War Letters of a Public-School Boy

by Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones

Reared in the home of a political journalist, it was natural that Paul Jones should be attracted to public affairs. He followed with lively curiosity the progress of the two general elections of 1910, and from that year was an interested observer of political events. As he grew older his bent towards politics became more pronounced. A youth familiar with Roman, mediæval and modern history could not fail to be fascinated by the political drama unfolding before his eyes. He watched history in the making with the same eagerness that he read the history of the past. The prevailing tone at Dulwich, as at most public schools, is Conservative. Paul was a perfervid Liberal. In school and out of school, not only did he not disguise, he gloried in his advanced opinions. The extent of his political knowledge and the ripeness of his views were astonishing in one so young.

From the moment he began to think for himself his sympathies flowed out to the wage-earning classes. What he remembered and what he had heard of his Puritan grandfather, William Jones, a grand specimen of the Victorian artisan, who died in December, 1905, on the verge of 80, deepened his regard for them. But his own broad and sympathetic nature would have drawn him instinctively to their side. In his judgment it was on and by the working-classes that the wheels of the world moved forward. He had nothing but contempt for the sparrow-like frivolity of fashionable Society, and was repelled from the middle classes by their servitude to conventions, their prejudices social and political, and their non-receptivity to ideas. He for his part must breathe an ampler air. He was wont to speak disdainfully of the Victorian era, because, in spite of all the advances it witnessed in the physical sciences and of Britain's rapid growth in wealth between 1850 and 1890, it did so little for social welfare.

For feudal magnates and the nouveaux riches he had scant respect, holding that both the aristocracy and the plutocracy had used their political power for selfish ends. Old feudalism in some respects he regarded as better than new Capital, for the landed aristocracy did at least recognise some obligations to those under their sway, whereas Capital was so concerned with its rights that it forgot altogether its reciprocal duties. His view was that, under shelter of the laissez-faire system, with its false presumption that employers and employed were on a parity in bargaining power, Capital had scandalously evaded its obligations to Labour. He regarded the conditions of life in some of our industrial districts as a grave reproach to the nation. The lust for wealth and other unlovely aspects of competitive commercialism were most repugnant to him. He knew that Nature cares not a rap for equality and lavishes her gifts with a strange caprice. But though there is inequality of natural gifts, he thought it was the duty of the State to ensure equality of opportunity to all its citizens. His ideal was a co-operative commonwealth, in which the competitive spirit would be held in check by communal needs and aims, and where every career would be opened freely to talent. In one of his essays he deplores the fact that political economists had fallen into the delusion of applying the laws that govern the exchange of commodities without any variation to Labour, and leaving out of account intangibles and imponderables like moral forces and other expressions of the delicate and mysterious human spirit. Political economy, he thought, would have to be recast and humanised. "The economists," he said, "have entirely ignored the human factor."

Paul's conviction was that when the rule of enlightened democracy was established wars would cease. "The peoples never want wars," he wrote; "under a pure democracy wars would be impossible." Because of the associations clustering around it the word "Imperialism" jarred on him, but he took pride in the greatness of the free and liberal British Empire, with its rule of law, its love of peace, its humane ideals. He had the historical sense in highly developed degree. The story of human progress stretched before the eye of his mind in a series of vivid pictures. Surveying the immense and imposing fabric of recorded events woven by the ceaseless loom of Time, he had an unerring instinct for the shining figures, the salient characteristic, the determining factor. Away from a library he could have written a quite tolerable essay on any century of the Christian era. Historical characters in whom he was specially interested were Julius Cæsar, Octavius, Charlemagne, the Emperor Charles V, Queen Elizabeth, Cromwell, Louis XIV, the elder Pitt, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon; and among the non-political Roger Bacon, Erasmus, Luther, Sir Thomas More, Isaac Newton, Faraday, and Darwin. The Elizabethan age had for him a magnetic attraction, because of the Queen with her enigmatical personality, marvellous statecraft and capacity for inspiring devotion, and of the brilliant galaxy of great men, statesmen and sailors, poets and scholars, who enriched her reign with so much glory. Another epoch he loved to study was that of the French Revolution. I have already referred to his habit of annotating the books he read. From notes he made on political books and from some of his essays I have culled the following:

Man's tool-using power is simply a symbol of man's unique reasoning gifts. Its connotations may be extended to mean the entire intellect.

The savage using his language with joy like a child, gives us the wealth of beautiful mythology about all natural objects.

It is wonderful to think that Julius Cæsar's imperial system was handed right down to the nineteenth century, until one not unlike Cæsar himself set his foot upon its neck in 1806. But long before it fell the Holy Roman Empire had really ceased, in Voltaire's words, to be holy, or Roman, or an empire.

Froude holds up to admiration the "serene calmness" of Tacitus, and says he took no side. But I ask anyone who has read the sarcastic remarks about Domitian and the Emperors in the "Agricola" whether he thinks Tacitus took no side in writing history.

Nothing can alter the fact that Mohammedanism has done a vast amount of good. Compare Carlyle's appreciation of Mahomet with Gibbon's acrimonious insinuations.

Much that is strange in human history is explained if we remember that aristocracies in the West were political, while in the East they were religious.