen’s apartments at Buckingham Palace were venti¬
lated through the common sewer: and a mysterious outbreak of
fever in Westminster cloisters led to the discovery of a mass of old
cesspools from whicii 500 cartloads of filth were subsequently re¬
moved. Many of the busier streets were ankle-deep in horse-dung.

If these were the sanitary conditions among which the
prosperous lived, those of the workers can be imagined. Off
Orchard Street, Portman Square, a single coturt 22 feet wide,
with a common sewer down its middle, housed nearly a thousand
human bangs in 26 three-storied houses. And the passer-by,
pursuing the course of Oxford Street towards Holbom, was
favoured by the sight and whiff of a narrow, winding, evil¬
smelling flane lined with hovels, through the open doors of
which could be seen earthen floors below the level of the streets
swarming vpith pallid, verminous, crawling human animals.
“Is it a street or kennel?” asked Punch,

“foul sludge and foetid stream

That from a chain of mantling pools sends up a choky steam;

Walls black with soot and bright with grease; low doorways,
entries dim;

And out of every window, pale frees gatuit and grim,”

ENGLISH SAGA

146

In Wapping the courtyards were deep with filth, like pigsties, in
which incredibly ragged and often naked children crawled
seeking for vegetable parings and offal among the refuse. In
Bethnal Green there were 80,000 inhabitants living under almost
completely primitive conditions. Until the first parliamentary
Sewer Commissioners in the middle ’fifties laid down over fifty
miles of underground arterial drainage and pumped out millions
of cubic feet of nauseating sludge, almost every street was barri¬
caded against overflowing sewers. London that had become a
dty such as the world had never before seen was still governed
like a. village. Punch depicted the Court of Aldermen guzzling
at one of the great traditional feasts, while King Death, with
folded arms and socket eyes, gazed down on his henchmen, the
spectres of Carbonic Acid Gas, Miasma, Cholera and Malaria,
who took their toll of gaimt, ragged humans amid arphed sewers
and slime.

As for the state of the river into which all this unmastered
nastiness drained, it beggared description. Its shores were rotten
with “guano, stable dimg, decaying sprats, and top dressings from
the market gardens.” In the hot summer of 1858 the stink became
so foul that there was talk of removing Parliament. In a famous
cartoon England’s leading comic journal apostrophied Father
Thames as a filthy old man dragging up dead rats om a liquid,
gaseous mass of black mud and dying fish.

“Filthy river, filthy river.

Foul from London to the Nore,

What art thou but one vast gutter.

One tremendous common shore.

All beside thy sludgy waters.

All beside thy reeking ooze,

Christian folks inhale memphitis

Which thy bubbly bosom brews.

• • • •

And from thee is brewed our porter,

Thee, thou gully, puddle, sink!

Thou vile cesspool art the liquor
Whence is made the beer we drink.

The water supply of three million people was polluted. Not till

^JPtoncA, XV^ i^u

THE FIGHTING FIFTIES J47

the establishment in 1855 of the Metropolitan Board of Works
—forerunner of the London County Council—did the evil begin
to abate.

Not only inertia and a certain native spirit of muddle, un¬
tamed by the discipline of established leadership, but the selfish¬
ness of vested interests operated to keep mid-Victorian London
dirty and unhealthy. Two scandalous examples were the
state of Smithfield—another Troy, reeking with the carcases
of half a million beasts slaughtered annually in the heart
of the City, which stood a ten years’ siege by the sanitary re¬
formers—and the privilege of intra-mural burial still claimed
under ancient charters by private dynasties of citizens. These
suicidal rights, automatically repeopling the pUed-up church-
3rards, continued unabated until 1852. This was all part of the
intense and traditional individualism of England: up to 1851,
any one could open a slaughtering yard. Private citizens like
Mr. Boffin made fortunes out of suburban dust-heaps—stinking
fly-haunted abominations poisoning the atmosphere for nailes
round—and the dty bakehouses were little better than common
nuisances.

So too in the narrow crowded streets pandemonium was long
permitted in the sacred name of liberty. The drivers of the 7d,
buses, growing in numbers as well as in girth, raced'each other
through the City while their stripe-trousered “cads” or con¬
ductors ran shouting beside them, sometimes almost dragging
unwilling passengers into their vehicles. The pavements were
blocked with long, rotating files of wretched men encased in
huge quadrilateral sandwich boards, and the narrow streets with
advertising carts towering ever higher like moving pagodas in
the attempt to overshadow one other. Vans stuck fast between
the stone posts that still served to mark the footways: vendors
of vegetables with wheel-barrows and ragged organ-grinders
paraded the cobbled gutters. In the national mania for turning
everything to money-making the very paving-stones were
scrawled with injimctions to buy so-and-so’s wares. Bill-stickers
were allowed to cover every vacant wall and hoarding vrith
advertisements, beggars, their clothes caked with a layer of
phosphorescent grime, to exhibit their sores and desritution.
Witlfin a stone’s throw of the heart of London, Leicester Square,
formerly the home of great artists, was a “ieary abomination
of desolation.” In its centre a headless statue, perpetually bom-

ENGLISH SAGA

148

barded by ragged urdhins with brickbats, stood in a wilderness
of weeds frequented by starved and half-savage cats.

All this was founded on and excused by the national
passion for independence. In the new towns order was lacking:
custom which to the English is always the warrant of law had
yet to arise. The right of a man to do what he liked with his
propaty, labour and time—the triple-guarded heritage of every
Eng lishman— had still to be tempered in the urban England that
had taken the place of the rustic by a realisation that society
depended on a general performance of social duty even when it
clashed with the promptings of individual self-intferest and love
of liberty. Punch put the prickly English attitude in a parable
of a fire that consumed a long street piecemeal because each
occupier refused to subscribe to a fire-engine on the groimds that
centralisation was inefficient and mischievous, crying “Let every
man get his bu<i:et and squirt and put out the fire himself. That
is self-government!”^ On the same principle a foreigner noticed
that when an Englishman went skating and fell through the
ice, it was not the business of authority to get him out of the
water.* Instead, assistance was afforded him by professional life-
savers who hovered perpetually round threatened points with
the implements of their humanitarian trade. The efficiency and
promptitude of such aid naturally bore some relation to the
kind of fee likely to be paid by the beneficiary.

•••••••a

It was a good England for the healthy and successful: a
fearful one for the weak and inefficienL Yet, for all the gloomy
horrors of its growing towns, the nation still had enough of
vigorotis country blood in its veins to make light of its cancers.
It stood four-square to the world with a confident smile on its
good-humoured pugnacious face ready to take on all-comers.
Its wealth was growing day by day, its ships sailed triumphant
and unhindoed on every sea, the beauty, order and peace of its
countryside were the wonder and admiration of every foreigner
who visitcif it. The loveliness of that Miltonian landscape, the
prosperity of its rose and ivy-covered cottages, the strength and
assurance of its thriving farms and lordly parks and mansinn a
blinded the indulgent eye to the darker comers of the new cities.

. r* where why dtizen is free of his acdoiis so long as he does not inter f e r t

mth his netghhour, the pofia look on pUddlj and respect the skaters’ liberty to the
•extent ofwatching them drown." W. Wey.A Pnnchmaisusthe^lishintlK'S^,a3a.

THE EIGHTINO FIFTIES

149

There was so much to love in England—^those wonderful oaks
and green lawns, the sleek, lowing cattle, the smoke curling up
from cottage chimneTS in a mysterious and blended sea of tender
verdure, the strong, kindly men and women who were so at
home among its frmiliar scenes—that there was no room for
criticism. One just took this strong-founded, dynamic island of
contradictions for granted and accepted it as a whole.

It seemed fitting that the chosen leader of such a land should
be Lord Palmerston. With his jaunty mien, his sturdy common
sense, his straw between his lips and his sobriquet of Cupid, the
game old man was the idol of mid-Victorian England and the
embodiment of everythii^ for which it stood. From 1855 until
his death at the age of 81 in 1865 he was continuously Prime
Minister, with one short break in 1858-9 when the discredited
protectionists imder Lord Derby and Disraeli had a brief spell of
minority office.

The last of the aristocratic Whigs of the tradition of the
“Glorious Revolution,” he represented the Liberals in his con¬
tempt for obscurantist mysticism and the Tories in his hatred
of doctrinaire reform. For ten years he kept a fast-changing
Britain in a political back-water of time and ruled not by the
magnetism of ideals nor by the machinery of party organisation
—^for he had neither—^but by shea- personal popularity. Nothing
could shake his hold on the British people. They loved him for
his brisk contempt for foreign ways and threats, for his English
balance, for his unshakable individualism, for his courage and
assurance—“an old admiral cut out of oak, the figure-head of
a 74-gun ship in a Biscay squall.” They delighted in his sporting
tastes, his little jokes—“it is impossible to give the Shah the
garter: he deserves the halter 1”—even his little scrapes: a
rumoured affair at the age of 78 -with a clergyman’s wife on
the eve of an election brought from the lips of his opponent,
Disraeli, who had learnt to know his coimtiymen, a hollow,
“For God’s sake don’t let the people of England know, or he’U
sweep the country!” That familiar figure—^the tilted white hat,
tight-buttoned coat, cane, dyed whiskas—^riding down Picca¬
dilly before breakfast or rising to jest or bluff away an awkward
situation in the House, gave the English confidence in them¬
selves. It was just so that they liked to think of themselves,
standing boldly before a world of which they had somehow
become lords.

ENGLISH SAGA

150

They saw him as their glorious prototype—both liberal and
tory, jingo and crusader—the game old cock whom Pi^h,
voicing the national sentiment, apostrophied on his 77^
birthday:

“An Irish Lord my John was bom,

Both dullness and dons he held in scorn.

But he stood for Cambridge at twenty-one,

My gallant, gay John Palmerston 1

With bis hat o’er his eyes and his nose in the air,

So jaimty and gmial and debonair.

Talk at him —to him —against him—none
Can take a rise out of Palmerston.

And suppose his parish registers say
He’s seventy-seven if he’s a day;

What’s that, if you’re still all fire and fun
like Methuselah or John Palmerston?”

• • • • • • • •'

The spirit and health of this old man sprang from the same

sources as those of the nation for which he stood. Palmerston
directed the course of a great commercial empire from his town
house in Piccadilly. But when he needed recreation he rode in
white trousers across the green fields to the wooded Harrow Hill
of his schooldays or went dovm for the vacation to his native
Broadlands in Hampshire. So it ivas with England. Since the
’forties John Bull had donned the sober dvic wear of the towns,
abjured horse for train, and settled down to work at lathe or
ledger among the chimney pots. But his strength still derived
from the countryside of his fathers in which, for all his new
absorption in money-making, his heart lay. “Home, sweet
home,” the Englishman’s favourite song, pictured not a tene¬
ment building but a country cottage. London was only an
encampment from which all who could afford it fied so soon
as the Season and parliamentary session were over, when the
blinds were drawn, the hotels left empty and the dubs asleep.

“In France,” a French traveller wrote, “we live in the tovras
and go to the country. The Englishman resides in the coimtry,
where his real home is. There he keeps his treasures, and pride
of race and station is given full play.”^ Here the rural gentry,

Wi^i A Frenchman sees the Fnglisk in the ^ Fifties^

THE FIGHTING FIFTIES

Still untouched by commerce and living on the cultivation of
the cla$sical and leisured past, had its strong roots, sending out
its shoots into the professional and administrative life of the
nation and Empire which it kept honest and sweet. At the back of
the educated Englisliman’s consciousness in the ’fifties lay always
the thought of the country house and the green shires: of slow
talk of acres and timber, of bullocks and crops, of sport by covert-
side and river, of sitting in the saddle among the blackthorn
bushes, of the smell of the gun-room, meadow hay and hot
leather, of dining out at the full moon, of archery parties and
croquet on smooth lawns, of familiar names and faces and
childhood’s remembered scenes repeated in the churchyard on
Sunday mornings after service, when counmmen met their
neighbours among the mounds beneath which their fathers
slept.

Somewhere in the ’fifties the urban population of England
began to exceed the rural. But agriculture remained the great
central productive industry of the cotmtiy, employing more
than two million skilled men. The competition of the new
wheat-growing lands overseas had still to be developed; free
trade spelt cheap and abundant raw materials for the manu¬
facturer but not yet unlimited imports. Despite the ceaseless
rise in population, not more than a quarter of the country’s
wheat was-imported and very little of her oats and barley. The
urban worker had more in his pocket, and he spent it on the
products of the English farmer. During the Crimea War wheat
prices rose, averaging 74/85 in 1855—a figure not to be equalled
till 1917—and fluctuating for many years around 50/-, or 10/- a
quarter more than they had been in 1850. The nemesis of Free
Trade was not yet. The middle period of Victoria’s reign con¬
stituted a golden age for British agriculture, when capital was
cheap and plentiful, markets expanding and improvements
profitable for landlord and tenant fanner.

The age of the small man was almost done. But there were
still nearly 100,000 men farming holdings of less than fifty acres
without hired labour. The agricultural worker was ill-paid and
without a real stake in the coimtry, but his wages, which averaged
well under 10/- a week in the South in 1850, touched ii/- in the
early ’sixties and 13/- in the next decade. He had his garden,
a wife who could bake his bread, and many small perquisites
—harvest money, beer or dder in the field, occasional firewood

ENGLISH SAGA

152

and gleanings. So long as he was healthy~and his life kept him
so—he was happy. Old Jas Dagley of Gawcott, Bucks, who with
his low forehead, eagle eyes, powerful nose and jaw, and stem
trap mouth, looked like Gladstone, paid fyi, a year rent for his
cottage, never wanted for good wholesome food in all his long
life of thrift and labour—“plenty a vegetables the whool yeeur

round and a flitch a beeacon.alwiz hangin’ up in the kitchen

and plenty a rabbuts round the meddurs”^—worked on his
allotment every night when his day’s work was done and boasted
that he had never missed a feast in any one of the villages about,
and that he had once carried a nine-gallon cask of ale in a sack
on his broad shoulders for three miles.

Strength and endurance were still the virtues that England,
rustic or urban, prized above all others. In April, i860, on a
lovely spring morning, Tom Sayers, the English champion; met
Heenan, the American, known to the fancy as the Benicia Boy,
on the edge of a wood near Famborough to fight for the
championship of the world. For weeks in every town and village
in the land men and women had canvassed the chances of the
event,^ and the police, fearing a fetal casualty in those days of
timeless contests and bare fists, had forbidden the fight and
kept dose watch on the would-be combatants. Eut where there
was a will there was a way; old England was not to be disap¬
pointed. On the night before the great day every tavern and
public-house in London remained open all night until the word
went round where the trains to the secret ringside were to start.

Sayers was thirty-four, stood five foot eight, and weighed
ten stone twdve. His American challenger was eight years
younger, stood five inches taller and weighed thirteen stone. In
the opening roimds the Englishman was knocked down re¬
peatedly, only to rise smiling for more. The blood poured dow n
his brown, tanned face which shone in the morning sun as
though it had been carved of old oak. For two hours after his
right arm was broken by a terrific blow of Heenan’s he fought
on, and, when the police broke through the exultant crowd into
the ring, the English champion, giving as good as he took, was
still undefeated.

Marmm, Sketches iff the Bucks Comtiyade, xj.

CHAPTER FIVE

Hhe March of the Caramn

“I wander thro’ each charter’d street,

Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,

And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every man,

In every infant’s cry of fear,

In every voice, in every ban.

The mind-forg’d mannades I hear.”

W. Blake.

T O A FOREIGNER Visiting England for the first time in the
’sixties and ’seventies of the 19th century, there seemed
something terrifying about its energy and power. “Every
quarter of an hour,” wrote Taine of the entry to the Thames,
“the imprint and the presence of man, the power by which he
has transformed nature, become more visible; dock, magazines,
shipbuilding and caulking yards, stocks, habitable houses,
prepared materials, accumulate merchandise . . . From Green¬
wich the river is nothing but a street a mile broad and upwards,
where ships ascend and descend between two rows of buildings,
interminable rows of a dull red, in brick or tiles bordered with
great piles stuck in the mud for mooring vessels, which come
here to unload or to load. Eva: new magazines for copper, stone,
coal, cordage, and the rest; bales are always being piled up,
sadts being hoisted, barrels being rolled, cranes are creaking,
capstans sounding.

“. . . To the west, rises an inextricable forest of yards, of
masts, of rigging: these are the vessels which arrive, depart or
anchor, in the first place, in groups, then in long rows, then in a
continuous heap, crowded together, massed against the chimnej^
of houses and the pulleys of warehouses, with all the tackle of
incessant, regular, gigantic labour. A foggy smoke penetrated
with light envelopes them; the sun there sifts its golden rain, and
the brackish, tawny, half-green, half violet water, balances in its

*33

ENGLISH SAGA

154

undulations striking and strange reflections. It might be said
this was the heavy and smoky air of a large hot^use. Nothing
is natural here, ever5rthing is transformed, artificially wrought
from the toil of man, up to the light and the air. But the hugeness
of the conglomeration and of the human creation hinders us from
thinking about this deformity and this artifice; for want of pure
and healthy beauty, the swarming and grandiose life remains; the
shimmering of embrowned waves, the scattering of the light
imprisoned in vapotu, the soft whitish or pink tints which cover
these vastnesses, difiuse a sort of grace over the prodigious dty,
having the effect of a smile upon the face of a shaggy and
blackened Cydop.”^

For over this vast dty, in size, wealth and power the greatest
commimal achievement of man’s sojourn on the planet, had
fallen a perpetual paU. The dassical pillars and ornaments of
the churches and larger buildings were half hidden under soot:
the naked Achilles in the park, tribute to the Iron Duke, was
almost black. Even the dripping tree and foliage were grimy.
It was like Homer’s Hell—^the land of the Cimmerians. “The vast
space which in the South stretches between the earth and sky
cannot be discovered . . . there is no air; there is nothing but
liquid fog.”*

For in the urban England that was taking the place of the
rustic England of the past, a people who still loved virtae, free¬
dom and justice and wished in thdr hearts to be generous and
chivalrous, were unconsdously sacrifidng ever3rthing in the last
resort to the making of wealth. Over every dty tall chimneys
cast a pall of smoke between earth and sky: the Thames ran
no longer blue and sparkling Jjut rayless under the grimy bridges.
The summer’s trip to Greenwich—joy of so many generations of
Londoners—^was.no longer a thing of delight; the trees on the Isle
of Dogs had begun to give way to ugly factories and mean houses,
and the yachts and pleasure boats to belching steamers anci
strings of coal barges. Even the time-honoured ministerial
Whitebait Dmner was soon to be abandoned: men had less
leisure than before for the graces and amenities of dvilised life.
For with the chance of groviting rich, there were more im¬
portant tbings-

The complete absorption of the English urban middle cdasses in
this single pursuit was both impressive and rather terrifying. The

m £nflaid, SS, on Znglcmd, ifK

THE MARCH OF THE CARAVAN I 55

old talkative, hail-fellow-well-met London was yielding place
to one more sombre and self-contained. Men went silent and
absorbed about their business: “ faces do not laugh, lips are dumb;
not a cry, not a voice is heard in the crowd; every individual
seems alone; the workman does not sing; passengers travelling
to and fro gaze about them without curiosity, without uttering a
word.”^ They were on the make, each man pitting his strength
and cunning against his neighbour and seeking not to make
things for the joy of making or to win the applause of his
fellows, but to amass sufficient wealth to keep himself and his
family in time of need. Their perpetual nightmare was the fear
of poverty. Unredeemed by the neighbouring field sports of the
countryside and cut off by the factory smoke and the high walls
of the houses from the cheerful sun, tibe life of the streets was not
to be borne without wealth. Those who had won it by their
sweat and struggle dreaded to lose it: “to have £20,000 in the
funds or cut one’s throat” was their unspoken thought. Those
without it were driven back, as the fields receded, into a life ever
more drab and uninviting. Taine noticed how many working-
class feces wore a starved, thwarted look: hollow, blanched and
spent with fatigue. In their patient inertia they reminded him
of the old “screws” in the cabs standing in the rain.

In the world of the new city, property was the breath of life:
without it men and women shrivelled and died. Save for mtirder,
offences against property were more severely punished than those
against the person. A barman and a glazier for stealing 5s. 4d.
were sentenced to five years’ penal servitude: a hideous assault
on a woman with child was expiated with six weeks’ imprison¬
ment. The sanest people in the world, in their new city surround¬
ings, were losing their sense of values. So long as a man kept
the law, the right to buy at the cheapest price and sell at the
highest over-rode all other considerations. Against the supreme
right of commerce, even duty as it came to be regarded, nothing
was held to weigh: social amenity, happiness, beauty. Whatever
did not contribute to this one.great commercial object was
neglected. In the British Museum in grimy Bloomsbury the
greatest masterpieces of human sculpture stood covered with
dust on filthy floors in a neglected yellow hall that looked like
a warehouse.

No one protested, for the English townsman had come to

accept such a state of affairs as the natural order. On the railways,
the second-class carriages were without upholstery; in the third
the windows were unglazed and the floors never swept. Men had
no rights but those they paid for after process of free bargain
with their fellows. Not even, it seemed, the right of life for,
though accidents were frequent, the railways directors kept the
doors of the carriages locked while trains were in transit lest any
passengers should escape without paying for their tickets.

Business was business: wherever English commerce reigned
the phrase was sufficient to explain and justify almost every
terrestrial happening. A man must abide by the law: he mmt
keep his bond: he must deliver the goods he had promised or pay
the forfeit. Beyond that, there could be no challenge: Shylock
was entitled to his pound of flesh. He had earned it by his indus¬
try, skill and integrity. In the innumerable little grimy brick
houses between the Tower and St. Paul’s, whose modest brass
plates bore names famous throughout the world, the sons of
millionaires arrived each morning with the punctuality of their
own clerks to transact business and later bought their mutton
chojs and threepenny loaves in a Cheapside tavern for their
Spartan midday meal. Only when they went home in the evening
to Portland Place or Grosvenor Square did they indulge the
princely tastes to which their hard-earned wealth entitled them.

Such men were resolute in purpose: iron when aijy one
crossed their strong intent. Taine on his visit observed their kind
closely.

“When at eight o’dock in the morning, at the terminus
of a railway, one sees people arriving from the country for
their daily avocations, or when one walks in a business
street, one is struck with the number of feces which exhibit
this type of cold and determined toU. They walk straight,
with a geometrical movement, without looking on either
hand; without distraction, wholly given up to their business,
like automatons, each moved by a spring; the large, bony
face, the pale complexion, often sallow or leaden-hued, the
rigid look, all even to their tall, peipendicular, blade hat,
even to the strong and large foot-covering, even to the
umbrella, rolled in its case and carried in a particular style,
display the man insensitive, dead to ideas of pleasure and
elegance, soldy preoccupied in getting through much

THE MARCH OF THE CARAVAN

157

business well and rapidly. Sometimes one detects the physi"
ognomy of Pitt—the slight face, impassive and impoious,
the pale and ardent eyes, the look which shines like the
fixed gleam of a sword; the man is then of finer mould, yet
his will is only the more incisive and the stouter; it is iron
transformed into sted.”^

Under the pressme of the claims of money-making, the
character of the English middle class was changing. It was
growing sterner, narrower in sympathy since too much sensi¬
bility weakened the will. The new kind of public school which
Arnold of Rugby had made the model for England catered for
those who needed hardening: the virtues it bred were reticence,
regularity and rectitude, above all self-reliance. An English boy
of the mid-Victorian age if he was short-sighted was not expected
to wear spectacles.® If he was cold he was not expected to wear a
great coat. His heart and senses were put on ice: from the first
day he was chucked into the lonely maelstrom of a great boarding
school he was taught to keep a stiff upper lip. For the highly
sensitive or affectionate child this stem schooling was hdl: in
self-defence boys leamt to keep their emotions to themselves, if
possible to eliminate them. In France, Taine reflected, happiness
dq>ended on affection: in England on having none.

Bo3rs brought up in this way were like young bull-dogs in
their teens: tough and tenacious, sometimes ferocious, uncon¬
querable. Being discouraged firom excessive feeling, the average
product of the public school could feel little sympathy for the
classical authors whose works he laboriously and medianically
translated and parsed®: he preferred organised games. Fromtl^
rim e dates the start of the decline in English upper-class culttire
and classical learning. Save at a few schools like Eton and Win¬
chester, where much of the older and fireer tradition lingered, the
scholar of an earlier age was to become the despised public-school
“swot,” the solid lad of brawn and muscle the hero. This made

■ ^Notes on England^ 7p-5o.

^Arthur James, Earl of Balfour, Chapters tf Autobiography,

®“ They do not appear to be reafiy acquainted with history; they recount the legends
of Curtius and of Regulus as authenticated facts.”

^They have read many classical teicts; but the explanatitm whidi is given to them is
wholly grammatical and positive. Nothing is done to set forth the beauty of the
passage, the delicacies of the style, the pathos of the situation; nor is the process of the
writer indicated, the character of his talents, the turn of his mind; all that would
seem vague.” H* Taine, Notes on England,

ENGLISH SAGA

158

litdedifFerence to the object of the new public school, which was
the training of character for a competitive world, and was as well
effected by the harsh discipline of the dormitory and the football
groxmd as by the Greek syntax. That the average boy responded
more readily to the former than to the latter, made the task of
the new school-master all the easier. But the loss in human
sympathy and intellectual alertness in those who were to become
the nation’s rulers was to have serious consequences later.

At the Universities the tremendous early discipline of the
public school was relaxed- Here the freer and more liberal
model of the eighteenth century past was retained: a gentleman
was encouraged to choose hi** own life and tastes and to be a
scholar if he chose. But the harm as well as the good of the
public school system was already done. The average lad of
eighteen from Harrow or Bugby came up to Oxford or Cambridge
what his school had made him. If, as still frequently happened,
he came from a cultivated home or had an exceptionally brilliant
teacher, he might have wide sympathies and genuine love for
learning. But more normally he cared for nothing but sport which
he pursued in the academic groves with the same zest as on the
Sixth Form Ground or Old Big Side. He had character, integrity,
energy—the qualities needed for worldly success. But his
•emotional and intellectual development were stunted. For that
j-eason he feU the more readily into the unthinking worship of
material attainment that was the fault of his age. The poor
prize-man of the schools might still be the talk of the Upper
Common Room; on the long benches of Hall the man acclaimed
was the “Blue” and the “blood” with money to bum.

The commercial type created by. the conditions of the
urban middle-class homes and academies that had not yet
attained public school status—the nursery of Matthew Arnold’s
“Philistines”—^has been drawn for all time by John Galsworthy
in the ForsyteSaga. It valued strength, order, above all
things property:* it despised weakness, subtlety, width of
sympathy. It was redeemed by its native boyishness and
by a certain inherent kindliness in the English soul that no
pursuit of mammon could wholly eradicate. But to a foreigner
its superficial appearance was not congenial: these English
merchants with their.stiff, big-boned frames and repressed, self-
contained faces looked stupid, frigid and unfeeling, raHng for
nothing but money and the animal pleasures of the chase and

THE MARCH OF THE CARAVAN 159

table. There seemed to be too much roast-beef <in them. Some¬
times they were lean, gaunt and awkward; more often they ran
to fullness of flesh, brick-red faces and apoplectic tempers;
Taine met such a one in the train going to the Derby—“large
ruddy features With flabby and pendant cheeks, large red
whiskers, blue eyes without expression, an enormous trunk,
noisy respiration.”^ Probably beneath that alarming exterior
there beat a kindly and, if only its sjTupathies could be awakened,
boyishly chivalrous heart. The difficulty was to awaken them.

For those with gentle blood, with family traditions and
connections, and the status afforded by a University degree,
there was emplo3mient in the civil and military services of
the crown, in the empire and the learned professions. For
the great majority commerce was the one sure road to the
desired' goal of private wealth, security and comfort. With the
rapidly expanding population and "with improved transport—
supported by British sea-power and arms—opening ever new
markets in lands overseas, the opportuniti® for growing rich
were enormous.. Between 1850 and 1872 the aimual exports
of Britain, almost floubling themselves every ten years, increased
from ^£90,000,000 to j£3I5,ooo,ooo.

A walk through the central districts of London bore eloquent
testimony to that wealth. A wide circumference of nearly a
mile round the country-like parks of the west end was being filled
by large six or seven-story houses, mostly built in the Italianate
style, for the residence of the upper middle merchant and pro¬
fessional classes. “Paris,” Taine reported, “is mediocre compared
with these squares, these crescents, these circles and rows of monu¬
mental buildings of massive stone, ■with porticos, with sculptured
fronts, these spacious streets.... Sixty of them as vast as the Sue
de la paix; assuredly Napoleon HI. demolished and rebuilt Paris
only because he had lived in London.”® Such great houses needed
establishments of seven or eight servants apiece and could not be
supported by incomes of less than ,£2,000 or ,£3,000 a year: yet
scarcely any were empty. They were the homes of “carriage-
folk”—of families who kept private carriages, whose numbers by
1856 ran into five figures.

The great summer afternoon parade in Hyde Park between
four and six revealed Victorian society in all its glory: the long
unbroken stream of brilliant equipages and lovely horses between

on England, go, ^Kotes on England, i6.

ENGLISH SAGA

i6o

Cumberland and Albert gates, the fine ladies with their glaring
coloured silts, crinolines and parasols gossiping and quizzing
the chestnuts, the Dundreary-whiskered gentlemen with
their white top hats and silveivtopped malacca canes, who leant
over the iron railings of Rotten Row to chat with elegant, long-
skirted, veiled equestrians or lolled on the fashionable grass slope
by Lancaster Gate. To a poor man who had ventured into the
park at such an hour amid all this splendour, the spectacle might
well have seemed to represent the wealth of the entire world
assembled in the persons of a few thousand fabulously favoured
creatures in this little space of English earth.

Foreigners in that age never ceased to wonder at the wealth
of England. Taine recorded that if one took a cab from Sydenham,
where the re-created Crystal Palace stood, one could travel for
five continuous miles past houses representing an annual outlay
of £1,500. In this feast of property, the professional as well as
the commercial classes had their share. While a professor at the
Sorbonne had to content himself with the equivalent of £500 a
year, the Head of an Oxford or Cambridge College could look for
several thousands. The Headmasters of Eton and Harrow, the
poet Tennyson and the novelist Thackeray aU enjoyed incomes
of £5000 or more. And successful lawyers and doctors made far
more in days when income tax stood at yd. in the poimd. Yet
even their comfortable emoluments paled into insignificance
when set against the princely incomes of the great industrial
manufacturing and engineering masters of the north. The Whit¬
worths, Platts, Eitsons, Fairbaims, Hawthorns, Stephensons
constituted a new millionaire aristocracy of effort whose- title
deeds of wealth and power were their own revolving wheels of
iron.

*•••••••

This commercial aristocracy looked far beyond the boundaries
of the little misty island which their works and warehouses
enrichrf. There was scarcely any place on earth capable of
trade where thdu representatives were not ^tablished. In ciis-
tant Shanghai and Hong-Kong one met the Eu gli.s b merchant
princes of the China trade, men of almost fabulous wealth made
out of tea, silk and opitun. Every year the tea-clippers—^the fastest
sailing ships ever made by human hands—took part in the famous
race from Foochow to London river to win the £600 bonus for
the first cargo of the season to reach the English market. John

THE MARCH OF THE CARAVAN l6l

'Masefield in his Bird of Dawning has drawn the picture of one of
these beautiful ships coming up the Channel, her three months’
voyage done, and of the rough, true, simple men who maimed
her. Galsworthy’s Jolyon Forsyte, the elder, is the coimterpart
of Captain Trewsbury: the City merchant of taste and flaw¬
less integrity with his great house in South Kensington and
his fastidious ways, whose palate for tea was a byword.
A supreme expression of what that sea-borne trade meant to
England is to be found in the pages of Joseph Conrad’s Nigger
of the Narcissus.

“The Narcissus entered the chops of the Channel. Under
white wings she skimmed low over the blue sea like a great
tired bird speeding to its nest. The clouds raced -with her
mastheads; they rose astern enormous and white, soared to
the zenith, flew past, and falling.down the wide curve of the
sky seemed to dash headlong into the sea—the clouds swifter
than the ship, more free, but without a home. The coast to
welcome her stepped out-of space into the sunshine. . . .

“At night the headlands retreated, the bays advanced into
one unbroken line of gloom. The lights of the earth mingled
with the lights of heaven; and above the tossing lanterns of
a trawling fleef a great lighthouse shone steadily, such as an
enormous riding light burning above a vessel of fabulous
dimensions. Below its steady glow, the coast, stretching away
straight and blade, resembling the high side of an indestructi¬
ble craft riding motionless upon the immortal and unrest¬
ing sea. The dark land lay alone in the midst of waters, like
a mighty ship bestarred with vigilant lights—a ship carrying
the burden of millions of lives—a ship freighted with dross
and with jewels, with gold and with steel. She towered up
iinmense and strong, guarding priceless traditions and
untold suffering, sheltering glorious memories and base
forgetfulness, ignoble virtues and splendid transgressions.
A great ship! For ages had the ocean battered in vain her
enduring sides; she was there when the world was vaster
and darker, when the sea was great and mysterious, and
ready to surrender the prize of fame to audacious men. A
ship mother of fleets and nations! The great flagship of the
race; stronger than the storms; and anchored in the open

i62 ENGLISH SAGA

The lovelv ships that carried the tribute of the world to the
cliffs of Engfand sailed, since the repeal of the Navigation Act in
1849, under many flags. Yet most of them, including the best,
were owned and built by Britons, for free trade if it took privi¬
leges from the merchant marine with one hand gave with an¬
other sinpp it stimulated interchange of sea-borne merchandise.
With the absorption of her chief shipping rival, the United
States, in a long and exhausting dvil war during the early
’sixties, Britain had things very much her own way at sea for
three halq-on decades. The new iron ships, triumphs of the
marine engineering works of the Clyde and T^ne, of Birkenhead
and Belfast, were beginning to come into their own: the Great
. Eastern, the famous iron leviathan, 700 feet in length and 80 in
beam, was launched at Millwall in 1858. Yet two years later not
more than a tenth of the merchant service of the United Kingdom
was steam driven.

In that year the country’s sailing tonnage reached its zenith.
These proud masterpieces of timber and canvas, cleaving the
ocean “with mainyards backed and bows of cream and foam”
were the key to Britain’s commercial and industrial supremacy.
They were recognised as the dite of the sea in every port of the
eartlu^

T his art and skill and the wealth that sprang from it rested

^Masefield, who once himself served before the mast, has hymned their vanished
glory:

“These splendid ships, each with her mce, her glory,

Her memory of old song and comrade’s story.

Still in my mind the image of life’s need.

Beauty in hardest action, beauty indeed.

* They built great ships and sailed them ’ sounds most brave,

Whatever arts we have or fail to have;

I touch my coimtry’s mind, I come to grip
W’ith half her purpose thinking of these ships.

That art untouched by softness, all that line,

Drawn ringing hard to stand the test of brine;

That nobleness and grandeur, all that beauty,

Bom of a manly life and bitter duty;

That splendour of fine bows ’which yet could stand
The shock of rollers never checked by land.

That art of masts, sail crowded, fit to break,

Yet sOTed to strength, and back-stayed into rake.

The life demanded by that art, the keen
Eye-puckered, hard-^ase seamen, silent, lean,

They axe grander things than all the ait of towns.

Their tests are tempests and the sea that drowns.

They are my country’s line, her great art done,

Bv strong brains labouring on the thought unwon.

They mark our passage as a race of men,

EarA will not see sudh ships as these agen.”

Joim Maxfaldt **Ships** (Collected Poems, ^86.)

THE MARCH OF THE CARAVAN 163

in the last resort on the British command of the seas. This was
often forgotten. But during the later ’fifties and early ’sixties
fear of the French Empire under Louis Napoleon had recalled an
island race immersed in mone}Tnaking to the necessity of looking
to its moat. After the Crimean War a period of naval reorganisa¬
tion began wliich, quickened by a panic over the new French
strength in ironclads,^ culminated in the launch of the 9000 ton
iron frigate, Warrior^ the fastest and most powerful ship in the
world. It was the first of a new fleet of iron-hulled, armoured,
screw-driven ships armed with muzzle-loaders, the latest product
of Armstrong’s, and capable of blo^ving the old three-decker
navies of the past out of the water.^ This mighty force—the
strongest single unit of ordered power in the nineteenth-century
world—was supported by a secondary fleet of unarmoured
wooden frigates and corvettes and by naval b^es in all the seven
seas—a standing terror to the slaver and the pirate and to all
lesser breeds without the law.

Out of all this sprang great comfort for the English possessing
classes. Peasants toiled in distant China and Ceylon to fill the
teapots of rich old ladies in Lancaster Gate, naked Malay boys
laboured to draw up pearls from the bottom of shark-irfested
seas, and trappers fought with bears in the frozen snows of Hud¬
son Bay to send home furs and hearthrugs. As they grew rich
the hardy English surrounded themselves with costly comforts,
the elder generation of the Forsytes because they valued the out¬
ward forms of the wealth for which they had laboured so hard,
the younger because they were growing accustomed to them.
Soft pile Brussels carpets, thick padded settees and ottomans,
elaborately-carved tables of polished mahogany and rosewood
with marble tops, enormous gilt mirrors flowed in a nevei>
ceasing flood out of the factories and warehouses and fashionable
furniture emporiums into the spacious houses of Kensington and
Bayswater, Edgbaston, Stockport and Everton imtil even their
great rooms seemed crowded out with these heavy S5anbols of
tribute. A cultured foreigner sta}ing in an English house in i86i

^“The war preparations of the French Marine are immense. Oure despicable! Oni
Ministers use npf phrases, but they do nothing; my blood boils within me.” Fiince
Albert. Heaven send Cherbourg may never be graven on Queen Victoria’s heart.”
Umied Sersim Magazine.

There is not a mail-clad man of war on
Ocean’s breast that rides,

But this great gun will knc«i a hole
slap through hex ironsides.”

Funcht XUVi igf.

ENGLISH SAGA

164

was amazed by the furniture of his bedroom—the entire floor
carpeted, a strip of oilcloth in front of the wash-stand, matting
along the walls; two dressing-tables, a swing looking-glass, a
great bed covered with the whitest and softest of tissu es , three
pairs of candles, two of them in a writing-table, porcelain exting¬
uishers, wax matches, paper spills in pretty holders, pin-cushions.
The most intimate piece of furniture in the room was a miracle
of elaborate ingenuity, made of the finest mahogany and m ar ble:
the washstand was furnished with a large and smaller jug
for hot and cold water, two porcelain basins, a dish for
toothbrushes, two soap-dishes, a water-bottle with a tumbler and
a finger glass with another. In addition there was a large shallow
zinc bath, and a towel-horse in the cupboard with several towels
of different sizes. A servant visited the room four times-a day to
see that all was iift)rder.

When an Englishman of the upper middle order travelled, the
same observer noted, he carried so many glasses, opera-glasses
and telescopes, umbrellas, canes and iron-tipped sticks, overcoats,
comforters, waterproofs and wrappers, dressing-cases, flacVc]
books and newspapers that it seemed astonishing that he should
ever have set out under such a burden at all. Every year the
English with their all-conquering Midas touch sank deeper imder
the weight of their own possessions. From the Queen on her
throne, who, in the course of her reign accumulated a vast
museum of objects, each acquiring with usage attributes of an
almost sacred kind and possessing its own hallowed and un¬
alterable place in one or other of her palaces, to the thrifty and
well-to-do artisan who fiUed eveiy inch of wall space in his
cottage with engravings, keepsakes, mementoes, grandfather
do^, samples and photographs, and kept apart a spedal air¬
tight compartment named the parlour for the display of more
treasured pieces of furniture and verpi, the nation seemed to have
gone mad on property. As ever with the English and the object
of thOT heart s desire, it becanfe invested with a semi-religious and
mysttcal q^hty. Since the pursuit or retention of wealth was for

™ single-hearted lives, that which

wealth bought was worthy of worship. The drawing-room
Wtur^ the silver and best china in the safe, the content? of the
were the sacred vessels on the altar, and a

THE MARCH OP THE CARAVAN I 65 --

Property, being sacred, and demanding decorum and rever¬
ence in its treatment, conferred respectability. Tbe contrary was
also true: the man without property was suspect. The “snob”
who drove up to a gentleman’s door in a public conveyance with
cab straw on his trousers was despised as a low adventurer who
could not afford a carriage. The third class passenger who could
buy no better ticket was kept off the platform until the last
moment lest he should offend his social superiors by his mean
presence. The vagrant without visible means of support was an
object of suspicion to be imprisoned and pxmished uiffess he could
prove his bana fides.

From this arose tragic consequences. Poverty in other lands
was regarded, as it had been in England in the past, as part of the
eternal human lot: to be pitied, to be avoided if possible, to be
relieved or ignored according to a man’s nature or temperament,
but not to be despised. It was a share of humanity’s bitter herit¬
age, like sickness, tempest and death. But in London and urbm
England in whidi the making of wealth had been elevated into a
moral duty, poverty hung its head for shame. It crept out of sight
into that new phenomenon of industrialisation—the working-
class district in which no man of wealth or position lived. The
new East End of London with its miles of mean, squalid streets
covering an area greater in extent than any continental dty, was
something of a portent in the world. It was not for nothing that
the scholar Marx was studying economic phenomena in the
British capital.

Here lived the pooi>-not merely the respectable artisan but the
countless broken outcasts of the industrid system. These were
pallid and gin-sodden; their ragged reeking dothes, which had
passed through many phases of sodety in their long, dedining
history, were so vile that they left a stain wherever they rested:
they stank. They herded together in bug-ridden lodging houses
and rotting tenements; they slept under railway arches and on
iron seats on the new Victoria Embankment. They were the
“submerged tenth,” the skeleton at the rich Victorian feast, the
squalid writing on the whitened wall.

They were not merdy congregated in the “darkest London” of
Charles Booth’s later survey: they were to be found in every place
where the untrammelled march for wealth had broken down the
old world of status and sodal morality. They were living testi¬
monies of that against which Coleridge had warned his country

E.S. M

ENGLISH SAGA

l 66

_trespasses on “its own inalienable and untransferable property

—the health, strength, honesty and filial love of its children.”
Across the lives of the rich and comfortable, of all who inherited
or had acquired established property they passed like a remote
shadow: to the remainder of their countrymen, especially to the
lower middle-class and the skilled and respectable artisan, they
were a terrible menace whose horrid existence it was almost
impossible to shake from the mind. Their pale, degraded, be¬
seeching faces and dripping rags were a reminder of what un¬
employment, sickness or any lapse from the straight and narrow
path of social integrity might bring: like wraiths liiey rose out
of a precipice into which every man without property might at
any moment of his life fall. More than any other cause, they
account for the almost fanatic desire of the Victorian of all
classes to acquire and retain propert}^

“I recall,” wrote Taine, “the alleys which run into Oxford
Street, stifling lanes encrusted with human exhalations; troops
of pale children nestling on the muddy stairs; the seats on London
Bridge where families, huddled together with dropping heads,
shiver through the night; particularly the Haymarket and the
Strand in the evening. Every hxmdred steps one jostles twenty
harlots; some of them ask for a glass of gin; others say, ‘ Sir,
it is to pay my lodging.’ This is not debauchery which flaunts
itself but destitution—^and such destitution! The deplorable
procession in the shade of the monumental streets is sickening;
it seems to me a march of the dead. That is a plague-spot, the
real plague-spot of English society.”^ Once down in that mire
there was no rising again. The sordid round of drink, debauchery,
violence, punishment, incompetence and hideous destitution
never ceased. “The great social mill crushes and grinds here . . .
the lowest human stratum.”

For the great individualists who had made nineteenth-century
Britain rich beyond the dreams of avarice had forgotten that
man was part of an und5ring order. The price of a social crime—
greed, slavery, the oppression of a subject people—is seldom paid
by those immediately guilty of it. It is paid later—by their
innocent descendants. The sins of the fathers are visited on the
children and the children's children,

'^NoUs on England^ 36 ,

THE MARCH OF THE CARAVAN l6^

“Thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born infant’s tear,

And blights with plagues the marriage hearse.”

Victorian Britain, for all her wealth, power and empire was
no exception. Her rulers, in their devotion to their creed of self-
help and holding that through liberty good would grow natur¬
ally out of evil, allowed social injustice to be done on a vast and
terrible scale. The progeny of those to whom that injustice was
done were to become in the fullness of time sources of national
weakness and division.

The individualists never admitted this. They believed that
men, left to themselves, could look after themselves. Starting
from the ancient English insistence on the liberty and dignity of
the individual, they assumed that e\Try man could be trusted to
judge all things rightly for himself and follow the law of his own
will. By registering and counting individual expressions of vrill,
and giving legislative effect to those of the majority, universal
human well-being could be ultimately attained. The ^vill of the
people was the will of God, and the statesman who wished to
consult the oracle should study statistics. Since the dead and the
unborn cannot record votes, the utilitarians were little concerned
with the national past or future: the more logical of them could
see no reason why there should be a nation at all.

From the tea chin g of Adam Smith, the utilitarians derived
the further and contradJfctory assumption that the w^th of a
nation was to be measured by the sum total of the riches of its
individual members.^ They held that if, as a result of any process
that increased this aggregate—such as the preference of foreign
to domestic trade—one million citizens were enriched but the
other nine millions impoverished, that nation would not be
poorer than it was before but richer. A Medieval or Tudor
statesman would have taken the opposite view, on the grounds
that in the next generation the, bulk of its people would
inherit less not more of the attributes that material well-being
can create.

. The aggregate of the wealth of individual citizens iBakes up the wealth of
the nation, and ... if each is as free as possible to pursue his own gain the wealth of
the nation will be sufficiently attended to and its power will follow as a matter of
course * W. Cunningham, Ths GTOWth of English Industry and Commerce, Eart /,

ENGLISH SAGA

l68

The core of Victorian economics lay in the doctrine of un¬
limited contractual freedom. If, as the Benthamites contended,
the exercise of liberty was the highest human function, every
man had a right to bind himself in any way he chose, even to his
own disadvantage. No authority ought to have any power to
stop him.

“Ought a borrower to have the right to obtain a loan which
he urgently requires,” asked Dicey in his contemporary study of
nineteenth-centviry legal trends, “by the promise to pay usurious
interest? Ought a man ... to be allowed to make a contract
binding himself to be the servant of his neighbour for life? . . ,
Ought every person of full age, acting with his eyes open and not
the .victim of fraud, but who nevertheless is placed in a position
in which from the pressure of his needs he can hardly make a fair
bargain, to be capable of binding himself by a contract ?”i The
rigid individu^t replied, yes. For within the limits of the
minimum of law necessary to preserve order and enforce contracts
every man ought to be his own master. He should be free even to
sell his own freedom.

But the moment man is viewed, not as an insulated and
self-contained being but as a membCT of a continuing
society, the individualist’s answer becomes inadequate. From
his own point of view, it may be best that a man should have the
right to bind himself as he pleases. But suppose that in doing so
he damages the community? For as a member of a complicated
organism, man binds more than himself. He binds his children
and children’s children. He binds them with his own status and
reputation. He binds them "with thefr upbr inging , with the
influences with which he surrotmds their most impressionable
years, with the transmitted traits of his blood. Every living man
has an unfair advantage over posterity. So has every generation.

Unless the state acts as trustee for the helpless unborn, sodel^i
can scarcely endure. For through the unthinking and un-
restrained greed and s elfi s hn ess of its life tenants, its heritage
will be wasted, and its slowly accumulated and hard-won unity,
prosperity and civilisation will be succeeded by disintegration,
ruin and barbarism. ^Selfishness is the age-long dissolvent of
anciaat commumties. No nation in the past had been more
conscious of this than the Fhgland of the Normans, the Planta-
g^ets and the Tudors. The English law of primogeniture arjd

^A. V. JDicqf, Xoie and PvbUe Opinion in England, igi.

THE MARCH OF THE CARAVAN 169

entail was its peculiar expression in the purely material sphere.
By denying the younger sons the enjo5Tnent of inherited wealth
and strictly limiting its use by the elder, the national property
was preserved.from dissipation while its educative influence in
each generation was rendered as wide as possible.

It had been the attempt of the state to fulfil its ancient func¬
tions of trusteeship that had most irritated the early individualists.
English Liberalism began as a protest against every legal restraint
that prevented the citizen from exercising his full freedom of
choice. That in an old country like England there were a great
many such restraints and that most of them in the light of the
isudden changes wrought by the industrial revolution were hope¬
lessly out of date lent popular force to what might otherwise have
been a purely academic and therefore ineffective rebellion against
traditional paternalism. A poor man might not settle in a new
parish lest he should become a burden to the ratepayers, skilled
artisans were forbidden to leave the country or migrate to the
colonies, machinery might not be exported. Usury and fore¬
stalling—the very Kfe-blood of modem commercial practice—^were
still in theory proscribed by laws enacted in the Middle Ages.
Because of the seventeenth century Navigation Acts, American
ships calling for freight in this country had often to enter British
ports empty while British ships fetching cotton from the United
States were forced in retaliation to make their outward journey
across the Atlantic without cargo. The consumer had thus to
pay the. cost of freight twice in his purchase price. A stubbornly
conservative country continued to maintain laws and institu¬
tions which had done yeoman service in the past but which were
little better than a mockery to the hxmgry generations of the new
industrial towns. The demand for their abolition became irresist¬
ible with the increasing urbanisation of the country.

The Benthamite assault on the statutory interference of
society with the freedom of the individual thus presented itself
at first as the march of common sense and humanity against the
ramparts of obscxirantist corruption and privilege. From 1830
to 1874 Liberalism—the political expression of Benthamism—
was the most dynamic force in Britain. It derived its strength
from the urban and educated middle-classes who enjoyed electoral
supremacy between the first and second Reform Bills, from the
manufacturers who wanted nothing to stand between them and
their search for wealth, and from the still unenfranchised masses

ENGLISH SAGA

170

of the industrial towns whose sufferings under a senile system
made a strong appeal both to humanitarian and rational feelings.
That tbpgp siSerings were far more due to the absence of protect¬
ive social institutions than to the presence of antiquated and in¬
efficient ones was not yet realised.

For fifty years British legislative annals mark the steady
removal from the statute hook of every law that offended against
individualistic reasoning. Privileges and illogical anachronisms
were ruthlessly swept aside with almost universal approval. No
law or institution, however venerable, that could not withstand
the cold test of utilitarian logic was safe from the iconoclasts. The
constitution was “lawyer ridden” and “aristocracy-ridden,” the
administration controlled by “sinister influences,” the King him¬
self the “Corruptor-GeneraJ.” The reform of the electorate in
1832, of local government in 1834 and of the Poor Law in the
following year werfe seen as the flrst steps in the triumphant
advance to a pure and radical republic. Protective duties, religious
tests, the Established Church, marriage as a sacrament instead of a
contract, titles and dignities, the House of Lords and even the
Throne would ultimately be swept away. Macaulay wrote in
1833 that should the Lords oppose a certain popular Whig
measure, he “would not give 6d. for a inronet or a id. for a
mitre.”

Yet for all its temporary mthusiasm for reform, England was
at heart a conservative coimtry. It was also one in which vested
interests were numerous and powerful. At the head of the party
which espoused radical reform in Pariiament were the historic
Whig nobles, who, though sympathetic to popular ideals of an
academic kind and always glad to dish the Tories, had no intention
of doing away with their own privilege and power to please a
few bourgeois doctrinaires. There was a pause—^after the repeal
of the Com Laws and the turn of the economic tide in the late
’forties a very marked pause—^in the advance towards the utili¬
tarian rqpublic. During the ten years in which Lord Palmerston
was Prime Minister, the march on Utopia almost ceased.

But with the death of the old champion in 1865, and the succes¬
sion of Gladstone to the Liberal leadership in tibe Commons, a
new era set in. The son of a Liverpool merchant, William Ewart
Gladstone was not, like his predec^ors, a Whig aristocrat,
but a member of the vigorous middle<lass stock from which the
disciples of Bentham were mainly recruited. He had begun life

THE MAECH OF THE CARAVAN I7I

as a ConsCTvative but had followed Peel over free trade. Since
then he had moved steadily towards the left and to the advocacy
of everything that extended the scope of abstract freedom. As
Chancellor of the Ejcchequer from 1853 to 1855 and again from
1859 to 1865 he had applied the Benthamite principles to the realm
of national finance. The annual Budget, which in his hands
almost achieved the popularity of a sporting event, was framed to
repress “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”: its
object was to exempt as large a portion of the nation as possible
from the unwelcome obligation to contribute to the national
financial burdens. The last remaining tariffs were swept away
and the poor man’s breakfast table freed from imposts. The
result, despite Gladstone’s declared intention to abolish it, was to
make the income tax the first potential source of national revenue.
Nor could all his unsparing and brilliant efforts to achieve strict
economy, even at the expense of paring the defence services to the
bone, prevent the hated tax from creeping slowly upwards.

Disraeli, Gladstone’s opposite number on the still unpopular
Conservative benches, protested. If, he argued, as a result of free
trade, direct taxation had to provide the national revenue, it
should be made as general as indirect. To restrict it to a single
class was to undermine the historic English principle of taxation
which had secured the liberty of the subject by granting to the
Estates of the Realm, representing the various types of property-
holder, the sole right of allocating taxation. By adopting the
principle that a majority might levy all taxes on a minority, the
Radicals were unconsciously substituting the ideal of a forced for a
voluntary contribution. At the moment this might matter little:
later it might well prove the starting-point of a new despotism
more arbitrary than any imposed by feudal baron or Stuart
king. But the coxmtry, still in the first flush of a trium¬
phant materialism and little troubled by a tax which, though
irritating, was still very low, was not interested in historic
principles. Disraeli’s attempt, while Chancellor of the Exchequer
in a minority administration, to extend direct taxation to lower
incomes was easily defeated.

Between 1865 and 1874, the advance towards radical uniform¬
ity went forward with great rapidity. When in the former year
Gladstone left the university constituency of High Church
Oxford for radical South Lancashire, Pegasus was unloosed. Tests,
oaths, bigotry and hereditary privilege were, it was understood.

ENGLISH SAGA

172

to be sent packing. Most of the reforms associated with the
Tiamp of Gladstone, who became Prime Minister for the first time
in 1868, were long overdue. Many of them were wholly beneficial.
Purchase was abolished in the army, the ballot established and
electoral bribery heavily penalised. The universities were thrown
open to all irrespective of religion. Jews were admitted to the
constitution, corporations reformed, ancient acts in restraint of
trade repealed, the dvil service opened to competitive examination
the laws simplified and the venerable Courts of Law reformed
and rationalised. The high towers of feudal privilege were sent
toppling: henceforward there was to be no place where the
industrious and resourceful man of intellect might not go. The
principles of the French Revolution were peaceably applied to an
England which seventy years before had withstood the siege*of
all Europe to destroy them. The career of the bourgeois was
thrown open to the talents.

Yet all this was only a beginning. For there were more
venerable fish to fry. England was still burdened with an estab¬
lished Chtu-ch, an hereditary second Chamber and a Monarchy.
On rational grounds there was no defending theiru They were
expensive, non-utilitarian and either potentially or in fact
reactionary.

The difficulty was to remove them. The English were so
conservative in their instincts that many of them still regarded
these irrational institutiQns as sacred and so mentally lazy that
many more, though indifferent to them, could see no sufficient
cause for getting rid of them. The light of pure reason, as the
reformers had long found to their cost, was not enough to awake
them. To arouse the English to a great effort nothing but the
irrational force of faith would suffice. And by a strange chance,
which only a rationalist could refuse to regard as a miracle, that
force was suddenly afforded.

For Mr. Gladstone, though the sword of the utilitarian and
leader of the Liberals, was not a rationalist. He was a man of
faith. And he was so constituted that whatever he undertook
became invested with moral significance. He had only to
embrace a task, for it to become a holy one. At such momoits
the blood of the old Covenanters from whom he was descended
would course through his veins and his eyes would shine with
prophetic fire. And such was the magnetism of the man that
milli ons of lesser men who saw and heard him would, in their

THE MARCH OF THE CARAVAN 173

hiimbler way, believe, too.^ In a land where in the last resort a
sober people will only bestir themselves for a moral and religious
cause, Mr. Gladstone unconciously transformed Benthamism
into a crusade. WTiat old Jeremy in his glass case in University
College, Gower Street, would have thought of it all, had he still
been alive, it is hard to say.

One of the irrational institutions in which Mr. Gladstone
himself had been brought up to believe was the Established
Church. His veneration for it even partook of the mystical: its
decent, prosaic ceremonies and homely organisation became
invested in his eyes with the fire on Sinai and the tongues of
flam§ that spoke out of the whirlwind. This mental weakness of
Mr. Gladstone’s was a great trial'to Ids Radical followers. On
several occasions it all but caused an open breach between them.

Yet when the moment came to do so—the electoral moment
—Mr. Gladstone proved ready to attack a vital outpost even of
the Established Church, and to do so with a crusader’s fervour.
The scene of the miraculous conversion to reason was Ireland.
The ecclesiastical establishment of that country was a peculiarly
irrational institution. It was Protestant. At least three-quarters
of the inhabitants were Catholics and regarded its ministrations
—^for which they paid—^as heretical. Of the Protestant remainder,
half were Presbyterian and never went near its doors. And as
Ireland was in a state of permanent misery and unrest, with its
peasants starHng and its tenants unable or unwilling to pay their
rents, it seemed obvious to a utilitarian mind that the existence of
an irrational and useless Church must be a chief cause of all
this suflFering and disturbance. Nature could not tolerate so
absurd an anachronism.

Yet it seemed on the face of it that it would be almost as hard
to get Mr. Gladstone to lead an attack against an ecclesiastical
establishment as it would be to persuade a Scottish minister to
declaim against the Sabbath. And up to a year of his assault on it,
nothing could well have been farther from his mind. But it
happened that a task even more manifestly righteous than the

^An opponent testified: “That white-hot face, stem as a Covenanter’s yet mobile as
a comedian’s, those restless, flashing eyes, that wondrous voice whose richness its norths
era burr enriched as the tang of the wood brines out the mellowness of a rare old wine;
the masterly cadence of his elocution, the vivid energy of his attitudes, the fine anima¬
tion of his gestures—when I am assailed through eye and ear by this compacted phalanx
of assailants . . . what wonder , . . in defiance of my very will, I should exclaim:

‘ This is indeed the voice of truth and wisdom: this man is honest and sagacious b^ond
his fellows. He must be believed; he must be obeyed.’**

ENGLISH SAGA

174

defence of established religion presented itself to Mr. Gladstone.
And it presented itself as a sacred duty and one which it was
impossible for him to refuse. It entailed the disestablishment of
the Irish Church. It did more: it justified it.

For in 1868, on the retirement of Lord Derby, Mr. Disraeli had
become Prime Minister. And if there was one thing more detest¬
able to Mr. Gladstone than another, and more symptomatic of
the existence of evil, it was that this man should become Prime
Minister. For in Gladstone’s eyes, his enigmatic rival was the
embodiment of eveiything that was sinister. He was flashy,
he was a Jew—not that Gladstone, the champion of tolerance
had the least objection to a Jew in his proper place—^he was
a writer of the lighter kind of fiction, he uttered cynical q>igrams,
he wore diamon^ on his person and was knovm to have
recourse to moneylenders. All this might have been forgiven by
a broadminded Christian, but there was worse. For Mr. D’Israeli
—and that was what his fa.ther’s name had been—had been guilty
of the vilest political tergiversation. He was completdy tmscrupu-
lous. He had changed his opinions, and not like Mr. Gladstone for
the highest but for the basest motives. In order to advance himself
he had brazenly championed stupid and harmful causes: such, for
instance, as protection for which it was obviously impossible
for any intelligent man—and no one could deny Disraeli’s intel¬
ligence—to fed the least sympathy. And the fdlow was diabolic¬
ally clever. He had just, by a feat of cynical legerdermain unpar¬
alleled in parliamentary history, carried, in the face of a superior
if divided opposition, a measure of dectoral reform only slightly
dissimilar to that which Gladstone birngplf had "vainly endeav¬
oured to carry when leading the Commons a few months before
and which nothing but evil mesmeric powers could possibly
have made acceptable to the stupid and reactionary Tories.
Like the good Sir Robert Ped whom he had cynically attacked
for doing so, Disraeli had caught the Liberals bathing and run
away with their dothes. And as a result he had established
himself in 10 Downing Street.

Thtte was only one course open for a good man who loved
the fair name of his rountry and its reputation for political
punty: to get the trickster out with the least possible delay.
And as God had given >lr. Gladstone, in a humble way,, the
powQT of l^dttship, it was plainly Mr. Gladstone’s business. He-
did not shirk it. Reform of the fianchise—hitherto the Liberal

THE MARCH OF THE CARAVAN I75

party’s strongest and most legitimate card—having been shame¬
fully filched by the Tories, the disturbed state of Ireland offered
the surest means of discrediting a pequred government. And the
anachronism of the Irish Church Establishment, to which
Gladstone had been recently devoting much serious study, was
the obvious Achilles heel of the administration.

Here, indeed, was a question on which it would be almost
impossible for Disraeli to join issue without suffering defeat in
the House, Once made the question of the,hour the absurdity of
the Irish Church could not be defended. Yet—and this was the
charm of the situation—as a result of his own former baseness,
Disraeli would be compelled to defend it. For this frivolous
Jewish adventurer had repeatedly made a pretence, both in and out
of the House, of his devotion to the Established Church, And his
own party, the “squire and parson” Tories, were trebly committed
to defence of the Church and its perquisites A vigorous move¬
ment to disestablish and disendow its outwork in Ireland could
not fail to bring down the government. The Radicals and the
enemies of the Church of England had the additional satisfaction
of knowing that the measure would be the thin end of the wedge.
Once the principle of unalterable establishment had been
destroyed, the rest would foUow automatically.

Everything happened at first according to plan. Disraeli was
caught in a cleft sticL Even his malign influence over the Queen
could not save him. The new working-class electorate he had so
cynically enfranchised proved itself honest and English and
turned against him. A dissolution to avoid an adverse vote in the
House cost the Tories more than fifty seats. A few weds before
Christmas, 1868, Mr. Gladstone became Prime Minister.

But in the course of the debates on the disestablishment of the
Irish Church Disraeli put the case against the whole trend of
Liberal and Radical reform. He saw it as he saw every political
programme, not—like Gladstone and the normal, honest, un¬
imaginative Englishman—as a complete step in itself but as an
inseparable part of a process. The utilitarian viewed the nation
as a collection of individuals to whose separate interests and rights
all other considerations were subordinate. In such a state privi¬
lege in whatever form was manifestly indefensible; every decent
instinct of man demanded equality.

But Disraeli did not see the state in this way. To him it was

ENGLISH SAGA

176

a conrinuing sodety in whidi the full value of each individual
life could only be attained and measured by its contribution to the
common weal. Privilege, though it involved inequality was
desirable, even necess^, if it evoked from selfish man a greater
measure of service and sacrifice to the community. For through
the imagination it had the power to appeal to self-respect and dvic
consdence. What mattered was not that all men should be equal,
as Radirals desired, but that all men should have an equal oppor¬
tunity to the kind of privilege that made them readier to serve
thdr coxmtry.

In this Disraeli based his argument on a profounder knowledge
of human nature than that po^essed by the middle-class utili¬
tarians who were massed against him. He was an artist with an
artist’s insight into human motive: he was a member of the
oldest dvilised race in the world. Unlike the sanguine and
innocent radicals he never believed in the perfectibility of human
nature: he merely believed in the divine instinct in man that,
given the right background, had power to raise him from the
brute to the dtizen, the martyr and the saint. It was his perpetual
study as a statesman to make the institutions of the State afford
that background.

In this Disraeli had the support of English history which he
had studied far more dosdy than most Englishmen. Thirty
years before while still a young man he had written:

“The basis of English sodety is Equality. But here let us
distinguish: there are two kinds of equality; there is the
equality that levels and destroys, and the equality that
elevates and creates. It is this last, this sublime, this cdestial
equality, that animates the laws of England. The prindple
of thefct equality, base, terrestrial, Gallic and grovelling, is
that no one should be privileged: the prindple of Englis h
equality is that every one should be privileged.”^

In his maturer age he had improved on this. “ Unlike the levdling
equ^ity of modem days the andent equality of England devates
and creates. Learned in human nature the English constitution
holds out privilege to every subject as the inducem^t to do his
ditty.” Instead of wishing like the Radicals to levd every andent
institution and human right that offended against the notion of
mathematical uniformity, Disradi sought consistently to main-
‘ nndica&m the EtigUsh CeasSiutim (z%), Ch. XXXI 7 .

THE MARCH OF THE CARAVAN I77

tain and by reforming to extend them. In what seemed in that
materialistic age a paradox he maintained that the greatness of
England depended not on her numerical superiority to her neigh¬
bours but on the institutions which in the course of three cen¬
turies had enabled her people to create such a system of extended
liberty, wealth and empire as the world had never seen. A com¬
munity whose slow but mighty growth had yielded so much of
permanent benefit to man would be betraying civilisation if it
permitted unthinking zealots to destroy it by cutting away its
roots. In a speech to the House of Commons dxuing the reform
debates of 1866 Disraeli recurred to a theme which he never
ceased to repeat:

“You have an ancient, powerful, richly-endowed Church
and perfect religious liberty. You have unbroken order
and complete freedom. You have landed estates as large as
the Romans, combined with commercial enterprise sudi as
Carthage and Venice united never equalled. And you must
remember that this peculiar country, with these strong
contrasts, is not governed by force; it is not governed by
standing armies, it is governed by a most singular series of
traditionary influences, which generation after generation
cherishes because it knows- that they embalm custom and
represent law. And, with this, what have you done? You
have created the greatest Empire of modem time.... You
have devised and sustained a system of credit still more-
marvellous. And, above all, you have established and main¬
tained a scheme so vast and complicated of labour and
industry, that the history of the world affords no paraliel
to it. And all these mighty creations are out of all pro¬
portion to the essential and indigenous elements and resources
of the country. If you destroy that state of society,
remember this—^England cannot begin again.”^

There lay the eternal thought of this strange and alien patriot
who had learnt amid the Chiltem beechwoods to love the land
of his adoption: that England could not begin again. If in pur¬
suit of a theory or for a transient commercial opportunity she
relinquished the great character-forming institutions that had
made her what she was, she would find.too late that she had

^Monypenny & Buckle 11 ,144,

ENGLISH SAGA

178

exchanged “a first-rate monarchy for a second-rate republic.” A
uniformity which aimed at eradicating every influence that
endowed the subject with a sense of duty and civic pride, could
only end in transforming a nation into a mob.

Of such influences the greatest in Disraeli’s eyes was the
Church.^ Proud in his membership of the race which had founded
the religion of the western world, this Jew never forgot the
lesson whidi he believed it to be the eternal lot of Israel to teach
the forgetful and materially-minded sons of men. “The
Churdi,” he wrote, “is a sacred corporation for the promulgation
and maintenance of certain Asian principles, which, although
local in their birth, are of Divine origin, and of universal and
external application.”® Without moral justice, honesty, truth,
mercy, charity and a humble belief in a ivine purpose, England
would not be England but a barbarous Teuton island on the
outer fringe of civilisation. It was the recognition of the Church
by the State that gave politics its signiflcance and saved it from
degenerating into a m^anical affair of police and statistics. It
stood as a constant reminder to statesmen and electors—as it had
stood to kings in the past—that the tenure by which they ruled
was their acknowledgment of moral truth. Without this political
institutions were “meat without salt, the crown a bauble, the
Church an establishment, Parliaments debating dubs, and dvilis-
ation itsdf but a fitful and transient dream.”

It was because their rulers had fdt themsdves bound to honour
the Christian verities that Englishmen were free and that through¬
out the world the name of England was synonymous with free¬
dom. Deny or ignore them, and arbitrary acts, arising from
human passions and greeds whether of individuals or assemblies,
would be committed with as much impunity in England as in
other lamls.® But its presence beside the temporal power was a

^There aie few great things left in England, and the Chnidi is one.” Mompamy
& Bucik, II, 83. ■ ^

the^ffih edition of Cotdngsiy, 18^,

_*“A wise Goyenunent ailing itsdt with religion, would, as it were, consecrate
sooe^ and sanctify the State. But how is this to be done! It is the problem of modem
politics whi^^ has always most embarrassed statesmen. No solution of the difficulty
can be found in salaried priesthoods and complicated concordates. But by the side of
England these has gradually arisen a majestic corporation—wealthy,
powerfm, mdependent—wiih^ihe sancdty of a long tradidon, yet sympathising with
authority, and full cd conciliation, even deference, to the civil power. Broamy
de^iy Ranted m the land, mix ed up with all our manners md customs, one of the
mam guarantes of our local government, and therefore one of the prime securities of
our common liberties, the Churdi of England is part of our history, part of our life,
part of Ett^and itsdf.” Mat^pemy & Buc&, II,s6.

THE MARCH OF THE CARAVAN

179

constant reminder of values, a check to the abuse of authority and
an insurance against tyranny.^

For this reason Disradi opposed the disendowment of the
Irish ChurcL He did so not because he wished to save vested
interests or to penalise those who did not conform with ecclesi¬
astical authority but because he saw that an Established Church,
however much in need of reform, was a bulwark against the moral
decay that threatens earthly kingdoms. He knew English history
too well to be under any illusion as to what happened when the
floodgates of confiscation, for whatever reason, were once opened.*
The wealth of the Church was in principle the people’s patrimony.
If it was not being used as such, the State should see that it was.
But it had no right to appropriate it (

The Radicals with the highest intentions wished to destroy
this safeguard to conscience and the liberty of the subject. It
angered them as illogical and unegalitarian, and they could not
see the need for it In their reforming zeal they were constantly
urging their Liberal allies to denounce the union betwem Church
and State. But for Disraeli’s determination to preserve it, th^
would probably have succeeded in abolishing it ^together.

For though it was not within his powCT to save the Irish
Establishment—and, though its destruction did nothing to solve
the Irish problem, it was scarcely worth saving—^Disraeli did
succeed in arousing popular support in defence of the Church of
England. To him more than any other man is due the gradual
reawakening of the English people before it was too late to a re¬
alisation that their ancient institutions were worth preserving.
While their intellectual leaders were cheerfully bidding them cast
them aside, Disraeli, during 35 years as the real leader of the
Conservative party, fought a ddaying action against the forces of
reforming radicalism. At the time these seemed so strong that
any further advance towards electoral democracy was expected to
spell the certain doom of the privileges of the Established Church.

Yet Britain is to-day a democracy in the fullest sense. There is
still an Established Church. There is still a Throne. There is even
still a House of Lords. In the eighteen-sixties, for all the immense
deference paid them by the older generation and in the semi-

lit was this, and not the denial of the indiTidiial right .to woiship, that inspired
Pastor Niemoller’s brave stand against Hitler.

*“1 have never found that Churches are plundered except to establish or enrich
oligarchies.” When Disraeli spoke in these terms, the word plutocracy was not in
general use.

ENGLISH SAGA

i8o

feudal countryside, none of these institutions seemed safe to the
student of politics. The more educated among the younger
generation in the growing towns had no feeling for them
but contempt or indifference. It was that new urban generation
which was to govern the England of the future. The teaching
of the rationalists had taken deep root: the spirit of the age was
one of critical egalitarianism, of ceaseless questioning in matters
secular, and in religion of honest doubt. The publication of
Charles Darwin’s Origin Species in 1859 and of similar scientific
works laid bare the absurdity of the popular theological history on
which past generations had been brought up. The revelation of
the laboratory confirmed the gospel of the utilitarian. Biological
and chemical evolution—clear and mathematically demonstrable
—was the explanation of everything,^ To thinking men belief
became harder with every year. Organised religion was nothing
now but a convenient form by which morality and decency could
be preserved until the ignorant masses were ready to do without
it.

For the great revolutionary inventions and changes of the age
of progress proved too much for those who had been taught to
put their trust in reason. Outwardly Victorian life, wdth its unde¬
viating round, stolid respectability, growing physical comfort
and strict religious observance, seemed stable and secure beyond
anything conceived of in former ages. But beneath the surface,
nothing was static and everj^hing familiar was changing at a
bewildering pace. Lack of faith means lack of vitality*: nothing
is more fatal to action than the divided and tortured mind.
Apathy and inertia are its inevitable aftermath. As yet the
d^ease of modem life only touched the few: the great majority,
the workers and countryfolk, the vigorous merchants and manu¬
facturers, the sporting gentry and aristocracy never troubled their
heads with doubts about the meaning of existence. But those who
were to teach their children and set the intellectual and moral
tone of the next age were falling into a ferment of philosophic
scepticism. In the ’seventies it became intellectually demode to
believe: fashionable to doubt. .

Everything that the illmninating explanation of all things on earth and in the
heavens above the earth by evolution could be stretched to bring within its sphere,
was pressed through our ordeaL Evolution was passed on from the laboratory and the
sti^y to th^ariour, and the eternal riddles that a dozen years before had been proposed
answered, and then in their crudest form, in obscure debating societies and secularist
clubs, now lay upon the table with the popular magazines.**

y. Morley^ RecoUecHotis, /, 88 ~g.

THE MARqH OF ‘THE CARAVAN. l8l

The Oxford Movement—the great ecclesiastical revival of the
’forties —had already spent its force or had lost itself in stagnant
Roman backvraters. But Disraeli, vdth his enigmatic eye ever on
some remote future, continued in a sceptical age to preach the
necessity of faith. Man, he declared, was bom to adore and obey.
Without something to worship he would merely “fashion his
own divinities and find a chieftain in his passions.”^ “If no
Church comes forward with its title-deeds of truth, sustained by
the tradition of sacred ages and by the conviction of countless
generations, to guide him,” he told the graduates of Oxford in the
Shddonian Theatre, “he will find altars and idols in his own
heart and his own imagination.”^ The scientists might have
exploded a few false scriptural glosses: but they had not touched
the central rock of religion. “Science may prove the insignific¬
ance of this globe in the scale of creation, but it cannot prove the
insignificance of man.” Battle had been joined between those
who labelled man an ape and those who believed him an angel:
the cynic Disraeli, who like Charles H. knew men to a hair,
amused his contemporaries by coming down on the side of the
angels.®

Disraeli laughed at a society which, having mastered a few
scientific principles, mistook comfort for civilisation. Material
progress meant nothing for man—a spiritual being—if not
accompanied by moral purpose and enlightenment. Otherwise
the gifts with which science was enriching humanity would prove
not instruments of life but of destruction. The tendency of the
age was to emulate the scientists and measure all things by a
material rule, forgetting that more than half of man’s nature and
existence could not be measured by any such rule. “The spiritual
nature of man is stronger than codes or constitutions. No govern¬
ment can endure which does not recognise that for its foimdation
and no legislation can last which does not flow from that-founda¬
tion, . • • Religion invigorates the intellect and expands the
heart. He who has a sense of his relations to God is best qualified
to fulfil his duties to man.”*

For England to lose her sense of spiritual values seemed to

^Cmtngsby. A prophecy horribly fulfilled by the totalitarian Greeds -which arose
from the rums of the age of reason.

^Monypemy S? Buckle^ //, joy.

^Punch depicted him dressing for a Bal Masque with wings and stars. YoL XL TIL
239 {23th Nov., 1864).

Hlonypenny & Buckle, /, 606.

Monypemvy S? Buckle, II, dby.

E.S. -jji

ENGLISH SAGA

182

Disraeli the greatest tragedy that could befall her. “A civilised
community must rest on a large realised capital of thought and
sentiment; there must be a reserve fund of public morality to
draw upon in the exigencies of national life. Society has a so^ as
well as a body. The traditions of a nation are part of its existence.
Its valour and its discipline, its venerable laws, its eloquence
and its scholarship are as much portions of its life as its
agriculture, its commerce and its engineering skiU. . . . If it be
true . . . that an aristorcacy distinguished merely by wealth
must perish from satiety, so I hold it equally true that a people
who recognise no higher aim than physical enjoyment must
become selfish and enervated. Under such circumstances the
supremacy of race which is the key to history will assert itself.
Some human progeny, distinguished by their bodily vigour or
their masculine intelligence . . . will assert their superiority
and conquer a world which deserves to be aislaved. It will then
be found that our boasted progress has only been an advancement
in a circle, and that omr new philosophy has brought us back to'
that old serfdom which it has taken ages to extirpate.*’^ When
these prophetic words were spoken sixteen years had still to elapse
before Adolf Hitler was bom in an obscure tovm in central
Eturope.

The real wealth of England was the character of her people.
To impair it was national suicide. Neither profits nor utopian
theories could ever justify a policy so short-sighted. “A domestic
oligarchy under frie guise of Liberalism, is denationalising
England,” Disraeli wrote in 1840, at the outset of his political
career: “Hitherto we have been preserved from the effects of the
folly of modem legislaticHi by the wisdom of our ancient manners.
The national character may yet save the Empire. The national
character is more important than the Great Charter or trial
by jmy." On the dusty roads from Mons to Marne river,
in frie blood-stained agony of Somme and Passdiendaele, on
Dunkirk Beach and in the skies above the Ch ann el, the tmth of
that century-old prediction became dear.

It was because her andent institutions fostered that cha racter
** that Disraeli guarded them so jealously. In an age when thinking
Englishman were taught to regard them as anachronisms, a Jew
made it his life’s work to educate the British people in an under¬
standing of the true tradition of their country. His success was
^l&ngipeiay flf Budde, I, ^7.

THE MARCH OF THE CARAVAN 183

only partial. The spirit of the age, with its emphasis on the
individual and its consequent mania for theoretical equality, was
against him. The ancient truths he taught were harder to instil
into half-educated minds than the surface logic of the rationalists:
the superficial is always easier to grasp than the profound. And
because of his disabilities he had to wait most of his life for other
men’s shoes. When his triumph at last came it was too late for
him to do much more than restate from the highest forum in the
land the lessons he had expounded throughout his long, half
tragic career.

Yet it was sufficient to save the people he served from self-
destruction, The very romance of his career—its persistence and
courage—endeared him and the creed he preached to'a great mul¬
titude. In the hearts of millions of his countrjmen, including
many of the new W’orking-class voters whom he helped to bring
within the pale of the constitution, a seed of thought was planted
that enabled them to resist the over-simplified and destructive
reasoning of the rationalists. Against the logic that sought to
destroy Monarchy, Church, property and local independence in
the name of abstract equality and to reduce the British parliament
—the most delicate and intricate machine for reflecting the
opinions of a free people mankind had ever evolved—to a single
vote-counting assembly enforcing the edicts of despotic party
caucuses and state officials, Disraeli reinforced the instinctive but
inarticulate conservatism of the ordinary man with a reasoned
body of principle capable of withstanding the iconoclast on his
own ground. In place of the paper perfection of a dead and
abstract uniformity he opposed tie pride and glamour of a living
patriotism, based not on official forms and figures but on the
realities of human nature.

So also he defended the Crown and the hereditary Second
Chamber, treating both with a'deference that seemed to some
snobbish or insincere but which arose from his detached realisa¬
tion of their poetic qualities and their contribution in pr^erving
the delicate balance on which English liberty depended. His
/Opponents imagined that by concentrating all power in the hands
of a single omnipotent assembly, elected by popular suffrage, the
will of the people would be imposed automatically and the age¬
long tjranny of the few made impossible. Disraeli saw how easily
such power could be perverted to the ends of the ambitious and
unscrupulous: of demagogues, dictators, party wire-pullers and

ENGLISH SAGA

184

plutocrats. The House of Commons by itself could never preserve
liberty. Without counter-availing forces securing popular rights
it might easily itself become a weapon of despotism and one
against which there would be no appeal.^

For the people by themselves could never be strong. Votes
alone could not secure their rights if the use of the power en¬
trusted by those votes to the ruling few was not kept in check by
the edstence of institutions strong enough to resist the abuse of
executive power. “None are so interested,” Disraeli wrote to a
working-man’s club, “in maintaining the institutions of the
country as the working-classes. The rich and the powerful will
not find much difficulty under any circumstances in maintaining
their rights but the privileges of the people can only be defended
and secured by popular institutions.”® It was this which caused
Disraeli to defend, for all its manifest absurdities and deficiencies,
the House of Lords—“an intermediate body between the popular
branch of the legislature and absolute legislation . . . supported
by property, by tradition and by experience, ready to act with the
critical faculty which is necessary when precipitate legislation is
threatened and at least to obtain time, so that upon all questions
of paramount importance the ultimate decision should be
founded on the mature opinion of an enlightened nation.”®
Such an institution, as recent European experience showed, could
not be created artificially: it had to grow gradually out of
national needs and realities before it could rest finnly on
instinctive popular support.

All this was true of a yet more venerable institution. Since the
long insanity of George HI., the English monarchy had been in
jeopardy. The dignity and good sense of Queen Victoria had done
something to redeem it from the oditun into which it had fallen
through the scandalous lives of her royal uncles. But in the
’sixties it was far from being a popular institution. The inter¬
minable and teutonically exaggerated retirement into which the
royal widow had fallen after the death of the Prince Consort
caused widespread criticism. The tone of radical youth increas¬
ingly tended towards a rq)ublic. To many thoughtful minds it

^In one of his earliet electoral addresses, Disraeli expressed such a fear. “I will
allow for the freedom of the Press; I will allow for the spirit of the age; I will allow
for the march of intellect; hut I cannot force' from my mind the conviction that a
House of ^Commons, concentrating in itself the whole power of the State, might . . ,
Gtablish in this .country a despotism of the most forxoiilable atid dangerous character.**
Uompemt^ Of Buckle^ /, ^

Monypaa^ & Buckk^ IT, ^Monypemy Buckle^ II, yy.

THE MARCH OF THE CARAVAN 185

appeared inprobable that the young Prince of Wales, who in his
pleasures seemed reverting to the less decorous traditions of his
Hanoverian forebears, would ever succeed to the throne. The
spirit of a progressive age demanded a republic.

In one of his early political works Disraeli defined his life-long
attitude to the Crown. “The wisdom of your forefathers placed
the prize of supreme power without the sphere of human passions
. . . Whatever the struggle of parties, whatever the strife of
factions . . . there has always been something in this country
round which all classes and parties could rally, representing the
majesty of the law, the administration of justice and involving
.. . the security of every man’s right and the fountain of
honour.” More than any other institution, the hereditary throne
represented to Disraeli the continuing community as opposed to
the government of the hour. For it embodied his conception of
perpetual trusteeship. His wise and delicate conduct towards his
sovereign whom he encouraged to resume her traditional
functions in the pageantry of state was part of his political
creed. His unfailing defence of the royal prerogative*^ in
the Commons was another. It was not the least of his sCTvices
to posterity that he laboured to revive popular sympathy and
affection for the throne, and with the aid of his royi mistress
to re-establish it on the firm foundation on which it had been the
pride of the great Tudor monarchs to rest it—the hearts of the
people.

In all that he did and advocated Disraeli strove to place the
government of Britain and its empire on a broad basis of in¬
dependence and privilege. He believed it to be his mission ttrdose
the breaches created by the Industrial Revolution and to blend the
diverse elements of the nation, not by levelling them but by
bringing them into sympathy with the spirit of a new age. “In
a progressive country,” he d^ared in 1867, “change is constant,
and the great question is, not whether you should resist change
which is inevitable, but whether that change should be carried
out in deference to the maimers, the customs, the laws, the
traditions of the people, or in deference to abstract principles and
arbitrary and general doctrines.”* It was his aim therefore—
pursued for more than thirty years in the face of constant

is not difficult to concdve an occasion when, suppprted by the sympathies of a
loyal people, its exercise might defeat an unconstitutional Ministry and a corrupt
Parliament.” Disraeli, Lord George JSentinck, Ch. /Fi

^Monypermy & BwkU, 11, zgx.

ENGLISH SAGA

186

detraction and misunderstanding—to make his Party the expres¬
sion not of stupid and selfish reaction but of mduring national
interests secured by popular principles and institutions. “What
is the Tory party,” he once asked, “unless it represents natio nal
feeling? Toryism is nothing . . . unless it represents and
upholds the institutions of the country.”^

His liberal opponents, whose ranks included some of the
noblest and most disinterested mto of that time, did not see the
the importance of preserving the national institutions. Th^
had, as they conceived, a higher goal—the greatest good of the
greatest number measured by the expression of the popular will
in an equally elected and all powerful assembly. “I see before
me,” Disraeli declared in a famous speech, “ a numerous and
powerful party, animated by chiefs whose opinions in favour
of all that can advance the cause of pure democracy have been
openly proclaimed. All unite in the march of fhe caravan
towards the heart of the desert, and if there be those who then
discover that the fountain which allures them on is but the
mirage it will be too late to return. ... If England is to
continue free, she must rest upon the intermediate institutions,
which fence round monarchy as the symbol of the executive
force from that suflaage of unalloyed democracy which represents
the invading agencies of legislative change.”

Eor a nation was “a work of art and a work of time.” It was
created gradually by a variety of influences. “If you destroy the
political institutions which these influences have called into
force . . . and which are the machinery by which th^ act, you
destrpy the nation.” “The formation of a free government on an
«tensive scale,” Disraeli had written on an earlier occasion, “while
it is assuredly one of the most interesting problems of humanity
is certainly the greatest achievement of human wit. Perhaps I
should rather term it a superhuman achievement; for it requires
such refined prudence, such comprdiaisive knowledge and such
perspicacious sagacity, united with such almost illimitable
powers of combination, that it is nearly in vain to hope for
qualities so rare to be congregated in a solitary mind. . . .
With us it has been the growth of ages, and brooding coituries
^ve watched over and tended its pailous birth and feeble
infancy.”*

Sf BmMe, 11, sSj.

*J. Vhdua&m^theMagM Constiiatim Ch. F.

CHAPTER SIX

Shooting Niagara

•Those TTho take * leaps in the dark,* as we are doing,
may find themselves in unexpected places before they
recover the beaten tracks again.*— Fmidey Oceam, ig.

•The life of a constitution is in the spirit and disr
position of those who work it.”—Bagehot.

I N 1864 while the Commons werh perfunctorily debating a
private member’s motion for reform of the franchise—a
question which in the view of most people had been dead
since 1832^—Mr. Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer,
electrified the House by dedaring that every man who was not
incapadtated by some consideration of personal unfitness or of
political danger was morally entitled to come within the pale of
the constitution. The dedaration marked the beginning of a
new phase in English history. Electoral power which thirty-
two years before had passed from the aristocracy to the middle-
class was now to shift by ordered but rapid stages to the masses.
The workers by virtue of their ntunerical superiority were to
become the dominating dass of the future.

A few years before no one but a few &natic reformers
regarded such a devdopment as within the sphere of practical
politics. Pure democracy was an ultimate goal: an equal vote
for every dtizen a pious aspiration, widdy honoured like the
beatitudes and acceded to by none. The rough type produced by
the factory and the housing conditions of the factory town was
not one to which the wealth, safety and honour of a ridh and
andent kingdom was likely to be entrusted, even by the most
sanguine. Where in other European countries, like republican
France, democracy had been tried, the result had been an orgy of
blood, plunder and anarchy followed by a military despotism.
A practical people like the British, felt little drawn to such
visionary courses.

Even in America where the experiment of eighty years back

‘John Bright, attempting an agitation in favour of household sufl&age in 1859,
observed it was like “flogging a dead horse.”

187

ENGLISH SAGA

i88

had so far escaped shipwreck—presumably through the smallness
of the population and the immensity of the territory—democracy
seemed in the ’sixties to be culminating in disaster. The
educated classes in Britain believed that the war waged by-the
vulgar Yankees and their backwoodsman President against the
aristocratic Southern cotton-planters could only end in one way.
Even the liberal-minded Punchy until the final magnanimous
apology over the great democrat’s murdered corpse,^ persistently
depicted Lincoln as a crude demagogue, half down and half
dictator. His defeat by an army of gentlemen appeared inevitable.

The triumph of the North, after three years of disaster,
surprised the English ruling'classes. It did not surprise the
British factory hands who grasped from the first the real
significance of the “ slaveowners’ war.” Their strong sympathy
for Lincoln’s cause helped to prevent the recognition of the
South by the government of Palmerston and Gladstone. During
the cotton famine caused by the blockade in 1862-3, patient
fortitude of the cotton operatives impressed and shamed their
betters. Gladstone’s pronotmcement that such men were
entitled to a place in the constitution awoke an answering chord
in thousands.

The movement towards electoral reform, stagnant since the
collapse of the People’s Charter in the ’forties, took on a new
complexion. It coindded with the end of the Palmerstonian era
and the succession of Gladstone to the Liberal leadership in the
Commons. In 1866 a Liberal government introduced a bill
reducing the occupation franchise in the counties from £50 to
and in the boroughs from £10 to By this it was hoped to
add another 400,000 voters to the electorate.

The bill’s promoters regarded it as a* logical step in the process
of advancing the happiness of the greatest number through the
exerdse of intelligent self-interest. It was now assumed that the
better class of working man was a rational being. In making
him mastd of his destiny and the nation’s, he could be trusted
like his bourgeois betters to follow the law of his ovm advantage
and so automatically serve the common weal.

But though the Liberals were in a majority their whig sup-

* “Yes, he Kad lived to shame me from my sneer,

To lame my pencil and confute my pen,

To make me ow this hind of princes peer,

This rail-spUtter a true*bonx king of men.”

^Funch, XLVm, 189.

SHOOTING NIAGARA

189

porters, led by Robert Lowe, regarded the measure as an uncalled-
for step towards the destruction of property and freedom. “With
our own rash and inconsiderate hands,” he declared, “we are
about to pluck down on our heads the venerable temple of our
liberty and our glory.”^ Entering the lobbies with the reactionary
Tories, the “ Adullamites,” as the old reformer Bright called them,
defeated the bill in committee. The government resigned, and
the Conservatives, still in a minority, took office.

But Disraeli, their leader in the Ctommons, having nursed his
Party for twenty years in the wilderness without enjoying a
majority, had no intention of committing it in the hour of
recovery to the same policy of obstinate resistance to the popular
tide which had ruined it in 1830. The debates had re-awakened the
country to an interest in reform. There were demonstrations
in its favour in Hyde Park that July when, the gates being locked
by the police, the mob tore up the railings of Park Lane.® The
government opened the session of 1867 by introducing a reform
measure of its own. Punch depicted the Prime Minister, Lord
Derby, in bonnet and petticoats making off with the infant
bill while its mother. Lord Russell, surveying the empty pram,
cried out, “Hi! help! ple-ae-ce-! She’s a taJdn’ away me cheild.”

The new biU went farther than that of the Liberals. In the
counties the basis proposed was household suffrage qualified
by personal rating and two years’ residence. In adopting what
seemed to many a Liberal policy Disraeli was honouring an ideal
which he had proclaimed at the outset of his career. For it had
always been his contention that the first Reform bill had
impaired the English principle of representation. He had
objected to it not, as many Tories had done, because it increased
the electorate but because it made the representation of opinion
less effective.® The object of a parliamentary system, he hdd,

1 Parliamentary Debates^ CLXXXII^ 2118. A still stronger expression of the case
against unnecessary concessions was made by Bulwer Lytton in a speech of 1859. “Do
not give to-day what you regret to-morrow that you cannot restore. Democracy is
like the grave—it perpetually cries, * Give! give! ’ and like the grave it never returns
what it has once taken. But you live under a constitutional monarchy which has ill
the vigour of health, all the energy of movement. Do not surrender to democrtcy
that ’^ch is not yet ripe for the ^ve."

* Demonstrations occurred in other parts of the country, especially at Manchester,
Newcastle, Birmingham and Glasgow. Those in Hyde^ Park had one interesting
consequence in leading to the permanent policing of the west-end parks.

• “In a hasty and factious effort to get rid of representation without election, it

will be as well if eventually we do not discover that we have only obtained dection
without representation.’*—Dwroe/i, Vindication qf Constitution Chapur

X 7 L

ENGLISH SAGA

190

was not to count votes—a mere means to an end—^but to weigh
opinion. And if a nation was to pursue a responsible policy, it
must be responsible opinion.

It was an English principle that the vote, like the exercise
of any other form of authority, should only be entrusted to those
fitted for responsibility. The Whigs in their remedy for the
electoral anomalies of five conservative centuries had forgotten
English history. It was right that the manufacturers and shop¬
keepers of the new industrial towns, wrongly excluded from the
pre-1832 constitution, should have been enfranchised. But, in
Disraeli’s view, it had been wrong to allow a single class,
hitherto without political experience, to outvote every other
nation^ interest merely because of its numerical superiority.

Disraeli had therefore always contended that the defence of the
settlement of 1832 was no concern of a Party which claimed to
represent national as opposed to sectional interests. During a
brief spell of office in 1859, he had proposed an extension of the
franchise to important interests overlooked by the whig re¬
formers, and had advocated an additional vote for university
graduates, ministers of religion, lawyers, doctors, certificated
schoolmasters, dvil service pensioners, fundholders and Post
Office Savings Bank depositors. Opinions were not merely to be
counted but weighed. The House of Commons, reverting to its
older tradition, was to become “a mirror of the mind as well as
the material interests of England.”

This conception, which received little support at the timo
either from Disraeli’s own party or his opponents, was now
revived in the proposals which he placed before Parliament. In
addition to bringing the responsible artisan within the constitu¬
tion by widening the borough qualification, he offered a dual
vote to every direct taxpayer and extended the franchise to all
with a certain standard of education or ^^50 in the Funds or
Savings Bank.

In all this Disraeli challenged the whole utilitarian tliimig of
his age. If, as Bentham argue(^ the happiness of the greatest
number was to be secured by giving every man the maviTr>nm
power to pursue his own selfish good, the more electors admitted
to the constitution the better. The Liberals accq)ted this in
theory, but qualifi^ it in practice by denying the vote to the
majority. For their rough habits and lack: of even the most
rudimentary education unfitted the workers in middle-dass eyes

SHOOTING NIAGARA

I9I

for the suffrage. An electorate of respectable shopkeepers and
city merchants was poised uneasily on the horns of a dilemma.
It had either to refuse to honour its Benthamite ideals or subject
its security and property to the vote of a, rude multitude of
unlettered toughs—of garrotters, wife-beaters, drunkards, foot¬
pads, and ragged, lousy beggars.

Disraeli shared neither the practical fears nor the idealist
hopes of the bourgeois. He had no illusions about the con¬
sequences of further extension of the franchise on a numerical
basis. He was not less willing to trust his countrymen—^he was
more so—^but he knew that in any state which based power
purely on numbers the result must be “the tyranny of one class
and that in the least enlightened.’’^ For against an unchanging
popular majority, the individual has no appeal. However mildly
exercised, such uniform despotism was boxmd to destroy
diversity of type and character.

“I have no apprehension myself that, if you had man¬
hood suffrage to-morrow, the honest, brave, and good-
natured people of England would resort to pillage, incendi¬
arism, and massacre. Who expects that? But though I
would do as much justice to the qualities of our coimtrymen
as any gentleman in this House, though I may not indulge in
high-flown and far-fetched ^pressions with respect to them
like those we have listened to—^for the people may have
their parasites as well as monarchs and aristocrats—^yet I
have no doubt that, whatever may be their high quaKties,
our countrymen are subject to the same political laws that
afffect the condition of all other communities and nations.
If you establish a democracy, you must in due season reap
the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have
great impatience of the public burdens combined in due
season with great increase of the public expenditure. You
will in due season reap the fruits of such united influence.
You will in due season have wars entered into from passion,
and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to
peace ignominously sought and ignominously obtained,
which will diminish your authority and perhaps endanger
your independence. You will, in due season, with a demo¬
cracy find that your property is less valuable and that your

^ and Buckle^ //, 146,

192

ENGLISH SAGA

freedom is less complete. I doubt not, when there has been
realised a sufficient quantity of disaffection and dismay,
the good sense of this country will come to the rally, and
that you will obtain some remedy for your grievances, and
some redress for wrongs, by the process through which
alone it can be obtained—by that process which may render
your property more secure, but which will not render your
liberty more eminent. . .

In his Reform Bill of 1867 DisraeK tried to constitute the vote a
privilege and not a right “ to be gained by virtue, by intelligence,
by industry, by integrity and to be exercised for the common
good.”® He wished to extend the franchise, not degrade it.
As he had always done, he wanted to see the working man a
partner in the constitution bnt not its dictator. But he held
office on sufferance only, and his power to carry the bill was
dependent on his acceptance of Liberal amendments.

The spirit of the age was still utilitarian, and the machinery
for restoring an older and more English ideal of government was
sabotaged in committee. The second Reform Bill passed its.
third reading on July 15, 1867, but without the provisions for
the dual vote for education and property.

The bill added a million vot^s to the electoral roll, roughly
doubling it. It created a democracy of heads of houses,
that is of men with some stake, however small, in the country.
Its weakness in its author’s eyes was that it gave too much
ultimate voting power to mere numbers. It was in Lord Derby’s
famous phrase “a leap in the dark.”® And the direction it took

suggested further leaps into still deeper, darkness before long.
«•••«*

The first general election fought on the new register gave the
liberal party a six years’ lease of power. But as Disraeli had
prophesied, the interests of artisans and middle-class utilitarians

’’ Monypaa^ and Budk^ /, i6o8~g.

^Monypenr^ and Budtk^ //, 144,

* Carlyle stigmatised it a$ ** shooting Niagara,” and the poet Coventry Patmore
wrote mournfully of—

“The year of the great crime,

When the false English nobles, and thrir Jew,

By God demented, slew

The trust they stood twice pleged to keep from wrong.”

To the future Lord Salisbury, Disrarii’s successor as conservative leader, it was “a
political betrayal which has no parallel in our axmah.”

SHOOTING NIAGARA 193

were not the same. The latter wanted to restrict the functions of
government and leave the ring clear for the individual with
talent and industry. The workers on the other hand, though the
educated and therefore better-to-do minority among them
tended to absorb liberal middle-class sympathies, needed
state protection against the economic excesses ^ of the in¬
dividual. As soon as they realised the power which the vote
had given them, they began to demand it. They leant not towards
the classic liberalism of laissez-faire but towards that social
reform whic| Disraeli had preached since his Young England
days and which Shaftesbury and the factory reformers had
fought for against the utilitarians. ... -i

Gladstone’s programme of civic emancipation, Irish Church
disestablishment and administrative reform therefore made
little appeal-to the working-class electorate. After a few years
of Liberal rule the country became surfeited with organic
change. The sun of “the People’s William” waned; that of
“ Dizzy,” the inspired Jew boy who had “ climbed to the top of
the greasy pole,” rose flamboyant. In 1874 for the first time in
23 years the Conservatives obtained a majority.

The date marks the dividing line between the utilitarian legis¬
lation of the middle half of the nineteenth century and the
collectivist or socialist legislation which has since taken its
place. The change was in some degree due to Disraeli, who at
the age of seventy was able to apply an instalment of the social
policy which he had advocated in his thirties. It was far more
due to the crying needs of the working classes and to the
preponderating influence in legislation which the extension of
the franchise had given them. With every expansion of the
industrial population, that preponderance increased.

During the quarter of a century that followed the collapse of
the Chartists the working-class movement had silently gathered
-momentum. In every town where skilled workers were assembled,
the Trade Unions made their appearance. The quiet yeam^ of
widening trade and employment helped their growth, giving
them cohesion, tradition and financial reserves to meet the
stormier years ahead. Local consolidation was usually followed
by amalgamation on a national scale. The first great national
Union, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, was founded in
1851 with the fusion of over a hundred local trade societies. In
the next fifteen years its membership of 12,000 more than doubled.

ENGLISH SAGA

194

With its many imitators it fought against piece-work, overtime,
victimisation aud the employment of unapprenticed men,
survived early attempts of impatient employers to destroy it by
lock-outs and taught a hostile bourgeois world to tolerate and
fear, if not to respect it.

To the middle-class citizen in his top-hat and castellated
home, the Trade Union was long something of a bogey—a secret
and treasonable society threatening mob violence and plotting
confiscation and revolution. In popular repute its shady path
was attended by a succession of outrages: explosions, stones
and broken glass, striking mobs intimidating honest Britons
out of their property and right to work as they pleased. None
felt this more strongly than the progressive radicals of the north.
“ Depend upon it,” wrote Cobden, “ nothing can be got by fratern¬
ising with Trade Unions. They are founded upon principles of
brutal tyranny and monopoly. I would rather live under a Dey
of Algiers than a trades committee.”^

The law, reflecting middle-class opinion, treated the Unions
with suspicion. Judges, who still regarded them as com¬
binations in restraint of trade, refused to protect their funds
from the defalcations of dishonest officials. A Trade Union
was an association to coerce individuals and limit their profits.
It was therefore viewed by a generation educated in laissez-faire
principles as injurious. It was only tolerated because it was
impossible to prevent it. That by improving conditions, remov¬
ing the workers’ sense of injustice and substituting orderly for
chaotic terms of employment, collective working-class action
might stabilise and so improve trade was still beyond the ken of
mid-Victorian philosophy.

^ Yet, though* those brought up in the principles of Bentham
tried not to see it, everything that was happening in the crowded
iirban world which individual enterprise had created was minimis¬
ing the importance of the individual and raising the power of the
herd.^ The sturdy pupil of self-help, who by his devotion to his
individual interests had created a thriving industrial unit employ-
injg[ ^000 workers where only fifty had existed before, had un¬
consciously called into being a community whose common
hopes and interests must presently dash with his own. For
though the more he prospered the more they multiplied, the more
th^ did so the more certain became their ultimate triumph over

Ccbden^ /,

195

SHOOTING NIAGARA

h i m self. So soon as they realised that their
happiness lay not in their action as individualSj ^
poor and ill-educated they were powerless, but io
strength, their final victory was certain. ,

. In hi great ™rk. Cpitd, fat obacn^?

“amid carbuncles and the constant dunning
1867, Karl Marx demonstrated the course events were ug-
saw that with its ever-increasing scale of operation® ca^ a ism
was digging its own grave. The evolution of a society w pu
its faith in figures was predestined. “ While there is ns a pro¬
gressive diminution in the number of capitalist magnates . . .
there octurs a corresponding increase in the . piwerty,
oppression, enslavement, degaieration and exploi^*^®^’ ont at
the same time there is a steady intensification of the wrath 01 tlie
working class—a class which grows ever more nuni^^P'^
disciplined, unified and organised by the very mechanism or the
capitalist method of production. Capitalist monopoly becomes
a fetter upon the method of production whidi has flourished with
it and under it. The centralisation of the means of production
and the socialisation of labour reach a point where they prove
incompatible with their capitalist husk. This bursts asimder.
The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators
are expropriated.”

To Marx’s logical, academic but violence-loving mind the
inevitable end was revolution. Divorced by his drcumstmces
and temperament from the contacts of normal life and society,^
this morose prophet never grasped the nature of the people whose
•commercial institutions he studied with such brilliant and

prophetic insight. He failed to see that in an ancient country
like England, with its strong sod^ character and representative
institutions, revolution would be deflected into smoother
channels. There would be no explosion, only a gradual
process.

The great change that Marx predicted happened. But
it took place in so unexpected a way that nobody, not even
Marx, realised that it was happening at all. The utilitarians
thesis, which supported laissez-faire, involved the extension of
the vote to the poor man. He used it to obtain legislation to
offset his disability in contracting power. In England the passage

5 His mother, Marthaplike, reflected the spirit of her age in wishing that her Karl
would make some capital instead of writing about it.

ENGLISH SAGA

196

of the second Reform Bill, and not the shouting proletarian
crowds and the blood-bath of the exploiters, marked the end of
unlimited freedom of contract and therefore of laissez-faire.

The application of the democratic thesis, advanced not
utilitarian ideals but those diametrically opposed to them. Math¬
ematical democracy belied the hopes of those who had sought
its triumph. Instead of peace and retrenchment—the central
pillars of the Benthamite structure and the prerequisites of
unrestricted individual liberty—democracy within a span of
little more than two generations was to bring about wars
and state expenditure on a scale never previously imagined.
Instead of freedom of contract, opinion and speech, it was
to create a mass paternalism and regimentation of thought
and expression beyond the dreams of Strafford and Laud. The
island home of liberty that had fought against ship-money and
forced billeting was to give its suffrage for penal taxation and
conscription. Within seventy-three years of the passing of the
second Reform Bill, it was to become possible for any newspaper
to be suppressed by bare order of a state department for advocat¬
ing a policy opposed to that of the government and for an English¬
man to be arrested and kept in prison without trial or right of
appeal for an expression of past opinion. To argue that such
powers, greater than any sought by Pitt in his struggle against
Napoleon, were solely the result of a threat to national existence
is to ignore the historical trend of nearly a century.

The scene being England, the transition from individualism
to collectivism was scarcely perceptible. At first nothing
appeared to have happened at all. Even after a quarter of a
century, when a respected liberal statesman made his cheerful
admission “we are all sociali^s now,” the process was cloaked by
so many English, and therefore conservative phrases and fictions,
that most people were unaware that it was taking place. For, as
always in England, the continuity of outward forms remained
and the great individualists rode to the guillotine at West¬
minster in their own private coaches attended by the Benthamite
liyery. Most of the socialist legislation under which modem
Britain is governed was passed by a Liberal government of Man¬
chester individualists between 1906 and the last European War
and the remainder by equally individualistic Conservative admin¬
istrations between 1922 and 1940.

The new direction was first set by Disraeli’s aristocratic

SHOOTING NIAGARA

197

government in the latter ’seventies. In the course of five years this
administration of rich hereditary peers and landowners passed
legislation which, though little.noticed at the time, struck at the
roots of the Benthamite thesis that the individual should be left
free to enrich himself as he chose. Factorj’ acts were extended and
consolidated and the hours^ and conditions of labour codified,
The process of private enclosure was reversed—though too late
to save more than a fragment of what once had been public
property—and the conversion of common land forbidden
unless it conferred a public as well as a private benefit. By the
Public Health Act of 1876 the interests of the individual were
first subordinated to the requirements of public sanitation. It
was only a beginning. Defending a policy which he described as
^^Sanitas samtatu?n, omnia sanitas^^ Disraeli replied to the con¬
temptuous attacks of those w’ho felt he was reducing statecraft
to a mere affair of sewerage:

“It must be obvious to all who consider the condition of
the multitude with a desire to improve and elevate it, that
no important step can be gained unless your effect some
reduction of their hours of labour and humanise their toil.
... I ventured to say a short time ago that the health of the
people was the most important subject for a statesman. It
is a large subject. It h^ many branches. It involves the
state of the dwellings of the people, the moral consequences
of which are not less considerable than the physical. It
involves their enjoyment of some of the chief elements of
nature—air, light, and water. It involves the regulation of
their industry, the inspection of their toil. It involves the
purity of their provisions, and it touches upon all the means
by which you may wean them from habits of excess and
brutality. . . . Well it may be the policy of sewerage to a
Liberal Member of Parliament. But to one of the labouring
multitude of England, who has found fever always to be
one of the inmates of his household—who has, year after
year, seen stricken down the children of his loins on whose
sympathy and support he has looked with hope and con¬
fidence, it is not a policy of sewerage but a question of life
and death.”

1 limited by an Act of 1874 to 56 hours a week, 10 on five weekdays and not more
than 6 on Saturdays.

E.S.

BNGLISH SAGA

198

The same government introduced an Artisans’ Dwelling
Bill, empowering local authorities to demolish insanitary
dwdlings and replace them by houses built expressly for
working men. The measure was not compulsory but only
permissive.^ It was no more than a tentative beginning: a
mere drop in the still rising ocean of slum. Yet its ultimate
effect was revolutionary. For it revived, in however dim a
form, the ancient ideal of the state as the guardian of the
people’s homes.

Behind all this legislation lay the silent voting power of the
workers. In 1874 there were returned to the House of Commons
two men who were to be the pioneers of a mighty army. Even at
the time Alexander Macdonald and Thomas Burt, the first two
working-class M.P.’s, were something of a portent among the
landed squires and thriving manufacturers at Westminster.
Burt was Secretary of the Northiimberland Miners’ Association,
which, by helping to establish that the occupants of colliery
houses, though not paying rates direct, were entitled to voting
rights like the compoimd householders in the towns, had secured
a majority of pitmen in the constituency of Morpeth. These
r^resentatives of the sons of toil tended at first to vote with
Disraeli’s “gentlemen of England” rather than with his oppon-
mts. Macdonald told his constituaits in 1879 that the Conserva¬
tive party had “done more for the working classes in five years
than the Liberals in fifty.”

For the old Jew, now nearing his end, for all his absorption
in duches^ and oriental splendour, believed in a tory democracy
and saw in the working man, with his native prejudices and
conservative instincts, an ally against the levelling utilitarian
forces he had fought all his life. He did not beUeve that the
simple, pleasure-loving Englis hm an in the craftsman’s square
«ap and apron wanted the drab uniformity so dear to Benthamite
pedmts. In his own phrase he made it his task to “ soften the
fedmgs of the working multitude.”® Byredressing injustices he
K>ught to end the fetal gulf between the “two Englands” which
more clearly than any other public man he had perceived in

‘“Bennisa-ra Diaradi etplained, ‘'is the character of a free neoole.

comp^oiy legislati<m when you have to deal with those wh^oSly
^ ^ country and especiaUy a country like V.nglanH, you must

demente if you wM ^ectTy
^ ^ pecple.»-ifo^ narf II. 55/

SHOOTING NIAGARA

199

youth and still—^though it was almost thirty years too late_

hoped to bridge.

His administration’s labour laws were an attempt to further
that hope. The common law, dating from an age when status
was fixed and the workman given security of tenure by the state,
treated breach of contract by an employer as a chdl offence and
that of his workman as criminal. The application of laissez-Jaire
to commercial relationships had long made this distinction
grossly unjust. By an act of 1875 Disraeli ended it by placing the.
workman on the same legal footing as his employer. In the sarrn*
year he righted a stUl greater grievance of industrial labour
against the law. Though the ancient doctrine of “ conspiracy”
had been modified by an Act of 1825, the Courts still refused to
accord Trade Unions full legal status. Their ftmds were un¬
protected against breaches of trust by their own employees and
their officers criminally liable for certain actions carried out in
the course of their duties. By a new Act of 1875 Trade Unions
were given the protection of the law. The mere fact of associa¬
tion to defeat an employer was freed from criminal taint. It
could only be indicted as a conspiracy when it constituted what
done by a single person would have been a crime.

By this change in the law “peaceful” picketing became per¬
missible if unaccompanied by violence or threat of violence—
though, as the upshot proved, it still remained open to judges to
take such a view of “intimidation” as to constitute all picketing
“unpeaceful.” Not until the Trade Disputes Act of 1906, passed by
a Liberal government which had repudiated kussez-faire for full-
blooded collectivism to win working-class support, did the Trade
Unions establish the privileged position they sought.^ To a
believer in great national institutions, preserving by their
trusteeship undying liberties and rights, it was a position to
which a Trade Union was entitled. To a middle-class lawyer,-
nursed in the tenets of Benthamism, it was not. For several
decades after the second Reform Bill the struggle between laissez-
faire and the new socialism of the great towns laissezfaire had
created continued.

It -was often for the early leaders of labour a cruelly hard
one. They had to do their public work in their spare time and

^ It reversed the decision of the judges in the Taff Vale case and freed Trade Unions
funds from liability for damages committed by its members in the course of strikes.

ENGLISH SAGA

200

finance it out of their wages. The pioneers of the Dockers’ Union
met “like conspirators hatching a second Guy Fawkes plot in a
gloomy cellar with only the flickering half-lights given by tallow
candles thrust into the necks of pop bottles.” In the ’eighties the
members of even the executive coimdl of so famous a union as
the Amalgamated Society of Engineers—at least two of whom in
after years became cabinet ministers—^used to receive one sbilling
and sixpence a night for thdr direction of the leading Union of
the time and think themselves lucky to get it. Trades Union
leadership in those days was less a career than a vocation. It was
sometimes a martyrdom.

For this reason, and because of the wrongs from which t hd r
class had suffered and was still suffering, these pioneers of a still
inconceivable future were often politically embittered. The good-
humoured rank and file in pub and music hall, on the beach at
Bladtpool or the racecourse at Aintree, troubled their heads little
about past history or future proletarian aspirations. But t hdr
leaders, and the earnest young men studying under immmigo
difficulties in public libraries and Mechanics’ Institutes^ who
were to be their leaders in the next generation, were painfully
aware of the fact that th^ and their class had not had a square
deal.

Yet with the vote in the workman’s wallet, time was on thdr
side. They felt that they had only to open the eyes of the wage
daves, teach them to combine and to use their latent strength
with disdpline and loyalty to obtain their share of the kingdn Tn,
The prejudices against them—^the malice and victimisation of
employers, the biased use of the dvil arm and even the mili tary
in time of strikes, the snobbery and class treachery of the workers
themselves—^were not so strong as the social impulse of the
exploited to combine or perish. Whenever times were hard the
men the Unions battled for, who were oblivious of their efforts
when employment was regular and beer and bread plentiffil, were
re mind ed of how much still remained to be won before there
could be any security for themsdves and their dear ones. With¬
out the Trade Union there could be only loss of hearth and home
and starvation for the workman who lost his job, and worse for

^The Working*Men’s College in London was founded by the Rev.-Frederick
Demson _Maun^ in 1854, -with a voluntary staff of middle^iass “Christian Sodalist”
^pathisa^ho induded Ruskin, Tom Hughes—author of Tom Btowu's School Dim
—^wes Dutanson, Vernon Lushington, Ford Madox Brown, Dante Gabriel
and fiaward Bume Jones.

SHOOTING NIAGARA

201

the family of the man crippled or killed by accident in the course
of his employment.!

Neither the error and human frailty of leaders nor the folly
and shortsightedness of the rank and file could halt the steady
march of organised labour. In 1880 the Trade Union Congress
only represented 600,000 members: by 1892 the figure had
doubled. It was not only for advances in wages that the older
Unions now fought, but for recognition as the sole representat¬
ives of the workers in all negotiations with employers. They
demanded a share in the direction of their labour. To the fury
of the old-fashioned capitalist, to whom freedom of contract
meant freedom of choice for the master and obedience for the
man, the new Trade Unionism sought to abolish overtime and
regulate piecework. It went further. It used the threat of the
worker’s vote to appeal over the head of the employer to a Parlia¬
ment now dependent on that vote, for legislation to enforce its
demands. At its annual Congresses, begim in 1866, the T.U.C.
instructed its members to press parliamentary candidates for
such reforms as an eight-hour day, compulsory compensation for
injured workers, the limitation of shop hours, new factory
regulations, furthar amendment of the law of conspiracy and the
abolition of child labour. It also demanded free elementary
education, land for allotments in country districts and the
appointment of working men to the Bench.

Organised labour in these years sought more than the pro¬
tection of the skilled worker. As Cobdoi had prophesied in the
hungry ’foirties, the triumph of bassez-faire had brought enhanced
prosperity to many workers. The skilled artisan had taken his
share, however sm^, in the increased prosperity of his country.
He had enjoyed good wages, untaxed and plentiful food, long
continued employment, cheap transport and amenitiesr-niuni-
dpal parks, libraries, galleries and concerts—such as his father
in a grimmer age had never known. In many cases he had been
able to put away money, insure against old age and sickness, even

* “Life was cheap in those days. It was by no means an uncommon thing to see
the maimed and sometimes the d^d being brought up from the dock bottom.... I
remember two cases in our gan^, George Washington, a smith’s striker, fell into the
dry dock one foggy night on his way home and was foimd at the bottom half dead
in the morning. Jim Platt, a machinist, had his badt nearly broken by the fell of a
loose plank from the workshop roof. The result was the same in both cases—patched
up in the hospital and then toth after a year or two of lingering pain at
work. But compensation was never thought of.*—G. N, Barnes, From Workshop
Cabinet, j/.

202

ENGLISH SAGA

to buy his own home. The utilitarian state had given him oppor¬
tunity and he had taken it.

But the skilled artisan in employment was only a part of
labour. For if kissez'faire postulate the successful workman
growing rich like his master through his own thrift and industry,
it also necessitated a residue of unskilled labour to meet the
fluctuating demands of a competitive world. This the capitalist
used in good time and discarded in bad. Such a system multiplied
the wastrel, the diseased and the ne’er-do-well. It multiplied
their inefficient and unhappy posterity. The statistics of the
economist showed the profits of unrestricted competition. The
slums of the industrial cities revealed its wastage.

It was no part of laiss^’Jiure that the successful should burden
themselves by helping the failures. The only economic place for
the weak was the rubbish heap. It was at this point that laissez-
faire always clashed with the English temperament. The middle-
class employer in the rarefied privacy of his sanctum might—in
the interests of a higher wisdom—suppress his inherited feelings
of charity and kindness. But the working man who had never
heard of laissez-faire could not. He never even tried. For he was
nothing if not sentimental, and imder his corduroys beat a heart
fuU of English instincts and prejudices. One of them was an
incorrigible desire to help the underdog.

It was from such a motive, unreasoning and unscientific, that
English sodalism first sprang. Abroad socialism followed more
logical channels: the brand that Karl Marx was preaching to his
fellow Germans and to embittered and excitable French and
Russian comrades was of a severely practical kind. There was
nothing that Marx^ despised and disliked so much as an underdog.
He merely wished to use him and his misery to destroy the cap¬
italist system. What would happen to the wretched, snivelling,
inefficient creature in the bloody process never troubled him.
For the underdog like the bourgeois was himself a product of the
capitalist system. Only when he was swept away would the brave
new world of the revolutionary logicians’ vision become possible.
To waste tears on him, let alone eflFort, was a crime against the
classless society of the future.

But English Socialists, even when they paid polite lip service

' despaired of the Ei^Ush. he wrote, “possesses all the necessary

condidons for sodal reredndon; what la^ is a nnivexsal ontIo(^ and revolu¬
tionary pasaan.”*—& Gut, £arl Marx,

SHOOTING NIAGARA 2O3

to the theses of their continental comrad®, seemed curiously
unaware of all this. It was precisely because they wished to help
the underdog that they were Socialists at all. Men like William
Morris and Arnold Toynbee devoted their lives to the working-
dass movement because their English sense of justice and kindli¬
ness was affronted by the sickening misery and cruelty of a great
reserve of unskilled labour like the East End of London. They did
not wish merdy to use the underdog but to tend and cherish him,
just as they wished not to exterminate the bourgeois but to
convert him. The University Settlement, then first taldng shape,
was a characteristic product of both these wishes. And in their
dreams for the future the early English Sodalists sought nothing
J)ut a gentle Christian paradise after their own kindly middle-
class hearts. Morris’s Nem from Novchere published in 1890 is
as far removed from Marx’s Capital as the Gospd of St. John
from the Book of Judges. “I know,” said its author of a worHng-
men’s procession, “what these men want: employment which
would foster their self-respect and win the praise and sympathy
of their fellows, and dwellings which they would come to with
pleasure, surroundings which would soothe and devate them;
reasonable labour, reasonable rest. There is only one thing that
can give them this—Art.

To modem middle-dass revolutionaries, writh their armoury
of Marxian dialectic and their pessimist’s despair of the living,
there miist seem something incurably futile about this lovdde
old man, haranguing in his gentle voice on Edbrook Common
and looking in his blue serge reefer jadcet like a cross between a
farmer and a sea captain. At that time he and his proletarian
prototype, John Bums, were the life and soul of militant English
Sodalism. Their object was to save the imderdog from the shame¬
less sweating and exploitation which he suffered by organising
him like his comrades, the prosperous artisans of the skilled
Trade Unions. During the recurrent trade depressions of the
’dghties th^ organised vast processions of unemployed—of the
imwanted and starving army of laissez-faire capital. One of these,
on “Bloody Sunday,” November, 1887, became part of English
history. Long drab companies of pallid ragged men, marching
behind red baimers and bands of antiquated instruments, con¬
verged in defiance of the police from the outer slums on Trafalgar

^ Speedi ddivered at Buzslfim, X3th OcL, z88iy ciL R. ff, Grettm^ A SRiiern Sbtoij
of tho JEngU^ Feopk^ 6^

ENGLISH SAGA

204

Square: here they were repeatedly charged by massed constables
with drawn batons until hundreds of skulls were cracked and
bleeding. It was the first glimmer of the red light that threatened
social explosion. “No one who saw it will ever forget the strange
and indeed terrible sight of that grey winter day, the vast, sombre-
coloured'crowd, the brief but fierce struggle at the comer of the
Strand, and the river of steel and scarlet that moved slowly
through the dusky swaying masses, when two squadrons of the
Life Guards were summoned up from Whitehall. Afterwards
two of the leaders, John Bums and the chivalrous Cunninghame
Graham, were taken into custody.

The red light was not unheeded. The conscience of England
is sometimes hard to awake but it never fails in the end to respond
to a great wrong. Two years later the selfless pioneers of the
British Socialist movement won a great triumph. In August,
1889, several thousand labourers in the London Docks stmck
work. Such men were the poorest of the poor—^the flotsam and
jetsam^ of the water-side. They wctc unorganised, despised even
by their fellow workers, without hope or craft. They slept in the
fo’c’sles of empty ships and subsisted on scraps of mouldy biscuits
left over by their hard-bitten crews, were subjected by sub¬
contractors—often more bmtes than men—to work with rotten
plant and defective machinery and left to perish in crippled
destitution and misery when their limbs had been mangled in
some squalid accident on the dock-side.® In the frantic competi¬
tion for frdghts, they could scarcely ever look for more then two
days continuous employment. But stirred by the new spirit
among their do'cratrodden kind, they now made the unheard of
demand that their labour should be hired at not less tBan four
hours at a time and at a uniform rate of 6d. an hour. It was.
rejected by dodtowners who relied on the poverty and stupidity of
the poor derelicts they exploited to ensure their defeat. But the
si^en resolve of the men, fanned to anger by the fiery eloquence
of one of their number, Ben TiUett, and sustained by the growing

IS- Life of Wittiam Morns, II, loi.

»I«rM ® precarious living as a dock-walloper, was hurled into

end gra^ wluch broke loose through a defective hook at the

md of the TO^fail and an untrajned incompetent at the wiich. His right cheek W

C^^S^on ^ f the soc^ and his skuU fractured. For two ho^ he
3^1^ the wmtiy decide, for such accidents were too common to be

® “ the Employers’ liability Act!

then recently passed, no compensation was paid him. J-iaumiy act,

—Sir yames Sexton, Agitator, 7^-5.

SHOOTING NIAGARA j 205

sympathy of the public, proved stronger than the famih^^
weapon of starvation. For two months the docks remained
closed. Then the dockowners gave way.. Not only was “the
docker’s tanner” won but a great Union of “ unskilled” labour—
the Doc^, Wharf and Riverside Labourers’ Union—had been
foimded.

Yet by itself Trade Unionism was not enough. In a society
seeking profits through world trade and based on economic
fluctuation, an army of surplus labour was inescapable. Under
the existing system its periodic unemplo3Tnent was attended by
the extreme of destitution and degradation. This hard rock of
imorganised and soulless poverty was a constant threat to the
Trade Union movement. In the highly-skilled trades, the aristo¬
crat of labour could present a solid front to the capitalist aggres¬
sor. But ekewhere the employer could always count on the
amorphous mass of starving poverty from which to draft non¬
union or “free” labour into his factories and so break a strike.
The bitterness of Union feeling against the “blackleg”—
generally some poor down-and-out in need of a meal—and the
sullen insistence on the rightfulness of peaceful picketing sprang
from this.

Before labour could secure its full rights, the working class
as a whole needed to be redeemed from extreme poverty and
given self-respect, knowledge and esprit de corps through better
housing, education and above all some sort of living wage. Organ¬
ised Labour could not stand erect so long as it rested on the social
morass of the submerged t&th. State action was necessary to
give the workers’ organisations—Trades Unions and co-operative
societies—a secure field of operation. Otherwise the capitalist,
with his constant recourse to new machinery displacing skilled
men by unskilled, might beat them in the end.

It was the recognition of this that inspired the foimdation in
1885 of the Fabian Society. It began as a little group of youthful
radicals—drawn mostly from the middle-class—^who had repudi¬
ated the Jmssez-Jaire tenets of utilitarianism but who retained the
utilitarian’s contempt for the inefiicient and illogical. One of the
members was a yoimg, red-haired Irishman named Bernard Shaw
who about this time electrified a conference of intellectuals and
highbrow politicians by rea ding a paper to prove that the land¬
lord, the capitalist and the burglar were equally the enemies of
society. The Fabian thesis was that before social revolution could

ENGLISH SAGA

206

be achieved, the educated leaders of society most themselves be
brought to see the necessity of revolution. In a law-abiding
country like England mob oratory and emotional appeals to
mass violence could never succeed. The capitalist state was not
to be stormed but gradually occupied by a process of infiltration.

This was the policy of “ permeation.” It aimed at permeating
the political organisations and institutions of the country with
Socialist ideas without any open avowal of socialism. The
Fabians were encouraged to seek membership of every society-
liberal, Tory or Labour, Christian or atheist—that would admit
them and there secure by the arts of persuasion and lobbying the
adoption of socialist measures. Especially were they to seek to
permeate the Opposition, since by its very nature parliamentary
Opposition is inclined to be revolutionary and always seeking to
overturn the government.

The Fabians pinned thdr faith to an extension of legislative
action. They announced that “the era of ad mini stration had
come.” The state was to be socialised through its own machinery.
Instead of concerning themselves with such questions as free
trade, retrenchment. Church disestablishment and the abolition
of the House of Lords, the Fabians were to concentrate on free
education, municipal trading, the provision of state-aided houses
and small holdings and the graduated taxation of incomes and
estates. They were not to dicta.te but to throw out suggestions.
Nothing could have been better adapted to the spirit of the
time or the character of England.

Fabianism went with the tide* of contemporary thought.
The Benthamites had long emphasised the sanatory qualities of
reforming legislation supported by an incorruptible and cen¬
tralised bureaucracy and inspectorate. As a result of their teach¬
ing, Liberals had purged the dvil service of corruption in the
name of utility and reason. An efficient administration, subject
to a Parliament increasingly taught to regard itself as legislative
rather than a debating assembly, was now to be applied for a
purpose which its utilitarian sponsors would have viewed with
horror—“the practical extoision of the activity of the state.
The weapon the utilitarians had forged was to destroy
economic utilitarianism.

For only the state’s intervention could now redress the state’s
neglect. The only remedy for the evil of laissez-faire seemed to

^A. V. JHc^, Lean and Opadon m Mgland, Jog.

SHOOTING NIAGARA 207

be to rq»udiate laissez-faire. For many years past great teachers
like Ruskin and T. H. Green at Oxford had impressed on
yoimger consciences the ideal of social responsibilitv. A new
generation of educated men and women was now growing up
whose minds were contemplating the necessity of solving the
problems created by a century of industrialism

But it was too late to imdo what laissez-faire had done. In
fifty years its hold on English thought had transformed the face
of society. By i88i seventeen and a half out of twenty-six milli ngs
were living in towns: by 1891 twenty-one millions out of twentj'-
nine millions. Eager Americans visiting Britain in the ’eighties
and ’nineties looked in vain in the dty streets for the hordes
of rosy, golden-haired, blue-eyed children whom they had
been led to expect in the Anglo-Saxon island. The national
type, already aft'ected in London by the constant influx of cheap
foreign labour, was growing smaller and paler. Bad teeth,
pasty complexions and weak chests were becoming British
traits.

For the great mass of the population the traditionary, religious
and rural England of the past had already passed out of memory.
In its place had risen a new Britain of, “male employment, boy
labour at relatively high wages, early marriages, over-worked
mothers, high birth and death rates, high infant mortality, bad
housing, a landscape scarred and smudged.”^ In the interests of
capital the majority of the British people had assumed lives that
bore little resemblance to those of their country forebears. The
age-long birthright of man—pure air, fresh food, the sight and
touch of growing nature, space for reflection—had ceased to
be theirs. In its place they had been given the atmosphere
of the smoke-stack and the pea-souper fog, the herd society
of the streets, the gin palace and the hdfpenny newspaper.
After a generation they scarcely any longer missed what they
had lost.

It was therefore idle to hope to return, vrith William Morris
and the socialists, to the days of peasant communities and hand-
craftsmanship. Capitalism had created the proletariat, and the
proletariat was not a theory but a fact. It could not be destroyed
or ignored: it could only be transformed by education and
improved urban conditions. It was in this that the problem of
the reformers lay.

^ Fify Tears^ Thomas Jones, The Life of the People, xyy*

ENGLISH SAGA

208

Education and municipal reform were the intellectual themes
of the hour. The need for the first impressed even reactionaries.

“ We must educate our masters,” Robert Lowe had declared before
the passing of Disraeli’s Reform Bill. The older ideal of education
based on rdigion and the teaching of hereditary crafts in the
home had vanished with the migration into the towns. Only
the most rudimentary instruction in reading, writing and
arithmetic had as yet taken its place. The ^eat mass of the
nation was Uliterate.^ In 1869 only one British child in two
was receiving any education at all. Of those, more than half were
being taught in schools maintained by the Church of England,
which together with other denominational and voluntary schools
had for some time been in receipt of small government grants-
in-aid.

In 1870 William Edward Forster, the Quaker Vice-President of
Gladstone’s fiirst liberal a dmini stration, introduced an Education
Act, setting up compulsory Local School Boards to provide
secular elementary education for all children between the ages of
five and thirteen® not already provided for by denominational
schools. The cost was met partly out of state grants and rates and
partly out of parents’ fees. Owing to jealousy between the
churches, the principle was laid down that all grant-aided educa¬
tion should be unsectarian. By this means religious teaching
inspired by conviction was virtually ruled out. It thus came
about—though no one seems to have realised it at the time—^that
the idealism of future generations, founded on a secular state
education, differed from that of the old, which still derived
from the Christian ethic. Between the two was to arise an
almost -unbridgeable gulf of misimderstanding.

Forster’s Act affected little more than half the children in the
coimtry. It was unpopular with working-class parents who
resent^ the limitation put on the family earning capacity by

1 The ignorance of the young factory operatives in the ’forties—the forerunners of
the new tixban nation—is illustrated by me Report of the Childrens’ Employment
Commission, dted by Engels in his Condition of the Working (Mss in England^ 112^13*

“Several had never heard the name of the ^een nor other.names, such as Nelson,
Wellington, Bonaparte; but it was noteworthy that those who had never heard even
of St. Paul, Moses, or Solomon, were very well instructed as to the life, deeds, and
character of Bid^ Turpin, and especially of Jack Sheppard. . . .”

“To the question who Christ was, Home received the following answers among
others; ‘ He was Adam*; ‘ He was an Apostle‘ He was the Saviour’s Lord’s Son*;
and from a youth of sixteen, * He was a king of London long ago.’ ”

*The school leaving age was raised to 14 in 1900 by a Conservative Government
which in the previous year established a national Board of Education.

SHOOTING NIAGARA

209

school attendance.^ Yet its underlying principle served the
ends of organised Labour, not only by bringing cheap education
within reach of the workers but by its indirect check on the com¬
petition of juvenile labour and its tendency to raise adult wages.

A strong demand arose, therefore, to extend its scope. In 1876 a
Conservative government tightened the obligations of parents
and in 1880 a Liberal government made them universally com¬
pulsory. In 1891 another Conservative administration dispensed
with fees and made elementary education free for all. Thus both
parties acknowledged the collectivist principle that the rich should
be compelled to contribute to the education of the poor.

The insignificance of the contribution could not alter the sig¬
nificance of the principle. Once established, the pressure of
electoral numbers was sure in the end to do more. Because of
the normal Anglo-Saxon indifference to the claims of intellect,
the advance of state education was at first deliberate rather
than rapid. But the figures speak for themselves. In 1870 the
total grant out of revenue towards national education was
5^912,000. By 1888 it had risen to ^4,168,000. By 1905 it was
nearly 3^11,000,000 and the contribution from local rates another
£7,000,000. At the turn of the century London alone was paying
a million a year or £28 per child—almost the equivalent of a con¬
temporary farm labourer’s wage. After the liberal triumph in
1906 school medical services were established and public funds
afforded for feeding necessitous children. To an old Chartist,
who fifty years before had paid 6d. a week for his fees at a night
school, the new policy appeared one of ‘‘coddling.” “It is well
to educate the people,” he wrote, “but the tendency of much of
the School Board policy of the day is to pauperise the people.
Yet School Boards ought, above all things, to beware of under¬
mining the independence of the individual,”®

In municipal administration the collectivist advance was even
more striking. Within a generation a vast new vested interest,
officiaUy subordinated to the general will as expressed in local

few years after the Act a visit by two antiquarians to the dingy neighbourhood
of Tuthill Stairs, Newcastle, caused a panic ^ong the mothers of the place who,
mistaking the learned gentlemen for school inspectors, made a rush to hide their
children.—IF. jE. Adams, Memoirs of a Social Atom, 11 ,373. , , j

* W, £• Adams, Memoirs of a Sodal Atom, //, Young Reginald

afterwards Lord Esher, was wiser. “It is pleasant to see small and boys rea^g
the labels in the shop windows,” he wrote in 1874. “It is one of the ot the
happier future. Shall I live to see education of children forced upon parents? Why can
it not be done? That great good which must come, but for which we have to linger
and wait?”—jfottmaZf and Letters of Ttscomt Esher, I, 21,

210

ENGLISH SAGA

and parliamentary elections and controlled by salaried public
servants, had sprung into existence in the island dedicated to the
sanctity of private wealth. Parliamentary powers of collective
control and ownership, and sometimes of monopoly, were sought
and obtained, at first by the greater cities, later by the counties
and smallor urban areas. The Local Government Act of 1888
established elective County Councils with control of local affairs
and taxation. In that year London achieved its County Council—
presently to revolutionise the life of its poorer inhabitants. The
services of communal life which individual effort had failed to
give to the vast urban agglomerations it had created, were
supplied step by step by locd authorities. They were paid for out
of rates and loans charged on rates. The first successful flotation
of municipal stock was made in 1880 by the Liverpool Corpora¬
tion. By 1896 the local government debt of the country was
already 200 million pounds. Only fourteen years later it was
three times greater.

The first services performed by the new local authorities were
lighting, paving, and cheap transport. By far the most important
were education and housing. In nothing had laissez-faire
achieved so much and so badly as in housing. It had built homes
for millions of new factory workers, and not to endure but to
perish. The vital attribute of a home is that it should be per¬
manent. The principle of the jerry builder was to make as quick
a profit as possible on as large a turnover for as little expendi¬
ture of labour and money. The houses went up fast enough
but they did not last. Thqr were not meant to.

They were built in rows and usually back to back—poky,
hideous, uncomfortable and insanitary. The last thing that
was thought of in making them was the convenience of the
occupant.^ Except in the granite towns and villages of East
Lancashire and Ae West Riding th^ were so flimsy that they
swayed with the wind and their walls so thin that their inmates
were traditionally reputed to be able to hear their neighbours
making up their minds.

Frequently such houses were erected by the companies that
employed their occupants This was particularly so in iron and coal
districts where there was little alternative employment. A man
who lost his job lost his home. The rents were “kept back” from

^ Jack Joaes, the lUboar said of one of them in the House of Commons that

when a man got up in the morning he had to put his legs through the window to get
his trousers on.

SHOOTING NIAGARA 2 II

the weekly wages. The feeling of security and the pride of owner¬
ship which home should foster in a free man were lacking.

It was due to the slowly-growing realisation of at least some of
this by the comfortable classes, many of whom were now encount¬
ering slum conditions at first hand in their “settlement” work, as
wdl as to the galloping deterioration that had by now begun in
the earlier industrial dwellings, that a Royal Commission on the
Housing of the Poor was set up by Gladstone in 1884. It was,
most significantly presided over by the Prince of Wales. Its
interim report published a year later proposed a preliminary
purchase at a statutory price of three old prison sites for housing
estates. This, in itself, was a most important modification of
utilitarian principle since it recurred—in however tentative a
form—to the old medieval ideal not of a market but of a “fair”
price. It was the first sign of recognition of a new, or rather a
very old, ideal of government.

The Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1890 which
embodied the main part of the recommendations of the Royal
Commission stemmed if it did not reverse the rising tide
of slum-dwelling. It created new powers of buying and demolish¬
ing insanitary houses, opening out congested dleys and cuk de sac
and building new dwellings on their sites. In practice, until
tightened up by increased powers of government inspection and
the growing force of organised working-class opinion, the Act
was frequently evaded or perverted. Representation on local
councils was usually confined to the smaller capitalists who
alone had both the time and the inclination to give to municipal
work: all too often they were prompted by the opportunities
afforded of serving their own interests. Jerry builders were
apt to pack Health and General Purposes Committees in
order to frame—and what was worse supervise—the bye¬
laws about building and sanitation which Parliament had
intended to control them. And the purchase of land for buildin g
purposes was. often proceeded by elaborate and shady manoeuvres
by those who were—according to democratic notions—supposed
to represent and protect the people but who in practice used the
machinery of democracy to exploit them further. For it was for¬
gotten by reformers that every reform is dependent in the last
resort on the men who carry it out, and national leadership,
whether aristocratic or democratic, bn the fitness, spiritual as
well as intellectual, of those who govern.

ENGLISH SAGA

212

Yet, as the theory of social responsibility increasingly haunted
the minds of the educated minority, a process characteristically
English took place. The larger and better-established capi¬
talists—and above all their sons—began to devote themselves to
the service of the public they or their forebears had fleeced.
They did so without hope of further profit and out of a sense of
noblesse oblige, gained more often than not at the new public
sdiools which since Arnold of Rugby’s days had opened their
gates and thpir ideology to the commercial classes. A new ty^
of public man arose—provincial, aggressive and democratic in
method and appeal—whose interest lay neither in foreign policy
n or parliamentary debate but in the extension of municipal
services. Living on the private wealth acquired or inherited under
laissez-faire, th^ were able to throw their entire energies into the
work of mitigating the evils wrought by Imsez-faire, These new,
and to their individualist fathers’ way of t h i n ki ng , heretic^ rad¬
icals were stiU iconoclastic towards the older notions of privilege
and decorum. But though they resented the power of the landed
aristocracy and lost no opportunity of humbling it, they were
no enemies to the capitalist and manufacturer. The very inroads
they made on laissez-faire practice helped to maintain the prestige
and opportunities of their class by appea^g the social unrest of
the masses. The most famous of these local radical reformers
was Joseph Chamberlain, the dapper young hardware merchant
with the orchid, the monode and the terrible rq)ublican senti¬
ments who became Mayor of Birmingham in 1873 at 37,
and President of the Board of Trade in Mr. Gladstone’s second
Adminis tration in 1880.

In all this the domestic history of Britain during the last two
decades of the nineteenth and the first of the twentieth century
constituted the first act of a great revolution. During these years
a vigorous capitalist and less vigorous but stiU powerful aristo¬
cratic England were Converted to an dementary socialism whose
baas was that the weak and ineffident should constitute a first
charge on the strong and able. The pioneer activities of a humane
and intdligent minority of their own members contributed to
that conversion. But the real driving force came from the
superior votes of the urban workers, which by a third Reform
Act in 1884 had been reinforced by those of bhe county house¬
holders.

The ruling dasses did not consdously admit their conversion,

SHOOTING NIAGARA

213

for they were unaware of it.^ And their struggle against it, like
all English struggles, was grudging and tenacious. But^ while
denouncing the name of Socialism which they believed to be
synonymous with mob plunder and the bloody destruction of
their homes and altars, they allowed socialist principles to inspire
their laws and, in an illogical, piecemeal and incomplete way
they increasingly applied socialist practice. For the void in the
great industrial towns that their fathers’ search for wealth had
created left them no alternative. The more the towns grew the
more it clamoured to be filled.

The triumphs of science hastened the triumph of the collecti¬
vist. Gas and electric lighting and fuel, steam and electric trans¬
port, the telegraph and the tdephone made for a communal
rather than an individualist organisation of life. So did the course
of capitalism itself. For the new collectivism that was imper-
ceptibly’destro3dng laissez-faire did not only spring from working-
class discontent at laissezfaire conditions.

It arose out of the very core of Benthamism. For the Bent¬
hamite, in his exaggerated tenderness for the individual, pro¬
claimed his right to make any contract he liked in the pursuit of
his own interests. It followed that two or more individuals
were free to associate in any way they chose and in pursuit of
their aggregate interests to agree to act as a single person.

With the extension of machinery and transport, industry
perpetually tended to increase its scale of operations. For this it
needed ever more capital. The individual trader was thus increas¬
ingly impelled to bind himself in association with others. The

1 Mr. Sidney Webb, now Lord Passfid^ spoke of this unconscious conversion of the
capitalist middle dasses to Sodalism in a conversation recorded by Mr. George
Eastgate in The Times of 23rd August, 1902.

“The practical man, oblivious or contemptuous of any theory of the s<^al
organism or general principals of social orgjanisation, has been forced, by the necessities
of the time, into an ever <KCpening collectivist channel. Sodalism, of course, he sdll
rejects and despises. The individualist town councillor will walk along the municipal
pavement, lit by munidpal gas, and deansed by munidpal brooms with^ mumdpal
water, and sedng by the munidpal dock in the munidpal market that he is too early
to meet his children coming &om the munidpal school, hard by the county lunatic
asylum and munidpal hospital, will use the national telegraph system to tdl them not
to walk through the munidpal park, but to come by the munidpal tramway to meet
him in the munidpal reading-room by the munidpal art gallery, museum and libraij
where he intends to consult some of the national publications in order to prepare his
next speech in the munidpal town hall in favour of the nationalisation of ca nal s and
the increase of Government control over the railway system. * Sodalism,^ Sir,* he
will say, * don’t waste the time of a practical man by your fantastic absurdities. Sdf*
help, Sir, individual sdf-hdp, that’s what’s made our dty what it is.’ •

E.S.

ENGLISH SAGA

214

fictitious trading personages so created enjoyed- the legal rights
of the individual of laissez-faire sodety. But the powers created
by their joint wealth far exceeded those of a single person. Just
as organised labour acquired rights against the individual, so
organised capital assumeii powers that left the private merchant
a pigmy in a realm of giants.

Though the ordinary man was slow to perceive what was
happening, his vaunted liberty and significance were dwindling
every year. Even by the ’seventies a handful of railway companies
owned wealth equal in the aggregate to three-quarters of the
National Debt. In the course of their business sudi corporations
sought vast powers. Who-e these were denied them by the
common law, recourse for legislation could be had to a House of
Commons in which the successful business man and finander was
b^inning to succeed the country gentleman as the predominant
type. Through new forms of investment the entire propertied
class of the cotmtry was learning to delegate its wealth and
responsibilities to corporate bodies. The historic justification of
private property had been that it fostered responsibility and acted
as a bulwark against tyranny. It was now being used by the
individual to purchase freedom from reqransibility. It was accum¬
ulating despotic powers in the hands of mechanical corporations
without consdence or sense of obligation.

A generation which had been taught to believe that the
pursuit of profits was the one road to national prosperity made
no attempt to secure the threatened birthright of their race. The
freedom of the subject inherited from the great English patriots
and martyrs was unconraously bartered away for increased
dividends. The later Victorians, for all the probity of thdr
private and domestic lives, cheerfully surrendered the liberties of
their unborn children to the soulless corporations that gave th>>m
wealth. They never paused to reflect what th^ were doing.

^Yet in all that they did as individuals the Victorians were
guid^ by consdence; in this they were the inheritors of the
English past. No generation ever had a higher record in this.
The honesty and integrity of the Victorian merchant and manu-
fectnrer was a byword throughout the world. Again and
again private charity-, pity and a sense of duty and public service
redeemed the consequences of a false economic philosophy.

Yet the consdence of the individual was also betrayed in the
end to the theory of the overriding sanctity of profit-making.

SHOOTING NIAGARA

215

In the late ’fifties and early ’sixties Liberal governments to suit
the convenience of the commercial community passed legislation
conferring on joint-stock companies the privilege of limited
liability. Henceforward fictitious bodies, enjoying the legal
rights of individuals, could incur unlimited financial obligations
without their individual shareholders becoming fully responsible
for them.

Up to this time a man’s power to make money by transferring
his credit and freedom of commercial action to others was"
restrained by his liability for the obligations they might
incur. This check on irresponsible delegation was. now removed.
A man could grow rich in security and even innocence from
business practices which would have outraged his conscience as
an individual. He could avoid both the risks and stigma of
transactions done by others in pursuit of profits in which he
shared.

At first the investing public was slow to avail itself of the
opportunities afforded by the Companies Act of 1862.^ For a
generation the use of limited liability was chiefly confined to
the professional commercial community. But after the failure of
the City of Glasgow Bank in 1879, when many private share¬
holders were called upon to meet obligations hundreds of times
greater than the-value of their shares, private investors increas¬
ingly entrusted their money to concerns carrying only limited
liability. During the last eight years of the century more than
thirty thousand limited companies were floated and ten thousand
wound up. In 1899 there were 27,969 registered companies in
the United ELingdom with a paid-up capital of £1,512,098,098:
by 1914, 64,692 with £2,531,947,661. Ownership of the nation’s
wealth was thus increasingly separated from its control. And
the conscience of the individual ceased to regiilate its use.

The consequences of the Companies Act of 1862 were perhaps
greater than that of any single measure in English parliamentary
history. They completed the divorce between the Christian
conscience and the economic practice of everyday life. They
paganised the commercial community. Henceforward an astute
man by adherence to legal rules which had nothing to do with
morality could grow immensely rich by virtue of shuffling off

1 By the Companies’ Act of 1862, it became possible for any one to fo^d a limited
liability company by obtaining signatures to a memora nd u m of registration and
adding the word Limited” to its nomenclature.

ENGLISH SAGA

216

his most elementary obligations to his fellows. He could not
only grow rich by such means. He could grow immensely
powerful.

The break-up of the medieval church' had transferred power
from the Christian state, ■with its theoretic moral control over ail
human economic activities, to the landovmer, who though he
may have begun as an avaricious courtier and a plunderer of
monastic lands, was gradually transmuted by the magic of the
English countryside and the personal responsibility attaching to
his rustic form of wealth into the co'untry gentleman. In less
than two centujries the hard, grasping usurer of Tudor timps had
grown into Sir Roger de Coverley. But by that time the pursuit
of wealth was already taking new forms. The great fortunes of
the eighteenth century were made by overseas trade. The Turkey
merchant and the East India nabob were the pioneers of the new
national economy. They also were absorbed by marriage and
purchase into the ranks of the landed gentry until in the early
nineteenth century their place was taken by still newer leaders—
the industrialists and shipowners, the capitalists of coal, cotton
and iron.

The principle of limited liability now set up another arbiter of
economic society. The company promoter—Sir Gorgias Midas of
du Maurier’s dra-wings and uncle Ponderevo of Wells’s ronaance
—^was the social wonder of the last years of the old and the first of
the new century. Before his glittering if nebulous throne all
who had money to invest prostrated themselves, lured by his
promise of quick and easy profits. His craft consisted in raising
money on loan to float or purchase commercial concerns on
favourable terms and in subsequently disposing of tTipm
at a profit, not necessarily by developing their productive
capacity but by enhancing their market value. He raised the
latter by the arts of display and suggestion as’ a stock breeder
raises a fat pig. His joum^men were advertisers, publicity
agents, stockbrokers and share pushers. If in the course of his o\sx
sanguine efforts to boost t h em, his concerns collapsed before they
were ripe for se lling —and-in his early days they frequently did—
he could escape under cover of limited liabilityj wind up the
company and with the full blessing of the law start again. The
burd^ was home by the company’s creditois and by sucdi credu¬
lous investors as, allured by his arts, had bought their shares at
an exaggerated price.

SHOOTING NIAGARA

217

But the effects of these operations did not stop there. For by
directing money into enterprises designed not so much for stable
long-term production as for quick capital appreciation the new
financier tended to make industrial employment even more
precarious than it had been before. Mushroom companies
sprang up in all directions to initiate or develop industrial
processes which could have little or no enduring foture. This
directly affected the working man and his social background.
More than ever his job and home became dependent on circum¬
stances beyond his control. As an individual he became more
and more helpless.

The stimulus to joint stock manufacturing and trading
afforded by the principle of limited liability had another fatal
consequence on the life of the working man. Under laissez-faire
individualism it at least paid to be efficient. The workman who
by his drill and industry furthered the interests of his employer
had a reasonable chance of promotion, for he was too valuabe
to lose. But when the control of business passed out of the hands
of the private employer using his own capital into that of the
financial company representing an intangible mass of absentee
shareholders without active knowledge of its affairs, the in¬
dustrious workman found it increasingly difficult to better
himself. His efficiency and steadfastness had no value to
directors whose only aim was to sell the concern that employed
him at an inflated value. In any case he was less likely to be noticed
by managers whose stake in the business was confined to salaries
paid them by the shareholders and who were riot personally inter¬
ested in its success. Thus the conscientious workman was
increasingly discouraged. The man with ambition and intelli¬
gence, instead of identifjdng himself with the industrial system
of which he was part, was driven to rebel against it. Instead of
becoming a small capitalist, he bkame a socialist.

Adam Smith had always maintained that manufacturing
by joint-stock companies must prove injurious to the public
interest. He argued that efficiency and consequently wealth
resulted from every man attending scrupulously to his own self-
interest. Such attention could not be successfiilly delegated. A
large joint-stock company, financed by distant and “amateur”
shareholders and managed by salaried nominees, was bound to be
less efficient than a small concern directed by the man who would
be the sole beneficiary if it succeeded and the chief loser if it failed.

ENGLISH SAGA

218

With the growth of this kind of business, the control of commerce
passed into less vigorous hands. The financial speculator with
the talent for exploiting the shareholder and the man of routine
who gave no trouble to the speculator took the place of the maT^
of initiative and drive. Gtenius was discouraged: mediocrity
preferred.

■ Had the world been governed by the purely mechanical and
mathematical processes that so fascinated the pedants of laissez-
faire, this would have mattered little, for it could not have
endured. The joint-stock company would have cut its own
throat and so perished. Its inefiiciency would have promptly
limited its capacity for harm. But what Adam Smith failed to sm
was that manufacturing by joint-stock companies might be
successful though injurious to the public. For, as has been
pointed out in a brilliant analysis of contemporary commercial
practice,^ “success for limited liability companies does not
depend upon efficiency but upon an ability to comer the market.”
With the enormous concentration of capital secured through
successful company promotion, monopoly of this kind became
increasingly easy. The public, and not the joint-stodc share¬
holders, paid for the inefficiency of the men who managed their,
concern. For though the latter might be, and. generally were,
less efficient as producers, they were not necessarily so as adver¬
tisers, numipulators of credit and political log-rollers.

The growth of collectivism in finance widened the gulf
between the man of property and the proletarian. The latter,
unless he had a gamin genius for financial manipulation, foimd
it increasingly hard to rise out of his class. The former, if he
invested his capital wisely, found it increasingly easy to live on
its fruits without contact with the industrial processes in which
it was employed. He became a rentier', a mere enjoyer of auto¬
matic wedth to whose making he contributed nothing in thought
or effort. His responsibility towards those who did so became
negligible.

* • • • • •

All this strengthened the case for the state control of private
wealth. The justification of privilege and power is the fulfil¬
ment of social duty. Possessions divorced from any personal
^nse of obligation seem a kind of theft on all who do not share
them. They outrage the moral sense of mankind. Once the
^ y. A Qvildmca^s IrUerprctation qf History^ 964,

SHOOTINtt NIAGARA 219

sanctity of Imssez-faire itself was repudiated, the riches of the
Forsytes and still more of their rattier children were impossible
to justify. They seemed to ser\'e no other purpose but the
private enjo3nment of their owners. Even w'here, as often
happened in kindly England, their possessors spmt their fortunes
in charitable deeds, their philanthropy had no visible connection
with the processes, harsh and inhuman, by which they obtained
their wealth.

The socialist attack that developed as the nineteenth century
drew to its dose was therefore levdled at the whole prindple of
private property. Because individual wealth was abused, it was
argued that it should be abolished altogether. As a reaction
against the maldistribution and inhuman conditions of capital¬
ist production, the old demand was made—long unheard in
Christian Eng land—that production should be directly for use
and not for profit. But tiiose who voiced it, being dther men
without property or rentiers whose ownership was divorced from
personal use, demanded not that the producer and craftsmen
should resume their lost control over their own industry, but that
the state should assume the functions of the capitalist. They were
so accustomed to the despotism of absentee capital that their
only remedy for its ill effects was to transfer its ownership from
the individual to the community, and its control from the
capitalist director to the state bureaucrat. They made no attempt
to restore it to those who could make the best use of it—not the
people in the abstract but the people as individual producers.
The scale of modem machinery and the gargantuan organisation
of life to which it had given rise seemed to them to render such
an attempt impracticable.

The intellectual Socialist, who superseded the more senti¬
mental Christian-Sodalist of the past, appeared as the champion
of an omnipotent state. He argued that the state should restrict
the power of the rich and powerful by taxing and ultimately
confiscating the wealth that was the source of their power. In
1893 the Fabian Society issued its famous manifesto d emand i ng
the ownership by the community of the means of production,
distribution and exchange. In the same year the Independent
Labour Party was founded, dedicated to the same end and seeking
it by direct socialist representation in Parliament and on local
authorities.

From this devdopment arose a curious contradiction in the

220

ENGLISH SAGA

character of the British working-class movement. Its intellectual
leaders set up the state as the deus ex machim which was to rescue
society from the abuses of individualism. But the state is an
abstraction and its supremacy can only be exercised through
individuals. If the state is to be all powerful, the individuals who
exercise its authority must be all pdwerful, too. To a Latin,
German or Russian socialist, accustomed from birth to the ideal
of an overriding centralised despo,tism, there was nothing repug¬
nant in such a daim. But in England, the traditional home of
individual liberty, a proposition that restored to a state official
the power of the Stuart kings was disquieting. To aigue that
this o mni potent Whitehall would in turn be controlled by the
elected representatives of the people was merdy to say that un¬
controlled power should rest in the hands of whoever could
persuade or hoax the dectorate into entrusting it to them. It
might be a party caucus, it might be a popular dictator. It might
even be the veiy capitalist whom the new state power was de¬
signed to suppress.

The early sodalists in their enthusiasm for their thesis did not
detect the weakness in their remedy. Thdr emotional appeal to
the masses, and even more to thdr middle-class sympathisers,
was to that love of liberty which the capitalist monopoly over
the work and daily life of millions had outraged. Yet by attack¬
ing the private ownership of property they struck unconsdously
at the foimdation on which in the historic polity of England’s
individual liberty had always rested. Because the privilege of
ownership had ceased to be widespread as in the past and had
become restricted to the few, they supposed that its destruction
would extend the freedom of the many.

They forgot that, apart from economic liberty, political
liberty has little meaning. Only so long as a man knows that he
can defy superior power and sl^ support bimsdf and his loved
ones is he a free man„r Without that knowledge, whatever his
standard of living or theoretical status, he is a kind of slave. And
when all power is vested in the state and the state is the owner
both of the workers’ homes and the means of production, private
liberty becomes a rather nebulous thing. There was little
enough liberty for the workers under the rule of the nineteenth-
century joint-stock capitalist, except, of course, the liberty to
starve. But in the Fabian paradise which was to take its place,
though there might be a great deal more comfort, there was to

SHOOTING NIAGARA 221

be no liberty at all. The State, or rather the state official, was
to rule all things.

Such a paradise, at first sight, seemed to offer so many things
of which the English worker stood in need. It offerrf better i
wages and conditions of labour, cleaner and more commodious
homes, social services and public amenities in place of the drab
negation of the utilitarian city, above all the end of the shameless
exploitation of poverty by we^th which robbed men and women
of their self-respect. Yet when the promised land was examined
more closely, it was seen to contain a presence which was not
acceptable to an Englishman. For there in the midst of the
garden stood Nosey Parker with the sword of the all-seeing
State. And of all men none was more temperamentally likely
to resent that presence than the rough and liberty-loving
workman of England.

The socialist thinkers could see no problem in this. The
dictatorship of the state would be exercised, they argued, on
behalf of the working classes. Being for the most part men
of the study, they failed to see how their republic would work
out in practice. They never realised how heavily in an over¬
crowded country, in which the productive work and home life
of the million had been centred in great towns, the tjTanny of
the official, if vested with absolute power, would press on the
working man. It is inevitably the poor not the rich who most
fed the humiliating effects of jack-in-office despotism, for as
individuals they have so much less power of appeal against it.
The Sodalists in their passion for statistics—^the instrument they
inherited from the utilitarians—^forgot that the liberty of the
workers in the aggregate may bear little rdation to the liberty of
the worker as an individual. They did not see how pathetically
helpless he might be against the pricks of petty tyranny.

The English working man, even after a century of factory
labour, did not take readily to aggregate conceptions of himself.
For all his exploitation he was the heir to the English ages; to
Simon de Montfort, John Hampden and old Kelly of Silverstone
who wanted naik over his coffin to stop his ndghbours trampling
on him. He did not want liberty as a member of a dass: he
wanted it as a man. An offidal bossing him about was no less a
tyrant in his ^es because he was vested with popular authority.
The English proletarian was a contradiction in terms: economic¬
ally a wage slave, he was still spiritually and in his own eyes a

222

ENGLISH SAGA

freeman. He was easily ‘‘put upon” but did not readily brook
interference. His fists and his tongue were always quick to assert
his independence.

The love of liberty came out in his phrases,-in his jokes, in his
invincible, half-blasphemous, ironical commentary on the ups
and downs of his harsh life. His “ ’Ere, who d’yre think yre a’get-
ting at?” his “Tell us anuvor, guvnor,” like his jokes about
mother-in-laws and old gentlemen slipping on banana skins,
were part of his protests against interference and pompous power.
He refused to part with his humour, his right to grumble, his
right to what little liberty the wage struggle left him to go
about his private business in his own way. Not . clearly under¬
standing how he had been swindled out of his birthright—Thorne,
status and privilege—^he was yet aware of the dignity of his
descent. He knew himself to be as good as any man, and better.

Robbed by the machine of pride and pleasure in his work, he
still kept inviolate his right to take pleasure in his liberty. His
most precious possession was his right to enjoy himself in his
own way. On Hampstead Heath or Hackney Marshes on a bank
holiday one saw him at his most uproarious: expressing himself
in codkney carnival: costers in all their pride of pearls and
feathers, frolicsome young women vrith tambourines singing
and making unblushing advances to joUy strangers, old parties
with bottles of stout and jests for every passer-by, and young and
old pressing into the side-shows and booths where giants and
dwarfs, nigger minstrels and performing dogs and every
variety ,of freak and novelty made merry for the delight of the
disinherited son, returned for a glorious hour to his father’s
kingdom of freedom. So in more normal times in the trains from
Stepney to Highbury one might in the coxirse of half an hour’s
journey encounter a lad pla3ring airs on a fiddle, an old man
beguiling his journey with an accordion and a chorus of young
workmen singing in unison. By being jolly and having a good
time when the occasion offered,the English poor reminded them¬
selves and the rich men they served that Jai was as good as his
master and that freedom was his birthright.

One saw industrial England at its roughest and freest in any
town where seamen congregated. In the Ratcliff Highway in the
’eighties and ’nineties almost every house was a tavern vrith a
dance hall at the back where a steam organ kept up perpetual
revelry. The whole jglace resounded vrith music, the shouting of

SHOOTING NIAGARA

223

drunken sailors and their bright scarved girls, the clatter of the
steam organs and the strumming of nigger minstrels. But any
poor street on frequent occasion presented the same scene in
miniature: a German band, a dancing polar bean a visit from
the Salvation Army or a band of morris dancers could bring the
population of every crowded house into the street. Most poor
districts had their quota of barrel-organs, whose owners, ha\dng
finished their day’s work in wealthier parts, could generally be
prevailed upon to oblige with a tune to w’hich the whole street
stepped it on the flags. A wedding was always the occasion for the
hire of a barrel oigan for the day and for continuous music from
the time of the bridal couple’s return to the adjournment of the
company to the nearest “boozer.” Only a fight—a common
occurrence—could bring the harmony to a stop.

The supreme embodiment of the sur\dving character of the
English working people was the music hall. Here art held up
the mirror to nature. It was, as Mr. J. B. Booth of Pink ^Un fame
has written, “a purely native product, cheery, unregenerate,
optimistic” Springing spontaneously out of the sing-song of the
upper tavern room and the old out-of-door gardens of the artisan
of the pastoral past it became for a space of time a British institu¬
tion. Its morality was to make the best of a bad job: its purpose
to make every one free and easy. Performers and audience, imder
the genial and bacchanalian presidency of the chairman, with his
buttonhole, his mesmeric eye and his town crier’s voice, combined
'in expressing their own individuality. At the old South London,
whenever there was a hitch in the programme, the chairman,
“Bob” Courtney, glittering with false diamonds and laying aside
his glass and cigar, would rise to sing his traditional, song,
“Britannia’s Voice of Thunder,” while the whole audience kept
time, drowning singing and even big drum with an equallj-
traditional refrain of “good old Bob I Bob! Bob! Bob!” Itssongs,
circulating in succession among the entire population—
“Champagne Charlie,” “Lardi-da,” “It’s all done by kindness,”
“How’s your poor feet,” “What ho! she bumps,” “Pretty Polly
Perkins of Paddington Green.” “ Ask a policeman,” and “ Eiiocked
’em in the Old Kent Road”—were vernacular, irreverent, demo-
oratic, yet intensely individualistic, as of a nation of disinherited,
cheery aristocrats, and arose from deeply felt experience: th(^
were the English answer to the lot which had befallen the
Eng lish worker. They told a man (in rousing chorus) to “paddle

ENGLISH SAGA

224

his own canoe,” “to cling to his love like the ivy,” and to fill
himself up with “beer, beer, glorious beer,” bade Tommy malrp
room for his unde, and the nation put the foreigner in his place:

“I’d wake men from their torpor, and every foreign pauper
That helps to make the sweater rich, and wages always low.
I’d send aboard a ship. Sir, for an everlasting trip. Sir,

And a chance give to the English if I only bossed the show.”

Such rough songs spoke of unchanging English virtues: of
courage and cheerfulness in adversity, of loyalty to old “pals,” of
constancy to home and wife. There is scarcely a more beautiful,
there is certainly no more English ballad in the whole range of
song than that which Albert Chevalier wrote for his codmey
impersonation of the old London workman philosophising over
his pipe on the faithful wife of his youth:

“We’ve been together now for forty years.

And it don’t seem a day too much.

Oh, there ain’t a lidy living in the land
As I’d swop for my dear ole Dutch.

But above all the music hall eicpressed the En glis h passion for
liberty: the English desire, so hard to translate into the life of
the factory, to follow the current of one’s own nature and be
true to it by being free. What was, however bad it seemed, had to
be and was therefore in a humorous way good, sinr e man being
free could turn his necessity to glorious gain. So the fat woman,
the grace and opportunity of youth gone for ever as it was for
most of her audience, would stand up, mountainous and im-
deterred, and, announced by the leering chairman as “your old
favourite, So-and-So,” send her steam-roundabout voice pulsat¬
ing through the thick pipe and cigar smoke:

“I weigh sixteen ston^ O!

I’m not all skin and honey 01”

So, in a more studied and perfect expression of the inner soul of a
great people who had lost everything but its cheerfulness and
courage, Marie Lloyd in a later age, wheu the old music hall was
dying, would sing her song “Dilly Dally”: a vinous old female,
moist-eyed, wandering but invincible:

SHOOTING NIAGARA

225

“My old man said, Follow the van
And don’t dilly dally on the way!

Off went the cart with the home packed in it,

I walked behind with my old cock linnet.

But I dillied and dallied, dallied and dillied,

Lost the van and don’t know where to roam.

I stopped on the way to have the old half-quartern.

And I can’t find my way home.”

It was to the people whose life this vulgar, proud and humane
art represented that the Socialist offered his collectivist remedy.
He assumed, not without the justification of logic, that the
English working man was already a proletarian slave and that
he would be only too willing to band himself as a nameless
comrade in the great army of his class against the rich and
privileged. But this was not so. The downtrodden wage-slave
did not think of himself as such but as the rightful inheritor—
as by ancestry he was—of a free tradition of transmitted privilege.
He only wanted to get back his own: to be the great gentleman
he knew himself to be, enjoying, generous and carefree. All the
while that the socialist propagandist was telling him of the pro¬
letarian heaven, he was dreaming of the day when a rich unknown
cousin would die in Australia or the horses he so hopefully and
religiously backed each week would bring him a fortune and he
would be able to have a house and a garden of his otvn and go to
race meetings and cricket matches every day instead of working
■with his fellow proletarians in the factory.

Thus it came about that the first missionaries of the new
socialist religion were treated with derision by the rough, un¬
believing multitude. They were denounced as atheists, anarchists
and republicans, as liars and quacks who offered “ sum’at for noth¬
ing.” Their meetings were frequently broken up amid rude
noises. In those days it was the Socialists who were heckled by
the local toughs and practical jokers, not the Tories. England
was so accustomed to being governed by well-spoken gentlemen
in top hats that the spectacle of an avowed Socialist going down'
• to the House of Commons in a check cap with a brass band
blaring at his side profoundly shocked many humble men and
women. Working men were at first exceedingly suspicious of
members of their own class who sought to enter Parliament as'
if they were toffs and were al^ys ready to listen to any

ENGLISH SAGA

226

malicious charge, however wild, of peculation or self-seddng
brought against them. Their creed was regarded, in pubs and
other places, where sound men congregated, as laughable if not
lunatic. In the 1895 election—a Conservative triumph—only one
working man held his seat and every one of the twenty-seven
candidates put up by the virgin independent Labour Party
suffered defeat at the polls.^ It was not till the great Conservative
rout of January, 1906, when the rising tide of collectivism swept
an almost revolutionary Liberal government into power that a
Parliamentary Labour Party took its place as a permanent force
in politics with a solid bloc of 51 seats and a strength sufficient
to sway the course of legislation.

Even many of the Trade Union and Co-operative Society
leaders—often stalwarts of the local Tory working mens’ dub-
regarded the new sodalism with disfavour. It was too highbrow
and foreign for their shrewd liking^: too far removed from the
familiar tastes and prejudices of the simple men they represented.
Had those who represented the larger forces of organised capital
been a little more sympathetic towards their Labour vis’-A-vis
instead of treating them, as they too often did, as impertinent
inferiors who had forgotten their place, the intellectual sodalist
movement might well have died still-born.

Yet a new spirit was abroad in the land. A reconciliation
between Capital and Labour that might have been possible a few
years earlier, became harder with the coming of a new generation.
For just as th6 first translation of the scriptures, spdt out by
unlettered zealots lent wings to an earlier English revolution,
so the education of the board school hdped to carry a new con¬
ception of life into the homes of the people. To cater for the
needs of this new dass of reader, a halfpenny press made its
appearance, jejune, snappy, sensational. The first in the fidd was
the radical the “twinkle, twinkle little star” of the late
’dghties and ’nineties. It had many imitators. Those who
controlled this revolutionary power might differ in politics and
educational purpose, but the circulation of their papers and the

*The Party Chest for the Election totalled only £400. Ardent supporters pawned
their watches, Sunday suits, accordions and fiddles.— Sir yames SextoTi^ Agitator^ 14^*

* daring, 1 went one night to speak at the Battersea Branch of the Soaal-

Dexnocratic Pederadcm. where I was so belaboured with words about ea^loitation,
proletariat, bourgeois and others of learned length and thundering souna just
unported £roxn Germany that 1 believe 1 retired sore all over and determined to go no
more to Sodal-Dcmocratic Peda:ation Branches. And I never have.**

— G, IV: Bantes, From Workshop to War Cabiaetf 4s,

SHOOTING NIAGARA

227

advertisements from which their profits came depended on their
^ving to the milli on what the million wanted.^ Being obscure
it wanted flattery and being poor a share of the pleasures of the
rich. The cheap newspaper gave it the one and fed its appetite
for the other. It promised that a time was coming when the
hungry should be filled with good things.

For the intelligent young worker, to whom state education
had given the key to the world of books and new ideas,
and to whom the pub and the humorous philosophy of his
class were insufficient solace, the background of life—even
though it was already vastly improved—was dreary and un¬
inspiring. As Joe Toole remembered, it was that of the street
comer, the smell of the tripe-works, the clatter of dogs, the
street brawls, short co mm ons, the pawnshop and the cries of
women giving birth to new dtizens.® The usual lot was to start
selling papers after school hours at eleven, borrowing 4jd. to
purchase thirteen with a hope of making 2d. profit for each
bundle sold. Three years later the scholar left school to plunge
into a battle for life which took the form of constantly chang¬
ing casual labour—sweeping floors or streets, holding horses’
heads for commerdal travdlers, laying tram tracks, storekeeping,
running errands and monotonous machine- min ding sometime
for ten hours at a stretch. All these occupations were “blind
alley”: the weaker brethren never climbed beyond them out of
the mck of the unskilled. Between jobs one stood at the comer
of the street or scoured the shop windows for a notice of “Boy
Wanted.” In such a start to life there were constant temptations:
the skylarking, chi’iking gang of boon companions who slipped
imperceptibly from practical joking into petty larceny on sweet
shops and battles with sticks and broken glass; the pubs to which
a boy became accustomed from his earliest years, the racecourse
and the bookie at the street comer. Later came the long losing
battle with poverty, undernourishment and insecurity, the home
with the verminous walls and broken window-sashes in the
crowded dirty street, the risk of acddent and maiming, and the
certainty sooner or later of “slack times” and unemployment
with the sickening tramp from factory gate to gate, the ^ys of

^ During a strike, a delegation of employers called on the editor of a popular news¬
paper to remonstrate with him for upholding the strikers’ cause. ^Well, gentlem^^
he replied, "the working man’s penny is as good as yours, and there’s a damned sight
more of ’eml”— W, E, Adams, Memoirs of a S>cicd Atom, IL, 6i$.

* FigfUing through Life,

228

ENGLISH SAGA

idle, hopeless hunger, the rot of body and soul and the dread of
the workhouse at the end of that bitter road.

It was to those whom this dreary heritage inspired to bitter
anger that the new socialism made its initial appeal. Behind the
solid structure of Trade Unionism and the brittle fagade of the
intelligentsia fermented the spirit and fervour of a new religion.
During the quarter of a century that preceded the first world
war, Socialism was preached through the crowded cities of Britain
as Methodism had been preached in the eighteenth century and
Puritanism in the seventeenth—as a Salvationist crusade. Into
the drab lives and starved minds of the industrial masses came a
new message of hope and righteousness, uttered on evangelist
platforms by ardent believers with red ties and flashing eyes:
that poverty and injustice could be abolished by state action.
The little handful of the elect who gathered in the north-country
market square after some crushing electoral defeat to sing
Carpenter’s Labour Hymn, “England, arise! the long, long night
is over,” was like the grain of seed which grew into a great tree.

Among the younger generation of the workers there were
many who read more seriously. Henry George’s Progress and
Poverty sold in thousands, and Blatchford’s Merrie England,
published at 6d. in 1894, in tens of thousands. The latter’s humble
Clarion, issued under many difficulties, made proselytes wherever
the factory chimneys and slated roofs marked the abode of the
toiling masses. For humbler minds the new gospel was preached
in its simplest and most appealing form. The bloated capitalist
with his white top-hat, his gold watch-chain and his money¬
bags, was the Devil who sucked the blood of the workers. The
upright young Socialist' with his Union ticket and his Fabian
pamphlet in his pocket was the pioneer of a new and better world,
ready for martyrdom if need be but never for compromise with
the evil spirit of greed which kept the virtuous proletariat in
chains. In a more sophisticated way this point of view was
broadly^ adopted by a whole generation of middle-class writers
and artists who, appalled by the accumulating evils of laissez-
faire industrialism, can-ied the message of Socialism into their
Generous youth at Oxford and Cambridge and newer centres
of learning thrilled at the gospel of apocalyptic hope: the school¬
masters, journalists, clergymen and civil servants of the future
went out to their labour consciously or unconsciously imbued
with the teaching of Socialists of genius like Shaw and Wells.

^SHOOTING NIAGARA 229

Yet the advance of Sodalism was nearly always anticipated by
the premature retreat of the individualist. Before the vanguard
of the red revolutionaries reached each successive barricade the
capitalists were already receding. Many of the demands of
organised Labour were granted by Liberal and Tory politicians—
quick to sense the changing wind of electoral favour—long
before its Socialist representatives were in a position to enforce
them. Successive Employers’ Liability Acts hmited and largely
abrogated the old legal doctrine of common employment.
Under pressure from the Unions the scope of the Factory Acts
was steely extended.^ The Workmen’s Cbmpensation Act of 1897
made an employer theoretically liable for aU the risks of his
workers’ employment. Charity, now invested with the prim
pince-nez of the statistical bureaucrat, was restored to its former*
place as a civic obligation. The stigma of pauperism was re¬
moved and those in receipt of poor law relief were admitted to
the franchise. Labour Exchanges were established at the expense
of the taxpayer to help j&nd work for the unemployed. Small
holdings were provided for agricultural labourers.

’ The Socialist principle that the State as the ultimate owner of
all property had the right to tax capital as well as income was
admitted by the imposition of Death Duties in Sir William
H^court’s Liberal budget of 1893. Fourteen years later Mr.
Asquith introduced the distinction between earned and unearned
incomes and a new impost on very rich men called super-tax. In
order to finance a nation-wide sAeme of old-age pensions and
other ‘‘rare and refreshing fruit for the parched lips of the
multitude,” the new levy was extended to £il incomes of more
than £5000 a year, by the Liberal Chancellor, David Lloyd
George. To a modem reformer, saddened by the omnipresent
spectacle of human greed, injustice and muddle, such modest
measures of working-class amelioration, now taken for granted,
may appear trifling. To a Liberal of the ’sixties they would have
seemed a revolutionary interference with the laws of supply and
demand and a half-way step to wholesale confiscation and Com¬
munism. To many old-fashioned persons like the Conservative
die-hard peers, who sacrificed the powers of their own House in
a last desperate attempt to stay the new electoral will, they seemed
so even in 1910.

^ within a few jrears of bringing the dockers within the scope of the Acts, the
number of dock accidents was halved.

E,S.

ENGLISH SAGA

230

For in the bewildering pace of modem evolution men have
forgotten how short a period divides our age from that of the
laissez-faire ’sixties, how vast are the ameliorating changes in the
conditions of the industrial worker which have been achieved in
the course of a single life-time. Because the world is still imper¬
fect and the evil curse of the past not wholly expiated, it is often
assumed that nothing has beeij worn Old men who grew up in the
Victorian industrial scene tell a different tale.

For the imderdog it was a far cry from the socialised industrial
England of Uoyd George’s budgets, still more from that of
Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald, to the grim commonwealth of
liberty to survive or perish of the mid-nineteenth century: from
the omniscient government inspector, the statutorily enforced
dosing hours and half holidays, the working-dass housing estate
with its bathrooms and gardens to the “young ladies” of Madame
Elise’s dressmaking establishment with their fifteen hours’
working day and airless, fever-stricken dormitory, the filthy,
ragged child crossing-sweepers sleeping under the Addphi arches,
and the days when W. E. Adams, tramping through Salford
in search of work, found at Fed Park with its Museum and Free
library an alm ost solitary example of mimidpal enlightenment.

Looking back in 1923, one whose whole life had been passed
in the service of the Labour movement which had raised him
from a poor apprentice’s bench to a Privy Coimdllorship and a
seat in the Cabinet, made an attempt to sum it all up. “I have
seen many lands,” he wrote, “but none as good as my own. I
have mixed with many peoples but foimd none with so large
measure of fellow feding or sense of fair play.

“And, finally, I have seen freedom broadening down to the
dass in which I was bom and bred and which I have tridi to serve. .
When I was young, working folk were uneducated and un¬
enfranchised. They ^were poor and dependent and their working
days were bounded hy age and want without concern by the
State which their labour had enriched. Now thqr have at least
a modicum of educatibn^ Aey are politically as wdl as industrially
organised, and although there is stiU unemployment and, in too
many instances, fear of wmt, yet these grim problems are being
tackled with greater knowledge and more humane feeling than
ever before. I take the present signs and tokens as indications of
better things to be.”^ '

* G. If. Banes, From Worish^ ta War Cabinet, ggg.

SHOOTING NIAGARA 23I

All this was true. The good man, looking back on his life
of struggle and seemingly miraculous achievement, knew how
much greater were the opportunities of the young workers of the
new age than were those of the old. But the young who had
never experienced the full, fury of the storm of laksez-Jaire .pierely
knew that they were born into a world of mean streets, monoton¬
ous labour, cramping poverty and narrowing uncertainty. They
inherited from the past, not only eienieiitarv and secondary
schools, labour exchanges, and Council houses, but bad digestions,
uninspiring surroundings and the instability of a comniercial
system based not on human welfare but on profits. They were
better off than their parents, but they were not satisfied with
their lot. For their instincts, as well as the professional preachers
of discontent, told them that something was still lacking.

CHAPTER SEVEN

'‘Lest We Forgets

“If you’re planning for one year plant grain; if
you’re p lanning for ten years plant trees; if you’re
p lanning for a hundred years plant men.”

—OU Chinese Proverb.

T he summer of 1879 was the worst recorded in modem
times. It rained continuously. Everywhere the harvest
blackened in the fields, and farmers were feced with ruin,
landlords with dq)leted rentals. In England and Wales alone
three million sheep died of rot. Meanwhile industry straggled
against one of those periodic slumps which seemed inseparable
from the capitalist system. It was a universal tale of woe: of
cataclysmic falls in prices and streets fiill of unemployed. The
fog which lay over London that winter—yellow, choking and
foreboding—seemed to symbolise something out of joint in the
times. The pursuit of wealth for its own sake was resulting in
what? For a moment the British vision seemed to have grown
too narrow; the basis of a cormnunity which lived on an
uncertain and uncontrollable export trade too small.

Yet for industry the trade depression of the early ’eighties
was only a passing phase: a pause in the progress of expansion.
It was followed in due course by recovery and renewed prosperity.
Demand for industrial products was still expanding faster than
supply: rich veins of xmexploited markets remained to be
developed by the capitalist. But for English agriculture the
blackened crops of 1879 and the years of continued rain and cold
that followed marked the end of an era. It never recovered.

It had enjoyed a glorious evening. The three decades between
the repeal of the Com Laws and the fall of Disraeli’s last
administration were the golden age of fanning. The bumper
harvests of the ’fifties and ’sixties had been accompanied by ex¬
panding home markets, plentiful capital and cheap transport and
labour. The landed estates of Britain, employing more than a
million skilled workers and supporting the richest aristocracy

233

“LEST WE FOEGETI” 233

the world had seen, gave bread to 17,000,000 and meat to the
whole population.

Those were the days when the Earl of Ladythome sat at the
covert side like a gentleman at his opera stall, thinking what a
good thing it was to be a lord with a sound digestion and plenty
of cash, when tenant farmers built conservatories and planted
ornamental trees, and young ladies in flowing skirts and jackets
and little feathered caps played croquet on ancient lapsus or
gossiped over “hair brushings” in rooms once habited by
ElizabeAan statesmen and Carolean divines. The great parks
■with tlSr noble trees slumbered iathe sunlight of those distant
summers; children bom heirs to the securest and liappiest lot
humankind had ever known, rode and played in their shade
never guessing that in their old age they w’ould see the classic
groves felled by the estate breaker and the stately halls pulled
down or sold to make convalescent homes for miners or county
asylums.

Yet all the while behind the dark curtain of time harvests
were ripening on the virgin plains of other continents which
were to,put an end to all this prosperity. Year by year the rail¬
ways crept farther into the prairies, while the freight of the
iron ships increased and man’s ingenuity found new ways to
preserve meat and foodstuffs from decay.

When the trumpet sounded the walls of Jericho that had
seemed so strong fell. They could not stand against the inrush
of cheap foreign food. They lacked defenders. The urban voters
had lost interest in the countryside. The rural workers were
without votes and, since the enclosures of the past century,
without a stake in the land. The social basis of British agri¬
culture was too narrow: its ownership concentrated in too few
hands. Some four thousand squires owned more than half the
land of England and Wales. Seven hundred thousand cottagers
between them only possessed 150,000 out of 39,000,000 cultivated
acres. They could not defend an interest they did not enjoy.

Henceforward the foreigner was to feed Britain. Com in
bulk came from America: frozen mutton from Australia^ and

1 Australian frozen beef -was appearing on British dinner tables as early as 1872
when Punch published a new version of “The Roast Beef of Old England* entitled
“Tlie Sirloin Suspended*;

“Once mighty roast beef was the Englishman’s food.

It has now grown so dear that ’tis nearly tabooed;

But Australian beef potted is cheap and is good,

O the boiled beef of Australia, and O the Australian boiled beef!

ENGLISH SAGA

234

beef from the Argentine made the work of the English farmer
superfluous. In ±e next two decades more than four million
acres of arable land went out of cultivation, and more than
half a million workers left the country for the town. Against
the competition of the new lands the farmer was powerless; a
bad season spelt ruin, for a diminished turnover could no longer
be oflFset by a rise in price. Falling rents, mortgages and bank
overdrafts broke the back of the smaller squires before death
duties and rising taxes drove them in the next generation from
their ancient homes and lands. Only the very rich who had
urban estat^ to offset rural and the farm labourer, helped after
1884 by the vote and the rising tide of social conscience, prospered
a little in the general tide of decay. But the heart was going out
of British farming. Henceforward the old conception of home
as a place permanently associated with man’s life and labour to
be inherited from his forebears and transmitted to his children
w^s for most Englishmen a thing of the past. The utilitarians
thought of home only as a shelter from the weather. They
could not see the need for beauty and continuity in human life.
Under their guidance and that of the manufacturers and changers
of money to whose keeping they trustfully committed England
more factory workers could be supported with cheap food than
ever before. But from the plain man, on whose character,
integrity and valour England in the last resort rested, something
precious had been taken away. The home smoke rising from
the valley, the call of the hours from the belfry, the field of
rooks and elms, had given place to a tenement in the land of the
coal truck and the slag heap. Here his life was cast and the
earliest memories of his children formed.

Yet the dream remained in pathetic attempts to keep curtains
white in grimy back rooms above East London railway yards
or to grow flowers in window-boxes in Bolton and Oldham. And
English history suggested that whenever for any reason English¬
men failed to find the elements of home, as they conceived them,
in their own land, they tended to seek them overseas. Such had
been the history of the colonisation of the transatlantic virgin

It is rapital cold, it is excdlent hot;

And, if a large number of childraa you’re got,
*Twill greatly assist you in boiling the pot.

Funch .LXIIIt y8.

“lest we forget!”

23s

forests and deserts that had grown into the United States of
America. Denied opportunity in their own countrj’, a race of
invincible romanticists had made new homes in the wilderness
to meet their heart’s desire.

The new English nations so formed had rebelled against the
home government’s claim to control them and had formed an
independent polity of their own. T^et even in the hour of the
English schism the age-long process continued. As the first
Empire fell away a second grew in its place. The united Empire
Loyalists, unable to fit their own conception of home into that
of a rebel federation, tramped across the Canadian border to
seek a new habitation in the wilderness. Here they mingled with
conquered French settlers and British emigrants to form in the
fullness of time the Dominion of Canada. During the next
century others crossed the oceans to make homes trader the
Brhish flag in Newfoundland, Cape Colony, in the islands of
New Zealand and the virgin continent of Australia. Most of
these emigrants were poor men who sought on a distant soil
the happiness and freedom they had failed to find in their own
. country.^ Few amid the hardship of their lot found the promised
land for themselves. They, left it for their children to create after
them.

In this process the pioneers received small help from the
imperial government. The ruling classes at home were not
interested in British settlers overseas. Their thoughts of them
were coloured by the memories of the War of Independence and
of the humiliations which had then befallen English statesmen.
They wished to have nothing further to do with colonials. They
regarded the Empire, apart from India, as a strategic network
of trading factories, spice islands and naval bases in which
squatters’ settlements had no part. At the end of the eight¬
eenth century they found a temporary use for New South
Wales as- a dumping ground for convicts. But when this practice
was stopped in the ’sixties the interest of the English official
classes in the colonies sank to zero.

The utilitarians had even less use for such troublesome
appendages. For to their way of thinking their only function
was to embroil the country in expensive foreign entanglements.

who died in ^e crowd^ holds of the immigrant sHps in the terrible transatlantic
passage against westerly gales. *

ENGLISH SAGA

236 ■

The old view of the Empire as a profitable monopoly for native
traders was outmoded, since it was a canon of free trade that
a monopoly defeated its own ends. Even the preferential treat¬
ment of Empire producers, granted by Huskisson in 1823
course of a general reduction of tariffs to obtain reciprocal
concessions in foreign iparkets, had since been discarded without
regard to the interests of colonial traders. For the Benthamites
held that the latter, like every one else in the utilitarian paradise,
were best left to look after themselves.

This view of Colonial possessions accorded with that held in
official circles. “I suppose I must take the thing myself,”
Palmerston remarked when he had some difficulty in filling the
Colonial Office. “Come upstairs with me, Helps, when the
Council is over. We will look at the maps, and you shall show
me where these places are.”^ Gladstone’s opinion was that the
Empire was too heavy a burden to be borne. Even Disraeli at
one moment of his career so far fell into the fashion of the day
as to refer to the Coloiiies as millstones. They were an expense
to the taxpayer, and, with their tiresome local politics, a con¬
stant source of annoyance to the official mind. For the exporter,
their under-inhabited markets were valueless compared with
those of Europe, South America and the United States. Nor
were they of any use to the politician. For the colonists had no
votes at home. They even objected to the use of their chief-
official and magisterial appointments for uses of domestic
patronage. The general view of the upper classes was that the
colonists were rough and uneducated provincials unfit for re¬
fined company.*

All that the rulers of England were prepared to do for
them was to give them their freedom.. After the painful
lesson of the American War of Independence no obstacle was
placed in the way of their political development. They were
given such constitutions as liey desired and quietly encouraged
to go their own way. Whenever opportunity arose they were
reminded in frigid official language that the time of parting
was at hand. “Colonies,” Turgot had Written, “are like fruits

1 Communicated to J. A. Froude by Sir Arthur Helps, Oceana ii,

* Scene; Five o^dock tea. Lady (to relative from Australia): ‘ Will you take any
reneshment. Cousin George?’

George. Tha nks , Bella. Don’t mind if I do. Give us a handful o’ tea a billy
0 water, and TU boil it while you make me a damper.’ **

Punch LXVm, 10,

“lest we forget!*

237

that cling to the tree only till they ripen.” This was the view
of Whitehall. A policy of veiled but deliberate disintegration
was adopted. “It 'is no use to speak about it any longer,”
a Colonial Office official said to the historian Froude. “The
thing is done. The great Colonies are gone. It is but a question
of a year or two.”^

But the colonists themselves, though they had no love for
Whitehall and resented interference, wished to remain British.
They wanted to enjoy their lands of promise under the flag
their fathers had known. In other words, they were sentimental
about patriotism. They refused to view it like superior folk in
England as an old-fashioned thing to smile at. Few in numbers
and without electoral influence, their protest would have availed
nothing but for one of those inesplicable movements that occur
in the lives of great nations.

It came not from the ruling classes but from the common
people. For those %vho thousands of miles away were building
new and freer Englands were their own kith and kin. They had
left home in poverty and obscurity: years later their success
had gladdened the hmnble kinsmen they had left behind. Fresh
settlers were always following the old. There was formed
a link of sentiment and hope between ■working-class homes in
Britain and thri-ving townships and farms in Canada and
Australia. The rich and powerful might have no use for the
self-governing colonies. To the poor they seemed the promise
of a happier future: an appeal from the black chimnejra, the herd
life of the sliim, the selfishness of the lords of rustic England
■with their closed parks and game preserves.

It was only after X867, wheruthe artisan housdiolder received
the vote,,that this feeling became a political factor. Yet it was
already a rallying point for all not content to subscribe to the
utilitarian thesis. The British middle-class were not all bagmen
and cotton-spiimers: there was Norse blood in their veins and
an ineradicable love of adventure which kept cropping up under
their ma-girns of shopkeeping prudence. Buying in the cheapest
market and se lling in the dearest was not everything. And as
foreign tariffs rose against British manufacturers and the em¬
ployment of the crowded dty population became ever less secure^
more and more questioned whether the utilitarian basis of the
economists was not too narrow and whether the time had not

ly. A, IrouAe^ Oceana^ 7.

238 ENGLISHSAGA

come to call in a new world to redress the balance of the
old.

One of the first to do so was Disraeli. At the moment when
a new Europe was being bom out of the national wars and
uprisings of 1859, he predicted a course for his country dia¬
metrically opposed to that held in contemporary official circles:

“The day is coming, if it has not already come, when
the question of the balance of power caimot be confined to
Europe alone... . England, though she is bound to Europe
by tradition, by affection, by great similarity of habits, and
all those ties which time alone can create arid consecrate, is
not a mere Power of the Old World. Her geographical
position, her laws, her language and religion, connect
her as much with the New World as with the Old. And
although she has occupied an eminent . . . position among
European nations for ages, still, if ever Europe by h er
shortsightedness falls into an inferior and exhausted state,
for England there will remain an illustrious future. We
are bound to communities of the New World, and those
great States which our own planting and colonising energies
have created, by ties and interests which will sustain our
power and enable us to play as great a part in the times
yet to come as we do in these days and we have done in
the past. And therefore now that Europe is on the eve of
war, I say it is for Europe not for England, that my heart
sinks.”^

Many people ffiought Disraeli’s growing interest in the
Empire an affectation. It was certainly politically prescient.
Just as he was able to associate his party with the growing
demand for social reform, so he was able to associate it with that
other popular longing—^for a new world of opportunity overseas.
He understood the nature of the attonpt the utilitarians were
making on the unity of the Empire, and realised that working
men could have little sympathy with it. Almost alone at this
time—^though his foresight was later eqxialled from the Liberal
bendhes by that of Charles Dilke, Disraeli realised that in
a fast expanding Eiuope, an England that insisted for the
sake of profit on remaining a small manufacturing island in

* and Sudde, 1 ,1631. •

‘‘lest we forgetI**

239

the North Sea would presently jSnd herself in danger from
other and more despotic empires jealous of her wealth and
resentful of the libertarian ideals she so light-heartedly and
provocative championed. It was this that made him the critic
of those who, “viewing everything in a financial aspect and
totally passing by those moral and political considerations
which make nations, great,” granted self-government to the
English-speaking colonies, not “as part of a great policy of
imperial consolidation” but merely in order to get rid of them.
His instinct of coming danger made him alive to the necessity
of responding to their craving for unity before it was too
late.

The old Jew saw that the world which Cobden and the great
Liberals had known was yielding to a new and sterner. He knew
how nearly it threatened England. In i860, with the help of a
French assault on Austria, Italy achieved unity and a place,
however at first precarious, among the European Powers. In
1864, Prussia under the inspiration of a Junker squire of genius,
defied the protests of a disarmed England and seized the
southern provinces of Denmark with the ultimate object of
building an ocean fleet. Two years later Bismarck struck at
his ally, Austria, and in the course of a six weeks’ blitzkrieg
won the leadership of Germany. The formal union of a new
Empire under the Prussian dynasty was completed on New
Year’s Day, 1871, in the Hall of l^^firrors at Versailles while
Moltke’s shells burst on the ramparts of a besieged and
starving Paris.

Of these dynamic events liberal England, dedicated to the rule
of reason and the peaceful making of wealth, remained a spectator.
The Europe she had helped to reshape after Waterloo crumbled
before her eyes. The principle of militant nationality which she
had defied so successfully in the first years of the century was
triumphing in every coimtry. With a little voluntary army of
200,000 she was left to face a continent of great conscript armies
running into millions of men and actuated by motives far
removed from Manchester’s reckoning. Even the industrialisa¬
tion in which the continental nations now feverishly began to
copy Britain was made to serve the ends of armed power, con¬
ceived in terms of strategic railways and gun foimdries and
protected by bristling tariffs. Essen was Middlesborough in a
nightmare.

2^0 ENGLISH SAGA

Disraeli was sensitive to these mighty forces: his countrymen
were not. He realised that England’s present place in the world
depended on the abandonment of the policy of “meddle and
muddle” so dear to liberal and humanitarian sentiment, and
its replacement by her historic doctrine of balancing Power
against Power. Still more clearly he realised that her future
d^ded on her capacity to find an outlet for her swelling
population beyond her own dangerously congested shores.
Because of this he was the first statesman to grasp the signifi¬
cance of the great canal which French engineers built in the
’sixties across the eastern Eg3^tian desert to linh the Bed Sea
with the Mediterranean. By securing for his country the
bankrupt Khedive of Egypt’s controlling shares in the Suez
r.ana1 Company, Disraeli during his final tenure of power
placed the most vital artery in the British Empire beyond the
control of an international financial power. By smultaneously
opposing a renewed Russian advance on Constantinople and the
Mediterranean he defended the same arteiry from the threat of
what seemed at that time—^though as many believe wrongly—,
the dominant Eiuopean' power of the future.

In doing so Disraeli was solicitous for interests still beyond
the narrow ken of the average British voter and stateman. The
tired imperial statesnjan who brought back “ peace with honour
from- the Berlin Conference unwittingly offended the humani¬
tarian conscience of his country. It was his misfortune—many
enthusiastic opponents regarded it as his fault to have to
maintain the independence of a Mohammedan despotism against
an uprising of Christian peoples. To the kindly middle classes
the inviolability of treaties, the balance of European power and
England’s strategic commumcations vtith India meant little or
nothing. But the stories of the atrocities committed by Turkish
irregulars in the Bulgarian provinces did. They aroused the
country.

In the of Gladstone, the very incarnation of the English

conscience, ail this became a weapon to scourge a cyme in oflS.ee.
The north-country working man was swqit off his feet by
his appeal for moral righteousness. To humble minds the
great liberal’s dectoral campaign of i88o'’ seemed a crusade for

^ A ConscTTative speiker "wlio told his audience tixat Gladstone was
ambitious poliddan with his eyes on. the Treasury Bmch wm answered with a Yes
an<^ have his bottom on it soon if you don^t look ouU^—BsheTf Memoirs.

“LEST WE forget!” 24I

the rights of small nations trampled under by the imperial
aggressor, whether Turkish or English: for the sanctity of life
in the hill villages of Afghanistan and in the vddt farms of the
Transvaal. “Amidst the din of preparation for warfare in the rime
of peace,” Gladstone declared in his final speech at Edinburgh,
“there is going on a profound mysterious movement that,
whether we will or not, is bringing the nations of the civilised
world, as well as the uncivilised, morally as well as physically
nearer to one another; and making them more and more
responsible before God for one another’s welfare.”

The truth of this could not be resolved by statesmen. Its
force lay in the fact that in his heart the ordinary Englis hma n
believed it. The defeated and now dying Disraeli, whom the
harsh experience of his race and a long life of struggle had made
a realist, might have replied that there was no such instrument
for bringing it about as the united and consistent policy of a
world-wide commonwealth of peace-loving British nations.

Because Englishmen wished to exercise power not for its
own sake but to further moral causes, Gladstone, on assuming
office in 1880, found himself involved in remote imperial adven¬
tures. Having no imperial policy, he was at a loss in meeting
them. Among the charges brought against Disraeli by his
opponents had been that of scheming to occupy Egypt. Yet
it was Gladstone who actually and most reluctantly did so.

Egypt was an independent tributary province of the Turkish
Empire. In 1876, being unable to wring any more out of his
over-taxed people or to raise further capital to pay the interest
on his debts, its nil®:, the spendthrift Khedive Ismail, agreed to
the appointment of a British and a French Controller-General
of Finance to safeguard the hundred million pounds he had
borrowed from French and British capitalists. Three years later
as Ismail, unable to break with his prodigal habits, intrigued
against his financial advisers, Britain and France induced his over-
lord, the Sultan of Turkey, to depose him in favour of his son.

This measure of foreign financial control was enough to
provoke the resentment of the Egyptian aristocracy and army.
In 1882 a military adventurer namrf Arabi Pasha established a
military dictatorship, and the Alexandria mob beat up and
murdered foreigners. Save for remote outbreaks in China, the
world was still unused to such popular jackboot reactions to the

ENGLISH SAGA

242

operations of international capital. The first “Fascist dictator”
was dealt with by Gladstone’s pacific government in the old
vigorous John Bull manner. British tars bombarded Alexandria,
and an expeditionary force under Sir Garnet Wolseley routed
Arabi at Tel-el-Kebir. The French, fearful of another attack
from Germany, preserved their freedom of action and left
their British partners to act alone.

Having entered Egypt to restore order the latter were forced
to stay to maintain it. For the only alternative was mob rule.
The Khedive was restored to a nominal authority. Vague
suzerainty continued to be vested in the Sultan of Turkey. But
for the next quarter of a century the real ruler of Egypt was ihe
British Agent and Consul General, Sir Evelyn Baring, later
Lord Cromer. He was supported by British officials and
soldiers.

Up to this point the Egyptian advaiture had been prompted
by financial interests. Capital, being free to operate wWe
its owners chose, strayed outside the imperial field in its pur¬
suit of profits. Its interest payments taking the form of imports
on which the employment of British voters depended, any
government which valued its existence was forced to use its
diplomatic influence to maintain them. Where such inflnenrp
provoked national reactions, military intervention became
necessary to avert anarchy and punish outrages against British
subjects.

Finance had led Britain into Egypt. Love of humanity and
liberty impelled her next step. Almost immediately Gladstone
was forced into further expansionist action by the moral forces
from which he derived his authority. They sent Gordon to a
martyr’s death at Khartoum and Kitchener in the fullness of
time to establish a new equatorial dominion in the heart of
Africa.

The Sudan, stretdiing nearly 2000 miles south from Egypt
along the Upper Nile, was an Egyptian province. The misrule
of corrupt officials and the depredations of savage warriors and
slave-tradas had long been its lot. Shortly before the British
occupation of Cairo the unhappy country was seized by a religious
fanatic, the Mahdi. An Egyptian army, sent to restore order,
was cut to pieces in the desert.

For this hell on earth Gladstone’s government now found
Itself responsible. Feeling not unnaturally that a liberal

“lest we forget!”

243

Britain had no business there, it resolved on a policy of immediate
evacuation. But, though nine out of ten Englishmen had never
heard of the Sudan, many of the government’s most valued
supporters were deeply interested in it. To the humanitarians
of Exeter Hall it was a stronghold of the slave trade, a field for
missionaries and the home of certain poor Christian converts.

In deference to their wishes Gladstone sent to the Sudan one
who, while formerly its Gk)vemor General under Khedive Ismail,
had won merit in their eyes by his Christian vigour in repressing
the slave trade. Generd Gordon was a strange soldier—half¬
crusader, half-adventurer—^but he was also a genius. His in¬
structions were to withdraw the Christians and all remaining
British and Egyptian subjects. But he deliberately interpreted
them in such a fashion as to secure his own martyrdom in the
Sudanese capital and the tardy dispatch of an eleventh-hour
expeditionary force to relieve him and the countrj^ to which
he had given his heart. Gladstone’s natural reluctance to rescue
this unjust but heroic steward aroused a wave of moral and patri¬
otic indignation. After the fall of Khartoum he foimd himself
regarded almost as a murderer. He had tried to refrain from
action in the Sudan because he wished to avoid extending the
already vast empire of Britain. But the very humanitarians who
applauded his dislike of imperialism coidd not refrain from
using the national might to suppress wrong-doing and crudty.
They hated force. But when it came to the point they hat^
slavery more. They did the hating and the soldiers they deplored
did the fighting. And the end of it was a still larger empire than
before.

T his contradiction lay at the root of Britain’s imperial
difficulties. It was not practicable for a democracy which both
indulged strong moral feelings and allowed its wealth to be
used in large-scale operations outside its own borders, to govern
an empire without an imperial policy. The only result was to
provoke confused and angry situations in which the pressure of
popular opinion compelled more violent imperial action than
any originally contemplated. The bounds of empire continued
to expand because its energies, moral and commercial, were
never canalised in any clearly defined channel. Sometimes the
force that made for expansion was God, sometimes Mammo n.
But it was nearly always a confused force.

Nothing illustrated ^s so well as the history of South Africa.

ENGLISH SAGA

244

Britain had first appeared at the Cape during the war with
the French Directory when her ally Holland, being overrun by
the enemy, the Prince of Orange asked her to take the Dutch
colony under her protection. Restored to Holland by the Treaty
of Amiens, the Cape—^the chief port of call on the ocean route
'to India—was reoccupied by British troops on the renewal of
hostilities. This time the Dutch colonists resisted, but in vain.
After the war the Cape was retained by Britain as one of her
few territorial rewards for her long struggle against Napoleon.

The Cape Dutch would probably have accepted the situation
and have become loyal British citizens like the French Canadians
but for one circumstance. They incurred the enmity of those
very elements in England who might have been expected to
defend their rights against over-zealous imperial administrators.
For unhappily the Dutch attitude towards the South AjBrican
native was different to that of the English humanitarian. The
latter viewed him as a defenceless black brothff whose welfare
was a sacred trust. The Dutch farmer thought of him as a
dangerous savage who could only be kqjt from vice and idleness
by strong paternal discipline and a liberal use of the whip. Of the
tvTO views that of the Dutch was perhaps founded on Ae closer
knowledge of the Cape Hottentot. But if the Dutch farmer was
the man on the spot, the English middle-class humanitarian was
the man who had the vote. The British government inevitably
interpreted the views of the latter.

Sooner than suffer interference with their ancient rights and
ways of life many Dutch left the Cape and trekked into the interior
wilderness. Here they made new homes and founded two in¬
dependent republics. But they wore not allowed to enjoy peace,
for they were represented by Exeter Hall as canying fire and
sword into the hereditary lands of the Kaffir, Basuto and Zulu.
There was truth in both points of view. But interpreted by the
Strang if reluctant arm of the imperial government, that of the
evangels of human equality and brotherhood usually prevailed
in the end. The pity was that it did not always correspond with
the facts as known to those on the spot. The British liberal voter
genuindy cared for the welfare of the South African native.
But he knew little of South Africa. Having no imperial principle
or interest in the Empire he did not trouble to learn.

In this he and his.rulers were to blame. For no aversion to
• imperial responsibility could alter the fact that they were morally

“lest we forget!”

responsible for the peace of South Africa. To interfere on behalf
of their own ideological convictions and simultaneously to refuse
to take any long view of imperial policy on the ground that
imperialism was expensive and morally wrong was to light a
*jBre on the veldt and leave it. Yet this was the habit of the
English hxunanitarian Left for more than a century.

This hiatus in the application of moral principle to the
government of an Empire again and again vitiated the history
of British South Africa. In 1852 an attempt was made by a
treaty with the Boers to stabilise the situation. Britain agreed
to “meddle no more beyond the Orange River and to leave the
Dutch and the natives to settle their differences among them¬
selves.” Yet seventeen years later Gladstone’s first administration,
yielding to the pressure of humanitarian supporters, intervened
in breach of treaty to protect the Basutos against the Boers of
the Orange Free State. Two years later it broke faith with the
Dutch again, annexing Griqualand to satisfy not missionaries
but prospectors. The diamond diggings—the richest in the
world—which had been discovoied on a Dutch farm beside the
Vaal river, were named after the Liberal Colonial Secretary,
Lord Eimberley. But, despite the production of a highly dubious
treaty with a native chief, the annexation was repudiated
by the Dutch electors of the Cape. To complete the circle of
ill-will, the natives in the new occupied territory were armed
by the British against the local* farmers.

Alfnost as imperfectly informed about the internal situation
of South Africa as Gla^tone’s govemment,^ but animated by
a different ideal, Disraeli’s administration of 1874-80 applied
imperial instead of humanitarian principles. The Colonial
’Secretary, Lord Carnarvon, satisfied that the union of Dutch and
English was the only solution of the African problem, paid
compensation to the Orange Free State for the loss of Griqualand
and admitted the wrong done. But ill-advised as to the local
facts and impatient to effect a federation of South Africa before
the swing of the political pendulum should put a term to his
oiEce, he sent Sir Bartle Frefe to the Cape with a premature
mandate to unite the two races. Ignoring the accumulated
animosities of generations and mthout waiting for the reviving
trust of the Dutch to mature, he allowed its peril from Zulu

^According to Froude, Lord Cardwell, who bad been a former Liberal Colonial
Secretary, thought in 1875 that Cape Colony was purely British in population and
that all the Dutch had migrated to the Orange Free State,—OcKiDia,

E.S. B

ENGLISH SAGA

246

tribes to be made an opportunity to annex the bankrupt Boa:
republic of the Transvaal. Shortly afterwards Britain became
involved in a costly war with the Zulus.

In the general election of 1880 the Liberals for the first rimp
professed S3rmpathy with the Dutch and promised to reverse the
Transvaal annexation. This, however, they subsequently felt
themsdves unable to do.^ The Boers, freed by British arms
from the fear of Zulu massacre, rose in defence of their freedom.
The government, tom between its aversion to imperial con¬
quest and its desire to pursue its own native policy in the
former Boer territories, failed to give its commander-in¬
chief sufficient support. On February 27th, 1881, Sir George
Colley with a small force was cut to pieces by the Boer farmers
at Majuba. Gladstone, with great moral courage but at a serious
sacrifice of prestige, thereupon agreed to grant virtual inde¬
pendence to the Transvaal. The British at the Cape were left
smarting undo: a sense of humiliation and injured patriotism.
The Dutch both in the Boer republic and the Cape Colony and
Natal were left with an even more dangerous contempt for the
courage and tenacity of the British.

«*••••••

The difficulty of ruling an empire while disbelieving in the
virtues of imperial rule involved the Liberals in difficulties
nearer home and for which they were not to blame. Ireland
was the damnosa hereditas of British politics. Deep in the-Irish
heart, whether in Ireland itself or in England, America or the
Colonies, survived the memory of ancient and terrible wrongs.*
No kindly intentions or benevolent acts of English Liberals
could wipe out this all too persistent past. The pig-nosed paddies
in their high hats, tight breeches and ragged tail-coats who
ambushed evicting landlords and chased their agents with
shillelaghs and shot-guns across the stony fields of Kerry and

^ *If Cyprus and the Transvaal,** Gladstone had declared during the dection, “were
as valuable ^ they are valueless, I would repudiate them because they are obtained
by c yan s dishonourable to the character of the country.** After the election, he
explained that he meant the word “repudiate** in the sense of dislike.

* Sir James Sexton, whose father was evicted from the Vale of Avoca in the ’forties
by an absenty landlord and whose maternal grandparents had been driven out of
Ireland into industrial La nca shire by the religious and political persecutions that
followed the Rebellion of 1798 wrote in his autobiography (17-18): “The story of
^ose days of terror was handed on to the children of all who endured their agony;
It ^spread all over the world, and engendered in the mind of every Irishman and
Irishwoman who heard it hatred—bitter and boundless hatred—of everything connect¬
ed with Britain and the British. That, so far as my Tninil \yas concerned, was
my principal political and spiritual inheritance.**

LEST WE forget!"

247

Clare; the Femans or R^ublican Brothers who took fearful
oaths and plotted in every part of the world and even invaded
Canada from the United States; the invisible dynamiters and
“Manchester martyrs” who swung from the Eng lish gallows
tree for murder and arson were the terror and bugbear of the
r^ecteble English in the prosperous middle years of Queen
Victoria’s reign.

In vain did a just Gladstone sternly and righteously offer up
the Irish Church to an ungrateful Irish priest and peasant. In
vain did successive governments vote grants to Catholic colleges
and pass land reform acts to protect the Irish tenant. Between
the English humanitarian and the credulous, priest-led Paddy
whom he wished to befriend and civilise a great gulf was fivpd.
The former did his best to believe in the existence of a body of
loyal, respectable and peace-loving Irish ready to enrol as special
constables against the Fenians, whose bloody anti senseless
doings outraged the peace and fair name of their country. Such
Irishmen did exist, but th^ were Orangemen: black, Protestant
Ulstermen from the grim North—an object of detestation to
every southern Irish patriot.

The Irish wished to avenge themselves on the English- The
English wished to let bygones be bygones and, though they
would never admit they were in the wrong, to make amends for
the past by making the Irish comfortable. The Irish did not
want to be comfortable. Thqr wanted to make the En glish
imcomfortable. Above all th^ wanted to be rid of the English
and their benevolent, insulting ministrations: they wanted to
be free. The English cotild not afford to let the Irish be fi%e.
Ireland lay across England’s lifeline. An Ireland in the hands
of a stranger might one day mean death for England.

All through the middle years of the century a new Irdand
was waking. Among a little minority in Dublin it was an
Ireland of poets and scholars fired by a passionate dream of their
country’s future. Cdtic Ireland, the Poland of the Western world;
would be a nation once more. For the great majority, the motive
power was a dull and sullen hatred: an angry resolve that spread
in aimless trickles of murder and outrage over a dark, haunted
land. Th^ could do nothing without a leader. And a nation
bom of a long line of degraded, landless, persecuted peasants—
feddess, C3mically jesting and despairing—bred rd>els more
readily than leaders.

ENGLISH SAGA

248

Yet the leader was forthcoming. He was a Protestant, an
aristocrat and a landowner: the last man in the world any one
would have predicted as a lawgiver to poor, squalid, rebd
Ireland. He despised the arts of the demagogue: loathed crowds
and politicians, and had an icy pride and reserve which few even
of his closest lieutenants could penetrate. But he had three
supreme assets: brilliant intellectual power, unshakable resolve
and a cold burning passion which nothing could quench. That
icy flame Charles Stewart Parnell applied for twenty years to a
single task: the breaking of the link that bound Ireland to
England.

His work began in the ’sevoities when he first entered the
House of Commons as member for County Meath. Until that
time the Irish members had been an ineffective body, regarded
by the desperate men who rode the stormy anarchy of Irish
assassination and land agitation as helpless prisoners of F.Ti g1ar> 4
Parnell realised from the first that the key to the Irish future
lay at Westminster. If he could wdd the four score or more
members whom Catholic Ireland returned to the imperial
parliament into a single disciplined body, he might use the
balanced rivalry of the English parties to wring legal concessions
that would open the road to Irish independence.

In the new Parliament of 1880 Parnell began to make his
power fdt He discovered that by taking advantage of the
intricate rules of parliamentary procedure which bad grown up
in the course of centmies, he could trepan the conservative
English with their own love of legality. His quick penetrating
mind made him master of these, and he taught his followers
how to use them. There ensued an extraordinary situation.
Night after night the most dignifled and orderly parliamentary
assembly in the world was hdd up by an interminable succession
of uimecessary speeches, questions and interruptions as Irish
member after member rose to dday business. The administration
of a great E m pire was hamstrung because, through an irony of
fate, a handfrd of resolute and alien obstructionists happened to
be members of ils soverdgn assembly.

By his success Pamdl achieved two things. He became the
most hated ma n jn England. He united the Irish nationalists.
It became realised that the battle of wdts that the Irish members
were waging nightly at Westminster was a struggle for the
rebirth of a nation. It was more. It was a gauntlet flung down

“lest we foeget!” 249

to England and her age-long donainion. The ej'es of the entire
world turned towards that little, mighty arena.

The Nationalist Party in Parliament had its counterpart in
Ireland. The Land Leaguft though not founded by him, also
marched at Parnell’s orders. The one aimed at destroying the
rule of Ireland by the English Parliament: the other her ex¬
ploitation by the English landlord. The League was an association
of Catholic tenant farmers and peasants against the Protestant
landowning garrison which had given local rule to Ireland
since the seventeenth century. It prescribed rents, banned or
“boycotted” all who paid more and made the taking of a farm
from whidi a member had been evicted a social crime.^ It was
accompanied inevitably, though this was contrary to Parnell’s
■wishes, by gang intimidation, cattle-maiming, rick-buming and'
murder.

The Liberal rulers of Britain were in a quandary. They
wished well to Ireland. They hated co^on. But they were
also men of peace and lovers of parliamentary govaranent.
They could not see law and order flouted and the democratic
noachineiy of parliament sabotaged. They were forced against
their will to act. They tried suspending the Habeas Corpus Act
and putting Parnell in Kilmainham Gaol. By doing so th^
rnaAf bi’m a martyr and themselves tyrants. As soon as they
released bim he continued the struggle. They were driven to
limit the freedom of parliamentary debate and to abandon part
of the democratic practice of centuries.® They only heightened
Parnell’s prestige. Ireland thrilled at the tale of his tritunphs
in the very temple of the Saxon tyrant. To aid his campai^
of pounds poured in fix)m Irish sympathisers in

America.

But the greatest of Parnell’s conquests was Gladstone’s con¬
science. Gladstone was a devout churchman and a man of

^ “Whea a takes a fana front whidi aaother has beea gected," Paiadl told
his followers in Septeniber, 1880, “you must show him on the roadside, tou m^t
show him in the streets, you must show him at the shop counter, you must show toa
in the feir and in the market place, and even in the house of worship, bv leaving him
severely alone, by isolating him from his kind as if he were a leper of old—you murt
show him your dctcstation of the crime he has committed, and you may dep^d on it
that there will be no man so fuU of araiice. so lost to shame, as to the public
opinion of all right-thinking men, and to transgrts your uawnttm cMe lawi
* In the view of a great living authority on parliamentary practice. Sir Bryan Fe^
the protective measures then introduced have since hem iised by the ?

deprive the private Member of Parliameiit of his traditional ppsiuon as the unk
between the Government and the Public.

ENGLISH SAGA

250

splendid probity of life. Parnell was a concealed adulterer. Yet
Parnell made Gladstone ashamed. And what Gladstone’s
conscience felt to-day, England’s conscience would feel
to-morrow. In 1882 the 73-year-old. Prime Minister, appalled
by the di£ 5 culty of governing Ireland and controlling the
Irish members, wrote to his Irish Secretary that so long as
there wore no responsible bodies in Ireland with which a British
Government could deal, every plan framed to help thpTn ramo
to Irishmen as an English plan. It was therefore probably con¬
demned: at best regarded as a one-sided bargain whidi bound
the English but not the Irish. Becavise of the miserable and
almost total want of responsibility for public welfare and peace
■ in Ireland, reform was impossible. Such a sense of responsibility
'could only be created through local sdf-govemment. “If we
say we must postpone the question till the state of the country
is more fit for it, I should answer that the least danger is in
going forward at once. It is liberty alone which fits men for
liberty.” The faith of a Liberal was never more nobly eY pr pg, s p d .

For Gladstone’s mind, more sincerely wed to the conception
of freedom than that of any of his followas, had grasped the
logic of the Irish situation. Either England must rule the subject
peoples of hCT Empire according to her own moral standards
and through strong and consistent imperial policy, or she must
make no attempt to impose her ways of life, however noble, on
others and trust to liberty to teach its own lesson. Gladstone
believed in liberty and was prepared to rely on it. He was even
prq>ared to give it to the Irish.

To initiate a new departure in Irish policy, he therefore rdeased
Parnell from KilmainhaiTi Gaol, and appointed Lord Frederick
Cavendish, his beloved niece’s husband and the most sympathetic
figure among the younger members of the House, as, Chief
Secretary- for Ireland. Four days after Parnell’s release Lord
Frederick was murder©! by Fenian assassins as he walked home
across Phoenix Park.

It was a mark of Gladstone’s growing greatness that he
allowed neither this terrible crime nor the crop of Irish dynamite
outrages in England in the following year, to deflect him from
his purpose. Others, including Liberal elements in the Tory
Party, who were influenced by the example of the self-governing
colmues, were moving in the same direction. In 1885, when the
balance between the major parties was sufficiently even to give

“lest we forget!” 251

the eighty-six Irish members under Parnell’s leadership a deciding
voice in a new parliament, he let it be known that he proposed
to introduce a scheme of Home Rule for Ireland.

Had the question only been political, Gladstone would
probably have carried his measure. The religious issue split the
liberal majority. Though religion as a political factor was a
dying force in Eirgland, there were many of Gladstone’s followers
who could not look unmoved on the subjection of a Protestant
minority to a Catholic majority. In such a case the democratic
formula was somehow inadequate. The little handful of WTiig
aristocrats who still provided leaders for the Liberal Part}’
derived their lands and honours from the glorious day when a
Protestant Prince delivered England from a Catholic King.
From the conquests of that Prince the Orange patriots of Ulster
still boasted their claim to be the ruling faction in Ireland.

If the Right wing of the Liberal Party could not conscien-
tiotisly drive Ulster out of a Protestant union into a Papist
province, nor could the Left. Nonconformity, with its strong
local organisation, was still a mighty power in the land. Though
fast mellowing into humanitarianism, its historic inspiration
had always been hatred of Popery. Its political leader was the
uncrownrf king of Birmingham, rascal Joe Chamberlain.
Though a man of wide sympathies who had looked with a
lenient eye on Irish rebd aspirations—^perhaps because he had so
many himself—he now showed hims elf a true mirror of pro¬
vincial middle-class England. Sooner than endorse Home Rule,
he resigned from the Cabinet and joined hands with the Whig
leader. Lord Hartington, to raise the fieiy cross of Protestant
and imperial unity.

When the Home Rule bill came up for its second reading,
more than a hundred Liberals voted against the government or
absented themselves. Defeated by thirty votes, Gladstone appealed
to the country. Protestant scruples, patriotic pride and the fear
and hatred engendered by the long Irish campaign of violence
and intimidation were stronger even than his courage and
magnerisnu Three hxmdred and sixteen Conservatives and 78
Liberal “Unionists” were returned, but only 191 Gladstonian
Liberals.

The decision was vital. The English democracy had refused
to allow the Irish tihe right to govern themselves. Though for
a further nine years Gladstone laboured to reverse that decision.

ENGLISH SAGA

252

giving all his immense powers to this single task, fate was
against him. In 1890 Parnell’s divorce case shattered the unity
of the Irish Nationalist Party. "For five years I have,rolled this
stone patiently uphill,” Gladstone complained, "and it is now
rolled to the bottom again, and I am 81 years old.” Yet even
then the old man would not give in. His venerable courage
almost won over England in spite of itself. In the autumn of
1892 an election brought him back to office with a chance of
carrying Home Rule vdth the help of Irish votes. But as the
dreaded hour of separation drew near opposition in the country
became intense. Punch depicted an aged and sworded pilgrim
advancing along a narrow ridge called Home Rule with the bog
of Irish Nationalism on one side and the last ditch of Orange
resistance on the other. After scraping through the Commons,
the Bill was rejected by an overwhelming majority in the Lords.
An appeal to ffie country would certainly have endorsed their
decision. Soon afterwards Gladstone, 84 years of age and almost
blind, laid down his burden.

With him died the last hope of self-government for Ireland
for a generation. In its place she received a course of strong
Conservative “repression” and of enlightened agrarian reform
which, applied half a century earlier, might have made her a
contented province like Wales. But the hopes aroused by Parnell’s
fire and Gladstone’s intensity were not to be stilled by Balfour’s
elegant firmness of George Wyndham’s squirearchial benevo¬
lence. The resolve of the Irish to be free persisted and grew add
for the waiting. Their hour came in 1910 when English internal
divisions and an even electoral balance between the parties once
more made the Irish Nationalist members arbiters at West¬
minster. Making Home Rule the price of their support, they
assisted one English faction to make a fundamental ch an ge
in the constitution to spite another. They then demanded
their price. The guttering candle of English Protestantism was
by that time too dim to light another religious crusade to save
the Irish Protestants. Though Ulster swore to fight. Home Rule
was granted. But it was too late. The Irish ulcer had become too
in fla m ed to be cured by any minor operation. In 1916 the Irish
took up arms against the age-long oppressor. In 1922, still
fighting, they achieved their independence.

Until the first rgection of Home Rule in the 'eighties, the

•I.E 3 T WB BOROBT!" 353

British people had shown no consciousness of the hecesity for
an imperial policy. But during the two decades of Conservative
supremacy that followed Gladstone’s defeat, they had become
increasingly aware of the Empire. For the big steamer, the
electric telegraph, the inventions of Marconi, were naaking the
world a smaller place. Th^ even made a united commonwealth
scattered haphazard over its surface seem a practical possibility.

A few scholars and dreamers began the fashion that made
men tliink in a new way. In 1883, John Seeley, Regius Professor
of Modem History at Cambridge, published his lectures on the
Expansion of England. His theme was that the outward spread
of the English race had been the main human trend of the past
three centuries. If England was wise enough to recognise her
chance, her future could be more glorious even than her past.
If she neglected it she would decline like Rome and Spain
and see her commercial wealth pass to younger rivals. For the
potamic and thalassic ages had been succeeded by an oceanic,
and the future of the world lay, not with the small nation states
of the past, but with composite world states like the U.S.A. and
Russia linked by the new forces of steam and electricity.

It was a question not of lust for power or empire, but of
common sense and dvic responsibility. If the race were to
survive in a changing world, its leaders must secure the
conditions necessary for it to do so. Already hundreds of
thousands in Britain were hungry and in need of work and
living space. Yet they could have both for the asking: their
heritage was already made. “It may be true that the
mother country of this great Empire is crowded, but in order
to relieve the pressure it is not necessary for us, as if we
were Goths or Turcomans, to seize upon the territory of our
neighbours. ... it is only necessary to take possession of bound¬
less territories in Canada, South A&ica and Australia where
alr^dy our language is spoken, our religion professed, and our
laws established. If tho^e is pauperism in Wiltshire and Dorset¬
shire, this is but complementary to unowned wealth in Australia.
On the one side there are men without property, on the other
there is property waiting for men.”^

Three years later Seeley’s work, which ran through many
editions, was followed by one even more widely read. The
historian Froude’s Oceana was named after the seventeenths
* y. a. Sedg, Expaisim oj Saglm^ jo-z»

ENGLISH SAGA

2S4

century Harrington’s dream of an English "commonwealth for
increase . . . embraced in the arms of ocean.” It described a
voyage to the Cape, Australia and New Zealand, and compared
the freedon and opportunity of a young country like Australia
—an England set free from limitations of space where he never
met a himgry man or saw a discontented face—^with the slums
which every year were enguliSng a larger part of the English
race—“miles upon miles of squalid lanes, each house the duplicate
of its neighbour; the dirty street in front, the dirty yard behind,
the fetid smell from the ill-made sewers, the public-house at the
street comer.” Posing the age-long question that the utili¬
tarians had ignored, he asked what sort of men and women
urban England was breeding to succeed the generations who
had made her great?

The English could not sttrvive only as factory drudges forced
by himger to be eternally manufacturing shirts and coats, tools
and engines for the happier part of mankind. Like a tree a
a nation had to breathe through its extremities. "A mere manu¬
facturing England, standing stripped and bare in the world’s
market-place and caring only to make wares for the world to
buy,” was a pollard tree. The life was going out of it.

The colonists were already Britain’s best customers, buying
from her in proportion to their tiny population three times
more than any stranger. They would not always be a mere
ten and a half millions, weak and scattered. The Prime Minister
of Victoria predicted in 1885 that in half a century at its present
rate of devdopment Australia alone would have a population of
fifty millions.^ Should danger ever come to England, the
colonists’ response would be imquestioning and automatic.

Froude did nof advocate imperial federation. The time was
not ripe for it. Nor was it needed. What mattered was that the
patriotism of the colonies,should be reciprocated. It was because
they valued the imperial tie so much that they fdt the sting in the
suggestion of parting. Their attachment might not always be
proof against contemptuous hints from frigid aristocrats and
dvil servants to take themsdves away. Indiflference might
produce indifference.

England was refusing her destiny. There might be no
second chance. “Were Canada and South Africa and Australia

* Because tlptt devdlopment was not maintained, it is to^iay only 7 millions, out of
wbich Australia is sending in her need the finest soldiers and pilots in the world.

"lest we forget!”

25s

and New Zealand members of one body with us,” Froude Wrote,
"we might sit secure against shifts and changes.” Without
them a little overcrowded island would not be able to support
its people or assure them the kind of life that made free men.
Already in her squalid mushroom cities multitudes were growing
up pale and stunted or were leaving her shores in despair. For
lack of an imperial policy four-fifths of those who emigrated
went to the United States, frequently in association with British
capital invested there. Other nations—Russia, Germany and
United States—^were seeking new territories to provide for their
people’s future. England alone, in her materialist absorption
with the present, seemed indifferent to hers.

Yet in her splendid past she had unconsciously made provision
for it, “in the fairest spots upon the globe where there was still
soil and sunshine; where the race might for ages renew its mighty
youth, bring forth as many millions as it would and still have
means to breed and rear them strong as the best which she pro¬
duced in her early prime. The colonists might be pajing no
revenue but they were opening up the face of the earth. By and
by, like the spreading branches of a forest tree, they would return
the sap which they were gathering into the heart. England could
pour out among them, in return, year after year, those poor
children of hers now Poking in fetid alleys, and, relieved of
the strain, breathe again fresh air into her own smoke-encrusted
Ixmgs. With her colonies part of herself, she would be, as
Harrington had foreshadowed, a commonwealth resting on the
mightiest foundations which the world had ever seen. Queen
among the nations, from vdthout invulnerable, and at peace and
at health within—this was the alternative future before Oceana.”^

Froude was an old man with his historian’s heart rooted in
the past. He was no friend to democracy: he feared its destructive
influences. But he ended his book with an appeal to the masses
with whom future power lay tp be wiser than the calico and hard-
v^are merchants they were supplanting. The other great Anglo-
Saxon democracy sooner than forfeit its future had shed the
blood of half a million of its sons to preserve the tmion. The
continuance of a commonwealth of freemen was worth some
sacrifice.

That was in 1886. Four years later came the biggest literaiy
sensation since the appearance of Pickwick. A young man of

'^Otxamy 20.

256 ENGLISH SAGA

genius bom in Bombay "between the palms and the sea’’ and bred
half in India, half in England, painted the life of the An'glo-
Indian community for his countrymen: the colour, scent and sound
of the East, the crowded bazaar opening for the sahib’s horse,
the contrast with the grey, suburban, northern island from
which the characters of his witty, glittering, malicious stories
hailed. Since the day when Lord Craven drew his interminable
cocoa trees for Harriette Wilson, the English had been bored
by tales of their own Empire. And here was a young journalist,
still in his early twenties, who could cause a run on them in
every circulating library in London.

But Rudyard Kipling did more than tdl stories. He told his
readers to think imperially. His message was not of opportunity
but of duty and destiny. From its hallowed centre at Westmins¬
ter—where the Abbey makes us we”—to the fringed palm and
the snow-capped fort at the outer circumference, the Empire was
a vast trust for humanity. "The white man’s burden” constituted
the peculiar contribution to human progress of the Anglo-Saxon
race. Despite its strident energy, Kipling’s work was as moral
in its purpose as Milton’s or Bunyan’s.^ Its aim was to remind
Englishmen of their duty, by relating the vigour, courage and
pathos of those who dedicat^ undemonstrative lives to a great
ruling tradition. "As to my notions of imperialism, I learned
them from men who mostly cursed their work, but always
carried- it through to the end, under difficult surroundings,
without help or acknowledgment.”

With Kipling as with all the great English moralists, duty
was no mere negative virtue—a prudent, middle-class insurance
against Hell. It was a mighty force, giving life, poetry and fire
as it did to the Hebrew poets of old. His vision of the English
was of a race finding its destiny in free surrender, self-training
and self-dedication to a divine purpose. In his hymn of the old
Scots engine M‘Andrew, published in 1896, he epitomised it as:

"Law, Order, Duty and Restraint, Obedience, Discipline.”

But the man who above all others turned the thoughts of

^A French critic realised this more dearly than Kipling’s own countrymen.
^*Kiplmg» of all tie great Hving writers of his country, stands alone for the absolute
in ethics, with a militant faith. A Wells, a Shaw, a Bennett, a Galsworthy, serve other
^ods, the gods of reason or sentiment. Eiplm^s work appeals to our will . . .; he
u the tesumer of conduct.*—JWre ChewUhni fhru Studies in English Literature, 6 j,

“lest we forget!”

257

his countrytoen to the empire they had neglected or taken for
granted was not a writer. Cecil Rhodes was bom on the 5th
July, 1853, the fifth son of a Hertfordshire vicarage. He was
one of a line of small gentry and yeomen farmers: his forbears,
he loved to boast, kept cows at Islington.

Though his elder brothers went to Eton and Winchester, the
femily resources restricted Cecil to the local grammar school.
When he was sixteen, having developed a tendency to consump¬
tion, he was sent to join an elder brother on a Natd cotton farm.
On a summer’s day in 1870 he landed at Durban—a shy, tall,
fair-headed lad, as lonely as Robert Clive at his first coming to
Madras.

After a year of unsuccessful farming he followed his brother
across the high veld to the new diamond diggings at Kimberley.
Here he spent the next two years in a crazy communitj* of rough
diggers from every comCT of the earth, Jewish speculators and
native labourers; mud holes, mud slides, refuse dumps and tin
roofs. In this school he learnt to know ma nkin d.

As the youthful Kipling was impressed by the alternate scenes
of F.Tigiand and India—the little, crowded, fog-bound island and
the vast glittering empire it ruled by force of character—so
Rhodes responded to the mining camp of Dutoitspan. He came
back to England to complete his education wi& a profound
sense of the honesty, kindliness and courage of the ordiria^
ynglisbrnan. While at Oxford, paying his fees by periodic visits
to the diggings, he conceived a burning desire to fiirth® the
expansion of his race. It was at the time that Ruskin, as
S l ad p Professor, was firing the imagination of a new generation
of imdergraduates by lectures on their country’s destiny, telling
th pm that they were still undegenerate in race and blood, not
yet dissolute in temper, with the firmness to govern and the
grace to obey. “Will you youths of England,” he asked, “make
your country again a royal throne of kings, a sceptred isle, for
all the world a source of light, a centre of peace; mistress of
learning and of the Arts, faithful guardian of time-med
principles, under temptation from fond experiments and licen¬
tious desires; and amidst the cruel and clamorous jealousies of
the nations, worshipped in her strange valour of goodwill
towards men?... This is what England must eithCT do or perish.
She must find colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed
of her most energetic and worthiest -men; seizing any piece

ENGLISH SAGA

258

of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on, and there
teaching her colonists that their chief virtue is to be fidelity to
their country_If we can get men, for little pay, to cast them¬

selves against cannon mouths for love of England, we may find
men also who will plough and sow for her, who will behave
kindly and righteously for her, and who will bring up their
children to love her. . .

Rhodes did not doubt Ruskin’s message. He linked it to his
own experience, and to the healthy, empty uplands of the South
African hinterland which he had seen on his travels—lands where
Englishmen could live, labom and multiply without injury to
others. To win those lands for England and to awaken the
imagination of his countrymen to their possibilities was to be
his life’s work. He went further. Since the English at their best
almost alone possessed the three attributes which seemed to him to
express most nearly the divine will—a sense of justice, a respect
for liberty and a love of peace—the next stage in human evolution
could best be accomplished through the peaceful expansion of
the Anglo Saxon race. Like Milton, Rhodes held that if God
wanted a thing done He sent for his Englishman.

With the crazy arrogance of youth he began to preach
his creed while still at Oxford. With debts pouring in and the
pump on his claim in the flooded diggings at Kimberley breaking
down, he drew up a will—^the first of many—in whidi he left a
still non-existent fortune to found a secret society to spread the
British rule into every unclaimed part of the ear^ where
white men could live by their own labour. The whole Anglo-
Saxon race was comprised in his grandiose dream; there was to
be an end to the eighteenth-century “schism,” a reunion, if
necessary imder the Stars and Stripes, complete freedom and
self-govemment for every part of the vast commonwealth so
formed, an imperial parliament and internal free trade. This
great achievement in human co-operation would guarantee the
permanent p^e of the world. “I contend,” he wrote, “that we
are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we
inhabit, &e better it is for the human race. I contend that every
acre add^ to our territory provides for the birth of more of the
English race who otherwise would not be brought into existence.
Added to which the absorption of the greater portion of the world
under our rule simply means the end of all wars.”

There was nothing unusual in a young man dreaming dreams.

“lest we forget!” 259

What was extraordinary was the speed and consistency with
which Rhodes put them into practice. In an age when money
had become power, he decided that nothing could be achieved
without cash—“the needful,” as he called it. He proceeded
to make hims elf the richest man in the Empire. At 27 he
founded the De Beers Mining Company with a capital of £200,000.
Within eight years he was dictator of the South African diamond
industry. Six years later, at the age of 41, he had achieved a
similar position in the new gold-mining industry of the
Johanne^urg Rand.

His enormous wealth, and the power it gave him, Rhodes did
not devote to personal or vulgar ends. Seeking, as he expressed
it, to combine the commacial and the imaginative, he still
pursued his dream. To his contemporaries there was something
staggering, and to many even incredible, in the spectacle of a
nineteenth<entury speculator “spending the profits of a mini ng
company on the development of an empire.” Yet this was pre¬
cisely what Rhodes did. “And the fun is,” he loved to say, “we
make Beit pay!” But his fiiend Alfred Beit, hard-head^ H^rew
and shrewd financier as he was, nevCT grudged a penny.
He knew Rhodes, honoured his vision and loved him; and his
devoted service to Rhodes’s ideal continued after death.

“The friend he loved he served through good and ill,

The man struck down, he served his memory still,

'Nor toiling asked more recompense of fame
Than to be coupled with another’s name.”

As part of the task he had set himself Rhodes mtered Cape
politics. His success was as dazzling as in business: there seemed
no resisting his energy and charm. At 36 li® be c a m e Prime
Minister of the Cape Colony. He had two objects: the exp^on
of British rule into the northern hinterland, and the umon of
British and Dutch in a federal South Africa.

To gain the first he had to fight against time. The early
’eighties saw the last scramble of the European Powers, all fest
industrialising themselves, for undaimed lands of settlement
whidi might afiFord them raw materials and new markets. The
African interior, recently opened by the missionary exploration
of men like Livingstone, offered the last unoccupied territories
of size in the world. To the north-western deserts of South

ENGLISH SAGA

260

Africa came in 1884 the armed and bustling pioneers of Bismarck’s
Grermany. Their annexation of Damara and Namaqua struck
a blow at Rhodes’s dream. For between the new German South-
West Africa and the two straggling, ever-expanding Boer republics
lay only a narrow corridor of disputed land linking Cape Colony
with the uplands of the African hinterland which !^odes coveted
for the settlement of his race. If England did not speedily
secure the missionaries’ road through Bechuanaland to the
empty north, the intriguing, ambitious German and the stubborn,
jealotis Boer would join hands and shut out the English for ever
from their lands of promise.-

It was the same situation that had confronted the American
colonists in the eighteenth century when the French in Canada
and Florida had sought to join hands along the Ohio valley and
so cut off the Anglo-Saxon community from the interior. Had
the French succeeded the future of the world would have
been changed. Rhodes, a young man of 31 in the very thick of
his struggle with fortune, saw himself at such a jimcture of
history. Neither his countrymen at the Cape nor in England
shared his wision. He had to act before he could awaken them.
With every ounce of his tremendous energy and will, he flung
himself into the task of keeping the gateway open to the north.
He got himself sent'into B^uanaland as Deputy ConoLmissioner
and played a leading part in the events that led to the
establishment of a British Protectorate over the country. Here
he made friends with his beaten opponents as was his way.
“I have never,” he said, “met any one in my life whom it was
not as easy to deal with as to fight.” In a letter he described how
he came to terms with one Boer farmer, an angry giant who
greeted him as he rode up to his door with the words, “blood
must flow.” No,’ said I, * give me my breakfast and then we
can talk about blood.’ Well, I stayed with him a week, I became
godfather of his children and we made a settlement,”

Having gained the corridor, Rhodes prepared to take the
North,” By devious ways he obtained concessions from the
savage Matabde tribes who fought and hiinted the vast empty
hinterland. Then he turned to the imperial government. By
badgering all parties and politicians,^ and using his wealth and
powers of persuasion to win over opposition, he secured a
Royal Charter for the company w hich was to create a

^ He used to say that the story of the importunate widow was the best in the Bible.

“lest we forget!*'

261

new dominion. In 1890 he launched his pioneers along the
northern road into the wilderness. In the next year, when he
could escape from his official duties at the Cape, he followed
them on a visit along the fifteen hundred mile trek to their
primitive capital at Fort Salisbury.

In all that he had done Rhodes was animated by a single and
unchanging ambition: to found homes—“more homes”—^for
the race. His imagination never ceased to dwell on the future
shade of the trees he planted. He loved to think that the road
he made up Table Mountain would be used by men and women
of his race in a hundred years* time. It was not chance that
made him seek the friendship of General Booth and spend days
with him in the crowded London slums: the contrast between
the England of the utilitarians and the wider, freer England
of Rhodes’s dream was his constant spur. The province which
he added to the Empire, and which later bore his name, was
equal in extent to Germany, France and” Spain together; a
country where free men could work and breed and make a new
English nation.

When Rhodes came back to England to sedb for his projects
the support of Conservative, Liberal and Irish politicians, of
royal Dukes and journalists, of speculators and social reformers,
it was always with the same idea. Somehow he had got to save
the English future from the blindness of the English—“the
greatest people the world has seen whose fault is that they do
not know ffieir strength, their greatness and their destiny.”
“Mr. Gladstone,” he is reported to have said, “the practical
reason for the further acquisition of territory is that every
power in the world, including our kinsmen the Americans, as
soon as they take new territory, place hostile tariffs against
British goods.” In his speeches to the shareholders of his Chartered
Company, essays in imperial planning, he reverted again and
again to the nightmare that haunted him: that the prohibitive
tariffs of a hostile world would one day pauperise and perhaps
starve an island people who could not feed themsdves:

“The classes can spend theirmoneyxmder anyflag,but tiiepoor
masses... can only look to other countries in connection with
what they produce. Instead of the world going alnght it
is all wrong for them. Cobden had his idea of Free Trade
fer all the world, but that idea has not been realised. The

E.S. ®

2^2

ENGLISH SAGA

whole world can see that we can make the best goods in this
country, and the countries of the world therefore establish
against us, not protective tariffs, but prohibitive tariffs....

“The question of the day is the tariff question and no
one tells the people anything about it. . . These islands can
only support six millions out of their thirty-six
... We cannot afford to part with one inch of the world’s
surfece whidi affords a free and open market to the manu-
frctures of our countrymen.

“When I came back to England the first time, I went up
the Thames, and what did I find they were doing? ... for
whom were they making? They were making for the world.
Of course, Cobdenism was a most beautiful theory, and it
is right that you should look to the world; but the human
beings in the world will not have that They will want to
make their own'things; and if they find that Eng lant^ can
make them best they will put on their protective duties;
and if they keep on doing that they will beat you in the
end."

For a short while Rhodes made empire a feshion. It became
the craze of society ladies and the theme of music-hall choruses.
When Gladstone wished to evacuate Uganda in 1893 he was
warned by his chief dection agent that the price for doing
so would be his own evacuation of Downing Street. Ihe
qieeches whidi Rhodes made to his shareholders were listened
to by breathless thousands and read by millions. Yet even he
could not stir the sound, prosperous men who controlled the
nation’s trade and finandtd policy into constructive action or
arouse the Westminster politidans from their dream of the
parish pump and their eternal talk of municipal trams and three
acres and a cow.

While Rhodes strove to expand South Africa he sought to
umte her. His dream was of a single nation from the Blodt
House at Table Mountain to the Great Lakes. He did not share
the vulgar hope of the Cape patriots of subordinating the Dutch
to the English. He liked the sturdy Dutch farmers and honoured
the old Dutch culture of the Cape. “The Dutch,” he said,, “are
the cmning race in South Africa and they must have their share
in running the country.” He made friends with tbwn, studied

G. MUHn^ JRhodeSi

“lest WE forget!" 263

their interests and sought to find a solution of the native problem
which had been the chief stumbling block between the two
European races. His aim was their equal status in a South
African union freed from the centralising trammels of White-
halli but linked with the rest of the Empire by the Crown, the
flag and imperial preference.

Rhodes wanted that union, like the wider world common¬
weal^ of sdf-goveming nations he envisage to follow the
English tradition of freedom, fair play and opportunity for all.
He once said in a speedi in the Cape Parliament that England
had two cardinal and historic principles; that its word, once
pigged, was never broken, and that when a man accepted citizen¬
ship of the British Empire there was no further distinctidn of
races. He did not want the South Africa of his dream to be
exclusive but open “to all men who loved truth, freedom and
the welfare of mankind.”

After a time Rhodes won the trust of the Dutch, Those in
the British colonies of the Cape and Natal came to look on him
as their leader—^an unheard-of position for an Englishman. In
the independent Orange Free State also he made friends. But
he had one serious obstacle—the character of the primitive
Dutch Transvaal and, above all, of its leader, Kruger. For the
little republic of Boer farmers that lay in the centre of the new
South Africa, bestriding its internal communications^ had no
sympathy with Rhodes’s ideals. Its leader had no i^eam of
the future nor belief in human progress: only a stubborn
resolve to live the life of bygone generations and preserve their
simple pastoral ways. To the old Dutch President, with his
spittoon and his Bible, Rhodes’s ideal of “equal rights for all
civilised men, irrespective of race, south of the Zambesi,*” made no
appeal. His ideal was exclusion of ail foreigners from the vddt
and if possible from South Africa. He excluded their goods by
dapping on a 33 per cent, tariff against all imports. He even
tried to exclude their railways and telegraphs.

But mammon is a powerful dissolvent of conservative com¬
munities. The discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in the
’eighties put President Kruger and his farmers in a dilemma.
They could only secure the profit of that lucky find by a dmi tting
foreigners with capital and mining skill. And when they did
so foreigners entered the country in such numbers that in a few

^ He supported Irish Home Rule as part of his policy of imperial sdf-govcmmcnt

ENGLISH SAGA

264

years they not only paid the bulk of the country’s taxation but
outnumbered the Dutch burghers. Kruger could only m ai ntain
Dutch independence by denying them the franchise. If he
granted them the rights of democratic citizenship, th^ -^ould
deliver his country and its ancient, primitive civilisation to the
enemy. For the uidanders, most of whom were British, natural¬
ly preferred Rhodes’s conception of South Africa to Kruger’s.

Rhodes had only to be patient Kruger was trying for the
impossible: he was fighting agmnst a majority and against
time. But, though no one knew it but himself, so was Rhodes.
In his early forties he learned that he was a dying man.
He had accomplished only a tithe of his great dream. If he was
to see it achieved, it must be achieved quickly. He could not
trust others to complete it. Already the power that had
come to him was impairing his diaracter; he was growing
arrogant and impatient of opposition. Discarding the virtues—
tact, patience and conciliation—by which he had climbed, he
staked all on a gamble. The gamble failed.

The armed Jameson Raid from Rhodesia into the Trans¬
vaal put a term to Rhodes’s power as a politician. The
Dutch felt he had betrayed them: the English liberals and
humanitarians, who had been growing increasingly suspicious
of his wealth, his dubious companions and his attitude to
the native problem, fdt their worst fears confirmed. Rhodes
had shown the cloven hoof. His failure discredited his
vision and made Little Englandism a permanent mood among
idealists and progressives. It was even assumed that he had
engineered the raid to improve the value of the Chartered
Company’s properties and shares. Henceforward he was a man
tainted and cut off from the people he had sought to serve.
Though there was much that was great in the final years of his
life, the future of South Africa and the Empire passed into other
hands. His legaqr to his country was Rhodesia, the Rhodes
Scholarships’ Trust, and, when his mis take had been eiq)iated
by the Boer War, the Union of South Africa.

A few months before his death at the age of 49, at the bitterest
moment of the war, when victory had be(x>me certain and foolish
men were talking of revenge, Rhodes addressed the South African
League at Cape Town. “You think,” he said, “you have beaten
the Dutchl But it is not so. The Dutch are not beatm; what
is beaten is Krugerism, a corrupt and evil gove rnm ent, no more

“lest we forget!®

265

Dutch in essence than English, No! The Dutch are as vigorous
and unconquered to-day as they have ever been; the counti^^ is
still as much theirs as it is yours, and you will have to live and
work with them hereafter as in the past. Remember that when
you go back to your homes in the towns or in the up-country
farms and villages. Let there be no vaxmting words, no vulgar
triumph over.your Dutch neighbours; make them feel that
bitterness is past and that the need of co-operation is greater
than ever. Teach your children to remember when they go to
their village school that the little Dutch boys and girls they find
sitting on the same benches with them are as much part of the
South African nation as they are themselves, and that as they
learn the same lessons together now, so hereafter they must
work together as comrades for a common object—the good of
South Africa.”

Rhodes’s last recorded words were, “So little done: so much
to do.” He was only 49 when he died. Had he lived another
twelve years, he might conceivably, by his strength and com¬
manding influence in the Anglo-Saxon world, have made it
dear in the summer of 1914 that the Empire would intervene
against an aggressor and so have averted the Great War and all
its incalculable consequences. Had he lived till now, like his
contemporary, Bernard Shaw, it is even possible that his full
dream might have been realised, the “Anglo-Saxon schism” be
ended and the peace and economic unity of mankind permanently
secured by the establishment of a pacific world power as
omnipotent as Rome. The Fates willrf it otherwise.

It was an English politidan who took up Rhodes’s work
where he had left it half shattered at the end of 1895. In that
year Joseph Chamberlain became Colonial Secretaiy. It was an
office about which no one had troubled much before. For eight
years Chamberlain made it the most important in the Empire.
He reconquered the Sudan,^ which during the Mahdi’s rule had
lost three-quarters of its population, and established a British
province twenty times .the size of England in the heart of
equatorial Africa. He transferred the rule of the vast country
which is to-day called Nigeria from the Royal Niger Company
to the imperial crown. He secured, by a war in which Australians,
Canadians and New Zealanders fought side by side with EngUsh-

1 General Kitchener the Sirdar, annihilated the Mahdi at Omduiman in 1898.

ENGLISH SAGA

266

men, Britisli sovereignty over the whole of South Africa from,
the Cape to Lake Tanganyika. His policy of appeasement in the
liouT of victory was a firet step towards a new and free South
Africa without racial predominance. He helped to bring about
the long-delayed federation of the Australian colonies.

These achievements were only part of Chamberlain’s service
to the Emime. This dapper ex-radical and Brumagemhardware
merchant with the frock coat, monocle and orchid, the art of a
demagogue and the vision of a Roman Emperor, infused a new
spirit into imperial administration. A business man of initiative
and enargy, in days when business still required both, he sought
to make the Empire pay by making it efficient. But he took the
long view of efficiency, looking to the interests not merely of
the living but of the imbom. He regarded the Crown Colonies
as undeveloped estates which could only be developed with
imperial assistance. Some of tliem, after a htmdred years of
British rule, were still in the same state as when they had
been annexed. Britain’s stewardship could only be justifirf if it
conferred active benefits on their peoples and the greater
populations comprised in the imperid union.

Chamberlain set up a Ro3ral Commission to rq)ort on the
West Indian sugar islands, derelict and half-ruined after half a
.century of laissez-faire^ founded an Imperial Departmoit of
Agriculture in the islands to investigate the causes of insert
pests and stimulate the planting of alternative crops, and granted
loans for colonial transport development at low rates of interest.
His Colonial Office fostered the study of tropical medicine and
hygiene, established native colleges and trained a new school of
scientific imperial administrators versed in the laborious arts
of making the wilderness flower. In Africa in particular his
policy produced remarkable results: provinces which for centuries
had been savage areas of vice, fetishism, slavery, filth and
pestilence became in the course of a single generation orderly
and weU-govemed communities with schools, railways and
hospitals and a most unfamiliar atmosphrte of hope.

Hope was, indeed, the do min ant -im p erial note while Joe
Chamberlain remain^ at the Colonial Office. His forceful
optimism brushed aside 'difficulties: distance, provincial
jealousies, lack of population, non-existent markets, want of
cajHtal to develop and of trade to repay develc^ment. There was
talk of imperial federation and of .some grand, nebulous scheme

“lest we forget!’*

267

of centralised government for the whole empire, for Chamber¬
lain’s mind ran on more bureaucratic lines than Rhodes’s. A
succession of Colonial Conferences discussed questions of imperial
defence and federation and recommended the adoption of pre¬
ferential trade within the Empire if ever Great Britain should
feel able to modify her sacrosanct commercial policy of unre¬
stricted imports. In the third Conference, in 1897, the Prime
Ministers of the eleven self-governing colonies pass^ a resolution
in favotir of federation should it become geographically feasible.
It was the year of the Diamond Jubilee: Empire and the pride
of Empire were in the air. The aged Queen drove in an open
carriage to St. Paul’s through streets lined by British troops from
every continent, and Kipling, as the tumult and the shouting
died away, recalled his countrymen to the age-long truth that
sets a term to all empires:

“If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
* Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe—

Such boastings as the Gentiles use
Or lesser breeds without the Law—

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet.

Lest we forget, lest we forget!”

That was the climax of the new imperialism. There was an
inevitable reaction. For one thing there was the price of Empire.
During the Boer War it was at times a heavy one. And to
many people the new imperialism bore too much an air of
swashbuckling and bullying: it was overloud and protested too
much. Worse: it aroused too many financial hopes and offered
too many opportunities for the speculator masking his sly
operations under the folds of the Union Jack. For the new fasHon
of Empire attracted a rather miscellaneous crew of patriots:
Jewish financiers, gold and diamond magnates of doubtful
antecedents, shady adventurers from foreign capitals peddling
concessions in African swamps and Australian mines to a public
which, at first swept off its feet by the mingled appeal to
patriotism and cupidity, became later increasipgly suspicious

of both. • .

In these ventures, some of which were animated by a genuine
belief in the imperial future and some merely by a shrewd business
desire to make hay while the imperial sun shone, much speculative

ENGLISH SAGA

268

capital was sunk in the Empire without any continuing return.
A great deal of it was lost in inflated share values which could
only have been justified by years of patient development.^ Such
losses aroused deep-seated and subconscious distrusts. The
imperial financial bubble of the ’nineties left a nasty taste in
the mouths of men who might otherwise have wished well
to a broad plan of social development for the Hi-distributed
populations who shared their allegiance.

But there was a deeper cause for the failure of the first attempt
to use British capital to develop the imperial heritage. Backward
and scantily populated territories can only be turned to profit
by a far-sighted use of credit. Under a system of private enter¬
prise such credit can not be aflPorded unless there is a reasonable
certainty of an landing and stable trade sufficient to repay
initial expenditure. Except as a quick gamble in share values,
investment in the British Empire seldom offered such certainty.
For so long as Great Britain stuck to Free Trade, its government
could not with the best will in the world afford sheltered markets
to young Empire industries. Other nations, wishing to foster
the growth of national industries, were able to grant protective
tarife and bonuses. The economic faith of the British forbade
their doing so.

In 1897 Josq)h Chamberlain, trying to develop a long-
neglected empire by parliamentary grants to agricultural in¬
stitutes and schools of tropical medicine, received an offer from
Canada of a tariff in favour of British goods.' This was followed
by a resolution of the Colonial Conference in favour of imperial
preference. But without reciprocity in the home market to
increase the colonial capacity to purchase British goods, sUch
one-sided preference, however generous, could be no more than
a gesture. All that the Colonial Secretary and his chief, Lord
Salisbury, could do was to ex^pt the British nations overseas
from the operations of the “most favoured” nation clause by
which free-trading Britain regulated her corrnnerdal treaties.
This ensured that if ever the British people should abandon
the policy of free imports and be ready to offer tariff preferences
to their impend kinsfolk, th^ would not be forced to pass on
such preferences to everj other nation with.which they had
made a treaty.

* “In 1920 the chartered shareholders received, after tiiirty years, their first dividend.
It was sixpence.**—d. G. JRhodes, 16^,

“lest we forget!" 269

Tliis concession meant little at the time. There were no
British duties to reduce in favour of the colonies. Least of all
could Britain oflFer the colonies the sheltered markets they needed
for their two most important articles of export—food and raw
material. Absolute freedom from restriction m both was an
article of faith of the Liberal Party. Since the day when
Disraeli had taught his followers in the early ’fifties to seek
electoral merit by discarding the dammsa hereditas of protection,
it was scarcely less so with the Tory.

It said much, therefore, for Chamberlain’s courage that, at
the age of 67, with a reasonable chance of the reversion of the
Conservative leadership and the Premiership, he should have
resigned his office in order to convince his countrymen of the
necessity of an imperial tariff union. In 1903 this ambitious and
vigorous man on his return from a tour in South Africa electrified
England by going on the stump in a nation-wide campaign of
economic education.

The outcry was tremendous. The Liberals, now long out of
favour, were jubilant. They raised the most popular of all
electoral cries—the People’s Food in Danger. The Conservative
Party was terrified, and for a while split from top to bottom.
Its leader, the aristocratic Arthur Balfour, saved its unity hy
temporising. But when in 1905, refusing to follow his lieutenant’s
lead, he went to the country on a note of half-hearted interroga¬
tion, he was routed. Imperial preference was marked down for
a generation.

It could hardly have been otherwise. For almost inevitably
Chamberlain, in his Empire crusade, fdl into a fatal error. He
began by appealing to patriotism. He asked for tariffi against
foreign imports in order to consolidate the imperial heritage of
the unborn and to help the primary producers of the Empire
who had fought for Britain in the Boer War and who were now
volrmtarily offering her traders preference. But having to win
votes in a commercial age, he and his more worldly followers
soon transferred the appeal to material self-interest. Ingenious
and elaborately supported economic arguments were advanced
to show that the British manufacturer and consumer would reap
immediate rewards from a general tariff on foreign goods. The
issue of imperial preference as a long-term patriotic investmmt
became obscured by that of protection as an opportunity for
quick profits. Great empire and little minds, as Burke saw, go

ENGLISH SAGA

ill together. The generous note first struck by Chamberlain
became lost in a cacophony of log-rolling and auctioneering
of rival figures.

Though the official Conservative Party refused to join open
issue with them over protection, the general election of 1905
was won by the Liberals—largely on the cry of “Hands Off the
People’s Bread.” Actually the addition to the price of the loaf
involved in Chamberlain’s original proposal of giving preference
in the home market to imperial corn-growers would have been
negligible. Owing to revolutionary changes in popular feeding
habits, caused by new methods of ocean storage, bread was no
longer the staple dietary of the masses. But in a conservative
country the old parrot-cry sufficed.

The real strength of Free Trade lay not in its power to
provision England cheaply but in the vested interests that
in sixty years of commercial expansion had grown round its
practice. A considered policy of imperial development might
in the course of comparatively few years have afforded the
British consumer and manufacturer adequate alternatives to
most of the cheap food and raw materials bought from the
foreigner. By guiding credit into the new area of preferential
tradej and by adequately-financed facilities for migration, stable
markets for British industrial exports could have been created in
an expanding Empire. They would have involved some immediate
sacrifice. But it would have been amply justified in, say, 1940.

But such a policy, however wise as a form of national insurance,
would have involved a transfer of trade and investment from
old-established into unproved chamiels. It scared cautious minds
and threatened vested interests. In an old and rich country both
were immens ely powerfuL With the extension of the franchise
and the ever-growing cost of electoral organisation, both the
main political parties were becoming dependent on the financial
support of the City. And the City, as opposed to the provincial
manufacturers, was opposed to any change in the country’s
trade and financial policy.

Behind the City was ffie ordinary investor. Since the general
adoption of the limited liability principle an ever-growing
• number of citizens had obtained a shareholder’s interest in
commerce. Their money was invested in British companies
trading with foreign countries in every part of the world.
Their dividends were paid by the imports with which those

“lest we forget!” 271

countries purchased British goods. A policy which transferred
part of the British home market to Empire producers endangered
their interests. They argued that Britain could not increase^
say, its sugar imports from Jamaica without taking less from
Cuba. And they had more money invested in Cuba than in
Jamaica.

Such forces preserving the status quo in commerce and
finance were cumulative. Every year, while its virtual mono¬
poly of manufactures lasted, a free-trading Britain, after
pa3dng for its foreign food and raw materials with manufactured
exports, had a favotirable balance. This balance, which for many
years averaged a hundred million poimds, was allowed to remain
in the form of accumulating loans to the debtor countries.
The interest could only be paid by still more of their goods.
The richer British investors grew, the greater became the
foreign debtors’ share of the British market. A creditor inevitably
tries to keep his debtor in employment. The yoimg empire
cotmtries, not being so heavily indebted, could not look for such
help from money-lending Britain. For, having been long under¬
developed and under-populated, they had only recently appeared
as large-scale borrowers on the London money market.

Thus all attempts to unite the Empire economically were
still-bom, because the mother country had prior and more
papng financial affiliations with the foreigner. The Dominions
and Colonies, it was felt, must be left to develop as best they
could by forming similar affilia tions with other nations who
were not so deq>ly committed to established chaimels of finance
and trade. For though in political matters Britain had become
conscious of her empire, in those of finance and investment she
still followed the teachings of laissez-faire. Scarcely any one
seemed to see the contradiction in her doing so. The most ardent
patriots, who glowed with pride at the thought of Australian
bushmen fighting in a British cause in South Africa, invested
their savings in Latin America and bought their beef from the
Argentine without a qualm.

Such men could not foresee the future. Th^ were ordinary,
honest, unimaginative Englishmen who were enjoying a
prosperity which had no parallel in human history but which
they assumed to be eternal and took for granted. Their right to
do as they pleased "with their own wealth, now mainly drawn from
dividends, was something they never questioned: it had nothing

ENGLISH SAGA

27a

to do with country or empire but was entirely their own afFair.
That if called on to do so, they would die for their King and
Countiy was not to be doubted. They sat, red-cheeked and dear-
eyed, in Pall Mall dubs or the Pavilion at Lord’s, shot, hunted and
£ish«i in the appropriate seasons and transacted business in board-
room or on ’change according to the unalterable laws of the
Medes and Persians in which they had been trained. They paid
their way with golden sovereigns and ruled the earth beneath
tall silk hats in an aroma of lavender water and dgar smnke.
After the Boer War, with its early disasters and its long
expensive litany of careless inefSdency, there were some mis¬
givings. “Let us admit it fairly,” wrote Kipling,

“as a business people should.
We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no.end of good.”

But such frank admissions were only temporary. The poet’s
condusion—“we have had an imperial lesson; it may make us
an Empire yet”—was not borne out by the course of events.
A few months later he was writing savagdy of “the flannelled
fools at the wicket and the muddied oafs at the goal”—of a people
who in their wealth and ease grudged even the slightest sacrifice
to arm against the coming day of reckoning:

“Andait, effortless, ordered, cyde on cyde set,

life so long untroubled, that ye who inherit forget...

But ye say * It will mar our comfort.’ Ye say ‘ It will minigh
our trade.’

Do ye wait for die spattered shrapnd ’ere ye learn how a gun
is laid?

For the low, red glare to southward when the raided coast-
towns bum?”

But die only result of tibe poet’s jeremiad was some loss of his
own i mm e n se poptdarity. Everybody read him but nobody paid
the least heed to his preaching.

For the English rich could not see what all the world but
they could see: that their wealth created envy and jealousy,
their empty empire greedy yearnings, thdr all pervading
never-resting usury anger and resentment. They could not
see that other nations, impadendy seddng outlets for their

LEST WB forget!”

rising manufactnres and popxiladons, and armed to the teeth,
were watching amid their jealousies a rich, obese and luxury-
loving Britain as jackals watch a dying lion. Night after night
as the London seasons of the young century sped by, amid the
decorous revelry of the great saloons of Mayfair and the new
hotels—^Ritz, Savoy and Claridges—the lords of the earth in their
starched linen, pearls and diamonds enjoyed their goodly
heritage unquestioning. To watchers there seemed to be some¬
thing reckless in the feverish speculation and worship of wealth
that had invaded the formerly exclusive society of die Imperial
capital.

’ The Utde Englanders and the Radicals and Socialists who
accepted their kindly but narrow ideology, were no more aware
of the dangers to their existence. To them the Empire seemed
only a financiers’ ramp for exploiting the backward races, or at
best an invention of the Tories.^ That the cheap meat and bread
that fed them came by grace of the forei^er, that others were
toasting the day when the age-long security and empire of the
Fngdsh should Old, and that their own ways of life in the
crowded dties might unfit them to stand in battle against the
armies of young and jealous nations never troubled them for a
moment. Th^ went to their labours in the morning, perused
thdr Sunday chronicle of murders and sensations, watched the
gladiators of the football League battle in the arena for thdr
fevour, and cheered the cheapjack politidans of the hour who
offered to plunder the ridi and distribute the next year’s seed-

com. And a despairing poet, feeling in his heart the imminence

of doom, wrote:

“Now we can only wait till the day, wait and apportion our
shame.

These are the dykes our fethers left, but we would not look
to the same.

Time and again were we warned of the dykes, time and agmn
we ddayed:

Now it may fa^ we have slain our sons as our fathers we
have betrayed.”

tsee ^mch CXJJV^

CHAPTER VIII

Battle in the Mud

By all borne and left unsaid
By the soldier. By the mire
Closing o’er a comrade’s head,

By the faces stripped by fire,

By daylight’s dumb and crowded wire
By moonlight’s lonely loathsome dead,

By the slow, the final dread
Slaying very heart’s desire:

Englishman, whoe’er thou art,

That is theirs, and this thy part—

Constant hold the English heart I

R, Nichols.

T he immediate cause of the Great War which burst on
an apprehensive and excited Europe in 1914 was the
arrogance of imperial Germany, Its people had been
taught that war was the peculiar national instrument of the
Teuton- Their philosophers had told them that in a German
cause the end always justified the means. Nursed in the Prussian
tradition and debauched by gross and ill-digested wealth, their
statesmen had alternately alarmed and angered every neighbour,
In the su mme r of 1914 they threatened and blxistered once too
often and then found themselves xmable to stop what they
had started.

The real causes of the war were deeper. Since her union in
1871 Germany, with all the thoroughness and vehemence native
to her people, had embraced the industrial revolution. In forty
years her population had increased by one half and her wealth,
measured by industrial assets and profits, nmny times over. Her
^vemment, embodying the national passion to excel—^which
in the first flush of her new-found unity amounted almost to a
mama ^had extended unlimited credit to Itier manufacturers
md traders. She was thus committed to a policy of unceasing
industri^ expansion, since without it her capitalists could not
pay the interest on the loans advanced them by the community.

The pace set by this system of state usury was too furious to
last. In the first fourteen years of the century Germany quad-

274

■ BATTLE IN THE MUD 275

rupled iief industrial output. Her whole economic structure—
strong and flourishing to outward appearance—depended on her
ability to secure rapidly expanding markets. The liabilities of
her producers, ever accelerating their pace, pursued her: she
could only keep ahead of bankruptcy by moving still faster.
The nemesis of capitalism came to her more quickly than to
any of her neighbours. It did so because she was more eager,
impatient and efiicient. She positively flung herself at the
Gaderene precipice.

All the world was heading in the same direction. For follow¬
ing England’s example and hoping to equal her success, the
merchants of every larger nation in Emope had taken to manu¬
facturing. Fostering their infant industries with state subsidies
and artificial systems of credit, they struggled feverishly to
undercut their rivals in foreign markets. The whole earth
became a vast field of exploitation ranged by the agents of the
more civilised peoples competing with one another for customers
and raw materials to feed the wheels of their growing factories
and the mouths of their fast-breeding factory populations. And
after their agents came consuls, warships and expeditionary
forces to establish spheres of influence. Envying England’s vast
empire, the industrial Powers hastened to found empires of their
own in still unexploited territories whence they could procure
cheap raw materials and force their manufactures on natives
subject to their exclusive control. During the latter half of the
nineteenth century Germany, France, Italy and Belgium all
pounced on large areas of xmclaimed land in Africa and the
Fax East. Holland and Portugal already possessed colonial
empires founded in an earlier age. MeanwWle the United States
and Russia each pursued a policy of unceasing continental ex¬
pansion. Austria, backed by Germany, turned towards the
Balkans and the Middle East, and a new oriental manufacturing
Power, modelled on the most approved Western lines and sus¬
tained by modem fleets and armies, fought two victorious wars
against China and Russia to establish a Japanese commercial
sphere of influence in Manchuria.

But the unclaimed areas of the earth available were not enough
to satisfy the cumulative and inexhaustible needs of the capitalist.
The fastjer the usurer—state or private—supplied the more
intelligent races with machinery, the vaster the territories and
populations needed to pay the interest on his capital and the

ENGLISH SAGA

276

more important to him their political control became. The
forces of diplomacy and those grimmer forces that give weight
to diplomacy, were inevitably marshalled in defence of the
economic interests he created. There were successive crises
which marked the clash of such forces, when one great Power
in search of markets for goods or loans encountered another in
the same field: Fashoda, Venezuela, Agadir. At each of these
there was ominous talk of war, and an unloosing of popular
national and racial feelings which had nothing to do with
economics but which, deep-rooted in human hearts, could only
too easily be aroused by the instruments of mass-suggestion.
And these, unconsciously but inevitably, tended to fall under
the control of the contending financial interests.

For when there was no more imoccupied land to seize or
spheres of financial interest to penetrate, the great Powers began
to covet each other’s colonial possessions and economic fields.
It was inevitable that those late starters in the twin race of
colonial expansion and loan-mongering who had acquired the
least should feel aggrieved. They thought of themselves as
“have-not” Powers denied a “proper place in the sun.” Germany,
who, though second to none either in commercial or military
pushfulness, had on account of her comparative newness obtained
a rather bleak share of colonial plunder, made a special point
of this.

The more ambitious of her people particularly resented the
size of the British Empire. A yoimg Englishman of education
lacking an outlet in his overcrowded country could look
for honourable and remunerative emplo3nment under his own
flag and laws in one or other of his country’s colonies. Germany,
with half again Britain’s population and apparently twice her
ener^ and ambition, was less happily circumstanced: her.
hastily acquired colonies were confined mainly to tropical or
semi-tropical deserts and forests in Africa and a few islands in
the Pacific. She had nothing to offer the eager and pushing
almnni of her overcrowded universities comparable in oppor¬
tunity to the career afforded by the I.C.S. or the Sudan Civil.
And, as Germany was finding, one of the inevitable concomitants
of capitalist enterprise is the creation of large n umb ers of
bourgeois youth demanding university education and some out¬
let for their talents more remunerative than handiwork and
more honourable than trade. They found it inevitably in a

B A T T L E I N T H E M U D 277

bureaucracy, and, in the nature of things, in an expanding
bureaucracy.

For these and other reasons the Germans and the F.nglisli
were rivals. The English did not consciously t-hinV of the
Germans ^ such; but the Germans did so think of the English.
They envied them, they admired them and they hated them.
For the Germans were seeking what the English had long had
and would not use for themselves—the hegemony of the world.
Germany had her army. It was larger than aiiy other army;
it was better organised It had the repute of being invincible.
But the English, though they refused to concern themselves in
Europe’s imtidy affairs, would not allow the German army to
rule Europe. They would not let it march through Belgium in
1870; they refused to let it attack defeated France in 1875. The
stronger it became, the more the English, true to the most
unchanging point in their foreign policy, tended to tilt the
scales against Germany. Though contempt for France and fear
of Russia had long been second nature to them, their states¬
men did not hesitate to lend their support to what the ingenuous
Teuton regarded as a decadent France and a barbarous Russia in
order to thwart the just and rightful ambitions of a virile
central Europe. After the turn of the centurj’^ and still more
after Russia’s defeat in the Far East, the English tendency was
increasingly in this direction. Such spiteful interference in the
affairs of die continent could only be explained, Germans con¬
tended, by jealousy; the English, fearing their succes, wished
to encircle them.

There were psychological differences too. When the Germans,
seeking the omnipotence they could never quite reach, gave
themselves airs, the English laughed at them. They thought of
them as conceited, slightly comical “sausages” and enjoyed the
name the discomfited but invincibly gay Viennese had invented
for Berlin of “Parvenuopopolis.” Their polite but occasionally
ill-concealed contempt and their more normal indifference
touched CJerman vanity on the raw. TliCTe were always plenty
of German statesmen, diplomats and merchants with a grudge
against England which, fann ed during war into a furnace of
national hatred, was to astonish the English in 1914. In German
regiments and in the ships of the High Seas Fleet toasts were
drunk to Der Tag —the day that should not only be France’s
reckoning but England’s.

E.S.

ENGLISH SAGA

278

But the most serious difference, apart from the invisible
rivalry of commerce, was the blue ribbon of sea power. With
an expansionist Russia preaching nationality to every Slav
minority on one side of her and a France with no more ground
to jdeld on the other, Germany had to look like England to the
younger continents for her kbensrcam. Her industrialists looked
overseas also for their markets and raw materials and, accustomed
to military victories at home, confidently demanded the pro¬
tection of the imperial government. A deqp sea fleet came to
be regarded as a national necessity. Even as early as 1864 Bis¬
marck’s campaign against Denmark revealed the new trend of
German policy.^ So did the purchase of Heligoland—^unwisely
sold by Lord Salisbury’s government in 1890. After the suc¬
cession of the yoimg Emperor William 11 —Queen Victoria’s
grandson and in his own eyes heir-elect to Neptune’s trident—
the resolve to create a High Seas Fleet became a mania. The
first German Navy Act of 1898 set a pace which within ten
years had developed into a galloping race between Germany and
a fast-awakening England for the command of the sea.

At first the English had treated Teuton naval ambitions as
an immense joke.® To Englishmen there was something in¬
congruous in the idea of fat Hans even trying to be a sailor.
They had forgotten that in the Middle Ages the seamen of the
Hanseatic League had sometimes given sea law to England and
that in the seventeenth century the fleets, which imder Tromp
and de Ruyter had afforded her toughest naval encotmters, had
been largely recruited from the north German ports. But after
the Boer War they began to wake up to the fact that a European
Power was challenging Trafalgar. In the closing years of King
Edward’s brief reign and the first of King George’s, the attention
of England was tom from internecine disputes about vrages,
nationd health insurance, votes for women and Home Rule for
Irdand, by the disquieting spectacle of German dreadnought
after dreadnought gliding down the slips of Kiel and Wilhelms-
. haven into the waters of the Baltic and North Sea. It was all
very well for the Kaiser to assure an English statesman that it

' ^Palmerston,, answering a question in the House in July, 1863, stated: “There is
so UM in disguising the fact that what is at the bottom of the whole German daign
. • • is the dream ca a German fleet and the wish to get Kiel as a German sea-port.’*

_ At the time of the Danish War Punch depicted two bearded British seamen
pointing at a fat, long-haired, shaggy-moustached, bespectacled Teuton and sa3ring
JS can’t be expect^ to fight a lot of lubberly swabs

like him. We’ll kick ’em, if that’ll do V*—Pmch, xlvii, 5.

BATTLE IN THE MUD

279

was ^nonsemical and untrue^ that the German Navy Bill was
meant as a challenge to British naval supremacy and to state
that “the German Navy was built against nobody at all,” For
what, then, was it built?

It was this challenge which made England’s participation by
France’s side in a European War inevitable. The sea was England’s
lifeline. Though her people did not know it, her rulers—almost
without realising that they did so—were forced to commit her
in advance. By an agreement to entrust the policing of the
Mediterranean to France so as to concentrate the entire battle
fleet in the North Sea, they made themselves morally responsible
for the defence of the French Channel and the Atlantic coasts.
Henceforward France and Britain had a common interest-
resistance to Germany. For Germany threatened the existence
of both.

Even then it was the educated minority rather than the
majority who grasped the significance of what was happening.
The unthinking multitude was still absorbed with its sports and
its struggles for a haj^a* existaice. But in London An English¬
man's Home played to packed houses, and young Winston Churchill,
unconsciously turning towards the task that was his life’s w^ork,
suddenly ceased to be the bitter opponent of army and navy
estimates to become the Liberal First Lord who, defying Little
Englanders and the Treasury, boldly laid down two keels to
Germany’s one and, in a turning-point of history^ gave the order
that kept the Grand Fleet at sea in the hour of Armageddon.

It only remained to set a spark to all this explosive material.
For this simple task the rulers of imperial Germany were more
than equal. They were neurotic, they were voluble and they
were vain. They were also intensely arrogant. They wane so
obsessed with their own point of view that they were constitu¬
tionally incapable of listening quietly to, let alone, seeing any
one els^’s. At their head, though far from controlling them or
the ruthless* military machine they wielded, was the Kaiser—a
clever, talkative, undisciplined, excitable egotist. His indiscre¬
tions were the terror of the European chancelleries. Add to this
the fact that no German in authority, though quick enough to
blunder and bluster, seemed able to apologise or withdraw, and
that the jingo Press in all countries magnified every incident
and hasty word, and it was obvious that an explosion could not
be long delayed.

ENGLISH SAGA

280

Everybody knew this except the islanders. Germany, in
blind pursuit of new and urgently needed markets, and honouring
a morality that placed her Rational ego above the law of nations,
was resolved on expansion at all costs. On August 4th, 191^
the British people knew too. Throwing themselves at the
eleventh hour on the side of an outnumbered France and an
incalculable and distant Russia, they stood fair and square in
the way. An irresistible force had encountered an immovable
body.

Thus it came about that the British people for the first time
in sixty years found themselves involved in a European war. It
was clear that Germany^had made a brutal and unprovoked
attack on Belgium and that Britain had long plighted her word
—as Germany had also—^to maintain Belgian integrity and
neutrality. Beyond that only a small minority had any dear
idea of what the war was about. Scarcdy any one realised that
it threatened the very existence of the coimtry. Invasion had
been a press bugbear for some years before the outbreak of war,
^d invasion scares continued to alarm the public mind until
1916. But the very fact indicated how little the English under¬
stood the real nature of their peril. For should the naval situation
deteriorate suffidently to make sustained invasion possible, no
invasion would be needed to bring England to her knees. For
three almost out of every four mouthfuls that sustained her,
Britain was dependent on sea-borne food. And her rulers, in
conformity with a national economy which left such matters to
private capital, had omitted to lay in any reserves. An over¬
crowded and unprepared island that could not feed itself for
more than a few weeks or escape bankruptcy without the main¬
tenance of a vast and complex export trade had challenged the
first military and the second greatest naval power in the
world.

• *•••• ••

But the people of England only knew that the gauntlet had
been thrown down and that their proud country was in the lists.
After a century of security and of being taught by their rulers that
the needs of tie living were all that mattered, they were called
upon to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the continuing com¬
munity. Four generations of laissezrfaire thinking and living
had not robbed them of their patriotism. As one man they flung
themselves into the fray. ^

BATTtE IN THE MUD

281

“Comfort, content, delight—

The ages slow-bought gain—

They shrivelled in a night,

Only ourselves remain
To face the naked days
In silent fortitude,

Through perils and dismays
Renewed and re-renewed.

No easy hopes or lies
Shall bring us to our goal,

But iron sacrifice
Of body, will and souL
There is but one task for all—

One life for each to give.

"Who stands if Freedom fall }

Who dies if England live?

It was an astonishing spectacle. On the continent of Europe
patriotism was the peculiar concern of the State. It was taught
in the schools; it was officially stamped on the mind and body
of the individual citizen in his conscript years. There was not a
Frenchman, a Or man, a Russian or even an Italian between
the ages of 18 and 60 who was not trained and liable at a moment’s
notice to serve in his country’s army. When war came, his place
in a mobilised nation was awaiting h i m .

In T-ngland it was diff erent. The State did not te%ch the
citizen patriotism: it scrupulously ignored the subject It did
not teach him nor expect him to serve his country. The State
existed to serve the individual, not the individual the State. It
provided him with legal and police protection, street lighting
and paving and, xmder recent socialist legislation, with—for those
who wanted them—free education, municipal baths and health
insurance. It asked nothing in return except obedience to the
law and the payment of taxes. If the individual ch(Ke to be
patriotic, that was his own afl^—a kind of hobby like collecting
stamps or big-game shooting. Thus there was a voluntary
Navy League, supported by private subscriptions, for awakening
public interest in the Navy, and quite a number of rival Emi»re
Societies for pasuading people to think imperially. But the
State itself had nothing to do with them excq>t to assess diem

ENGLISH SAGA

282

for their shares of taxation. It treated them in exactly the same
way as it treated atheist or revolutionary societies.- Even pro¬
fessional sailors and soldiers were only ordinary citizens without
special privileges. Outside the close corporation of their ships
and regiments they made no demonstration of their relation to
the State: in England an officer when off duty did not swaggo*
down the street in uniform, but punctiliously donned mufti
and went about like an ordinary private citizen. It was what,
in the eyes of the law, he was.

Continental observers—particularly German ones who loved
to contrast their own strident patriotism with English casualness
—^assumed from this that English people had ceased to love
their country and, under the influence of commerce and luxury,
had become degenerate. They supposed them lacking in the
fighting virtues of self-sacrifice, discipline and esprit de cm-ps.
They even thought them cravens. In the trenches before Ypres
and Le Bassde they received a rude awakening. For though in
England the State had long disinterested itself in the private
citizen’s patriotism or capacity for war, the English with their
long history retained a stronger national consciousness and
imderlying unity than probably any other people in the world.
They took their love of country and their willingness to die for
her for granted. For modem war they were out of date and out
of practice. But, as the event proved, when once they'set their
minds to it, they caught up with the martial accomplishmmts
of their militarist neighbours at an astonishing rate.

It was perhaps just because the State left the Englishman sq/
free to serve the nation in his own way that he came to its aid
in the hom of need with such enthusiasm. He valued the virtues
of self-sacrifice, dvic pride and comradeship the more because he
had had to foster fhem himself. For doing so the English had
unconsdously evolved a vast network of private organisations
and associations winch, though legally divorced from the State,
kept alive the attributes on which the State depended. Theirs
was a capadty for creating loved institutions which amounted
to the highest political genius. Round these they wove a kind
of affectionate mystery. The more venerable they were the more
they loved them and the more sacred became every familiar and
hallowed accompaniment. Nothing short of a life-work of close
and loving scholarship could do justice to the lore that grew
up in the course of a few decades round an institution like county

BATTLE IN THE MUD

283

cricket or foxhunting or an Oxford Common Room, English¬
men were almost ready to die sooner than pass the port to the
right or omit a phrase of the customary chaff and larking that
attended the August Bank Holiday on Hampstead Heath or
at Blackpool.

This curious and apparently unconscious capacity for attach¬
ing individual effort to a corporate ideal embodied in group
ritual informed almost every activity of the nation’s life. Hos¬
pitals and charitable trusts like the City Companies transmitted
traditions as unchanging and proud as those of the Brigade of
Guards. Money-making abstractions like the Stock Exchange
and Lloyds and far humbler commercial concerns had their
sacred laws of the Medes and Persians unenforced by law yet
which no member would dream of breaking and which good
. men loved to honour. The very newspapers evolved their own
individual pride and code of honour: STAe Times was as much
a national institution as Convocation* or the House of Lords,
and its staff regarded it with the same affection as a Pomeranian
grenadier his regiment.

Even schoolboys shared the national aptitude. The ritual,
increasingly hallowed by tradition, of a great public school was
as intricate and finely woven as a Beethoven sonata and aroused
in those who were subjected to it an affection which nothing
but death could eradicate. When the school songs were sung in
the Speech Room at Harrow grown and undemonstrative men
—^immersed in aimmerce or other individualistic pursuits—
would let thdr eyes fill with tears in a surge of emotion whidi
reason could not explain but which was an unconscious exprea*
sion of their capacity for devotion to an undying ideal. In a
humbler sodal sphere Workmens’ Colleges and Coundl Schools
began to gather traditions, and the ragged urchins of the street
evolved their own rough loyalties and rules of honour. Playing
for one’s side was in the English blood. It only needed the
alchemy of war and national peril to harness these diverse en¬
thusiasms and loyalties to the service of the community. For
when the Kaiser with his mailol fist threatened England, he did
not threaten England alone. He threatened the Fourth of June,
anH the May Day choir on Magdalen Tower, and the village bon¬
fire (m Guy Fawkes Night; the M.C.C. and the Reform Club;
the Amalgamated Society of Engineers and the Ancient
Order of BufiEaloes. Behind the easy facade of England there wa*

ENGLISH SAGA

284

something mightier than England: there was Hayward and
Hobbs going in to bat, the Oddfellows’ dinner and the Old
Kent Road.

It was a people subject to such influences who created in the
next few years, as though by a miracle, a military machine as
vast and as efiicient as Germany’s. In the first eighteen months
of the war Great Britain without compulsion raised two and
three-quarter million men for the Services, and the self-governing
Dominions close on another million. The miracle was achieved
merely by asking for volunteers. They were told that their
King and Country needed them, and it was enough. . It was in
the nature of things that the best went first and were the first
killed. In the democracy of Britain there was no equality of
sacrifice. The war graves of Gallipoli and the Somme are the
memorials of a national aristocracy nobler than any Herald’s
College could have conceived. That spontaneous and inspired
loss—of her very finest—^was the price Britain paid both for her
voluntary system and her past neglect. It won her the war but
it cost her the peace. For by their elected sacrifice she lost the
leaders she was to need when the war was over.

A nation of amateur patriots was absorbed into tibe little
professional peace-time army, which itself suflFered virtual
annihilation while England buckled on her long-neglected
armour. The traditions of that army were perfectly adapted to
the subconscious nature of Englishmen. Men who a few weeks
before had never seen a rifle handled or thought of soldiering
with anything but contempt found themselves swelling with
pride at regimental annals and titles won by remote forerunners,
and boasted to their womenfolk that they were “Pontius Mate’s
Bodyguard,” or the “Devil’s Own” or the “Diehards” or the
“Fighting Fifth.” For every unit in the army had its own pride
and its own privileges, won for it on the battlefield. To many
Englishmen, long robbed by factory life of status and privilege,
that return to the aimy—for all its harshness—^was like a
recall home.

There was little of ease or comfort about it, much of hardship;
and men came to realise that the certain end of the road they
trod was death and wounds. But nobody who lived in England
in that first winter of the first Great War will ever forget the
tra inin g battalions of “Kitchener’s Army,” marching in their
ill-fitting blue tunics down muddy coimtry lanes and singing
as th^ marched:

BATTLE IN THE MUD

285

“Why did we join the Army, boys?

Why did we join the Army?

Why did we come to Salisbuiy Plain?
We must have been ruddy well balmy!”

One young officer, himself soon to fall in action, who shared
the comradeship and common purpose of that great and gallant
company, left behind him the picture of those wintry marches
across the English countryside;

“All the hills and vales along
Earth is bursting into song.

And the singers are the chaps
WTio are going to die perhaps.

O sing, marching men.

Till the valleys ring again.

Give your gladness to earth’s keq)ing.

So be glad, when you are sleeping.

Cast away regret and rue.

Think what you are marching to.

Little live, great pass.

Jesus Christ and Barabbas
Were found the same day.

This died, that went his way.

So sing with joyful breath.

For why, you are going to death.

Teeming earth will surely store
All the gladness that you pour.”^

Among those who in those early months of the war chose
death for their bride were thousands of young men who had
seemingly been bom to the happiest lot ever enjoyed by man.
Nursed in a traditional culture that had not yet quite lost its
hold on the well-to-do classes, yet admitted to the greater fireedom
of a wider and more liberal educational ideal than the past had
known, they inherited the best of both worlds.

Of this generation one tnan in particular became idmtified in
the public mind. Rupert Brooke was in reality only one of

*C. H. Sorley, Marlborough, and other Poems.

ENGLISH SAGA

286

many; he was not even wholly typical of those he came to
embody. But the direct appeal of tiis poetry, the beauty of his
appearance and the romance of his brief life caught the imagina¬
tion of a wider circle than those who ordinarily read poetry.
Even before the tempest burst and the publication of his 1914
sonnets took reading England by storm, he was known to many
as the personification of a new kind of youth, careless of appear¬
ances, generous, out-spoken, almost Mizabethan in its uncal-
culating love of adventure, spiritual and physical. The dedication
to death of one so much in love with life became momentarily
the symbol of a whole generation’s sacrifice. In the mood of
1914 h^e was youth going down with touched lips into the shadows
■ as an earnest of a nobler and a happier life for all men in the
years to come.

A greater poet than Brooke and a greater Englishman was
Julian Grenfell. A fine scholar and a brilliant athlete, bom to
all the worldly gifts that any man could inherit, his sympathies
—at a time when such sympathies were still imusual and regarded
with disfavour—were always with the revolutionary, the crank
and the under-dog. It was not that he rebelled against order but
that he instinctively comprehended the causes of his age’s dis¬
content. A professional soldier before the war, he embraced the
call to arms as a crusade—not so much against the German
people or even thdr tiresome rulers as against the inertia and
death that seemed to have fallen on the world. After enduring
with astonishing happiness and cheerfulness the first harsh
winter in the trendies, he fell in the spring of 1915. A few weeks
before he died, looking over the April Flemish plain, he wrote
one of the greatest lyrical poems in the language and which, so
long as English is read, will remain the epitaph of himself and bis
generation:

“The naked earth is warm with spring.

And with green grass and bursting trees
Leans to the sun’s gaze glorying
And quivers in the sunny breeze;

And Life is Colour and Warmth and Lights
And a striving evermore for these;

And he is dead who will not fight;

And who dies fighting has inaease.

BATTLE IN THE MUD’

287

The fighting man shall from the sun

Take warmth, and life from the glowing earth;

Speed with the light-foot winds to run,

And with the trees to newer birth;

And find, when fighting shall be done.

Great rest, and fullness after dearth.

All the bright company of Heaven
Hold him in their high comradeship.

The Dog-Star and the Sisters Seven,

Orion’s Belt and sworded hip.

The blackbird sings to him, * Brother, brother,
If -this be the last song you shall sing.

Sing well, for you may not sing another;
Brother, sing’I”

The changing mood of England at war can be traced in the
work of its poets. Almost at once there was a division between
the professional poets at home and the combatant poets—
amateurs in verse as in soldiering and astonishingly great in
both. This division widened tmtil in the end it became an un¬
bridgeable gulf. It typified the greater gulf between the m-o
Englands—^the young living England that died and the old
petrified England that lived. A quarter of a centoy later, when
a second world war broke out, that gulf was still unbridged.

The early war poets wore like frie England that took up the
challenge of the German War Lords: passionate in their sacrifice,
confident, uncalculating. They never doubted their victory or
the rightness of their dedication. Theirs was an almost m3rstical
exaltation: the war had been sent as guerdon of their manhood,
to test them and by thdr testing to purtfy a world “gro-wn old
and stale and weary.” They positively rejoiced in their unlooked-
for, elected lot: it was for this, they felt, that they had been
bom.

“Bettor far to pass away
While the limbs are strong and young,
Ere the aiding of the day.

Ere youth’s lusty song be sung.

288

ENGLISH SAGA

Hot blood pulsing through the veins,

Youth’s high hope a burning fire,

Young men needs must break the chains
That hold them from their hearts’ desire.”^

But by 1916 the note had changed. With the co mm encement
of the great slaughter on the Somme it could scarcely have
done otherwise. On the first day of the battle alone, 60,000
casualties were sustained—the very flower of England. And week
by week, as the brazen fury continued and a whole countryside was
churned into a slimy mire of death, victory was realised to be an
infinitely distant goal, far beyond the reach of most of those
striving for it. Courage grew commonplace,* strength faltered,
vision faded. The poetry of fighting England became grimmer,
often bitterly ironic, yet none the less, with the extraordinary
capacity of the English for rejecting by ignoring calamity,
soaring in moments of ecstasy above “the smoke and stir of this
dim spot which men call earth,” and seeing beauty above the
horror of carnage.

“Music of whispering trees
Hushed by the broad-winged breeze
Where shakoi water gleams;

And evening radiance falling
With reedy bird-notes calling.

0 bear me safe through dark, you low-voiced streams.

I have no need to pray
That fear may pass away;

I scorn the growl and rumble of the fight
That summons me from cool
Silence of marsh and pool.

And yellow lilies islanded in light.

0 river of stars and ^dows, lead me through the night!”*

In the last two years of the war, as poet after poet passed into
the ghostly company of the mouthless dead, the lyrical note was
drowned in the angry, unpitying clamour of a universe gone

^The Muse in Arms •pi—Poem hy R, M, Dennys,

•The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon, B^ore the BatOe,

BATTLE IN THE MUD 289

mad; the last snatches of a lost world of colour going down
into a w'elter of mud and desolation;

“What passing bells for those w'ho die as cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns,

Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries for them from prayers or bells,

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs—

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.”^

It was a subconscious protest of the human spirit which common
unlettered fighting men also echoed, but in blasphemies and
erim iests w^hich no one has recorded.

Yet this people, out of whose finest minds such poet:^- was
rung, could not be deterred from its purpose. Ti^eir will was
equfl to their task. “How to pull the_ English off^™te
Walter Page, the American Ambassador m London, «^ats a
hard thing to say, as it is a hard thing to say how to pull a bull¬
dog ofh” Watching day by day the never-ceasing procession of

inquirers seeking news at the Embas^^ of missing sons and
husbands, the Ambassador was struck b} their foioism .
a tear haVe I seen yet,” he vTote. “They take it as part of die
price of greatness and of empire. You guess at their gnei ody
by their reticence. They use as few words as
cLrteously take themselves away. It isn’t an accident ^^t *ose
people own a fifth of the world. Utterly un-warhke, they out
last everybody else when war comes. You don t get a s^e ^
fiphtine here—only of endurance and of high resohe.
She? lettTpage painted the same picture, set against the
aS b SounI 0? battle-of a nation “sad, deaffearn^t

Solute, united: not a dissenting voice-silent. Itwiil^end

all its treasure and give alHts men, if nee e.

nSXtre tSelglish came to to jomneYS
There were disasters in distant places ot offensive

^Wilfred Oicen, Anthem for Doomed 2onth.

»B. J. Hendrick, Life Sf Letters of litdtcT Pag..

ENGLISH SAGA

apo

his wings against the panes of innumerable homes. In the
spring of 1917 the German submarine campaign, before it was
brought under control, was sinking half a million tons of
shipping a month. For a few weeks—though the hideous truth
was hidden from the multitude—it seemed as though the price
of uncultivated farms and a neglected empire would be faruine
and defeat. New methods, long obstinately rejected by leaders
nursed in old ways, and the aid of American destroyers turned
the tide at the eleventh hour.

The full magnitude of what Englishmen were called upon
to endure was reached in the great offensive in the Flemish mud,
sometimes called the third battle of Ypres and sometimes
Passchendaele, which went on without a break for two drenching
months in the autumn of 1917. The battle, long planned by the
General Staff, was partly undertaken in the hope of driving the.-
German submarine bases from the Belgian coast. But it was
also fought in pursuance of a definite philosophy of war which,
after the failure of successive attempts to break the ugly deadlock
of trench warfare, had taken firm hold of the British military
mind. It had already been pursued, it was argued, with con¬
siderable success, though at the price of half a miUioa British
casualties, in the four months’ battle of the Somme. The
dominating idea was that as the total population of the
Allied Powers was higher than that of their foes, the process
of scaling down both fighting populations, man for man,
as rapidly as possible must end in the ultimate survival of
the larger. The quicier the rate of mutual destruction, the
military statisticians argued, the sooner the war would be
over.

For many weds the Passchoidade offensive, begun on July
31st, was regarded as the prdude to victory. Every day brought
its black lettering of triumph in the popular press: that autumn,
as in the amtum miTobtlis, 1759, gentlemen abed in En gland woke
to ask what new victory had been won. An advance of a thousand
yards over Flemish mud so dnirned up and battered that even
the oldest denizen could not have recognised it, and won with a
loss -of British life heavier than which it had cost a century alld
half earlier to conquer India and Canada together, was hailed
in 7 he Times with headlines of “German Defence Broken!” “We
have broken,” the Special Correspondent of that paper wrote,
“and broken at a single blow in the course of some three or four

BATTLE IN THE MOD 2^1

hours, the German system of defence.” Nest day it was broken
again, and the next and the next.

Night after night watchers of the bombardment that pro¬
ceeded each day’s attack saw “the flame of shell-fire... stretching
away round a great horizon,” and heard “from near and far the
ceaseless hammer-stroke of great guns making the sky red and
restless with tongues of leaping fire and bringing unseen, un¬
imaginable destruction to the masses of men hidden in the dark
woods and trenches.” Over such a landscape, if landscape it can
be called, denuded by tornadoes of shells of all vestiges of vegeta¬
tion or human habitation, men heavily laden with arms and
military equipment were expected to advance against a pitiless
rain of machine-gun fire. Whichever way th^ turned in pursuit
of their orders, they floundered in oceans of knee-deep mud;
even on the rare dry days of that ghastly autumn the solidest-
looking earth proved as thin as half-cooked porridge into which a
fully-equipped man sank until face, hands and tunic were soaked
with black mire, foetid with the obscene and decomposing
femains of dead comrades. “Ck)ld and paddling through a
sea of slime” to reach objectives whose value seemed as worth¬
less as their own water-logged shell-holes and whose cost must
be probably their own lives or mutilation, men yet endured and
kept their pride and manhood. Many were drowned as they
went forwMd or dragged their mangled bodies towards the rear.

Looking down from a slight eminence on that vast battle¬
field in the swamps between Ypres and the Passchendade ridge,
“the long bare slope down to St Julien, the valley of the Steen-
be^ choked with wreckage, churned into swamp and dotted
with derelict tanks; the rising ground to Poelcapelle, and in
the far distance fields and pastures new, green trees and a church
spire,a young officer—^no weakling but a hardened veteran—
was reminded of a child’s picture of TAe Pilgrittfs Progress, unread
since nursery days. “Here was Christian descending into the
Valley of Humiliation and seeing in the distance the Delectable
Mountains ‘beautified with woods, vin^ards, fruits of ail sorts,
flowers, also with springs and fountains’ very delectable to behold,
but in the path there lay *a wilderness, a land of deserts and pits;
a land of drought and of the shadow of deathl’ There was * also
in that valley a continual howling and yelling, as of people unde r
unutterable misery who there sat bound in afflictions and irons;

^G. EdmonUs, A Subaitern^s Waty

ENGLISH SAGA

292

over that valley bang the discouraging douds of confusion;
death also doth always spread his wings over it. In a word it is
every whit dreadful, being utterly without order; ... at the
other end of this valley lay blood, bones, ashes and mangled
bodies of men, even of pilgrims that had gone this way formerly’.”
In that place, though only the strongest and most faithful were
gathered there, even the strongest and most faithful were near
breaking-point.

Far from the blood-stained swamp, in the Olympian calm of
G.H.Q^ Haig, with his handsome head thrown back and his
.quiet, confident smile, would make a dramatic sweep with his
hands over his maps to show visiting politicians how he was
driving the Germans back to their frontiers. Mr. F. S. Oliver,
the historian, contemplating the deluge that poured continually
from the skies, admired the serene way the commander-in-chief
ignored the elements and persisted in his attacks. Presently the
(fistant ridge votfid be captured and the plain of Belgium would
open up before his victorious troops. Or so it seemed, looking
out through the tall, rain-spattered windows of the chateau of
Montreuil. The German generals pursued similar visions of
early victory; that autumn Russia, rent by revolution and
anardiy, collapsed before their advancing armies, and in October
the Austrians, believed to be at the last gasp, struck back with
German aid at their Italian assailants and sent them in headlong
rout with a loss of more than half a million men towards the
Piave. These disasters, like those which had befallen Belgium,
Servia and Romania in the earlier years of the war, were attended
by a mass flight of non-combatants—of whole nations on the
trds leaving behind a vast, untidy trail of dying women, old
men and children and the skeletons of starved animals. The
sum total of human misery was past calculation. Men,crueller
than the beasts, grew indifferent to it. German civilians sang
specially composed hymns of hate against England and, in the
most civilised country in the world, quiet, inoffensive English
gentlemen and ladies who had never seen a blow struck in anger
scouted the very mention of peace and spoke of the whole German
race as they would of a pack of wild beasts. Only in the battle¬
line itself was there no hatr^: only suffering and endurance:
death and infinite vraste.

Through the autumn months the “triumphal crawl throu^fh
the mud proceeded.” Flemish villages, whose names had never

BATTLE IN THE MUD

293

been heard of before in England, fell amid national jubilations
and at the cost of nearly 400,000 casualties— a, loss equal to the entire
population of Bristol. On the German side another 250,000 fell.
For each of these casualties, somebody in some town or village
far from the fighting line suffered anxiety, heart-ache inde¬
scribable, or irretrievable loss. It was a time when women all
over the world wore set faces, knowing that their d^r ones*
were in danger in a noble cause in defence of which no sacrifice
could be too great.

When nearly half a million men had fallen, the battle was
called off. For the time being there were no more men to send
to the slaughter, and there was nothing for it for those who
remained but to dig themselves into the mud and wait until
the still undrained man-power of the new world beyond the
Atlantic should arise to redress the exhaustion of the old. Then
“the bovine and brutal game of attrition could begin again.”
Amid the stench of thomands of unburied corpses the victorious
survivors consolidated their watery gains. These unfortunately
were nearly all lost in the next German offensive.

Yet there was no suri^der, for on both sides of the line con¬
gregated all that was most heroic and constant in the manhood
of the most virile nations of the old world. These fighters,
hidden from one another in the slime, subjected day and night
to a ceaseless tornado of screeching death out of the darkened
sky, tortured by every foul breath and sight that can appal the
sensitive mind, were in that place and hour because they had
chosen to be there. There were many roads out of the
battle-line; they were nerassary since none but the strong
could stand the test. No unit wished to keep the weak. Behind
the lines were all those fulfilling a thousand lesser tasks, who
could or would not fight it out. The stalwarts remained. Along
either rim of the rat-haunted, corpse-strewn limbo of no-man’s
land the philosopher seeking virtue in 1917 'would have found

the elect of the earth. .

The men who formed the rank and file of the army of Bntam
did not only retain their courage. Under a cloak of ironical
often blasphemous jargon they preserved their nauve
humour. Even cheerfulness was constantly breaking through--
in a world of thunder and screeching, mangled bo^es, foul
miasmas and ceaseless terror they laughed and joke<L Bruce
Baimsfather’s cartoon of the old veteran with his gnm, ugly,

ENGLISH SAGA

294

resolute fece and his walrus moustache, telling the grumbling
youngsters in his mud-bath of a shell-hole—“If yer know of a
better ’ole, go to it”—was the epitome of an invincible army.
Whenever the nerves of the strongest were at breaking-point the
English soldier fell back on an inner fortress of his soul. It was
buttressed with a kind of stubborn laughter. He jested at fate
because he did not wholly believe in it. For he knew it was too
bad to be true.

Sometimes that defiant cheerfulness arose above the mire
and squalor in some communal expression like the great shout
that would spring from masses of men at the most unlikely
moments c£“Are we downhearted — No/” or the impossible songs
with which troops beguiled the march, few of them printable.

“Send for the boys of the Old Brigade
To keep old England free!

Send for me’ father and me’ mother and me’ brother,

But for Gawd’s sake don’t send mel”

More often in the latter stages of the w^ the regiments marched
in silence under their medieval steel-rimmed helmets with a
certain monotonous, almost brute-like grimness. But the humour
and dheerfulness found expression in an undertone of individual
facetiousness: the “’Ave a ’eart, Fritz, we broke our bloody
gun!” which accompanied an intensive German bombardment

unreplied to; the time-honoured, “There goes the-receipt!”

when the British response came at last.

Sergeant Tozer, Little Mardow, Shem, Weeper Smart,
Madd^—the common soldiers of that great and forgotten qiic
of England in trial. Her Privates We —were dravm from Hfe
against a badtgroimd of unimaginable nightmare which their
incorrigible valour alone kept from being more than nightmare.
“These apparendy rude and brutal natures comforted, encouraged
and reconciled each other to fate, with a tenderness and tact
whidi was more moving than anything in life. They had
nothing, not even their own bodies, which had become mere
implements of warfare. They turned from the wreckage and
misery of life to an empty heaven, and from an empty heaven
to the silence of their own hearts. They had been brought to the
last extremity of hope, ^d yet they put their hands on each
other’s shoulders and said with a passionate conviction that it

BATTLEINTHEMUD 395

would be all right, though they had faith in nothing but in
themselves and each other.” They never broke, never gave way,
never despaired; they only jested, stuck it out and died.

“What’s the use of worrj^g?” ran the refrain of a music-hall
song much used for marching and barn-concerts at the aid of
the war. “Eh, corporal, w’a’s this?” asked the soldier of his.
exi^ous bread ration. “That, m’lad, is your bread ration.”
“Blimey! A tliowt it were ’Oly Communion!” An army which
could face hell in such a spirit was one which might be
annihilated. It could not be defeated.

It was not numbers nor efficiency nor even courage that did
England’s business, though in all these, learning the art of
modem war by harsh experience, she came to excel. In the last
resort victory went to the nation with the greatest capacity for
endurance. During the final terrible year of the war Genhany,
released firom all danger on her long eastern front by the colla]^
of Russia and temporarily relieved of any fear of Italian action,
concentrated her entire armament for a decisive blow in the
■west. On a misty morning of March 21st, 1918, 62 German
divisions, attacking on a front of 25 miles, broke through the
fifth British Army. For the next four months the German
attacks scarcely ever ceased; at one moment, driving a wedge
between the British and French, they almost reached the vital
junction of Amiens; at another there seemed to be nothing but
one shattered, invincible battalion of Grenadiers between the
grey-coated hordes and the Channel coast. The gains of the
Somme, Cambrai, Passchendaele, the Aisne, even the Marne
melted away in a few days.

But somehow Britain and her failing ally, France, stuck fast.
The line held. American reinforcements were beginning to cross
the Atlantic in large numbers; in Palestine, AUenby of Jerusalem
and Lawrence of Arabia with shrewd hard blows brought down
the Turkish Empire, leaving an open door in the German rear.
By the beginning of August the army of Britain, decimated and
tired as it was, gathered its strength, for a new spring. When
it came on August 8th it proved, contrary to all expectations,
the beginning of tiie end. The German Army had met its match.
It struggled bravely, wavered and finally broke. On November
nth, still falling back across the Fredch and Belgian soil it had
conquered, it surrendered unconditionally.

296 ENGLISHSAGA

Behind tie army lay another force without which its efforts
would have availed nothing. During the fom and a quarter years
of the war the army absorbed nearly six million Britons, the
navy only half a million. But those five hundred thousand mpg
and their Admiral could have lost the war in a smgle hour. By
their mere existence hundreds of miles away from the struggling
armies and smoking towns that fed the battlefield, the strength
of Germany was slowly sapped. The terrible purpose of
beset by foes was expressed in its final form in remote silence:
among the islands of the North the Fleet was in being. It was
enough. The only half-hearted attempt to challenge it
in the thunder of Jutland; but when the mists and smoke of
that confused cannonade lifted, the seas remained as they were—
England’s forbidden waterway. The people of central Europe
tried every way to avert and postpone the hungry negation of
that invisible siege. Even while their armies, out-gunned, out¬
manoeuvred and out-fought, were falling back before the advanc¬
ing surge of victorious khaki and blue, hunger was gnawing at
the vitals of the Gomian workers and housewives at home.
Revolution and surrender went hand in hand. And at the end
of all, the Kaiser’s tall ships of war, manned by hungry and
mutinotis men, tailed in mournful submission to Scapa Flow.

I Victory, eagerly hoped for in 1914, struggled for in vain and
in the face of repeated disappointments and defeats in the long
middle years, almost despaired of in the spring and summer of
1918, had come at last. Never a military nation, England, when
it came to testing the martial virtues, had outlasted all others.
That was why she won. In after years successful men of peace
were to argue that her financial resources had given her victory
just as the defeated Grermans, forgetting their sores. Were to
contend that there had been no victory at all. But in the grim
days of March, 1918, and during the fierce, terrible advance
against the struggling German lines of that September and
October, the fate of the world rested on the stubborn shoulders
of the British soldier. He and the superb fighters that the British
nations overseas sent from their lands of snow and sim to stand
by England’s ade, were the ultimate arbiters of that iron time,
^d they failed the world would have failed, and the German
ideal of rule by power woixld have triumphed while Adolf Hitler
was still a corporal. Not Brit ain’ s wealth but her character was
the deading &ctor in that hour of destiny.

BATTLE IN THE MV n 297

Thoiigh the exhausted French and the brchen Siisshins
and the still untried legions of the United States ail contributed
to victory, the dominating force in the world on Xoveraber iitin
1918, were the five million fighting men —the greater parr of
them volunteers and amateur soldiers—drawn frcnt a scattereii
community of tiiirty-five million English, four and a hair
million Scots, two million Welsh, perhaps two and a iralf rnhlion
loyal Irish, eight million Canadians, six and a Italf rnilhon
Australians and Neiv Zealanders, and one and a half mihiGH
South Africans—^in all rather less than sixty million free people,
of w^hom more than three-quarters were English or of English
descent. Contrary to all expectation, they had given the German
army the thrashing it needed and taught a would-be despot the
lesson that, though imperial Britain herself would not give rule
to Europe, no one else should^

^A page of drawings by Fougasse in Fmck in tlie year cf tbsTiztrry cUcbrati-ns,
stowed tow tte process tad been accomplisted. WcU, Fin Viz'TtdV sd - tlr: Ir. cFs'”
civilian of 1914, first in his shirt-sleeves by the fire and then :a his ih-d:::: g - ^ ^ tr-d g
suit. “What good can I be, turning out to tight them blooming Germans vith ah their
guns and millions of men!” And thereafter one sees him with increasing emticncy*
leaming amid hardships and great difficulties to do the job in hand, until in the end,
it is the professional and military German who is out-guimed, out-tanked and
out-manoeuvred. “It’s not as if we were a military aationd’ adds the victor cnce mere
by Ms fireside, “or took kindly to it at all. I don't wendtxit's taken to four to
finish the job I ^^—Funch CL F//,

CHAPTER NINE

Cnmbling Heritagt

If England was what England seems,

An’ not the England of our dreams,

But only putty, brass an’ paint,

’Ow quick we’d chuck ’Er! But she ain'tl

Kipling.

▼ X TSeh the war ended the simple fighting men who had
l/^ won it thought that a new world was about to be built
T T on the ruins of the old. They looked across a desolate
landscape of charred ruins and ghostly tree trunks—the very
field of Golgotha and dead-men’s skulls. Between them and the
life they had known before the war was an unbridgeable gulf of
scalding tears and the blood of dead comrades and of incommuni¬
cable agony.

They had no clear idea of the exact form the world they fdt
thgr had earned should take. It was a romantic rather than a
conaete conception, and one that, unspoken, had scnnetimes
floated through the smoky air of battalion concerts when some
prosaic enough looking singer regaled his comrades with “A
Long Long Trail” or “Roses are blooming in Picardy,” homely
tunes which no one who heard them in that setting ever heard
again without a forewarning of tears. But being an English
dream, it was curious how it reverted to ideas of roses round the
door and nightingales singing and the sound of the rooster

“-^the one that used ’ter

Wake me up at four a.m.”

For most of the rough, hard-tried men who listened’approv-
ingly and in the choruses sent their very souls humming into the
rafters, hailed from scenes far removed firom the rustic para¬
phernalia of thdr imaginary heaven. In the remote days of 1914
before they joined up, they would certainly not have thanked
any utopian visionary who had shifted them from the crowded,
noisy life of the street comer and planted them down in a country
cottage or woodland glade. But somdiow after four years of

298

CRUMBLING HERITAGE 299

war th^ were far nearer, though they did not know it, to the
vanished England of 1840 or even 1740 than to the bissez-faire
industrial society of I9t4> encrustations of a hundred years
of urban development had fallen from them, shed on the dusty,
bullet-swept downs above Contalmaison or in the blood and mud
of the Salient, leaving their souls naked as they had inherited
them from their remote forebears. Bereft by the pitiless tempest
of war of almost everything they had known in their brief,
stunted city lives, their desires and needs were unconsciously
dictated by their country’s forgotten tradition. Put to the test
the slum boy, made man by otdeal of battle, had acquired an
atavistic memory of the things he had lost.

He wanted a home he could call his own, with perhaps a
garden for vegetables and flowers, a regular job of work in which
he could take pleasure and pride, security in his livelihood and
the self-respect that comes from status and a fixed place in society.
It was not a very exacting ambition, and by the universal acclama¬
tion of the nation he had deserved it. He had even been promised
it by the politicians. There was nobody who wanted to deny
it him,

Amid a wild delirium of hooters, squeakers, and flag-wagging
men and girls on car-roofe, the nation shut off steam. No more
digging potatoes for victory in dreary allotments beside the gas¬
works, no more going out on Special Constable’s duty on cold
winter nights: good-bye, reflected business England, to all that.
The hour had come for every man to help himself and in his
leisure to enjoy the good time to which his patriotic efforts had
entitled him. For the British were not merely a profit-seeing
people: they were an enjoying people. Goff, cricket, seaside
holidays, sunny June afternoons on the river ot at the wheel
were the prizes whidi those able to awarded themselves.

Even in the armies overseas, after a slight pause, the same
thing happened. The war was over: the goal was reached.
There was no point in men who were not professional soldiers
remaining soldiers any longer. The only thing to do was to get
absorbed in civilian employment as quickly as possible. Self-
sacrifice, devotion to the corporate ideal, tsprit de corps, were no
longer needed: dreanas must wait. Within a few weeks the
amateur soldier had only one thought: to get “demobbed" and
back to clean sheets—if he had them—warm wife and the ftuniliar
sights of Blighty. A few old soldiers, <ynical about politicians’

ENGLISH SAGA

300

promises and reckoning that they were in a tolerably snug hole
and in a harsh world would find no better, made no hurry to
doff their khaki and stayed where they were—so long as an
indulgent Treasury would let them. The remainder evaporated.
For four years they had placed duty and fidelity to comrades
above self: now, the bugles having sounded armistice, there was
a not unnatural reaction. Number One came first.

So the fighting man received the thanks of his country, a suit
of civilian clothes, a pair of medals and a small cash gratuity.
In the case of a private soldier it amounted to the equivalent
of a few weeks wages. In the case of an ofiicer it was more liberal
and was often sufiicient to purchase a small chicken farm or a
wayside garage and car.

Unless he had a disability pension—which carried with it the
inconvenience of a disability—that was all. Like the Pied Piper,
the man who, a little while before, had been acclaimed the
saviour of his country, was given a matter of something to put
in his pdie and told by the Mayor and Ciorporation that any more
was out of the question. The sacrifice of the past belonged to the
past. It was already history.

Another history had begun—^the history, as we now know, of
the twenty years between two wars. It started in exhaustion and
hope; it was to end in disillusion and disaster. The nineteen
twenties and thirties are too near to be seen as history, and all
narrative of them is still only conjecture. Surveying them firom
1940 the historian is like a man looking back on a mountain
range which he has just left. The peaks which are nearest still
dominate the others: he carniot see the range in perspective nor
perhaps even glimpse at aU the highest peaks of all. He must
travel farther before their true outline, so simple when viewed
, from far horizons, can be comprehended.

The soldiers who came ba^ to the land they had defended
greeted the peace in the mood of their dream. They supposed
that th^ were going to devote the lives so miraculously spared
them to the rebuilding of a better England, worthy of the men
who had died for it. But they and the civilian majority to whom
they returned—^who, lacking their revolutionary spiritual
experience, had never shared their vision—were almost at once
overwhelmed by the necessity of forcing a living out of the
economic system in which they found themselves. Few of them
had any time or opportunity for politick or philosophical

fRUMBLING HERITAGE 30 »

reflection, let alone action. They had more than enough to do to
earn their daily bread and, so far as they were able, a decent life
for themselves and their dear ones. Beyond voting in masses at
set intervals for two or more organised groups of politicians
offering stereotyped legislative programmes of a general kind,
whose practical purport was never very clear, they could not
shape the course of events. They merely lived through them,
reacting to them as their native feelings and their limited know¬
ledge—^mostly acquired through the newspapers—dictated. For
the rest, they looked for jobs, worked hard to hold them when
they had them—^though seldom for the joy of working since
few available jobs offered any scope for this—and, Englishwise,
took whatever pleasure their confined lives afforded: in the
bosom of their families, listening to the wireless, watching
League football or the Ackers, and holiday-making in cheap
cars or charabancs.

What followed in the world of public affairs bore small
relation to their desire. The emphasis at first was almost wholly
domestic. It seemed attended by a great deal of bitterness and
strife- There were constant strikes and lock-outs, and violent
speeches in which Britons in the public eye called each other
tyrants, bloodsuckers, murderers, firebrands, and red revolu¬
tionaries. These industrial upheavak involved much recurrent
inconvenience to the ordinary man: clerks had to^ make their
way to the office without trains or trams, housewives to cook
without coal or gas, shareholders to forgo their wonted divi¬
dends, and strikers their wages, and often, as a result of pro¬
longed economic dislocation and the loss of foreign customers,
tbp'ir employment. There was a general atmosphere of uncer¬
tainty and among the industrial masses who, though the osten¬
sible beneficiaries, were the worst sufferers from these acrimonious
efforts to better conditions, a great deal of vray real bitterness
against the social system in general and their more fortunate
countrymen in particular. The paradise of “Blighty" as seen in
wistful anticipation from the trenches proved, on closer aojuamt-
ance, to be somewhat precarious, even for those who had had the
luck of the economic roulette. For the less fortuiwte there were
times when it seemed, what with slum housing, tightened bdts,
hungry, querulous womenfolk and pinched children, almost as
grim as the trenches and far less friendly.

Seen through the medium of the daUy papers the first years of

ENGLISH SAGA

302

the great Peace that succeeded the war to end war were disconcert¬
ingly unrestful. Anger and strife were not confined to the
factory and soapbox. Ireland, India and Egypt were all in more
or less open rebellion. At Amritsar General Dyer gave the order
to fire on an Indian Nationalist crowd: in a few minutes 400 were
killed and nearly 1000 wounded. Some said that the general had
averted a second Mutiny, others that he had disgraced his uniform
and bdiaved like a P^sian. In Ireland British officers were
dragged from their beds by masked assassins and butchered in
front of their wives, an imprisoned Lord Mayor starved birriRplf
to death to shame the Saxon despot, and Sinn Fein gunmen
maintained a rival and forbidden administration with their own
parliament, army, police and courts of justice defying those of the
imperial government with whom they waged ceaseless, secret,
and bloody war. The campaign was even carried into England,
where a Field-Marshal of Orange views was shot by Sinn Feiners
on the steps of his house in Eaton Place.

But when the Coalition government responded in kind to
lawlessness by abandoning law and recruiting a force of dare¬
devil, ex-service misfits—^nicknamed “bladt and tans”—to “raise
hell” in Irish villages, the tired English dream for a moment
reasserted itself. The English did not like the Irish, who, as
^represent^ by the newspapers and their own actions, were a
manifest nuisance, but thq'’ had a sense of justice and an invinc¬
ible love of decent and legalised dealing. “Authorised rq)risals”
against innocent householders and women and chil dren were too
much for . them. Public opinion, for once rendered articulate by
imanimity, made itself felt, and the government, with an election
before it in the not distant future, dianged its policy. In the
latter part of 1921, assisted by a timdy speech from the King, the
more imaginative members of the Coalition made contact with
the less intransigent of the Irish leaders. In the strained negotia-
•tions that preceded the Treaty which gave Dominion Status to
Ireland, one great Englishman, Lord Birkenhead, long lost in the
post-war moral'confusion and welter, took his solitary chance to
prove his own wasted genius for statesmanship and the enduring
tolerance, common sense and humanity of British policy.

After i92ikimperial, like foreign problems, faded into the
background. In that year the full force of the economic anardiy
which scourged the post-war world struck commercial Britain.
The orders for urgent reconstruction after the devastation of the

CRUMBLING HERITAGE

303

war dried up; instead the European nations, struggling back into
the industrial battle-line, began to manufacture for themselves.
Their very ruin helped them: with their prior charges wiped
out by inflation and their workers rendered servile by long famine,
th^ were easily able to imdercut British rivals. Pries, and with
them wages, came tumbling down. So did employment. In June
1920 there were 67,000 unemployed in Britain. By July 1921 there
were two and a half million.

The shock of this new adversity sobered the nation. It brought
a temporary end to strikes and lock-outs and a drastic reduction
in unnecessary spending. It also brought Lloyd George's grandi¬
ose Coalition to a slightly premature end. An imknown Worces¬
tershire ironmaster named Stanley Baldwin, with an honest face
and a penchant for pipes and pigs, led an unexpected Tory' back¬
bench rebellion against the Welsh wizard, and entlironed a
Conservative govornment dedicated to tranquillity. The country,
feeling by this time that tranquillity was about the best it could
hope for, gave it a comfortable mandate; and its modest leader,
Bonar Law, quickly falling mortally ill, the Premiership passed
unexpectedly to the unknown Baldwin. The new dispensation
proved a success, certainly with the business community. “V^hy
all rliTs fuss about the servant problem?” asked Mrs. Britamua in
Punch. “There’s my Baldwin—can turn her hand to anything,
keeps the House in order, checks the accounts, doesn’t want any
evenings off, very tactftil with visitors, especially foreign^, in
faa a perfea treasure.” In the circumstances of the time it was
an advantage that the new government seemed rather humdrum.

• •••* • " *

But if the business world was contented^ the industrial workers
were not. The terrible figures of unemployment were a cancer at
the country's heart, retarding all recoveiy and embittering
relations between Englishmen. For the commercial predominance
of the past had vanished. The competition of younger rivals,
most of them with inferior standards of living, increasing.
So was the urban population which Britain had built up behind
her former manufacturing ascendancy and which could only be
employed and fed by the sale of manufactured goods abroad.
And the accumulated investments of the Victorian era whiA had
helped to bridge the gulf between what Britain bought with her
exports and what she was able to produce in foodstufis and raw
materials, were dwindling. More than half her pre-war

ENGIISH SAGA

304

capital invested in foreign countries outside the Empire had
already been lost or was soon to vanish in default and
depredation.

The uncertainty of an anarchical Europe increased her difficul¬
ties. Though her own sodal fabric remained tmbroken, Britain
was dependent on the custom of foreign nations whose ability or
readiness to pay for their purchases was constantly in doubt
She had to trade to live. Trading with uncertain customers in
uncertain currendes, she could only live imcertainly. Fluctuation
in foreign prices and markets meant fluctuation in domestic
employment and sodal standards. A revolutionary sitjiation
abroad threatened a revolutionary situation at home.

. The City, Englishwise refusing to admit reverse, put a brave
face on things. It still continued to base the economic life of the
country on the time-honoured assumption that every mari ^yho
was industrious and prudent could make profits. The absence of
prosperity was explained away by the assurance that a good timo
was sure to arrive as soon as the depression was over. TTie un¬
employed man standing in the rain outside the labour exchange,
and the small manufacturer vainly waiting for the return of lost
orders, were told that thdr sufierings wOuld be compensated for
by the magnitude of the coming recovery.

It never came. True, there were ups and downs, periods of
slump and boom. But the booms were mostly confined to the
fluctuating values of Stock Exchange shares and a few new luxury
trades due to redistribution of national wealth and changes of
social habit. At no time was there any steady expansion of
British exports: throughout the greater part of the period there
was steady decline. In little more than a decade those to foreign
countries fell by nearly a third.

Because of these things unemplojmaient remained a nnillstntu^
round the neck of every post-war government. In the twenty
years between the two wars every third working-class family in
the land suffered at some time the despair and indignity of the
dole. Every statesman promised.or tried to find a remedy. Within
six months of taking office Baldwin, himself a manufacturer,
seeing Britain’s manufacturers undercut by foreign rivals with
lower social-standards and wage costs, sought a mandate for a
modification of her policy of free imports to enable him to
bargain' for reciprocal advantages for her traders abroad. But a
conservative people brought up to regard free trade and pros-

CSCMBLING HEBITAOE

perity as synonymous and to suspect all would-be protectionttS-of
log-rolling, was still not ready for the hour of economic
gression and repentance which Disraeli had foreseen as inevitable.
The Conservatives, themselves far from unanimous about their
imtried chief’s impetuous lead, were defeated at the poUs, and the
Socialists, now the second largest Party, took office for the first
time in December, 1923.

The newcomers, still in a minority, did not remain in power
for long. Their foreign policy was unpopular, and their domestic
reforms did nothing to solve the problem of unemployment.
After nine months their Liberal allies withdrew their hesitant

support. An appeal to the country did not help the Sodaiists.
Despite their hold on the distressed areas and mining districts,
they went down heavily. In November, 1924, Baldwin again
took office.

During the next four years there was a slight improvement
in trade, tmemployment fell by nearly half a million and there
was a reduction of fid. in the £ in income tax. An attempt at a
general strike, which for a dramatic week in the spring of 1926
created a revolutionary situation, was defeated by the refusal
of ordinary Englishmen—most of whom sympathised with the
miners on whose behalf the strike was ordered—^to permit an
outside body to dictate to an elected and lawful government.
The coal strike was subsequently allowed to drag on for six
miserable months to its dismal, inevitable end; thereafter

industrial conditions became temporarily more normal. There
was a good deal of slum clearance carried out by the joint efibrts
of private enterprise and local authorities with the aid of govern¬
ment grants: in the four and a half years of the administra^
tion 8,000,000 houses were built. Workmen’s savings increased
by £170,000,000, and there was a steady, if unspectacular,
improvement in the extent and quality of the Social Services,
whose cost, only £63^000,000 in 1911, rose by 1929 to £341,000,000.
The general adiievement was not inspiring and fell far short of
the soldiers’ dream. Yet it was the nearest post-war Britain ever

came to prosperity.

But there still remained over ipoo,ooo unemployed. There were
srill millions of English men and women living ugly, under¬
nourished, uncertain lives, in cramped, mean, verminous dwell¬
ings, and bringing up thdr child^ in dirt and degradatioo.
When the Baldwin government, in the summer of I 929 > trying

ENGLISH SAGA

306

on the unimaginative slogan of Safety First, asked for a renewal
of its mandate, it was found it had forfeited the confidence of the
country. The change of rulers was not based on reason so much
as on the human feeling that there was more sufiering in Britain
than flesh and blood should be asked to bear.

Yet the Socialists, who again took office with unofficial
Liberal support, could do no more than the Conservatives to
alleviate that suffering. In fact, through no fault of their own,
they were able to do far less. In the autumn of 1929 a series of
crashes on the New York Stock Exchange were followed by a
failure of credit from one end of Europe to the other. The great
world economic crisis or trade blizzard began. It was grimmer
and bigger than any that had ever happened. By the
autumn of 1931, unemployment in Britain was approaching
3,000,000. In the same month, the government’s imbalanced
borrovdngs to meet the deficit on the Unemployment Insurance
Fund precipitated a panic among foreign depositors and an
incipient flight from the pound. Amid much confused bandying
of figures and waving of depreciated pound notes, and a wholly
irrational but rather moving recrudescence of patriotic feeling,
a hastily-formed coalition government appealed to the country
for a “doctor’s mandate” to solve the economic ills under which
its people were suffering. It received it with a majority un¬
precedented in British electoral history. The Socialist and former
pacifist Prime Minister, who had abandoned his Party at the
dictates of his conscience and the Bank of England, was returned
to power with a following of 556 members, 472 of whom were
Tories.

The new government made little impression on the un¬
employment figures at first, which, true to the uncontrollable
laws which seemed to govern world trade, continued to rise
gently until 1933. Thereafter th^ fell substantially for three
years, and then with the “National” government still in power,
showed unmistakable signs of rising again. Yet it would be
unfair to say ffiat the administration’s efforts, which were
painstaking if uninspired, had no effect on them at all.
Comprised in the doctor’s mandate, though the purer and less
accommodating Liberal free traders who supported the coalition
subse^ently denied it, was a carte blanche to adopt some'form of
protection for native and imperial industry. In the cumulative
distress and anxiety of 1931, Britain, after close on a century.

CRUMBLING HERITAGE 3O7

■was ready at last to repudiate free trade. For men had cried to
their totem, and their totem had failed them.

Not that any very vigorous protective policy was adopted.
The worst abuses of dumping by State subsi^sed foreign impor¬
ters, who had long regarded the unprotected British urban market
as a happy hunting ground, were checked. And in 1932 a British
Delegation, led by the Lord Privy Seal, Baldwin, agreed at the
Imperial Conference at Ottawa to afford to the Dominions, in
return for reciprocal advantages for British exporters, that prefer¬
ential treatment which had been refused by Lord Salisbury’s
government at the Diamond Jubilee thirty-five years before.
But the extent of such preference was strictly limit^ because the
National Government felt itself unable to reserve more than a
moderate fraction of the home market in foodstufe for imperial
producers. Its reluctance was dictated not so much by the old
fear of raising the price of food to the Britbh consumer as by its
deference to the vested financial, commercial and shipping
interests which had grown up round the imports of forei^
agricultural products. For it ■was plainly impossible for Britain
to talfp her beef simultaneously from British farms and from
the Argentine: if she sacrificed the latter for the former, it would
become difficult and perhaps impossible to transmit the interest
on the British capital invested in that country. And as the vast and
costly party machines necessary to a country 'with a democratic
franchise inevitably received more support from bankers and
shipowners than farmers, it was only natural that the former s
interests should prevail.

So imperial preference, though popularly approved, was but
tentatively encouraged instead of boldly applied.^ It was not
possible to create a new economic order for the British Empire as
the public wished without br e a king financial eggs.. In 1938, the
Anglo-American Trade Agreement, "without any mandate from
the electorate, actually whittled do'wn the modest concessions
granted to Dominion producers in 1932. As for protection, this
was •virtually never possible ■without the repudiation of a com¬
plicated system of foreign commercial treaties wffidi had bem
built up during the Free Trade years, and of which the public
knew nothing. The whole economic structime raised in a century
of titanic capitalist enterprise was too intricate and interdepen¬
dent for any one to be able to produce, let alone execute a plan
capable for mending any one of its defective parts without mjur-

ENGLISH SAGA

308

ing, perhaps irreparably, some other. However delicately one
stepped, the floor of. the commercial edifice was alive with vested
interests, every one of which was apparently sacred and defended
by a whole chorus of jealous hierophants. The utter fiasco of the
much advertised World Economic Conference in London, in the
summer of 1933, was an illustration, if any was needed, of the
omnipresence of the disintegrating forces in contemporary
human society. It was poor Ramsay Macdonald’s last attempt to
view the. world as a unified whole. Despite his oratory and good
intentions the task was beyond his or apparently any other man’s
comprehension.

• ••••*•••

Before the Conference broke up in cynical despair the emphasis
was already passing from internal ills, still uncured, to still
graver external ones. Adolf Hitler, rising to stormy political
victory on a surge of angry oratory and the bitter despair of six
million unemploy^ and thirty million underfed, became the
Tvlcr of Germany. His aims, shrilly enunciated for fourteen
passionate years, were the repudiation of the Peace Treaties and
the establishment of a greater Reich that should dominate the
Europe which had humiliated her. He was a man of hate, who
hated the French, hated the Jews, hated his own rivals and pre¬
decessors in hatred, the Bolshevists. He hated everything which
opposed the interests and destiny of Germany and, as he always
identified himself with Germany, by implication every one who
barred his path.

Apart from an instinctive dislike for the man’s manners and
methods, the British people were not at first interested in Hitler.
That they might themselves be among the causes, though as yet
not amongst the immediate objects, of his vituperative fury
never struck them. At the time of the Armistice, when almost
every family in the land was mourning some relative and when
many harsh and bitter things had long been said and done, they
had not uimaturally responded to a hasty request from their
politicians for a mandate to rebuild Europe by telling them to
hang the Kaiser and squeeze the German lemon till the pips
squeaked. After that, being heartily tired of foreigners and their
, problems, they had turned their backs on- the Continent and,
immersing themselves in their own aflFairs, left their politicians
and publicists to reshape Europe as they chose.

Their bri ef spa sm of ill-humour had soon passed. With tern-

CRUMBLING HERITAGE 309

peramental British inability to nurse a grudge, they wished
Germany nothing but well. The anxious efforts of the French
to keep their ancient and terrible enemy prostrate, only increased
British sympathies for her. Moreover, an island state dependent
on foreign trade found that she could ill afford so disturbing an
economic factor as a ruined central Europe. \Mien the French
Premier pointed to his country’s devastated areas as a reason for
tightening the screw, Lloyd George retorted by pointing to the
export districts of industrial South Wales and northern England
with an unanswerable “These are our devastated areas.”

But of the Treaties still standing in their name—their content,
the extent of their enforcement, their effects on the conquered—
the British people, except for a small minority of intellectual
Socialists and Liberals who had always opposed the Peace Treaties
as politically inexpedient and economically suicidal, were almost
totally ignorant. They were unaware that Germany had been
ruined economically before a single mark of reparations had
been paid or even demanded. They did not know—or had for¬
gotten if they had ever known—that for several years the peoples
of central Europe had starved, that the entire middle dass of
Germany had lost its savings in the inflation, that hundreds of
thousand of German dvilians had been driven at a few hours’
notice from their homes by French soldiers. Because in the
latter ’twenties Germany thrived for a while on the reck¬
less loans with which British and American finanders tried to
resusdtate and exploit her industries, they never realised that
millions of Germans, were secretly nursing bitter grievances and
irrational hatreds. They knew nothing of the dry timber which
the orator Hitler was seeking to ignite.

According to their lights such grievances as existed had been
allayed. The Locarno Pact, conduded in 1925 between Austen
Chamberlain, Stresemann, and Briand, which, in effect, merely
congealed the status quOy they enthusiastically acclaimed in the
belief that it consecrated the policy of let bygones be bygones,
and restored equality between victors and vanquished. That it
had not done so they learned with perplexity when, in their
successive attempts to achieve disarmament—their historic
practice after all wars—the Germans insisted on parity with the
French and the French on an overwhelming superiority in cv^
weapon as their only security against Germany. Wanting
nothing but peace—the one positive gain from the wastage^
ZJS. ’ X

ENGLISH SAGA

310

cruelty and misery of the war—the British people assumed in
their insular, hopeful way that every one else felt the same.
Through their voluntary associations and parliamentary insti¬
tutions they affirmed over and over again their sense of
its necessity and their faith in the League of Nations and the
machinery of international law. They even succeeded with the
help of their Anglo-Saxon kinsmen in the United States in per¬
suading the statesmen of the world to affix their signatures to a
document called the Kellog Pact, repudiating war as an instru¬
ment of policy. For, having suffered so much from the tidal
flood of war, they supposed, like King Canute, that an edict
against tides would protect them from further inundation.
Their courtiers, the democratic newspapers and politicians,
loudly assxired them that it would.

Yet, everywhere, the old national jealousies and fears barred
the way to that rule of perpetual peace and international law
that was the Englishman’s ideal. Italy wanted naval parity with
France, and the U.S.A. with Britain, who in turn depended for her
very existence on the freedom of her sea routes. Japan wanted
hegemony in Eastern waters; Soviet Russia, in order to secure
and further the proletarian revolutionary experiment, wanted
the largest air-force in the world; Poland wanted a big army,
preferably mounted, to defend herself against Russia; and Czecho-
slovalda and Belgium wanted the continued profits from the sale
of the armaments they so industriously manufactured. Every
disarmament conference failed. For no formula cotdd resolve
these eternal discordancies.

Into, this imbroglio of rival expedients, figures and formulas, >
like a bull entering a china shop, burst Hitler. Even before the
easy-going, preoccupied British public had become conscious of
his strident rancour, their pacific hopes had been dashed. In
1931, Japan, seeking preferential markets for the expanding
industrid population of her overcrowded island, marched into
an anarchic China to seize Manchuria. British peace-lovers
protested, the more logical of them even damotiring to go to
war to vindicate the decencies of international law and the rules
of the League of Nations. But neither their fellow members of
the League, nor Japan’s great rival, the United States, was pre¬
pared to go to such an extreme and desperate course. Nor were
the British—Ihen in the throes of a financial crisis—^in any
position, after ten years of disarmament, to impose single-

CRUMBLING HERITAGE 311

handed the rule of righteousness on a great naval Power at the
far end of Ae world. The only result of .^nglo-Saxon disapproval

aggression was Japan’s exit from the League, taking her con¬
quest with her.

^ Two years after Hitler’s irruption on the European scene, a
still more brazen aggression occurred. A noisy Fascist Italv, seek-
ing preferential markets, raw materials and an outlet for her
expanding population—^now shut out from the Americas bv
restrictive emigration acts—^revived a long dormant claim on
Abyssinia.^

At the instance of Italy herself, Abyssinia had been admitted
to the League, and was therefore recognised by the British public
as an equal and sovereign fellow nation. What complicated the
outrage was that Italy was still a kind of tacit ally of Britain and
Fr^ce. Mussolini, who, as western Europe’s first dictator, was
believed to have no love for his upstart Teuton imitator,
had only recently declared from (he stronghold of the
Brenner Pass that Fascist Italy would not allow Austria to be
absorbed in the Reich. With Germany rearming in open violation
of the Peace Treaties, the loyal alignment of the three victor
Powers against the reviving barbarian seemed vital to the safety
of them all.

The French, always more sensitive than the British to the
peril beyond the Rhine, were painfully aware of this. When
Italy, true to her boasts and warlike preparations, marched into
Abyssinia in the autumn of 1935, they did their best to restrain
the pacific enthusiasm of the British for vindicating the violated
principles of international law. But the British were not to be
restrained. Their politicians had rqjeatedly told them that the
Great War had been fought to end war for ever. The heroic and
loved dead had died and the millions had suffered for the sake of
that great consummation. And the League of Nations, honoured
in Britain as nowhere else, was the guarantee that peace should
endure. Its Covenant was the British prople’s war gain. They
would not allow it to be flouted.

But their dilemma was tragic. For they could not protect the
integrity of League principles without waging another war—
. that which they had hoped above all things to avert—and so

iln The fi^pes Atlas of 1896 the whole of Abyssinia was cdoured green as an Italian
possession. Only the defeat of the Italians by the Abyssinian waniois at A&wa
prevented Abyssinia from becoming Italian, as the Sudan, at that time, became BtitislL

ENGLISH SAGA

312

destroying the one achievement of the war to end war. Reluc¬
tant to ignore the Italian challenge, equally reluctant to embark
on hostilities in which, as it became painfully clear, they could
not count on the help of the nations associated with them in the
Covenant, they tried the expedient of commercial sanctions.
Even to these the associated nations, loath to dislocate their
trade, gave only tepid support. Ineffectual for any purpose save
to irritate Italy against what seemed. British sanctimony—for
who were the British to cavil at imperial conquest?—sanctions
not only failed to stop her triumphal march into Addis Abbaba
but drove her out of the League into the arms of her hereditary
enemy. Henceforward the two Dictators marched together on
one brazen axis, with the other aggressor of the Far East in
uneasy co-operation. Their declared aim was a New Order con¬
structed on falsehood, menace and violence.

Hitler snatched at his opportunity. While the Italo-Abyssi-
nian war was stiU waging, he reoccupied the demilitarised Rhine¬
land, relying on pacifist opinion in a disarmed Britain to prevent
more than verbal protests at this breach of the Peace Treaties and
Locarno, France, suffering from internal dissension and indus¬
trial unrest, dared not act alone. The door of Europe was sla mm ed
in her face. Henceforward she could only come to the assistance
of her eastern allies by breaking through a fortified German
frontier. It was the end of Versailles. It was virtually, though
scarcely any one yet knew it, the end of peace.

...... ••

Such was the fate of the dream which the soldiers brought
back from the trenches. On September 3rd, 1939, it seemed as if
the dead-had died in vain. The veterans of the Great War had
seen their homely ideals of a decent life constantly frustrated by
economic factors beyond their control or even that of their
politicians. The home of their own with a garden, the job in
which they could take pride, the security for themselves and
their dear ones, had had to wait. In their patient English way
they had acc^ted the fact, hoping that gradual amelioration of
social conditions might one day ensure the promised land for
their children and children’s children. In that hope they had
passively adopted the Baldwinian thesis, put aside bitterness, and
worked for the slow realisation of a more just and happier
society in the days after their death. But even for this limited
realisation, peace was essential. A repetition of the terrible

CRUMBLING HERITAGE 3X3

Struggle of 1914-18 would put the dock of progress back fifty, a
hundred, perhaps a thousand years. War marked the end of all
their dreams, and war had come.

Yet there was nothing left for an Englishman but to fight and
beat the enemy, cost him what it might. He had at least done his
best to keep the peace. His cause, however tragic, was a noble
one: he was fighting against evil things and a cruel, unappeasable
aggressor who tortured radal minorities, who tore up treaties,
w^ho ranted and shouted and bullied and, when he was thwarted,
rained death and desolation on peaceful millions.

Yet, evai when the war had begun and the need for strong
united action became obvious to the most obtuse, the national
driving force still faltered. The fatal indecision and divisions
that had weakened British purpose for twent}' years persisted. For
more than six months, while the Germans completed their pre¬
parations behind the Siegfried Line, the British effort at rearma¬
ment, begun leisurely in the old days of tranquillitj’ and pacificism
when Baldwin took office for the third time in 1935, and speeded
up by Chamberlain since Mxinich, proceeded at what seemed little
more than pre-war pace. The leaders of Labour were second to
none in their resolve to destroy Hitler and the hated Nazis. But
they did not mean to allow the almost equally hated Chamberlain
to do so. And the Prime Minister, who had identified himself
with appeasement and then, with palpable integrity, led the
nation to war, was honestly resolved, like Sir Robert Peel, to be
the chief executant of the policy he had formerly opposed.

It was not till the Germans, after their lightning conquest of
Norway, had struck with their full force at the Netherlands
and sent France reeling that Britain awoke to the magnitude
of her task. The politicians and financiers who had assured her
that her economic resources would alone enable her to beat the
“have not” Powers were seen to be liais, the elderly Civil Servants
who.had complacently assumed their ability to crush the young
revolutionaries of the Nazi Reich by rule of thumb were proved
bunglers. Not to these but only to the enduring character
of her people, made manifest on the Dunkirk beaches and in the
skies above the Channel and Kentish Weald, could Britain look
for deliverance. She was where she had stood in March, 1918.

Once more she was face to face with reality. For the datas quo
which the men of business had told her was the only feasible
reality for a practical people had proved insubstantial as the

ENGLISH SAGA

314

kingdom of Cloud Cuckoodom. The sanctity of profits and
dividends was a mere shadow. It had vanished before for the
soldiers of the Great War in the smoke and flame of Somme
and Passchendaele. As the German tanks thundered over the
same battlefields it vanished again. Men were back with their
own souls because the realities of the world of commerce and
profit-seeking had failed them. Twenty years before they had
been persuaded that their vision was an illusion. But as a tired
England girded on again the invincible armour of her tireless
valour, the vision was all that remained.

CHAPTER X

Way of Redanption

“In the dty set u^n slime and loam
They cry in their parliament WTio goes home?’

And there a>mes no answer in arch or dome;

For none in the city of graves goes home.

Yet these shall perish and understand,

For God has pity on this great land.

Men that are men again; who goes home?

Tocsin and trumpeter! Who goes home?

For there’s blood on the field and blood on the foam
And blood on the body when Man goes home.

And a voice valedictory . . . Who is for Victory?

Who is for Liberty? Who goes home?

G. K. Chederton.

B ot what, puzzled men with long but hazy memories
asked, had happened? Why had the soldier who had over¬
come so much failed after the peace to achieve those rimple
and elementary hopes for which the dead had died? The things
he wanted in those far days in the trenches had seemed so reason¬
able, and for a rich country so easy. A tithe of the efFort and
cost which Britain had expended in defeating Germany could
have made her a different land, offering good homes for all,
ample pleasant places unsullied by the wastage of competitive
indusoy, an assurance to every man of work in which he could
take pleasure and pride and by which he could earn a modest
but secure livelihood.

All over tortured Europe other men who had suffered and
bled had asked the same things. They also had had their dream,
conceived in an hour of blinding and agonising revelation—
Frenchmen and Italians; vanquished Russians, Germans and
Austrians, Hungarians, Bulgarians and Turks; Serbs, Belgians,
Romanians, Gredb, Jews, Poles and Czechs. They too had
wanted, each in the form dictated by their radal and national
pasts, the same elemental human satisfaction; the home of thdr
own, the craft of their choice, the bit of land—status, security,
creation and continuity. God who had made man in His own

3t5

ENGLISH SAGA

316

image had meant him to have these things, and out of the
whirlwind of Verdun and Caporetto had spoken of them.

It was not to these that the returning soldiers, marching
with set faces to demobilisation across a broken Europe, returned.
It was to frustration and disillusion: to hunger and enforced
idleness, to untilled fields and empty factories. All they had
suffered for their loved ones and country ended only in more
suffering: not in a Christian and compassionate commonwealth
but in a pigsty. The politicians in all countries had promised a
land fit for heroes. But when the soldiers came home they found
a world designed for stockbrokers and rentiers and civil servants.
It was built not in the image of their apocalyptic dream but in
that of the utilitarian lab3nrinth of the money-changers from
which they had gone forth in 1914. ’.

For industrial society as it had grown up in the past century,
first in island Britain and then everywhere else, did not admit
the fulfilment of the soldiers’ need. Laissez-faire capitalism
postulated a fluctuating reserve of labour and therefore imem-
ployment, the power of the man with capital to hire and dismiss
his workers as he chose and therefore insecurity; and the legal
priority of usurious over equitable rights and therefore die
accumulation of property in the hands of the few and its denial
to every one else. The men who had gone to battle to defend
such a society were divided from it by a great chasm which they
had crossed in agony, sweat and blood. But those who had to
reconstruct a broken Europe—the political leaders, the in¬
dustrialists, the clever thinkers and capitalists who had stayed
at home—were still on the other side.

The only remedy these men of an older generation could see
for the ruin around them was to rebuild the world they knew
before the war. It never occurred to them that they were
restoring the situation that had caused the war. The basis of
their world was the overriding necessity of earning evpanding
profits. The test of every human enterprise in every country
had increasingly come to be: will it make enough to meet the
contractual demands of the initiating lender? The universal
search of the profit-maker- was a fruitful field for exploitation in
some other country. The desideratum of every national policy
was not whether it increased the actual wealth of a country—
^e crops, homes, amenities, health, happiness and character of
its inhabitants'—^but whether it multiplied the returns of the

WAT OF REDEMPTION 317

men of money and of those to whom their money, s^king
multiplication by usury, was advanced.

The success of the great British capitalists of the nineteenth
century had blinded civilisation to the essential difference between
profits and real wealth. A rare combination of native character,
vigour and inventiveness, geographical good fortune and
historical opportunity had caused their experiment to succeed
in its early stages beyond their wildest expectations. Britain
became richer than any other nation had ever been before. But
she also became poorer. Her soaring exports and accumulating
investments were the products of the new econoniic indi¬
vidualism. So were the conditions of the early factory towms.

It was the paradox of the nineteenth century—an epoch in
which Britain led the world~that the practice of a sturdy and
often heroic individualism, which increased the potentialities of
human wealth out of measure, imwittingly created social
injustice and inhumanity on a scale formerly unknown to
Christians. The economists were proved right in their
contention that enlightened self-interest, unfettered by State
-control, could enrich men more quickly than any other means.
Yet the human misery caused by its pursuit justified the prophets
of a more ordered society who warned unheeding generations
that profits created at the price of social health and content¬
ment were illusory. In the long nm they were not profits at all.
For they had stiU to be paid for in the cumulative loss of
working power sustained through inhuman conditions of
life and labour and inferior breeding capacity. The flaw in
laissez-faire, and in the entire system of accountancy to which it
gave birth, was that it regarded man as a self-sufficient umt
like a machine. It forgot that he grew. It failed^ to recognise
that the human economic unit was the continuing society-
nation, group or family—from which the individual derived his
habits-and instincts. ItVailed to perceive that the effe^ of md^-
" nourishment, bad housing, xmemployment and social injustice
was not confined to the immediate victims but was transmitted
to his descendants. A business that only operated in one genera¬
tion might profit from overworking and underpaying human
beings. A nation could not. Yet there was no nation of any
im portance that did not follow Britain’s example. ^

Those who set out so gaily along that glittering road of
accuinulation failed to see to what it led. They did not gnisp

the moral truth, hidden from the utilitarians, that greed always
overreaches itself. By enthroning it as the motivating principle
of all economic activity, they set society on a downward declivity.
At first the profits accruing to a man of enterprise, who under
such a system was encouraged to apply his entire energies to
their pursuit, could be great. Operating in a community in
which- wholesale exploitation had not Tutherto been permitted,
he was able to command the vigour, content m ent, health and
character of its people without paying anything towards the
cost of these commercial assets—^the accumulated legacy of
former ages of sane and virtuous living and the real wealth of
any continuing society. But with each generation the margin of
available profit diminish es until the day arrives when the society
under exploitation consists of debilitated, inefficient and resent¬
ful h uman beings without pmperty, social cohesion or religion.
The seven good years of the capitalist’s policy are presently
consumed by the seven lean. The exploiter is driven to seA
new fields to succeed those already used up. .And in these fields
rival exploiters encounter each other, narrowing profits still
further. i

The peacemakers who assembled in 1919 could not see the
flaw in the system. They were not bad men: only uninspired
and, for all their entourage of experts, ignorant. They had none
of theknowledge of far humbler men whom their great limousines
passed marching on the dusty roads aroimd Paris. They had
not shared the soldier’s crud^on and his blinding, revealing
vision. Th^ could not therefore conceive a new world. They
could only speak in the language of an old. They thought in
tenns of maps, political frontiers, racial rights and creeds, above
all in markets and fields of profits for their bankers and in¬
dustrialists. With infinite pains they re-erected the structure not
of a co-operative but of a competitive world. They never saw
the simple'truth that for four years had been flashed nightly
across the sky above the trenches in which millions of men who
had no conceivable personal quarrel lived troglodyte lives to
slay one another in the slime: that a competitive world ends in
a warring world.

The peacen^ers not only strove to reconstruct an imprac¬
ticable system: they unconsciously aggravated it. They not
only set the profit-makers and usurers of all nations in renewed
competition with one another, they intensified and embittered

WAY OF REDEMPTION

319

that competition. There was little that was vindictive about the
political terms of Versailles. It was just that France should
regain her stolen provinces, Italy, Romania and Serbia their
natural frontiers, and Poland and Bohemia their independence.
It was only common sense that Germany should be disarmed
and the claws of the Prussian bully cut. But it was madness
deliberately to reshape the frontiers of central Europe in order
to ensure the bankruptcy of German, Austrian and Hungarian
producers and enrich their rivals in the victor states.^ The
British soldier in the trenches had fought only for one reason—
to beat the Germans and teach them to keep their place. He
had not endured that four years’ agony in orda: to render
future generations of workers poor and restless.

The German of 1919 was under no illusion as to who had
won the war. He was cowed, humble and very hungry; he
wras fed up vrith imperialism and dreams of world conquest.
He wanted to be what his ancestors had been before the Prussians
had taught Teutons to dream of worldly domination and the
financier and industrialist had made it seem a necessity—a home-
loving, sentimental bourgeois smoking a pipe, swilling beer and
imbibing mUSic and philosophy. He had been taught his place.

There vras no need, after thrashing him and taking his arms,
to bankrupt him. It was suicidal, if a Germany was to remain
part of Europe, to render it a financial cripple. As MajTiard
Reynes pointed out, during the half-century before the war
Europe had become industrialised round the hard core of a
manufacttuing. Germany. Instead of a con tinen t of self-sup¬
porting agricultural states, m^ufacturing only for luxury,
there had grown up an intensely complicated polity based on
the industrialisation of the more advanced co mmuni ties and a
grouping of the others as customers and growers of their food-
stuEs and raw materials. It might have been far better had no
such economic alignment ever taken place. But since it had,
any rearrangement of political frontiers that ignored it was
bound to unsettle the life of millions.

For since capitalist Europe, in its search for industrial profits

iln a letter writteao in Noreinber, 1917, F. ^ ^

Cabinet Committee, described how the Forei|n Office, the Board

and the India Office were all thinking out “separate pobaes for doing m tlwHm m

the matter of his exports of manufacturer’s imports of raw mal^ls

At the time of writing thousands of Englishmen were dying daily m the mud of

Passchendade.

ENGLISH SAGA

320

and interest, had become interdependent, a regrouping of its
provinces and people such as German aggression had rendered
necessary was only practicable if accompanied by a divorce
between national and economic sovereignty. Unrestricted
political independence for its diverse races was, however danger¬
ous, possible: but unrestricted economic independence set laissez-^
faire to operate in the conditions of a madhouse. For so long
as sovereignty carried with it the right to raise tariffs and trade
barriers along national frontiers, every transfer of industrial,
mineral or agricultural territory involved the dislocation of
existing industries and the unemployment and diminishing
purchasing power of those dependent on them. The aimexation
of a province did not merely as in the past affront the pride of
a few crazy nationalists and militarists. Under capitalist laissez-
faire it entailed poverty and perhaps ruin on millions. It played
into the hands of the very warmongers the treaties were designed
to punish. For it offered for their discredited and antiquated
notions a vast and hungry audience.

Since the countries who shared the same continent with
industrial Germany were dependent for the sales of their primary
products on the purchasing power of the German workers, the
handicap imposed on her by anxious French statesmen created
economic disturbance everywhere. It unwittingly sentenced the
whole world to suffmng. Already ruined by war and famine,
men in all countries found themselves without-former customers,
markets or emplo3ment. Everywhere governments seeking to
alleviate their sufferings and still their clamour w;ere driven
to create in a hurry new industries and markets to fill the hiatus.
Artificial and perilous economic creations arose like the great
armament industry of Czechoslovakia, cutting across the lines
of natural economic development and arousing needless rivalries
and animosities. A great geographical area like the Danube basin,
which had formerly been an economic whole under the Haps-^
burgs, was cut up into unworkable trade-tight compart¬
ments.

In a world so' anarchically devised that all nations were com¬
petitors for markets beyond their borders, nothing but the
closest economic co-operation could have enabled thHr govern¬
ments to safeguard the welfare of those for whom they were
responsible. So long as a nation was dependent for its markets,
credit and raw materials on forces outside its control, its people

WAY OF REDEMPTION* 331

were subjected to fluctuations in prices and market conditions
which rendered their life and employment uncertain. Only an
agreement betwe^ nations to. sacrifice part of their economic
isolation, either in some internationally enforced system of
multi-lateral clearing arrangements or in a low tariff‘group or
economic union comparable to that formed by the Stares of the
U.S.A. or the ts.S.S.R., could have stabilised the trade conditions
of a capitalist and politically divided continent. Only thus could
the peacemakers have averted the fluctuations that devastated
human society in the early ’thirties and, among other e\'ils,
carried Hitler to power on the flood-tide of central European
misery and unemployment.

But in the bitterness of their aggravated racial feelings the
Versailles statesmen, constant to the grooves of their vanished
youth, deliberately discouraged international economic co¬
operation. The fiscal anschluss between republican Germany
and the German rump of the old Austria was forbidden, as was
a Danubian tariff union between the States which had con¬
stituted the Hapsburg Empire. Either permitted in time .might
have saved central Europe from ruin and Nazi domination.
And with every year that passed any modification of economic
barriers between the nations became harder because of the vested
interests which grew up round even the most artificial and
restrictive trade and financial channels. In the great slump of
the ’thirties even generous Britain—^fiscally the most liberal of
all States—^invoked her ^‘most favoured” nation rights to prevent
the formation of mutually beneficial low-tariff groups, first
between the Scandinavian countries and then between Holland
and Belgium.

For by a curious paradox the very insistence of Britain on the
jEreedom of international trade now had the effect of restricting
its free flow. A kind of intellectual petrification in its leaders
caused them to insist on the retmtion of the identical form of
commercial treaty employed in the days of Cobden. The ‘‘naost
favoured” nation clause, which the Foreign Ofiice still rigidly
inserted in every trade treaty, had been designed in a very different
age to prevent coimtries which had not adopted free trade from
obtaining concessions from which Britain was excluded. Its
object, by making it impossible for any party to it to reduce
its tariffs to another nation or nations without reducing them
to every nation with which it had ever signed a treaty, had been

ENGLISH SAGA

322

to generalise tariff reductions and so make for greater freedom
of trade.

Before mass production and cheap transport made it as easy
to export to the far side of the world as to the next province,
the universal use of the “most favoured” nation clause did not
have the effect of subjecting a country, "which -wished to reduce
tariffs to a favoured foreign customer, to dumping from the
rest of the world. It merely lowered tariffs all round -without
interfering -with that natural preferential and stable trade which
existed between neighbouring countries. But once the world
became for transport purposes a single unit and every nation,
emulating Britain’s example, started manufacturing for export,
the operation of the clause made it dangerous and even impossible
for any government to reduce tariffs at all. Though every nation
needed stable trade and the reduction of fiscal barriers between
itself and those with whom it normally traded, any agreement
between two nations to this effect was impossible so long as this
ubiquitous clause enabled others v?ith lower wage and pro¬
duction costs^ to claim equal rights and so flood the markets
which they were trying to regulate and extend. Paradoxically
the “most fevomed” nation system meant that no nation could,
under normal trading conditions, be favoured at all. It pre¬
vented by any but arbitrary and violent methods the formation
of those larger and natural fiscal areas which alone could have
rendered the capitalist system workable.

This unintended ossification of tariffs by the very measure
which had been designed to reduce them had disastrous effects
in the changed -world of the ’twenties and ’thirties. By making
the creation of planned and orderly international trade impos¬
sible, it subjected the peoples of every country to violent fluctua¬
tions which perpetually dislocated their employment and
standards of li-ving. Obstructing profits from stable trade, it
drove investment into speculative channels and created a -vast
vested interest in fluctuating prices. Because capital could not
earn assured returns from long-term investments, it sought
them from forestalling rises and falls in stock exchange, currency
and commodity prices. The ends of those who controlled capital
became increasingly served, not by the steady development of
the earth’s reso-urces, but by successive booms and Slumps which
brought recurrent u n certainty and unemployment to the workers

^Such, for instance, as Japan.

WAY OF'REDEMPTION 323

in all lands but whose intelligent foreknowledge oflFered favour¬
ably-placed speculators and monopolists opportunities of
enormous profits.^

In countries like the U.S.A., Britain and France, which had
strong traditional social systems, reserves of wealth and access
to raw materials purchasable in their own currencies, such evils
could be endured for a time. Despite the suflFerings of large
minorities they even could become—as the event showed—
accepted as a matter of course. In less fortunate countries,
especially those which had suffered defeat in war, they shook
the social system to its foundations. The broken nations of
Europe revolted against the misery of recurrent unemployment,
the burden of contractual usury and the waste of povertj^ in the
midst of potential plenty.

In place of these things there arose out of the fires of revolu¬
tion monstrous and primeval t}Tannies. For society in the throes
of rebirth fell inevitably into the hands of men who subordinated
all things to their struggle for power. To them violence, at first
a necessity of revolution, became an end in itself, power a con¬
suming lust. The idealists, seeking to rescue mankind from its
cross of gold, conceived the ends of these revolutions; but it
was men more ruthless, violent and resolute who supplied the
means. Having gained power, they maintained it by the
centralising weapons of modem science. Murderers, torturers
and perjurers, they took their place on the thrones of kings.
The State bemme their tool and their will the law. In their
cruel hands creeds, which first arose as a human protest against
inhumardty, became far more harmful to man’s happiness and
liberty even than the evil things they supplanted.

• • •*. «*.•

What happened in these less fortimate strongholds of Christian
civilisation did not occur in Britain. Her victory in the war,
her vast accumulated reserves of wealth won in her Victorian
hey-day, above all the greater strength of her political and
social institutions and the natural kindliness and good humour
of her people, enabled her to withstand the corrosion of a disr

iRow great such profits were can be seen from the fluctuating prices of cominodities.
In the three years between 1935 and 1938 the variations in the maximuin and minimum
prices of lead, zinc, copper, and rubber, were respectively, 176, 170, and per
cent. In 1938 wheat prices at Liverpool ranged between 58s. 4jd. and 24s. Si^ ’Wt
variations in a world unified by science and cheap transport cannot be explained smdj
by natural causes.

ENGLISH SAGA

324

integrating system longer than any other European nation. Her
ancient order and peace held. Her people shrank frdm the brutal
remedies of their continental neighbours. They could not see
the need for them. They loathed their practical expression.

But though the British fighting men had returned in 1919
to a land of ordered progress, in which many of the worst features
of the industrial system were being constantly mitigated by the
organised conscience of the community, business was still
business: The soldier’s dream of a decent and stable life for
himself and his dear ones remained a dream. For in an island
which had escaped the horrors of invasion, battle and famine,
the old belief in the sanctity of profits and investments remained
unshaken. Though a million of her bravest had fallen, laissez-
faire had survived.

The soldier was expected to adjust himself to it. A govern¬
ment department was even set up to help him do so. But he
soon found that, so far as commercial and professional success
was concerned, he had merely lost four years. If he was a man
of exceptional energy, in possession of good health and nerves
and a little capital, he might have no great difficulty in making
up the leeway. If, as" was more often the case, he was spiritually
and physically tired, he was soon at a disadvantage. After all
his sacrifice this seemed unjust. But by the laws of laissez-faire^
tempered though they were in kindly England by State charity,
it was m^ely inevitable.

By sudi laws the men who had not shared the sacrifice of
the trenches were, generally speaking, better off than those who
had. They were established m their jobs and suffered no violent
transition in their lives and habits. Whatever they had achieved
in the past four years remained to their credit. If they had made
money—and with soaring war prices and wagQs there had been
unprecedented opportunities for doing so—^it remained theirs.
If th^ had invested it in government securities the State
guaranteed them not only the capital but a safe five or even six
per cent return on it for many years to come. And the man
who in nature of things was best off of all was the profiteer
who had turned his coimtry’s necessity to glorious gain.

There was nothing in the economic morality on which
Britain had based her commercial life for a century to make it
wrong for a man to do so. The whole trend of finance and
commerce had been to divorce the possession of money from

WAY OF REDEMPTION

3^5

that of civic virtue. By the mathematical rules of Mssez-faire
the two had nothing to do with each other except on the assump¬
tion that the accumulation of cash was itself tantamount to
virtue. The war, wdth its contrasts between penniless V.C.s and
hard-faced profiteers, had proved the falsity of this assumption.
Yet the slick company promoter, with his untidy trail of bank¬
ruptcies and ruined concerns, the slum landlord, the conscience¬
less usurer were still allowed to render whole communities
miserable and unstable. So, without realising it, were the
rentiers and small savers who, under a system of joint-stock
companies and giant trusts, lent the use of their money to those
whom they could not control.

A man might be a fine craftsman, a self-sacrificing citizen, a
gallant soldier, but in peace-time his virtues were tvorth only
what they could earn in the market-place. They could not of
their own buy him a house with a garden, a decent bed with
clean sheets, goods and clothes for himself and his family. They
could not even guarantee him a job or keep him in it. In such
^matters money alone spoke. If he was^ without it he was at a
hopeless disadvantage in a community governed by contract
instead of status: He could only with the greatest difficulty live
a good life: it was almost impossible fox him not to live a
higgledy-piggledy one. He had to face the prospect of being
workless, living on a dole insufficient to buy more than the
barest necessities, sheltering from the weather with his family
in a single verminous room in some dreary slum street without
the slightest security of tenure and suffering the abasement which
every man feels who has not the dignity of an assured craft and
a home. The State, true to an enduring English tradition that had
survived even the worst rigours of laissez-faire^ saw to it that a
workless man did not starve. But it did no more. It left him to
the operation of economic laws which condemned him to a life
of ceaseless discomfort and degrading squalor, enforced idleness
and the absence of almost everything that can delight and
ennoble man.

Instead of a world fit for heroes, let alone decent men and
women, the corroding shame of unemployment and the degrada¬
tion of urban poverty became the lot of millions. Nobody wished
Englishmen to bear such suffering. It arose unavoidably out of
the economic system and the circumstances of the age.

The masses who had been given unrestricted adult suffrage

E.S. Y

ENGLISH SAGA

326

could not see this. They supposed that the fluctuating numbers
of the workless, which in reality depended on world factors out¬
side the control of any single government, were due to the mis¬
carriage of thdr politicians. Sometimes they blamed the Con¬
servatives and sometimes the Socialists. It was all said to be
Lloyd George’s fault or Baldwin’s or MacDonald’s. This em¬
bittered public life, for unemplo3maent and the poverty and
wretchedness that went with it were such evils that they seemed
a crime against the dignity of human nature. Whoever was
responsible for them was obviotrsly a criminal.

It was this, too, that explained the rapid rise of the Socialist
Party which during the War had been discredited as a pacifist
minority. For men felt that as the rich were so powerM and
yet so impotent or imwilling to remedy such inhnmari con¬
ditions, there must be something fundamentally wrong with
the private possession of property. A political party that pro¬
claimed this could not fail to win votes. Its two chief fields of
recruitment were the masses who suffered imder the industrial
system and the intellectuals who sought remedies for it. The
worse the suffering, the more insistent became the demand that ‘
the State should restrict the power of the rich by taxing and
ultimately confiscating the wealth that was its source. No
government^ even the most conservative, dared oppose this.
Hiough the project of a capital levy, much discussed in the first
post-war years, was easily defeated through the influence of
the great financial houses and trusts whose business it would
have dislocated, high taxation of incomes and inherited estates
was the toll which private wealth was made to pay for the mani¬
fest suffering and injustice of the social system. It was recognised
as inevitable even by the most diehard.

I So far as Socialism constituted an attack on the existing
^tem, it thus received support from all but the stupidest and
smallest minority. The alleviations which it proposed—^unem¬
ployment insurance, increased social services, help to distressed
areas—became part of the programme of ^ parties. Yet it
never achieved a dominating hold on the British, far less on the
English electorate. The English reacted against joint-stock
capitalism because th^ did not want to be mge-slaves. Th^
reacted against Socialism and still more against Communism
because they did not want to be proletarians. By English indi¬
vidual standards of liberty a proletaiian, whatever his status in

WAY OF REDEMPTION 327

the Marxian hierarchy, remained a kind of slave. For these
philosophies of the omnipotence of the State with their rigid
administrative machinery subordinated the freedom of dhioice
and self-respect of the ordinary man to vast and tyrannic powers
as effectually as did joint-stock capitalism itself.' They left no
scope for the English dream which was a free man’s dream. ^

Because of this, despite the ob%ious disabilities of the existing
^stem, the British electorate, though largely composed of work¬
ing men, even continued to send Conservative majorities to
Parliament. But they probably would not have done so but for
Baldwin. This kindly, liberal-minded and characteristically
English politician so obviously shared the ordinarj’ Englishman’s
humane ideal that when he told them that he was working to
bring about a better England they believed him. They had no
idea how he was ^ing to bring it about, nor, it now seems, had
he. The only thing that was certain—and he never tri^ to
deceive them about this—^was that it was going to take a very
long time. For Baldwin,-like his Socialist vis-a-vis, Sidney Webb,
believed in the inevitability of gradualness. And it was just
possible that by some miracle in the English mode the nation
might ultimately have escaped the toils of its fatal economic
disease by gradual methods and so have achieved what it was
sedting.

But it was never given time. For the breakdown of the
economic system on the Continent came too swiftly for the smdlr
like pace of Baldwinian evolution. So long as they could, the
British people and their leader averted their eyes from the Euro¬
pean scene. But presently it became impossible to do so. The
strident dictators of hate who had emerged from the economic
welter could not be ignored. Thereafter, rearming feverishly
and desperately trying to avert their hateful doom and that of all
mankind, the British people never removed their fascinated gaze
from Europe until they were finally and inevitably drawn into
the maelstrom.

For they knew instinctively that what was happening on the
Continent could not be allowed to continue. However much they
mi ght loathe the idea of fighting a second war to end war, a

'The English answer to them was that of ihe Conuminist window-deanar, ■rto
told 8 Tory that what he really wanted was a house and a garden of his o^ wiA a
bish. 'wall round it, and spikes in the top of it. It ms because capitalist socut3r OW M W
Viim this that he was a Communist. He had still to realise that Commuxusxn would
deny it him too. Most of his countrymen realised it already.

ENGLISH SAGA

328

■world Power like Britain, dependent on public confidence and
peaceful dealing between nations, could not ignore the rq)eated
challenge to international law and decency. As before in her
history, she had to uphold public order in the world. A world
■without public order was not a world in which England could
exist.

True to her past, her people took up the challenge. But even
as they did so they knew instinctively that they were- in some
peril of fighting not only to destroy e^sdl things but to preserve
them. They were resolved to put an end to Hitlerism, for apart
from their resentment at brutality and cruelty, they knew that.
their own frustrated dream could never be fulfilled by violence.
In resisting it they were unconsciously protecting an unborn and
gentler English revolution. But they did not want to destroy a
felse totalitarianism merely in order to make the world safe a
second time for the system that passed, however unfairly, under
the name of “Chamberlainism.” The young men who, ill-
equipped and abandoned by their allies, triumphantly and in the
face of all expectation, fought their way intact to Dunkirk out
of what threatened to be the biggest military disaster in British
history, were not doing so for the sanctity of ^■vidends or the con¬
tinuance of profitable speculation in shares and conimodity
prices. They were fighting—though they still only knew it
hazily—for the dream for which the forgotten dead had died
a quarter of a century before,

t ••••••••

i In a hundred years pigland had comt full circle. The laws
that govern human existence may seem inscrutable. Yet they
possess one ruling principle—that of ultimate justice. This can¬
not be perceived by a generation that glorifies the individual at
&e^ expense of the living society. For it is not the guilty
individual who is punished or rewarded but the commonwealth of
which he is part. The rulers or electors who neglect eternal
truth may escape retribution. Their innocent descendants cannot,
f Because of an unbalanced obsession with the individual,
private profit-making—^formerly regarded merely as a means to
the acquisition of that modest ownership that makes virtuous
^d free men became accepted as an end itself. But for certain
indestructible elements in the English character it might have
become the only end. In the sphere of economics, covering nine-
tenths of man’s daily life, the test of every activity, increasingly

came to be not “Is it just?” but “Does it pay?" There was only
one chedt on that rule—^the hu m a n conscience. With the gradual
concentration of business in the hands of limited liability com¬
panies, even tlmt check was removed. A limited liability company
has no conscience. A priesthood of figures cannot consider
claims of morality and justice that conflict with its mathematical
formulas: it must live by its own rules. Man, who had once
tried to model his life on the divine, came to take his orders from
the lender of money and the charted accoxmtant acting in their
purely professional capacity. That has been the story of the last
century of civilisation. The age of enlightened selfishness b^ot
plutocracy, and plutocracy begot the monstrous materialistic
and pagan tyrannies we are now fighting to destroy. It was
England that first unconsciously led the world into this mnrass-
It is England—wisest and gentlest of the nations—that has now
to discover the way out.

If, remembering all the kindly and virtuous men who in the
course of their duty and livel^ood minis ter to the modem
economic and financial machine, the reader doubts this, let him
ask himself this question. Can a bank, in the &ce of actuarial
fiict, grant credit to a man whose failure must cause far greater
human misery and injustice than the imprudent under-writing
of his overdr^ could conceivably cause the bank’s shareholders?
To a modem mind, brought up in commercial prindples, the
very question has come to seem dishonest.

It is not the profit motive that is to blame. Free men have
at all times sought profit from their labour. It is its enthrone¬
ment to the exclusion of other motives far more important.
Under, any sane human system the first concern of a fiictory
should be the production of goods to give the utmost use^
pleasure, and wear to those who require them, and the satis¬
faction of the human needs of their makers. Under the present
system the one is only considered indirectly, being subordinated
to the prior ends of making the maximum profit on the year’s
trading or paying the rake-oflF—fi:equently an unnecessary one—
of the middleman. The other is scarcely considered at all
Lack of satisfaction of the producer in his work—the supreme
tintnan need of our age—is embittering and abotaging the
whole industrial system. It is destroying the rhyihm and
vitality of life. It is of little avail for scientists to give man
the wonderful tools of modem machinery if a system of

ENGLISH SAGA

330

accountancy makes it necessary to use them in such a way
as to deprive him of pride and enjoyment in his labour and
of stability in his life. For these are as essential to the well¬
being of man, as children and child-bearing to woman. A
factory that do^ not afford them to its workers is a badly
organised factory. Nearly all factories in the economy of mass
production for profits are badly organised. So are those in
the new despotic states organised for quantity of output.

Man should be master of his tools, not his tools of man. It
used to be the glory of England that its craftsmen took pride in
their work. Under the modem system the artisan is denied the
joy of giving quality to his task and is usually employed on a
temporary basis. He is at the mercy of forces over which he has
no control. He is not truly that which his English instinct
prompts him to be—a freeman. That is why many Englishmen
found so surprising a degree of satisfaction ami^t the perils,
pain and discomfort of the last war. The army, for all its
harshness, gave comradeship, pride in achievement and the
assurance that a man who did his best would receive his reward.
It was the same appeal that the iron totalitarian creeds later made
to the starving and workless millions of capitalist Europe.

Civilisation is the science of enabling men to live in society
as free, virtuous and rational individuals. The cement of any
sudi society must be justice. The utilitarians by setting the rule
of figures above that of human equity gradually undermined
Christian civilisation. Those who destroy civilisation leave men
no other refuge but the herd. And the herd, as the totalitarians
have proved, is cruel md irrational.

It is particularly uimatural for an Englishman to live in a
world not governed by justice. That is why he is fighting to¬
day. An attadk on the independence of a small people by a large
is an obvious act of injustice which awakes the dormant conscience
of every Englishman, But behind the barrage of figures which
cloaks the pursuit of private profits, injustices have daily and
unconsdously been committed against millions with almost as
litrie ^uity as Hitler’s rape of Poland and Czechoslovakia,
There is not only a crying need for justice between nation and
nation. There is a crying need for justice between man and
man. Even in Franco’s despised new Spain the law now compels
the payment of seven continuous days’ wages to manual workers

WAY OF REDEMPTION 33I

employed by the day^ on the ground that a man who woriN is
entitled to his Sabbath’s rest and his dailv bread with :r, naan**
ever the logic of accountants may sav.

It is an error in human matlieiiiatics to ar^me that any cour-e
which creates contented citizens can be econarnicahe un^tund.
Figures that prove anything so preposterous lie. \\ siitishci
community will always find a way to exist. Ami a dissatished
community, however sound its balance sheet, vdll invari-bhv ^nd
in some social disaster—war, revolution, or naticnal tit.iv—
which will nullify all its figures and profits. However learnedlv
accountants may reason that in a nation which l'cc.ks after
the money the men will look after themselves, the final account
will always shatter their logic Slums, social disaontent, dole
queues and war lie at the end of their avenues of rr'^'inisL:t-
mentum requiriSj cheumspke! The truth, as Engiar.d pr^'Yed in
her earlier past, is that, only in a nation which looks after the
men, will the money look after itself.

Yet there are still some in this country ivho believe that
economic laissez-faire wdll survive the war. They have Iciig
realised that a victory for the Dictators means the end of the right
of man to invest his money as he pleases and of the sanctity of
private investments. They have therefore, on the assumption
that whatever the totalitarian states condemn must in itself be
good, assumed that a victory for Britain must necessarily involve
the re-consecration of the economic practice of the last century.
At the expense of millions of lives the clock is to be put back to
the paradisial hour of 1927 or even 1913.

Their system’s inadequacy has once again been exposed
in the hour of testing. In 1917 Britain was. within an ace
of starvation^ because her people, in pursuit of profits from
foreign trade, had become dependent to an unbalanced degree
on foreign food. The same danger again threatens her
because, in the very years when, recognising the ininiinence
of a second war, she was spending £ 1,500,000,ax) on
re-armament, no provision was made for an adequate
grain reserve for human and animal consumption, ap¬
parently because its purchase would have interiered with the
customary profits of the middleman and speculator in foreign

^At one timej wb.eii the German submarines were sinking half a miiHon tons ot
shipping a month, there was less Aan seventeen days’ supply ot food in the counm\
—Lord Lymington Famint in England.

ENGLISH SAGA

332

foodstuffs.^ In the same period the storage room for wheat in
a dangerously overcrowded island was allowed to decline when
every argument of prudence and patriotism dictated its urgent
increase.

So also lack of .care for the Empire has given needless
hostages to the aggressor. Because foreign trade and invest¬
ments brought bigger returns to the men of money, British lands
that could have bred vigorous and healthy millions of our own
race were neglected in favour of other lands. Canada, with an
area equal to that of Europe, has still only a population of eleven
millions. Australia, more than fifty times the size of England
and the home of perhaps the finest natural fighters the world has
ever seen, has hardly more white inhabitants than Portugal. After
fifty years of British rule the two Rhodesias have fewer than
Huntingdonshire. Those responsible for this blindness may
have profited in their generation. But they helped to lose'us
the forty or fifty millions of oiu own allegiance and idealism
who would otherwise be fighting by our side against Hitler.
That the total population of all the British nations overseas is
still less than that of Brazil or pre-war Romania is the price now
being paid for a century of enlightened self-interest.

Because of a false philosophy that set the profits and comfort
of the living generation above the needs and security of a
continuing society, the happiness, health and character of the
British people—so strongly founded in the past—^has been
jeopardised. Millions of men have been allowed to rot and
eat out their hearts in idleness because bigger profits could be
earned by buying from the foreign than from the home producer.
Much of the finest farming country in the world, inhabited by the
most skilful agricultural population, has been allowed to go out of
cultivation—endangering the nation’s vital security—because
it paid vested interests better if Britain did her far ming in
the Argentine, Dehm^k, Poland and Cuba. Even the beauty of
her countr3rside, an irreplaceable and spiritual heritage, has been
subordinated to private enrichment. The crinunal law forbids
a man to obstruct an urban thoroughfare for a few minutes with
a car. But it takes no account of such outrages on the permanent
property of a great people.

the usual economic ar^fument of the expense involved did not apply in this
case, s in ce such a reserve of gram—war or no war—would constitute, like Disraeli’s
Suez Canal shares, a saleable and even pro£bd>le asset.

WAY OF EEDEMPTION

333

For a hundred years, in eyer increasing mrasure, patriotism
for the common man has been presented as a mere emotional
affair of flag-wagging. That it has had anything to do with his
daily life, his skill in his craft, his love of home and his care
of his diildren, has been obscured. Yet slums and imder-nourished
men and vromso, verminous children and despairing dole queues
^^gre-aslmuch the concern of the patriot as the battlefield. It is as
high a treason to undermine public morality and endanger the
"'safety of the commonwealth for the sake of profits as it is to
trade with the enemy or sell military secrets. In time of war
nothing can save the State but the character of its people. The
TYian yrho for selfish ends undermines it is the real fiffo columnist
Her capacity for making profits by foreign trade impaired
by a continental blockade and her foreign investments mostly
evaporated or frozen, Britain tonlay has still two supreme
assets—the character of her people and the lands of promise won
for her in the past Both have been neglected; lx)th, despite
defective leadership and lack of human vision, survive. The one
is her guarantee of victory. The other is her opportunity for
fulfilling the English dream. In the past many pursuing that
vision have argjued that it would be better if England ceased to
be a world commercial power and became again a little land like
Sweden or Holland, producing only for quality and the happiness
of her people. But a nation, which has allowed its population
to exceed its capacity for feeding it by more than half, cannot
exist within its own narrow compass. Starvation and rum
for our densely populated millions have been the unthinkable
price threatened for every attempt to discard foe servitude and
uncertainty of world laissezfoin trading conditions for a gender
and juster organisation of national life. Yet there remains an
alternative. Canada and Australia, New Zealand and the
Rhodesias are the life-line of the English future. There
lies the appeal for the British people from foe slum, foe dole and
foe regimentation of foe factory

• • • • • *

Nations like men must reap what thty sow. The justice that
is visited upon the children’s diildraa is an inescapable law of
existence. Yet there is another eternal principle govei^g
the world. It is that of redemption. Man may learn from
his mistakes and, when he has made atonement, raise his
Stature by self-regeneratioiL Here, also, he learns and acts

ENGLISH SAGA

334

not as an isolated individual but as a member of a continuing
society of which his own birth and death as an individual are but
a seasonal part. A great nation is a society that learns from its
prior follies and in learning recreates itself

England has always learnt her lessons from her past mistakes.
That is why, in the last resort—on the Dunkirk beaches of her
history—she is so great. She lost her first Empire by ignoring a
great principle of human government. She kept her second by
regarding it She made war against the Boer burghers: she
gave them freedom and self-dominion within ten years of their
defeat She denied nationhood to the Irish: she granted it un¬
grudgingly when the scales were lifted from her eyes. Her
enemies have often recalled the crimes of England. Yet her true
history is the record of how they were redeemed.

England is now learning again that neither wealth nor power
nor comfort, whether for class or individual, are ends in them¬
selves: that the wealth of a nation consists in nothing but the
virtue of her children and children’s children. That no profits,
eduation, law, custom, or institution that does not contribute to
their health and goodness is of any enduring value. That the
proper test of all legislation, of every politick programme and
economic activity, is not “Does it pay?” or “Does it enrich this
class or that?” but “Will it make better men and women?”

An island fortress, England is fighting a war of redemp¬
tion not only for Europe but for her own soul. Facing dangers
greater than any in her history she has’fallen back on the rod of
her national character. Her frture and that of the world depend
not only on her victory but on her ability to restate in a new form
the audent laws of her own moral purpose and unity. By so
doing she may discovo: a common denominator for human
reconstruction more glorious than anything in her long past

THE END

INDEX

Abbots Bromley, 36.

Aberdeen, 4th Earl of, 127*

Abyssinia, 311-12.

Adams, W. E., 38,127, 209.

Afghanistan, 241.

Agriculture, i, ii. 40-50, 85-6, 94-6, 9^
106-7, 117, 150-2, 298-9 ; decline of,

«32-4.I

Albemarle, Lord, 28.

Albert Prince, 24, 71,1x2-13, X16,121,122,
X23, idjn., 184.

Alexandria, 241, 242.

Althorp, Lord (later 3rd Earl Spencer), 55.
Amalgamated Society of Engineers, 193,
200, 283.

Amiens, 295.

Amritsar, 302.

Amusements, Boxing, 25-6, iii, 152;
Cricket, 13, 139, 271, 283-4, 299; Field
Sports, II, 13, 175 24* 45^ 39' ^3?

Football, 139, IS7-S; About

Town and “Society,” 5, 9, 12, 138, 142,
159-60, 272, 273, 299; Popular, 12-13,
iio-iii, 114 €t seq., 143:4j 222-5, 283-4;
Racing, 23-4, iii, 142-45 200; Rusti<^ 25,
33 et seq,, 42, 44, 49;'Seaside, 139-4*;
Theatre, 12, 13, in, I4*'2» 223-5.
Alienby, Lord, 295.

Anglesey, 1st M^uis of, 45, IIO.

Ar5)i Pasha, 241.

Argentine, 234, 271, 332.

Aristocracy, m 1840, 5-7, 9, IS“*9»

Army, 123,128-9, 242, 272, 284-98.

Arnold, Dr. Thomas, 157, 212.

Ashton, 73.

Asqwith, Rt. Hon. Hcrbm. 229.

AustraUa, i, 107, 233, 235, 23611., 253-4,
265, 267,271, 297,332, 333.

Austria, 239, 275 * 277» 292 * 3*3» 3*0. 32*

Bagehot, Walter, 187.

Balaclava, Battle of^ 128.

Baldwin, Earl, 230, 303, 304-5, 307, 3x2,
313* 326, 327.

Balfour, Earl, 252, 269.

Bank of England, 26.

Barnes, Rt. Hon. G. N., 20xn., 226n., 230.
Bechuanaland, 260.

Bedford, 6th Duke of, 40.

Bdt, Sir Alfred, 259.

Belfast, 162. -

Belgium, 275, 280, 313, 32*-
Bemerton,37.

Bentham, Jeremy, 54? 9®» *27» *9®*
Bentinck, Lord George, 17*

Berlin, 277.

Besstesworth, Fred, 27. h,

Birkenhead, ist Earl of, 302.
Birmingham, 26, 70,80,212.

Bismarck, 239, 26a

Blackburn, 72, 74.

Blackpool. 111.

Blatchford, 22S.

Blunt, Wilfred Seawen, 45.

Boers, The, 244-6, 260, 263-5, 334.

Bolton, 71, 75.

Bombay, 256.

Booth, Charles, 165.

Booth, J. B.| 223.

Booth, “Gener^* W,, 261.

Borneo, 132.

Borrow, George, 26.

Bewood, 18,

Briand, Aristide, 309.

Blight, John, 85,127, iSTn., 189.
Brighton, 80,14a
Bristol, 35, 80, 83.

Brooke, Sir James vRajah of Sarawak), 130-
Brooke, Rupert, 2S5-6.

Brougham, Lord 17.

Brown, Ford Madox, 2Qon.

Browning, Mrs. E, B., 77.

Buckingham, 42.

Buckingham, ist Duke of, 19, 42.
Bulgarian “Atrocities,” 24c.

•Bume Jones, Sir Edward, aoon.

Bumiev, 71.

Bums, Rt. Hon. John, 203-4.

Burt, Thomas, 198.

Bury, 75-
Burslem, 74, 75.

Byrne, Simon, 25.

Cairo, 242.

California, 107.

Caine, 19.

Cambridge, 88, aS3- , ^ >~

Canada, i, *35, *37, >44> *97» 33®>

Candia, 126.

Cape Colonv, 244-6, 25941, mJrSr
Caporetto, Battle of, 29^* 3*°-
Cardwell, Lord, 245x1*

Carlisle, 82.

Carlyle, Thomas, 15,69, 77,102,192.
Carnarvon, Earl of, 245.

Carpenter, Edward, 228.

Carr, Professor E. H-, 202n.

Cavendish, Lord Frederick, 250.
Chadwick, Sir Edwin, 76.

Chamberlain, Sir Austen- 309.
Chamberlain, Joseph, 212, 251, 265^
Chamberlain, Neville, 313, 328*

Chartist Movement, 69-7^ 73* 74*

no, 188^ 209.

Chesterton, G. K., 319.

Chevalier, Albert, 224.

Chevrilion, Andrew, 256m

Children, Employment ot, 5 i- 3 > SS»

, 107,208-9,230.

1 China, 2,160, 275, 3xa

335

INDEX

CJhurch of England, 31, 33-4, 98, 170, 173 ]
tt seg., 2o8.

Clmrcmll, Rt. Honu Winston, 279.

Christ’s Hospital, 38.

Clapham, Professor J. H., 8on.

Classics, Influence of the, 38-40, 49, 1570.
Clubs, London, 10, 272.

Coaches, Stage, 46, 80, 81, 82.

Coalmines, Conations in, 51-3.

Coal Strike of 1926, 305.

Cobbett, William, 47, 55, 57.

Cobden, Hidiard, 85, 88, 93, 95, 106,

194, 201, 239, 261-2, 321.

Coleridge, S. T., 51, 64, 96, 165-6.
Collectivism, 193 et seg,; see Socialism.
Communism, 08,109,195, 202, 326>7.
Colne, 71.

Conrad Joseph, 161.

Colley, Sir George, 246.

Constantmople, 240.

Cork, 72,103, 302.

Com Laws, 73, 76; repeal of, 85 et seq.,
106-7, 170, 232-4.

Cotton Industry, 47,55, 58 et seg.y 84 et seq.
Country gentry, 21-2, 24 et seq., 39-41, 45,
49.50, 150-1,233^

Country life, 27-8, 30-50,148-9, 150-2, 207,
232-S, 298-9.

Courtney, “Bob,” 223.

Craftsmanship, 31, 35, 46-8, 58, 60-1, 64,
109, 117-18, 144, 162, 193, 201-2, 217;
nm for, 299, 3^30.

Crawford and Balcaires, Earl of, 74.
Creevey, Thomas, 8,16, 24n,

Crimea War, 125^.

Croker, J. W., 106.

Cromer, xst Earl of, 242.

Cruickshank, George, 5. [160.

Crystal Palace (Or^t Exhibition), 112-18,
Cubitts (architects), 4.

C^rus, 246m

Czechoslovakia, 31Q, 315, 319, 321, 330.

I^aglej, Jas., 152. j

Darwin, Charles, 180.

Death Duties, 229.

Demobilisation, 300-1, 314, 316.

Denmark, 239, 278.

Dennys, R. M., 287-8.

Derby, 7th Earl of, 23, 89, 174,189, 192.
Derby, th^ 142-4.

Dexter, Min., no.

Dicey, Sir A. V., 168, 2o6n.

Dickens, Charles, 5, 77.

Dickinson, Lowes, 20on.

DUke, Sir Charles, 238.

Disra^, B., Earl of Beaconsfidd, 18, 63-6,
70,77,100,149; defends the Com Laws,
92^ 3®5J opposes the utilitarian spirit
of the age, 96-100; dud with Glad¬
stone, 171, 174.5; political idealism,
175-86; carries second Reform Bill, 189- .

92; obtains real power, 193; introduces
sodal legislation, 197-9; attitude to the
Emnire, 236, 238-41, 245; prophecies,
92-6, 99-100, 176-9, 182, 186, 191-2, 238.

Dissenters, 34.

P’Orsay, Count, 28.

Dresden, 108.

Drunkenness, 9,65,137-8,143.4, 222-3.

Dublin, loi, 247, 250.

du Mauiier, George, 216.

Dunkirk, retreat to, 182, 313, 328, 334.

Dupin, Baron, 47.

Durban, 257.

Durham, ist Earl of, i6w

Dyer, General, 302.

Dyott, W., 15.

East^te, George, 2130.

Edinburgh, 241.

Education, Christim ideal of, 30-8, 135-6;
dassical, 38-40; in craftsmanship, 43-4,
46.7; neglect 594S0,132-3,157-8,281;
working-dass, 200, 208^; m sodal
service, 205, 207; traditionalism in,
283.

Ed-ward Vn., 115, 185, 211, 278.

Egypt, 28, 126, 131, 240, 241-2, 302.

Empire, in 1840, 1-2; growth of, 129-31,
235 -“y-; neglect of, 235 et sea.; envy

of, 275-0; war effort of, 297; idealism
of, 29-30; failure to devdop economi¬
cally, 261-2, 269-71, 307, 332; promise
of, 234-5, 237, 238, 241, 253-5, 2STetseq.,

Empoyers’ Liability Act, 229.

Endosures, 42, 43, 197.

Engels, F., 48, 59, 6in, 6311., 67-8, 75, 78n.,
loi, 2o8n.

Epping Forest, 13,14.

Epsom, 142.

Esher, and Lord, 20911.

Eto^College, 38-9,157, 257.

Exeter, 35.

Exeter Hall, 17,134,137, 243, 244.

Fabian Sodety, 205-6, 219, 220, 228.

Factory Acts, 55,58, 76,107, iii, 197, 229.

Fairbaim, Andrew, 160..

Family life, Victorian, 131 et seq.

Farm labourer, 42 et seq,, 151-a, 233-4

Famborough, 152.

Fashoda, 276.

Fenians, the, 247.

Fitzgerald, Mward, 39, 48-9, i34n.

Fleetwood, 82.

Food, English love for, 7-8, 43, iio-ii,

13^. 152-

Fore^ Policy, British, 108-9, ^

236-7 et seq,, 274-80,308-14 318-23,327-8.

Foster, Rt. Hon, W. E, 208.

“Fougasse,” 2970.

INDEX

337

France, 2,16,28-9, 56, io8,119,122-4,125,
i 27 - 9 » 1505 241* 242. 275, 277,

27^ 29s, 297, 309, 310, 312. 313, 319,
320,323.

Free Trade, 85 et seq., 106 et seq., 118, 151,
232-4, 261-2, 267, 268-73, 27s, 303-s,
316 et seq.

FreemaDtle, A. F., 570.

Frere, Sir Bartle, 245.

Froude, J. A., iSTn., 236,237, 245n., 253-5.
Gallipoli, 284.

Galsworthy, John, 4,6,158,161,163.

Game Laws, 43.

Gateshead, 81.

Gawcott, 152.

George IV., 15.

George V., 278, 302.

George, Henry, 228.

Germany, ^ 108; Union of, 239; Policy
of Imperisd, 255, 260, 274 et seq.; Fost-
3 ^ 5 » 31^ Hitler’s, 182,

.308-14,323,327-8,330,334.

German South West Amca, 26a
Gladstone, Rt Hon. W. E., 30, 890., 188;
leaderdiip of Liberal Party, 1707^, 193,
208, 211, 212, 240-1; bdief in Liberty,
187, 241, 250; attitude to Empire, 236,
240e^ss^., 245; to Ireland, 246-52.
Glasgow, 58,82,162.

Gold discoTeries, 107.

Gordon, General, 243.

Graham, Sir John, 77n.

Great Es^bidon. Crystal Palace.
Green, T. H., 207.

Greenwich, 12,73,113,138,154.

Grenadier Guard^ 295.

Grenfell, Hon. Julian, 286^.

GrcTillc, Charles, 14, 18, 24, 40, 760., 81,
104, 108, X22n., 1230.

Grey, 2nd Earl, 8,20,

Grey, Rt, Hon, Sir George, 122.

Haig, Field^Marshal Earl, 292.

Halffax, 74.

Hanley, 75.

Hammond,!. L. andB., 58n., 84-
Hanslope, 26,

Harcourt, Rt. Hon. Sir William, 229.
Harman, H., 4311., 440., I52n.

Harrow School, 88, 283.

Hartington, Lord, 251.

Hawthorne, Nathamel, iii.

Helps, Sir Arthur, 236,

Heligoland, 278.

Hdston, 36,

Hertford, Marquis of, 18.

Hicks, Ann, II, 113.

Hill, Sir Rowland, 83. 133 ®-

Hitler, Adolf, 179a-. 1S2, 308, 310-12,323,
Hobbs, J. B.,284.

Holland, 244, 275, 321.

Holland, 3rd Lord, 1230.

Hong Kong, 160.

Homer, L^naxd, 39.

Housing, 6, S, 64-9, icr-2, 144*7.

197-8, ac;, 210-12,227,234,261, pi, 316,
22s et seq.

Huddersfield, 36.

Hudson, George, 82.

Hughes, T., 33n., aocn.

Huski^on, The Rt. Hon. W,. 236,

Income Tax, 27, 71, 171, 229. 305, 326.
India, 2, 125. 129, 24c, 3C2,
lUustraied London .Veu j, 29, 7in.. 79.
Ireland, population in 1S42. i; its suffer¬
ings, 18, 58, 72, 100-2, ro6; Famine,
$9^^, 102-5; Church Disestablishment
in, etseq., 179; fight for Home Rule,
246-52, 263x1,; post-war unrest, 302;
Treaty of 1922, 302,

Ismail, Khedive, 240, 242.

Italy, 108, 239, 275, 292,311,312,315.

Jamaica, 266, 271.

Japan, 2, 275, 310-11, 32211.

Johannesburg, 259.

Jones, Jack, 2icn.

Jones, Thomas, 207n.

Jubilee, Diamond, 267, 307.

I Jutland Battle of, 296.

Kellog Pact, 310.

Keynes, Maynard, 319.

Khartoum, 343.

Kilmainham gaol, 249,25a
Kimberley, 258.

Kimberley, Earl of, 243.

Kingsley, Charles, 77.

Kiphng, Rudyard, 236, 267, 272, 273, 261,
298.

Kitchener, Lord, 242,2650., 284.

Kroger, President, 263-4.

LtdsseZ'‘faiTe, new England of, 4f5, 6-7;
advance of, 27, 32, 53 e^ seq., 83 e^ jcf.;
106 et seq^ 130-1, 137, 147-0? >53

seq., 169 et seq.; its fallacy, 62-4, 92 et
seq., 165 et seq., 194,210,213 et seq., 235-8,
TO^etseq., 274 et seq., 303 et seq., 316 ei seq.,
reaction against, 194 et seq., 205 et seq.,
211 et eeq.

Law, Rt. Hon. A. Bonar, 303.

Lawrence, Col. T. E,, 295,

Lansdowne, 3rd Marquess of, 19.

Deeds, 60, 75.

X^cester, 1st Earl of, 41.

Lesseps, de, 240.

Libem, English passion for, 4, 21, 25-7,
29-3®^ 55 . 57 ? 87, >09. «®-*» * 37 - 8 ’

143-4. 147-^ > 49 . > 7 >. > 7 ^. 221-S. 281-2,
3 ® 2 . 3 > 3 . 32^7. 328. 333 - 4 *

Xjncohi, Abraham, x88.

Limited Liability, Principle of, 215 et seq.

Liverpool, 58, 66 , m, 139*

Livingstone, 259.

IN D£X

338

Lloyd George, Rt. Hon. D., 229, 230, 303,
309,326.

Lloyd, Marie, 224.

Local Government Act of t 888, 210.
Locarno, 309, 312. ^ uu 1.

London, m 1840, i, ^ et xq.; Sapbatb,
127-8; in the ’50’s, et seq*\ in the
’&’s, 153 et seq.

— Addphia, 8.

— Albany, 7, ii.

Apsley House, 4.

— The Bank, 6.

— Battersea, 3, iii. *

— Bayswater, 3, ii., 163.

— Belgrave Square, 4,145.

— Blackwell, 138.

— Blackfriars, 14.

— Bloomsbury, no.

— Bridge Street, 4.

— Brompton, 6, 9.

— Buckingham Palace, 3, ii, 7 *» * 45 *

— Camberwell, 5.

— Carlton House Terrace, 4.

— Chalk Farm, iii.

— Ch^ea, 3, 9, II, 14, in.

— Covent Garden, ii, 12.

— Cremome, in.

— Drury Lane, 12.

— Duke of York’s Column, 3.

— Euston Square, 75.

— Fleet Street, no.

— Grosvenor Square, 5, IX*

— Hackney, in, 222.

— Hammersmi^, 12.

— Hampstead Heath, 222«

— Hampton Court, 3.

— Hanover Room; 12,

— Holland House, 18.

— Hoxton, 5, in.

— Hyde Park, 4, 112-118,160.

— Hyde Park Comer, 10,14, n 4 »’ nS*
— Islington, 5, in.

— Kennington Common, io8.

— Kensington, 4,1.0,14,163.

— Knightsbridge, n.

— Lancaster Gate, i6o.

— Leicester Square, 13,147.

— lisson Grove, 6.

— London Bridge, 7.

— “Lords,” 272.

— Maiden Lane, 141.*

— MaU, The, 3.

— Maiylebone High Street, 27.

— Nelson’s Column, 4.

— New Cross, 7.

— Newgate, 14I
— NorAuniberland House, 4.

— Netting Dale, ii,

— Old Kent Road, 222, 284.

— Orchard Street, 145.

— Oxford Street, 8, 9.

— Paddington, ^ 145.

London, Pall Mall, 9.

— Parliament, Houses of, 4, 19 et seq»

— Piccadilly, n, 149, 569.

— Putney, 12.

— Regent’s Park, 2.

— Regent Street, 8, 75.

— Richmond, 13, 310,

- St, Giles’, 14, loi.

- St. James’, 3, 9.

- St, James’s Park, il, 14.

- Shadwell, 3.

- Smithfield, II. •

— Spitalfields, 47, 51,

— South London Music Hall, 224 *

— Spring Gardens, 3.

— Surrey Theatre, 1420.

— Temple Bar, 9.

— The Temple, 8.

— Tothill Fieldsi 9.

— Trafalgar Square, 4,13, 7 S» 203 * 4 *

— Vauxhall, 13.

— Vigo Lane, 9.

— Wappmg,3.

— Waterloo Bndge, 8.

— Westminster Abbey, 4,114.

— Westminster Hall, 49.

— “Yorkshire Stingo,” 6.

London County Council, 210.

Lowe, Robert, 189, 208.

Louis Philippe, 108,122.

Lushing ton, Vernon, aoon.

Macaulay, Lord, 7,18,19, 39,63,128,136,
170.

Macdesfield, 75.

Macdonald, Alexander, 198.

MacDonald, Rt. Hon. Ramsay, 230, 306,
308, 326.

McKay, Sandy, 25,

Mahdi, The, 242, 265.

Majuba, 246.

Malthus, T. R., 53.

Manchester, 66-8, 73-4, 75, 80, 84-5,87, 92,
98,101,137,139.

“Manchester School,” 85 etseq,

Manchuria, 275,310-11.

Marconi, 253.

Margate, Preface, 140.

Marx, Karl, 109,165,105, 202.

Masefield, John, 161,10211.

Matebeles, The, 260.

Maurice, Rev. F. D., 200n.

Mehemet Ali, 28.

Melbourne, 2nd Viscount, m, 24, 51.
Merchant Marine, 46, 83, i<^.
Methodism, 34.

Merthyr Tydvil, 84.

Mettemich, Prince, 108.

Miller, Mrs. S. G., 262n., 268n.

Miners’ Association, Northumberland,
198.

IK DEX

339

Monarchy, critidsm of, 14-15, 71, no,
170, 172; ideal of, 25, 74; Disraeli’s
defence of, 179,183-5.

Montreal, 2350.

Morlcy, The Rt Hon. John, iSon.

Morp^h, 198.

Morris, William, 203, 207.

“Most tfavotired” Nation Clause, 26S,
320-2.

Mottram, R. H., 13.

Mumming Players, 33.

Museum, British, 130,155.

Music The, 223-5.

Mussolini, Benito, 311, 323.

Mutiny, The Indian, 129.

Mytton, Jack, 17.

Napier, Admiral Sir Charles, 125.

Napoleon IIL, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 159,
163.

Nash, John, 3.

Navigation Laws, 107,162,169.

“Navvies," railway, 82.

Navy, the Royal, 2, 46,123, 125, 128,163,
278^ 296, 310-11.

Newcastle-on-Tyne, ii, 81, 2090.

New Forest, 36.

Newfoxmdland, 235.

Newmarket, 23.

New South Wales, 235.

New Zealand, 131, 235, 254, 255, 297, 333.
Nicholas I. of Russia, 125-7.

Nichols, Robert, 274.

Nigeria, 265.

Nightingale, Florence, 77,129.

Norway, 313, 321,

Norwich, 35.

- Oastler, Richard, 6i«

O’Brien, Smith, 100,109.

O’Connor, Feargus, 701L, 108.

Oldham, 73.

Oliver, F. S., 292, 3190.

Orange Free State, 245,

Ottawa Conference, 307. ]

Owen, Wilfred, 289.

Oxford, 25,17I1 207, 228, 25S,'2 s 6, 283.
Oxford Movement, 134,181.

Page, Walter, 289.

Parley, 71.

Palestme, 295.

Palmerston, Lord, 25,26,28-30, 9 ^* 121-3*
127, 130-1, 14^50, 170,188, 236, 2780.
Palmerston, Lady, 24.

Paris, Treaty of, 129.

Parliament m ®^" 4 > Sections t o, 19 -
21; Reform of, 187 ; itt Kwms

and id^dism, 179 et seq.

Parnell, Charles Stewart, 248-50,252.
Passchendaele, 290-3.

Patmore, Coventry, 1920.

Paxton, Joseph, 112.

Peel, Sir Robert f is: Eart^, 23, 58.

Peel, Rt. Hon. Sir Robert, 9, 25-4, 71, 73,
86, 83-92, 106, 1070., 313.

Pendlehill, 72^.

Penn', A. J., 21S.

Playfair, Dr. L} on, 66n-
Pclard, 310, 3:9, 33c.

Polebrock, 37,

Poor Law, the Xsw, 62.

Population, in 104c, 1; in i 56 i. 131, 151;

in 1918, 297; of Empire in 1942, 332.
Portsmouth, 75.

Portugal, 275,

Post, Penny, S3.

Press, 227, 273.

Preston, 73, 82.

Priestley, J. B., Preface.

Protection, abandonment of, 85, et seq.;

attempts to revive, 26S etjeq.. 324-5, 327.
Punch, I in., S2n., 100, xci, 104. ic6,10711.,
108, mm, 112, 1140., 115, 117, 124,

1250., 134, 13S1L, 145, 146, 148, X5C,

1630., 236n., 2730., 2780., 2970., 303.

Quebec, 23Sn.

Raglan, Lord, i2Sn.

Railways, coming of the, 79 ef iff.
Redesdale, ist Lord, 30, 38^, xi8.

Reform Bill, of 1S32, 19, 20, 86, 90, 169,
189-90; of 1S67, 1S7-192, 195-6; of
1884, 2X2, 234.

Revolt of 1832, Northern, 70-6.

Revolution of, 1848, 108-9.

Rhodes, Cecil, 256^5.

Rhodcsias, The, 260-1, 264, 332, 333.
Richmond, the 5th Duke of, 18.

Rochdale, 75.

Rock Ferry, iii.

Roebuck, John, 7711.

Roget, P. M., 141.

I Romania, t26, 292, 315, 319, 332-
Roscommon, 103.

Rossetti, D. G., 2001L
Rugby, 32,139,158.

Ruskin/John, 79, 200n., 207, 255,257^
Russdi, Lord Jdan (ist Earl), aa-3,91,127,

134*

Russia, 2,119-20,125-9, 240, 253, 25s, 275,
278, 280, 281, 292, 295, 297, 310, 3x5,

3x8* sax-

Sabbatarianism, 135-8.

Salisbury, 3rd Marquess a, 1921L, abS,
278,

Salisbuiy Plaint 285.

Salford, 74,137* ^ 30 *

Sanitation, 65-8, ^ 84, X 44 “ 7 » * 97 »
Sarawak, X3a
Sassoon, Siegfried, 288.

Saunders, R. J., 39 *

INDEX

340

Sayers, Tom, 152.

Scapa Flow, 290.

Scotland, i, 47,129, 297.

Seeley, Sir John, 253.

Servia, 292, 315,319.

Sexton, Sir James, 204n., 240n.
Shaftesbury, 7th Earl of, 51,52, 55,60, 76,
193 -

Shan^ai, 160.

Shap Fell, 82.

Shaw, G. B., 205, 228, 256n., 265.
Shrewsbury, 35.

Slbthorpe, Colonel, 81.

Silverstone, 27.

Skibbereen, 103.

Slave Trade, Abolition of, 29-30, 53-4.
Smith, Adam, 53, 87, 167, 217-18.

Smith, Southwood, 39.

Social Service, 77-8, 202-3, 207, 212.
Socialism, 96,195 et se^., 202 et seq,, 2i3n.,
218-21, 225-31, 273, 306,326.

Somme, Battle of the, 284, 288, 290, 2^.
South Africa, Union of, 245-6, 259, 203-5,
297 -

South African War, ist, 246; 2nd, 264,
265-6,269, 272.

Star, The, 226.

Staleybridge, 73.

Stockport, 73,75.

Stockton, 80.

Stoke-on-Trent, 74.

Stowe, 42.

Stratford de Redcliffe, Lord, 127.
Stresemaim, 309.

String Choirs, Village, 33.

Strike, General, 305.

Submerged Tenth, The, 8, 56-8 et seq.,
101-2, 165-7, '202 et seq., 255, 310.
Sudan, 242-3, 265, 276, 3iin.

Suez Canal, 240.

Taine, H., I3in., 135, 137, 143-4, 153-7,
15^, 160,166.

Taglioni, Marie, 12.

TeW-Kebir, 142.

Tennyson, Lord, 33n., 39-40,41, 77,106.
Thackeray, W. M., 18.

Thames, in 1840, 7; re^ttas on, 11-12;

insanitary state of, 146.

Thiers, L. A., 28.

Tillett, Ben, 204.

The, 111,113,283,290.

Todmorden, 75.

Toole, Toe, oarj.

Toyn^e, Arnold, 203.

Trade, expansion, 2-3, 4,6, 46, 57, 63, 78,
83-6, 1067, 109, 116-17, i29-3i» 153-7*
159-61, 162,163, 201, 232, 270; fluctua¬
tions, 62-3,70 et seq., 89, 202 et seq., 215,
216-18, 227-8, 231, 232, 301 et seq., 316
et seq., 323 n.; contraction in, 93, 261
et seq., 302 et seq.\ vested interest in

foreign, 270 et seq., 307-8, 322-3; world,
93, 274 etseq., 304, 308, %i 6 et seq.

Trade Unions, 193-4, 198, 199-201, 203-5,
226, 228 et seq., 301, 305.

Traditionalism, English, Preface, 6-7,
30-9. 43. 45 “?•> 6a, 74, 79, 93

148^, 157,168,170, T.-j6ttseq., 385,23a-3,
334-S. 256, 373, a83-4,398^ 3WI5 333.4.

Transvaal, 246, 263-4.

Trevelyan, Sir G. O., i36n.

Turkey, 2, 120,126-8, 240-2, 295, 315.

Uganda, 262.

Ulster, 130, 247, 251, 252, 297.

UnemploymenV70 etseq., 202 et seq., 227-8,
231, 232, 301, 302-6, 325-6.

U.S.A., 2-3, 56, 107, 113, 124, 187-8, 233,
23s. 238,247. 253 * 258,275, 297,310,321,
323 -

Utilitarianism, 53 et seq., 62-4, 85 et seq.,
93-9, 167 et seq., 176 et seq., 190 et seq.,
202, 206-7, 217-18, 234, 235 et seq., 274
et seq., 299, 310 et seq.

Venezuela, 276.

Verdun, 316.

Versailles, Treaty of, 308, 311, 312, 318
et sef.

Victoria, Queen, 14, 15, 26, 42, 71, 74,109,
113, 115-16, 127, 1420., 184, 185, 267.

Wales, I, 84,107, 297.

War, ist Great, 274-97.

Webb, Sidney (Lord Passfield), 2i3n., 327.

Wellington, 1st Duke of, 1^17, 90, 103,
108, Ii3n-, 116, 123.

Wells, H. G., 216, 228, 2561L

West Bromwich, 72.

West Indies, 266, 271.

Westminster, Marquis of, 4.

Wey, Francis, i38n., 139-40,14211,, 1481L

Whittlebury Forest, 27.

Wigan, 74.

William II. of Germany, 278.

WilUam IV., 28.

Winchester, 157.

Windsor Castle, 26, 27.

Witney, 67.

Woburn, 40-1.

Wolseley, Sir Garnet, 2A2.

Wordsworth, William, 81.

Working Men’s College zoom

Workmen’s Compensation Act, 229.

World Economic Conference, 308.

Wyndham, Rt. Hon. George, 252.

Young, Arthur, 43.

Young, G. M., I4n.

York, 35.

Ypres, 282, 290 et seq.

Zambesi River, 263.

Zulus, 244, 246. .

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