Again, no living observer has ever seen England in adversity: beaten to the knees, to the ground. No one can foresee what spirit—either of resistance or acquiescence—latent in this kindly, lazy, good-natured people might be evoked by so elemental a challenge. England is often sharply contrasted with Ireland, and the Irish with the English people. What spirit would be manifest amongst the English people to-day if they had been subjugated by an alien conqueror, with their lands dispossessed, their religion penalised, their national ideals everywhere faced with opposition and disdain? Such an experience might have been stamped upon history if the Armada had reached these shores; it might have “staggered humanity” with unforgettable memories. Would an invaded England offer the resistance of an invaded Germany, or of an invaded Spain, in the Napoleonic Wars? How would we actually treat our “Communists” if they seized London after a time of national disaster and established a “Social” Republic? No one can tell what a man will do in such a shock as the Messina earthquake, or when the shells of the invader, without warning, crash through the ruins of his home. And no one can foresee what a nation will do in adversity which has never seen itself compelled to face the end of its customary world.
Again, we know little or nothing to-day of the great multitude of the people who inhabit these islands. They produce no authors. They edit no newspapers. They find no vocal expression for their sentiments and desires. Their leaders are either chosen from another class, or, from the very fact of leadership, sharply distinguished from the members of their own. They are never articulate except in times of exceptional excitement; in depression, when trade is bad; in exuberance, when, as on the “Mafeking” nights, they suddenly appear from nowhere to take possession of the city. England, for the nation or foreign observer, is the tone and temper which the ideals and determinations of the middle class have stamped upon the vision of an astonished Europe. It is the middle class which stands for England in most modern analyses. It is the middle class which is losing its religion; which is slowly or suddenly discovering that it no longer believes in the existence of the God of its fathers, or a life beyond the grave. It is the middle class whose inexhaustible patience fills the observer with admiration and amazement as he beholds it waiting in the fog at a London terminus for three hours beyond the advertised time, and then raising a cheer, half joyful, half ironical, when the melancholy train at last emerges from the darkness. And it is the middle class which has preserved under all its security and prosperity that elemental unrest which this same observer has identified as an inheritance from an ancestry of criminals and adventurers: which drives it out from many a quiet vicarage and rose garden into a journey far beyond the skyline, to become the “frontiersmen of all the world.”[1]
But below this large kingdom, which for more than half a century has stood for “England,” stretches a huge and unexplored region which seems destined in the next half-century to progress towards articulate voice, and to demand an increasing power. It is the class of which Matthew Arnold, with the agreeable insolence of his habitual attitude, declared himself to be the discoverer, and to which he gave the name of the “Populace.” “That vast portion of the working class,” he defined it, nearly forty years ago, “which, raw and half-developed, has long been half hidden amid its poverty and squalor, and is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman’s heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bending what it likes, breaking what it likes.” “To this vast residuum,” he adds, “we may with great propriety give the name of Populace.” To most observers from the classes above, this is the Deluge; and its attainment of power—if such attainment ever were realised—the coming of the twilight of the gods. They see our civilisation as a little patch of redeemed land in the wilderness; preserved as by a miracle from one decade to another. They behold the influx, as the rush of a bank-holiday crowd upon some tranquil garden: tearing up the flowers by the roots, reeling in drunken merriment on the grass plots, strewing the pleasant landscape with torn paper and broken bottles. This class—in the cities—cannot be accused of losing its religion. It is not losing its religion, because it had never gained a religion. In the industrial centres of England, since the city first was, the old inherited faiths have never been anything but the carefully preserved treasure of a tiny minority. It is a class full of sentiment which the foreigner is apt to condemn as sentimentality. Amusing examples are familiar of its uncalculating kindliness. An immense traffic is held up for considerable time because a sheep—on its way to immediate slaughter—is entangled between two tramcars. The whole populace cheerfully submit to this inconvenience, sooner than consummate the decease of the unfortunate animal. In a certain pottery manufactory, the apparatus has been arranged for the baking process, and the fires are about to be lighted, when the mewing of a cat is heard from inside the kiln. The men refuse to proceed with the work. A whole day is spent in an endeavour to entice the cat out again; and, on this proving fruitless, in the unloading of the kiln, in order to rescue the creature. When it is liberated, it is immediately hurled—with objurgations—into the river. The men were exasperated with the trouble which had been caused and the time wasted; but they could not allow the cat to be roasted alive.
Next to this “sentimentality,” so astonishing to Europe—because so irrational—comes the invincible patience of the English workman. He will endure almost anything—in silence—until it becomes unendurable. When he is vocal, it is pretty certain that things have become unendurable. I once had occasion to visit a family whose two sons were working on the railway when the dispute between directors and the union leaders threatened a universal disturbance. I inquired about the strike. There was an awkward pause in the conversation. “Jim won’t have to come out,” said the mother, “because he isn’t on the regular staff.” “Of course Jim will come out,” said the father firmly, “if the others come out.” “The fact is,” they explained, after further silence, “we don’t talk about the strike here; we try to forget that there ever may be one.” It was the experience of a thousand homes. There was no recognised or felt grievance. There was no clear understanding of the purpose and meaning of it all. But there were firmly planted in the mind two bedrock facts: the one, the tragedy that the strike would mean in this particular household; the other, the complete impossibility of any other choice but of the boys standing with their comrades in the day of decision. And this is England; an England which has learnt more than all other peoples the secret of acquiescence, of toleration, of settling down and making the best of things in a world on the whole desirable; but an England also of a determination unshaken by the vicissitudes of purpose and time, with a certain ruthlessness about the means when it has accepted the end, and with a patience which is perhaps more terrible in its silence than the violence of a conspicuous despair.
These and other qualities form an absorbing subject of study. A figure emerges from it all. It is the figure of an average from which all its great men are definitely variants. No body of men have ever been so “un-English” as the great Englishmen, Nelson, Shelley, Gladstone: supreme in war, in literature, in practical affairs; yet with no single evidence in the characteristics of their energy that they possess any of the qualities of the English blood. But in submitting to the leadership of such perplexing variations from the common stock, the Englishman is merely exhibiting his general capacity for accepting the universe, rather than for rebelling against it. His idea of its origin or of its goal has become vague and cloudy; definite statements of the average belief, set out in black and white by the average congregation, would astonish the average preacher. But he drives ahead along the day’s work: in pursuing his own business, conquering great empires: gaining them by his power of energy and honesty, jeopardising them by his stiffness and lack of sympathy and inability to learn. So he will continue to the end; occupying, not in Mr. Pinero’s bitter gibe the “suburb of the Universe”; but rather that locality whose jolly, stupid, brave denizens may be utilised for every kind of hazardous and unimaginable enterprise; fulfilling the work of another, content to know nothing of the reason of it all; journeying always, like Columbus, “to new Americas, or whither God wills.”
It may be helpful to break up this composite figure of an “Englishman” into the various economic divisions of the present time, to examine what changes are fermenting amongst the rich, the middle stratum of comfort, the multitudinous ranks of the toilers, the dim hordes of the disinherited. A summary of science, art, literature, and religion in their influence upon the common life will indicate the changes most manifest, less in material conveniences than in the spirit of man. At the end arises the question of the future of a society, evidently moving in a direction which no one can foresee, towards experience of far-reaching change.
CHAPTER II
THE CONQUERORS
I
“ENGLAND is a sieve” is the cry of the astonished audience in Mr. Belloc’s brochure on the fiscal question. “Poor old England is a sieve.” They were filled with horror at the Tariff Reformer’s revelation of the surplusage of imports over exports, and his vision of the golden sovereigns being drained from this country to pay for these undesirable incursionists. They already contemplated the time when the last piece of gold would have been transported to meet the demands of the insatiable “foreigner,” and the whole country would suddenly realise that its pockets were empty—that it had spent all that it had. Undoubtedly similar if less pleasant arguments of a vigorous fiscal campaign have succeeded in shaking belief in England’s prosperity. It is still possible in train or street, or places where men assemble, to find observers, with an air of sagacity, declaiming upon England’s headlong rush towards poverty and the abyss. I remember listening for many hours, on the journey over the St. Gothard to Milan, to a fluent English traveller explaining to some astonished Italians that England was steadily growing poorer year by year; less money accumulated, less money spent. Such are the follies of untrained minds, who are unable to read experience or to interpret figures. They cannot apprehend the astonishing facts of “super-wealth” as accumulated in this country; as accumulated in the past thirty years. That rate of accumulation has never been before paralleled: just as the expenditure which accompanies accumulation—for we are not a thrifty race—offers something new in a standard of whole classes. A serious study of the superfluous wastage of the nation might bring reassurance to all who are afraid of an enforced austerity of manners; even if it provides little gratification to those who would see expenditure devoted to desirable ends. Statistics present to the reader incredible arrays of increase: so much leaping forward of income-tax returns, unchecked by wars, borrowings, or trade depressions; nearly two hundred millions of the National Income divided amongst people whose individual incomes exceed five thousand a year. Where does it go to? How is it consumed? What asset of permanent value will be left behind as evidence of the super-wealth of the twentieth century? The answers to these questions are not entirely satisfactory. “Waste” is written large over a very substantial proportion of the national expenditure, and that far more in the private than in the public consumption. A Conservative leader once informed a meeting in Scotland that if all the rich men were abolished there would be no one left to give work to the poor people. That, however, was rather a popular method of combating Socialism, than a serious contribution to political economy. “To a retailer of news,” says Mr. George Russell, “who informed him that Lord Omnium, recently deceased, had left a large sum of money to charities, Mr. Gladstone replied with characteristic emphasis, ‘Thank him for nothing. He was obliged to leave it. He couldn’t carry it with him.’” And what the rich man is to do with his money except to find employment, and how he is to escape the burden of death duties or graduated income tax in a world where every civilised nation has an eye upon his “super-wealth,” are queries whose answer is conjectural.