This instance is well brought forward (though only in a line or two, by Mr. Froude) as one among many proofs that the working classes in Henry the Eighth’s time ‘enjoyed an abundance far beyond that which in general falls to the lot of that order in long-settled countries, incomparably beyond what the same class were enjoying at that very time in Germany or France. The laws secured them; and that the laws were put in force, we have the direct evidence of successive acts of the Legislature, justifying the general policy by its success: and we have also the indirect evidence of the contented loyalty of the great body of the people, at a time when, if they had been discontented, they held in their own hands the means of asserting what the law acknowledged to be their right. ‘The Government,’ as we have just shown at length, ‘had no power to compel injustice . . . If the peasantry had been suffering under any real grievances we should have heard of them when the religious rebellions furnished so fair an opportunity to press them forward. Complaint was loud enough, when complaint was just, under the Somerset Protectorate.’
Such broad facts as these—for facts they are—ought to make us pause ere we boast of the greater liberty enjoyed by Englishmen of the present day, as compared with the tyranny of Tudor times. Thank God, there is no lack of that blessing now: but was there any real lack of it then? Certainly the outward notes of a tyranny exist now in far greater completeness than then. A standing army, a Government police, ministries who bear no love to a militia, and would consider the compulsory arming and drilling of the people as a dangerous insanity, do not look at first sight as much like ‘free institutions’ as a Government which, though again and again in danger not merely of rebellion, but of internecine wars of succession, so trusted the people as to force weapons into their hands from boyhood. Let us not be mistaken: we are no hankerers after retrogression: the present system works very well; let it be; all that we say is that the imputation of despotic institutions lies, primâ facie, rather against the reign of Queen Victoria than against that of King Henry the Eighth. Of course it is not so in fact. Many modern methods, which are despotic in appearance, are not so in practice. Let us believe that the same was the case in the sixteenth century. Our governors now understand their own business best, and make a very fair compromise between discipline and freedom. Let us believe that the men of the sixteenth century did so likewise. All we ask is that our forefathers should be judged as we wish to be judged ourselves, ‘not according to outward appearance, but with righteous judgment.’
Mr. Froude finds the cause of this general contentment and loyalty of the masses in the extreme care which the Government took of their well-being. The introductory chapter, in which he proves to his own satisfaction the correctness of his opinion, is well worth the study of our political economists. The facts which he brings seem certainly overwhelming; of course, they can only be met by counter-facts; and our knowledge does not enable us either to corroborate or refute his statements. The chief argument used against them seems to us, at least, to show that for some cause or other the working classes were prosperous enough. It is said the Acts of Parliament regulating wages do not fix the minimum of wages, but the maximum. They are not intended to defend the employed against the employer, but the employer against the employed, in a defective state of the labour market, when the workmen, by the fewness of their numbers, were enabled to make extravagant demands. Let this be the case—we do not say that it is so—what is it but a token of prosperity among the working classes? A labour market so thin that workmen can demand their own price for their labour, till Parliament is compelled to bring them to reason, is surely a time of prosperity to the employed—a time of full work and high wages; of full stomachs, inclined from very prosperity to ‘wax fat and kick.’ If, however, any learned statistician should be able to advance, on the opposite side of the question, enough to weaken some of Mr. Froude’s conclusions, he must still, if he be a just man, do honour to the noble morality of this most striking chapter, couched as it is in as perfect English as we have ever had the delight of reading. We shall leave, then, the battle of facts to be fought out by statisticians, always asking Mr. Froude’s readers to bear in mind that, though other facts may be true, yet his facts are no less true likewise; and we shall quote at length, both as a specimen of his manner and of his matter, the last three pages of this introductory chapter, in which, after speaking of the severity of the laws against vagrancy, and showing how they were excused by the organisation which found employment for every able-bodied man, he goes on to say:—
‘It was therefore the expressed conviction of the English nation that it was better for a man not to live at all than to live a profitless and worthless life. The vagabond was a sore spot upon the commonwealth, to be healed by wholesale discipline if the gangrene was not incurable; to be cut away with the knife if the milder treatment of the cart-whip failed to be of profit.
‘A measure so extreme in its severity was partly dictated by policy. The state of the country was critical; and the danger from questionable persons traversing it, unexamined and uncontrolled, was greater than at ordinary times. But in point of justice as well as of prudence it harmonised with the iron temper of the age, and it answered well for the government of a fierce and powerful people, in whose hearts lay an intense hatred of rascality, and among whom no one could have lapsed into evil courses except by deliberate preference for them. The moral sinew of the English must have been strong indeed when it admitted of such stringent bracing; but, on the whole, they were ruled as they preferred to be ruled; and if wisdom can be tested by success, the manner in which they passed the great crisis of the Reformation is the best justification of their princes. The era was great throughout Europe. The Italians of the age of Michael Angelo, the Spaniards who were the contemporaries of Cortez, the Germans who shook off the Pope at the call of Luther, and the splendid chivalry of Francis I. of France, were no common men. But they were all brought face to face with the same trials, and none met them as the English met them. The English alone never lost their self-possession, and if they owed something to fortune in their escape from anarchy, they owed more to the strong hand and steady purpose of their rulers.
‘To conclude this chapter, then.
‘In the brief review of the system under which England was governed, we have seen a state of things in which the principles of political economy were, consciously or unconsciously, contradicted; where an attempt, more or less successful, was made to bring the production and distribution of wealth under the moral rule of right or wrong; and where those laws of supply and demand, which we are now taught to regard as immutable ordinances of nature, were absorbed or superseded by a higher code. It is necessary for me to repeat that I am not holding up the sixteenth century as a model which the nineteenth might safely follow. The population has become too large, and employment too complicated and fluctuating, to admit of such control; while, in default of control, the relapse upon self-interest as the one motive principle is certain to ensue, and, when it ensues, is absolute in its operations. But as, even with us, these so-called ordinances of nature in time of war consent to be suspended, and duty to his country becomes with every good citizen a higher motive of action than the advantages which he may gain in an enemy’s market; so it is not uncheering to look back upon a time when the nation was in a normal condition of militancy against social injustice—when the Government was enabled, by happy circumstances, to pursue into detail a single and serious aim at the well-being—well-being in its widest sense—of all members of the commonwealth. There were difficulties and drawbacks at that time as well as this. Of Liberty, in the modern sense of the word—of the supposed right of every man “to do what he will with his own,” or with himself—there was no idea. To the question, if ever it was asked, “May I not do what I will with my own?” there was the brief answer, “No man may do what is wrong, either with what is his own or with what is another’s.” Producers, too, who were not permitted to drive down their workmen’s wages by competition, could not sell their goods as cheaply as they might have done, and the consumer paid for the law in an advance of price; but the burden, though it fell heavily on the rich, lightly touched the poor and the rich consented cheerfully to a tax which ensured the loyalty of the people. The working man of modern times has bought the extension of his liberty at the price of his material comfort. The higher classes have gained in wealth what they have lost in power. It is not for the historian to balance advantages. His duty is with the facts.’
Our forefathers, then, were not free, if we attach to that word the meaning which our Transatlantic brothers seem inclined to give to it. They had not learnt to deify self-will, and to claim for each member of the human race a right to the indulgence of every eccentricity. They called themselves free, and boasted of their freedom; but their conception of liberty was that of all old nations, a freedom which not only allowed of discipline, but which grew out of it. No people had less wish to exalt the kingly power into that specious tyranny, a paternal Government; the king was with them, and always had been, both formally and really, subject to their choice; bound by many oaths to many duties; the minister, not the master of the people. But their whole conception of political life was, nevertheless, shaped by their conception of family life. Strict obedience, stern discipline, compulsory education in practical duties, was the law of the latter; without such training they thought their sons could never become in any true sense men. And when they grew up, their civic life was to be conducted on the same principles, for the very purpose of enabling them to live as members of a free nation. If the self-will of the individual was curbed, now and then, needlessly—as it is the nature of all human methods to caricature themselves at times—the purpose was, not to weaken the man, but to strengthen him by strengthening the body to which he belonged. The nation was to be free, self-helping, self-containing, unconquerable; to that great purpose the will, the fancy—even, if need be, the mortal life of the individual, must give way. Men must be trained at all costs in self-restraint, because only so could they become heroes in the day of danger; in self-sacrifice for the common good, because only so would they remain united, while foreign nations and evil home influences were trying to tear them asunder. In a word, their conception of life was as a warfare; their organisation that of a regiment. It is a question whether the conception of corporate life embodied in a regiment or army be not, after all, the best working one for this world. At least the problem of a perfect society, howsoever beautiful on paper, will always issue in a compromise, more or less perfect—let us hope more and more perfect as the centuries roll on—between the strictness of military discipline and the Irishman’s laissez-faire ideal, wherein ‘every man should do that which was right in the sight of his own eyes, and wrong too, if he liked.’ At least, such had England been for centuries; under such a system had she thriven; a fact which, duly considered, should silence somewhat those gentlemen who, not being of a military turn themselves, inform Europe so patriotically and so prudently that ‘England is not a military nation.’
From this dogma we beg leave to differ utterly. Britain is at this moment, in our eyes, the only military nation in Europe. All other nations seem to us to have military governments, but not to be military themselves. As proof of the assertion, we appeal merely to the existence of our militia. While other nations are employing conscription, we have raised in twelve months a noble army, every soul of which has volunteered as a free man; and yet, forsooth, we are not a military nation! We are not ashamed to tell how, but the other day, standing in the rear of those militia regiments, no matter where, a flush of pride came over us at the sight of those lads, but a few months since helpless and awkward country boors, now full of sturdy intelligence, cheerful obedience, and the manhood which can afford to be respectful to others, because it respects itself, and knows that it is respected in turn. True, they had not the lightness, the order, the practical ease, the cunning self-helpfulness of the splendid German legionaries who stood beside them, the breast of every other private decorated with clasps and medals for service in the wars of seven years since. As an invading body, perhaps, one would have preferred the Germans; but only because experience had taught them already what it would teach in twelve months to the Berkshire or Cambridge ‘clod.’ There, to us, was the true test of England’s military qualities; her young men had come by tens of thousands, of their own free will, to be made soldiers of by her country gentlemen, and treated by them the while as men to be educated, not as things to be compelled; not driven like sheep to the slaughter, to be disciplined by men with whom they had no bond but the mere official one of military obedience; and ‘What,’ we ask ourselves, ‘does England lack to make her a second Rome?’ Her people have physical strength, animal courage, that self-dependence of freemen which enabled at Inkerman the privates to fight on literally without officers, every man for his own hand. She has inventive genius, enormous wealth; and if, as is said, her soldiers lack at present the self-helpfulness of the Zouave, it is ridiculous to suppose that that quality could long be wanting in the men of a nation which is at this moment the foremost in the work of emigration and colonisation. If organising power and military system be, as is said, lacking in high quarters, surely there must be organising power enough somewhere in the greatest industrial nation upon earth, ready to come forward when there is a real demand for it; and whatever be the defects of our system, we are surely not as far behind Prussia or France as Rome was behind the Carthaginians and the Greeks whom she crushed. A few years sufficed for them to learn all they needed from their enemies; fewer still would suffice us to learn from our friends. Our working classes are not, like those of America, in a state of physical comfort too great to make it worth while for them to leave their home occupations; and whether that be a good or an evil, it at least ensures us, as our militia proves, an almost inexhaustible supply of volunteers. What a new and awful scene for the world’s drama, did such a nation as this once set before itself, steadily and ruthlessly, as Rome did of old, the idea of conquest. Even now, waging war as she has done, as it were, ἐν παρεργᾷ, thinking war too unimportant a part of her work to employ on it her highest intellects, her flag has advanced in the last fifty years over more vast and richer tracts than that of any European nation upon earth. What keeps her from the dream which lured to their destruction Babylon, Macedonia, Rome?
This: that, thank God, she has a conscience still; that, feeling intensely the sacredness of her own national life, she has learned to look on that of other people’s as sacred also; and since, in the fifteenth century, she finally repented of that wild and unrighteous dream of conquering France, she has discovered more and more that true military greatness lies in the power of defence, and not of attack; not in waging war, but being able to wage it; and has gone on her true mission of replenishing the earth more peacefully, on the whole, and more humanely, than did ever nation before her; conquering only when it was necessary to put down the lawlessness of the savage few for the well-being of the civilised many. This has been her idea; she may have confused it and herself in Caffre or in Chinese wars; for who can always be true to the light within him? But this has been her idea; and therefore she stands and grows and thrives, a virgin land for now eight hundred years.
But a fancy has come over us during the last blessed forty years of unexampled peace, from which our ancestors of the sixteenth century were kept by stern and yet most wholesome lessons; the fancy that peace, and not war, is the normal condition of the world. The fancy is so fair that we blame none who cherish it; after all they do good by cherishing it; they point us to an ideal which we should otherwise forget, as Babylon, Rome, France in the seventeenth century, forgot utterly. Only they are in haste (and pardonable haste too) to realise that ideal, forgetting that to do so would be really to stop short of it, and to rest contented in some form of human society far lower than that which God has actually prepared for those who love Him. Better to believe that all our conceptions of the height to which the human race might attain are poor and paltry compared with that toward which God is guiding it, and for which he is disciplining it by awful lessons: and to fight on, if need be, ruthless, and yet full of pity—and many a noble soul has learnt within the last two years how easy it is to reconcile in practice that seeming paradox of words—smiting down stoutly evil wheresoever we shall find it, and saying, ‘What ought to be, we know not; God alone can know: but that this ought not to be, we do know, and here, in God’s name, it shall not stay.’
We repeat it: war, in some shape or other, is the normal condition of the world. It is a fearful fact: but we shall not abolish it by ignoring it, and ignoring by the same method the teaching of our Bibles. Not in mere metaphor does the gospel of Love describe the life of the individual good man as a perpetual warfare. Not in mere metaphor does the apostle of Love see in his visions of the world’s future no Arcadian shepherd paradises, not even a perfect civilisation, but an eternal war in heaven, wrath and woe, plague and earthquake; and amid the everlasting storm, the voices of the saints beneath the altar crying, ‘Lord, how long?’ Shall we pretend to have more tender hearts than the old man of Ephesus, whose dying sermon, so old legends say, was nought but—‘Little children, love one another’; and who yet could denounce the liar and the hater and the covetous man, and proclaim the vengeance of God against all evildoers, with all the fierceness of an Isaiah? It was enough for him—let it be enough for us—that he should see, above the thunder-cloud, and the rain of blood, and the scorpion swarm, and the great angel calling all the fowl of heaven to the supper of the great God, that they might eat the flesh of kings and valiant men, a city of God eternal in the heavens, and yet eternally descending among men; a perfect order, justice, love, and peace, becoming actual more and more in every age, through all the fearful training needful for a fallen race.
Let that be enough for us: but do not let us fancy that what is true of the two extremes must not needs be true of the mean also; that while the life of the individual and of the universe is one of perpetual self-defence, the life of the nation can be aught else: or that any appliances of scientific comforts, any intellectual cultivation, even any of the most direct and common-sense arguments of self-interest, can avail to quiet in man those outbursts of wrath, ambition, cupidity, wounded pride, which have periodically convulsed, and will convulse to the end, the human race. The philosopher in his study may prove their absurdity, their suicidal folly, till, deluded by the strange lull of a forty years’ peace, he may look on wars as in the same category with flagellantisms, witch-manias, and other ‘popular delusions,’ as insanities of the past, impossible henceforth; and may prophesy, as really wise political economists were doing in 1847, that mankind had grown too sensible to go to war any more. And behold, the peace proves only to be the lull before the thunderstorm; and one electric shock sets free forces unsuspected, transcendental, supernatural in the deepest sense; forces which we can no more stop, by shrieks at their absurdity, from incarnating themselves in actual blood, and misery, and horror, than we can control the madman in his paroxysm by telling him that he is a madman. And so the fair vision of the student is buried once more in rack and hail and driving storm; and, like Daniel of old when rejoicing over the coming restoration of his people, he sees beyond the victory some darker struggle still, and lets his notes of triumph die away into a wail,—‘And the end thereof shall be with a flood; and to the end of the war desolations are determined.’