Let us state the case briefly and simply. Nobody who knows anything of the facts of the case regards the citizen of the United States as a sort of transplanted Britisher; but with the exception of certain coloured millions and certain Red Indian survivals they are manifestly transplanted Europeans, whose political institutions were originally built up in reaction to the Hanoverian monarchy and as a development of and in close sympathy with European liberalism and British nonconformity. This community of transplanted Europeans had the good fortune to have no strong military neighbour, and it had an almost virgin continent into which to expand. This good fortune enabled the States to realise very swiftly the full social and political possibilities of steamboat, railway, and electric communication.
They have developed a great State on the modern scale, with an unprecedented unity and uniformity of general ideas. A little too favoured by their immunities, they have not perhaps made so good a pace as they might have done with their general elementary education, but altogether their progress has been marvellous. The congested and entangled States of Western Europe—I leave out the Russian and British systems, which are neither of them truly European—are destined to achieve an ultimate unity under the same irresistible forces of transport that have expanded and held together the American United States. Their unification may be complicated or arrested by the unavoidable interweaving of the Slav and British systems with their destinies, and it is surely impossible for anyone outside the Belloc type of mentality to imagine either English-speaking or Latin-speaking America having neither voice nor share in the European part of this recrystallisation of the world’s affairs.
In this new order of life into which our kind is passing, Roman Christendom will become a local tradition and a province, just as Sumeria was swallowed up in Babylonia and just as the Empires of Babylon and Egypt became memories and provinces in the Empire of Rome. We are not developing new races, but merely mingling those we have, and our cultures do not so much differentiate as fuse, so we may reasonably hope to have at last one creative culture, with many aspects, replacing the partial civilisations of the past.
Fate has imposed it upon Mr. Belloc that he should see these things and deny them. His lot, I think, might have been happier had he been born and settled in some rich little town in the South of France, and there sat in the café, drinking his good red wine and orating and denying, without the irritation of having seen and known. But it was decreed that he should go to America and come back to report a strange and terrible land where the mountains are not really mountains nor the rivers rivers, and where a strange race grows outside the pale.
And, an exile in modern England, he has been forced, too, to turn his eyes into the depths of the past and see how life arose and how it has come to be man and will pass beyond man. And that also he denies, with much banging of the little round drum of a table on the terrasse. The American is a phantom and geology a lie; the only true world is Latin-made Europe, and if Heaven had not created it specially for jolly men, Mr. Belloc would; and in the warmth and congenial friendliness of it, Mr. Belloc will sit fighting reality with voice and gesture until the good red wine runs out and the sun goes down upon him for the last time.
XXIV
A CREATIVE EDUCATIONAL SCHEME FOR BRITAIN: A TENTATIVE FORECAST
22.2.24
The Labour Government of Great Britain starts its career with a conservative discretion that should reassure even the most excitable inmates of the Rothermere journalistic institutions. For this year at any rate we shall get little that we might not have had from a rather left-handed Liberal Cabinet. The Social Revolution is in no hurry to arrive.
The recognition of Russia is all to the good; and the treatment of foreign politicians in office as though they were statesmen and the serious little visits and talks, are full of promise. If you treat a politician as a statesman sufficiently it is possible that he will become one. It is to be hoped that the economies upon military things will have a certain courage, and that we may see the last of costly Guards’ uniforms and such-like gilt on the Royal gingerbread, this year. A democratic monarchy with a Labour Prime Minister should wear plain clothes. But these are minor matters. The immediate test of the Labour Government’s quality will be its treatment of national education. There is no excuse for just carrying on. The British educational policy since the war has been mean and deadly. The children insist upon growing up, and at present most of them for all practical purposes achieve the status of unemployed adults or undertrained blacklegs at fourteen. Secondary and higher education is a dislocated muddle.
I do not want to undervalue British education. Compared with other countries the common citizen of Britain is well educated and well informed. He is—though many Americans are loath to realise this—better educated and better informed than the average American common citizen. But compared with what is needed in a great modern State he is pitifully and dangerously under-educated. It is impossible for a Labour Government to realise its ideal of a highly organised community inspired not by profit-hunting but by the spirit of co-operative service, and working and producing abundantly for the common good, with the British population at the present level of education. To raise that level is a necessary condition to the successful extension of public service into economic life and the replacement of the money scramble by economic order.