The condition of England

BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Tennyson as a Religious Teacher In Peril of Change
THE CONDITION OF ENGLAND
BY C. F. G. MASTERMAN
“WHETHER IN GENERAL WE ARE GETTING ON, AND IF SO WHERE WE ARE GOING TO.” Ruskin
METHUEN & CO. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON
First Published in 1909
TO MY WIFE
“I ’VE got to a time of life,” says the hero of a modern novel, “when the only theories that interest me are generalisations about realities.” There are many contemporary observers who do not require advancing years and a wider experience of life to concentrate them upon so serious a study. It is not that they deliberately turn towards consideration of the meaning and progress of the actual life around them. It is that they cannot—with the best desire in the world—escape from such an encompassing problem. To those the only question before them is the present: the past but furnishing material through which that present can rightly be interpreted, the future appearing as a present which is hurrying towards them—impatient to be born. They ask for fact; not make-believe. With Thoreau, “Be it life or death,” they will cry, “We crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.”
The following pages offer an attempt to estimate some of these “realities” in the life of contemporary England. The effort might appear presumptuous, demanding not one volume but ten, the observation, not of a decade, but of a lifetime. I would plead, however, that any contribution may help in some degree the work of others in a more far-reaching and detailed survey. The right judgment of such an attempt should be directed not at its completeness, but its sincerity. In my former work as a critic and reviewer it was this test alone that I sought to apply to similar estimates of to-day and to-morrow. It is to this test alone that I now venture to appeal.
“Things are what they are. Their consequences will be what they will be. Why then should we seek to be deceived?” The custom of mankind to live in a world of illusion endows Butler’s magnificent platitude with something of the novelty of a paradox. For many generations—perhaps since man first was—we have succeeded in believing what we wished to believe. The process has gone so far as to have excited a kind of reverse wave. We are supposed to wish to believe what we believe. We identify diagnosis with desire, and think that the prophet of evil is secretly rejoicing over the impending calamity. We are convinced that no man would assert that certain events are going to happen if he did not wish them to happen. If an observer anticipates a victory for Tariff Reform he is supposed to be weakening on Free Trade. If he proclaims a decline in religion he is deemed to be little better than an atheist.