The Whig historian and his Liberal counterpart attempt to find some intelligibility or meaning in history. The rejection of the Catholic ethos robs the Whig of the one steady, continuous influence that has always operated in the West through the ages. The Whig cannot, for example, see the rise of liberty as something caused by the Faith, as an effect of an institution already in existence. His dilemma consists in seeing a genuine growth in liberty; his rejection of the Catholic tradition forces him to one of two alternatives: either liberty is purely fortuitous and has no over-all historical cause, and history is thereby totally unintelligible; or liberty is the effect of something not actually in existence, but which is conceived as though it were. From the latter issues the Liberal-Whig mythology of “progress,” “evolution,” “human perfectibility,” and so on. What these historians seem incapable of understanding is that these formulas stand for nothing but tissues of imagery, existing in the minds of men who view historical situations after the fact. In no sense did “progress” ever cause anything historical, for the simple reason that “progress” has no being of its own. Yet the Liberals treat these constructs as though they were physical laws operative in the extramental order. Belloc had more than a lively grip on this fallacy, and he fingered it for the imaginative trick it is, in his controversy with H. G. Wells.
When Mr. Wells concludes this passage by saying “I strut to no such personal beatitude,” and then goes on to say, “the life to which I belong uses me and will go on beyond me, and I am content,” he does two unintelligent things. First of all, he mixes up the real with the imaginary ... and next he falls into the very common error of confused intellects—the personification of abstract ideas. “The life to which we belong uses us” is a meaningless phrase. God may use us or we may use ourselves, or some other third Will, not God’s or our own, may use us: but “the life to which we belong” does not use us. Talking like that is harmless when it is mere metaphor, it is asinine when it sets up to be definition.[39]
Wells was not alone in this personification of the abstract. He was only a popularizer of a tendency that is ever at work in all historical theory that commences by minimizing the religious causality operative in the West. The Whig substituted for the Catholic tradition an over-all finality which he called “progress.” The idealist historian and the Weltanschauung historian add to the Whig denial the negation of the personal will. All the historian is left to work with are impersonal forces, either physical or logical. He falls into the old error of laying his eggs in a basket that does not exist.
The Liberal is bound by his own theory. His sociological ideals must be projected ahead of his historical understanding; they can never emerge from an insight into that which actually has existed. The classical European Liberal (and his contemporary counterpart) is always marked by his rejection of any way of life rooted in the older past of Christendom.
When Hilaire Belloc launched his concept of the proprietary state, he effected a political and sociological revolution that had its roots in his historical vision. Mr. Douglas Jerrold has analyzed brilliantly the profound effect made by Belloc’s polemic against the English parliamentary party system which was wedded to Whig ideals and their Edwardian Liberal refinements.[40] It was a time when Britain had reached next to the limit of its material expansion. English industry and productivity were unequalled in excellence and quantity. The nation was united in the firm conviction that Britannia ruled by the grace of God. Providence had specially blessed the Island Empire. The innate superiority, not only of Englishmen, but of English ways and English religion, was less a conscious doctrine than a broad myth on which a whole people reposed. Liberal capitalism appeared to the “progressivists” as the final flowering of a history that had its roots in the Reformation and the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
Belloc’s economics and sociology, the fruit of his historical insight, effected a revolution. Since it was a revolution of thought, its effects were not immediately apparent, but acting as corrosives they gradually ate away the rust of centuries of complacency and smugness. Belloc told the Englishmen of his day that their cherished system of parliamentary government represented not the nation, but two parties that stood for the same thing: capitalist, industrial wealth. He went on to tell them that the supposed incorruptibility of this ancient governmental institution was a lie: men were bought and sold, and titles were bartered for privilege.
Expanding his polemic, Belloc informed the nation that liberal capitalism would not issue into the golden age, but would work inexorably toward the Servile State: a state in which the vast majority of the populace laboured perforce for a small minority of wealthy owners, or for an entrenched government dominated by technical experts. He grounded his predictions on the drying up of the traditional economic basis of Western Christian societies: the institution of small property, widely distributed, giving the tone to society, and reposing on the family community. As far back as 1908, in The Servile State, Belloc deduced that unless the institution of property were reestablished, the nation would give itself over to slavery. The England of the late forties and early fifties has borne him out with tragic finality. Belloc contended that party control was an irrelevant point; if the society were propertyless, contractual slavery would inexorably result. The age of the ration card, the social leveling of the whole people, the increasing drabness of life, the elimination of the middle classes, the legislation of enforced labour—this age is upon England, and it will remain until and unless property is restored.
Belloc’s prophecies were successes in the only way any prophecy can succeed. What he said would come to pass did come to pass; and it came to pass the way he said it would. There is more than irony in looking back thirty years to that superman of the Wells school of thought: that uninhibited, traditionless blank who was to be the term of the march of liberal progress; that dull abstraction, “the man of the future,” who was to inherit the earth. Who is he today, and where is he? He is the industrial slave of an impoverished and spiritually bankrupt Europe—Heidegger’s faceless “one” who neither owns nor can be said even to be.
The striking truth in the utter failure of the hopes of post-Victorian Liberalism lies in the fact that Liberalism, the child of Whiggery, grounded its predictions in an historical theory that was a well-intentioned myth. The future simply is not a magnet. It has no existence. It is a refuge for cowards, Chesterton said somewhere; a retreat for men who cannot bear to face the grandeur of their own past. Belloc was able to lay down the broad lines which were leading to the Servile State because his historical vision was orientated realistically: it looked to causes actually operative in the past, whose collective efficacy hardened and sharpened with the passing of time. The English Reformation had created a wealthy landed aristocracy. This aristocracy had ruined a crown that for all its failures had stood, immemorially, for the rights of the common man, already a landed owner in large part by the close of the fourteenth century. Having gained political power, the aristocracy usurped economic power; the long series of legislative acts and judicial decisions, from the Poor Laws to the final enclosure acts, ended in the creation of a rural proletariat. The rise of industrialism was controlled by a capitalism already in existence, and the rural proletariat was transformed into its urban counterpart.
Belloc’s prophetic ability, strikingly demonstrated time and again, worked because it was based on his grasp of causality actually operative in history. The future can never be predicted with certitude because causes operating at the present moment in time are contingent. They can be replaced, diminished, checked, or rechannelled. Nonetheless, to have an insight into these causes is to possess an instrument for predicting a possible or even probable future. No historical theory grounded in a mere Weltanschauung, nor any history deduced from a philosophical system such as the Hegelian and Marxist, is of any practical utility in understanding what might happen.