GEORGE, JANE AND LENIN.
Now that Soviet rule in England is apparently so imminent it seems to me that we ought to consider a little more closely the application of its practical machinery. The morning papers reach this village at three o'clock in the afternoon, so that nobody is in to read them, and when one comes back in the evening one is generally too lazy, but a couple of rather startling sentences about the coming Communist régime have recently caught my eye.
"The people of England, like the people of Russia," runs the first, "will soon be working under the lash." And the second, so far as I remember, says, "Our rations will no doubt be reduced to half a herring and some boiled bird-seed, which is all the unhappy Russians are getting to eat."
Before these changes fall suddenly upon us I think we should ponder a little on the way in which they will affect our urban and agricultural life.
Take the House of Commons. A very large and symbolic knout might occupy the position of the present mace, and from time to time the Speaker could take it up and crack it. As this needs a certain amount of practice it will be necessary to select a fairly horsey man as Speaker, and the Whips, who will follow the same procedure, should also be skilled practitioners. I see no difficulty in applying the same method to commercial and factory life in general, still less to the packing of the Underground Railway and the loading of motor-omnibuses and trams.
It is rather when we come to scattered rural communities that the system seems likely to break down. Take the case of George Harrison in this village. When I first met George Harrison, and he said that he thought the weather was lifting, he was carrying a basket of red plums which he offered to sell me for an old song. On subsequent occasions I met him—
1. Driving cows. (At least I suppose he was driving them; he was sitting sideways on a large horse doing nothing in particular, and some of the cows were going into one field and some into another, and a dog was biting their tails indiscriminately.)
2. Clearing muck and weeds out of the stream.
3. Setting a springe for rabbits.
4. Delivering letters, because the postman doesn't like walking up the hill.
Now I maintain that there would be insuperable difficulties in making George carry out all these various activities under the lash. Anyone, I suppose, under a properly constituted Soviet régime might be detailed as George Harrison's lasher, Mr. Smillie, Mr. G.K. Chesterton, Lord Curzon, Mr. Clynes or the Duke of Northumberland. Can you imagine Mr. Chesterton walking about on guard duty in a rabbit warren while George Harrison set springes in accordance with the principles laid down by the Third Internationale for rabbit-snaring? or the Duke of Northumberland standing in gum-boots in the middle of a stream and flicking George Harrison about the trousers if he didn't rake out old tin cans at forty to the minute as laid down by the Moscow Code? Now I ask you.
And then there is this half a herring and boiled bird-seed arrangement. George Harrison has a sister of eighteen who kindly comes in to do cooking and housework for us every day. She thinks us frightfully queer, and if we bought some herrings and bird-seed and asked her to cook them for us I have no doubt she would oblige, but, though she doesn't much care what we eat, there are a lot of things she doesn't eat herself, and fish is one of them. Porridge, which, I suppose, is a kind of bird-seed, is another.
Not that Jane calls it eating, by the way. She calls it "touching," and there are any number of things that she doesn't fancy touching. She will touch enormous platefuls of bacon or sausages or almost any derivative of the domestic pig, and the same applies to puddings and cake. But beef and mutton she does not touch, nor margarine, and we have to be almost as careful that Jane Harrison has plenty of the right things to touch as about the whole of the rest of the family.
Now here again I think it would be quite possible to induce the people of England in our large industrial centres to ration themselves on boiled herring and bird-seed. We should not use those names, of course. The advertisements on the hoardings would say:—
The Bountiful Harvest of the Sea brought to the Breakfast Table
or
What Makes The Skylark so Happy?
Try Harraby's Hemp. A Song in Every Spoonful.
But propaganda of that sort would have no effect on Jane. She would simply say that she never cared to touch herrings and that she did not fancy hemp-seed.
When I consider the cases of George and Jane I am bound to believe either that the Russian moujiks (if this is still the right word) are more docile and tractable than ours, or else that the Soviet régime will need a great deal of adaptation before it can be extended to our English villages. Or, of course, it may be possible that some of the minuter details of M. Lenin's administration have not been fully revealed to me. I shall find out about this no doubt when I return to London. In the meantime I am banking on George and Jane, whatever the Council of Action may do.
Evoe.