The Tyranny of Shams

by Joseph McCabe

The third and gravest fact is our appalling and costly slowness in mobilising our resources when the war began. Six months after the outbreak of war I went over a very large engineering shop in the north. Out of hundreds of men only a score or two were engaged on war-material: and one of the two objects on which this mere handful of men were engaged has proved to be wholly valueless. At that time, and for months afterwards, the workers of Britain were encouraged in their easy ways, and the bulk of the manufacturers were encouraged to go on with their usual business, by official assurances that no greater effort was needed. When our disgusted soldiers sent us a message that, not “the weather,” but a scandalous shortage of ammunition and machine-guns kept them back, the Prime Minister, quoting the “highest available authority,” publicly declared this to be untrue. We were asked rather to admire the way in which we had dispatched the greatest expeditionary force known in history: as if the enormous progress of modern times did not make this superiority a matter of course. When criticism increased, we cried for the gag and the public prosecutor, and we garlanded the portraits of the very men who had disgraced us; and we agreed to the retention or promotion of incompetent men, on obvious party-grounds.

Happily one minister had the grit and patriotism to call to his aid a group of business-men, and the facts could no longer be concealed. Mr. Lloyd George admitted that since the beginning of the war, we had increased a thousandfold our production of munitions, yet were still far behind the Germans and far short of our needs; and at last, eleven months after the outbreak of war, we began to organise, or at least to ascertain, our resources. Again we loudly congratulated ourselves on our energy. We cried shame on all critics and pessimists and people who wanted more. We fancied ourselves in the character of Atlas, taking the whole burden on our massive shoulders, to spare our weaker Allies. But the sinister light which this late increase of output threw on the first six months, or more, of indolent incompetence was quite disregarded. We genially overlooked the fact that the delay of our advance was costing us nearly a hundred millions a month. We allowed less prominent affairs to be conducted with the same indolent insufficiency. The most absurdly inadequate measures were taken to control the prices of food and coal, and scarcely a thought was given to the tremendous economic problem which will confront us when the war is over, or to the means of recouping ourselves by a systematic promotion of our oversea-trade.

In a word, the magnificent organisation and ordered national devotion of the German people make the conduct of England during the first year of the war seem clumsy, lazy, and full of danger for the future. For this the chief blame quite obviously falls on our statesmen. English soldiers have at least been second to none in the field: English artisans have, since the need was acknowledged, worked magnificently. It is the directing brain that was sluggish and incompetent. The magnitude of the sudden task does not excuse our rulers, nor does the very large service that was actually done—which I do not for a moment overlook—lessen the scandal. If a political machine does not know how to enlarge itself in less than twelve months to meet a new and very urgent task, especially a task that it ought to have foreseen, it is unfit to control our national destiny. Our governmental system has proved itself most dangerously and mischievously unfit to meet such a national emergency, and this catastrophic experience may encourage the reader to examine with patience the criticisms which I propose to pass on it.

Here again we submit to the tyranny of a largely obsolete tradition. When the story of the development of human institutions can be written with a detachment of which we are yet incapable, one of the strangest pages will be that which tells of the evolution of Church and State. From the early days when some exceptionally powerful warrior is raised on his shield and saluted as chief or king, and when some weird individual earns the repute of being able to control or propitiate the mighty powers of the environing world, government and religion steadily advance to a commanding position in the life of the people. The two men of power, the king and the priest, must have establishments in accord with their value to the tribe, and the palace and the temple rise in spacious dignity above the mean cluster of huts. Time after time the race turns to examine the tradition which has been so deeply impressed on it, and kings and gods are cast from their thrones; but new dynasties always arise. Of Rome, no less than of Thebes or Nineveh, it is the monuments of kings and gods that survive. Only a few centuries ago the European city consisted mainly of two institutions: the palace and the cathedral. The bulk of the citizens huddled in squalid fever-stricken houses beyond the fringe of the estates of their secular and priestly rulers.

The modern age, with its inconvenient questions and its bold speech, arrives. Commerce develops, and the palace and cathedral disappear, in the forest of soaring buildings. When the roofs of the new commerce and the new commoner rise to a level with the roof of the palace or the cathedral, when men are no longer overshadowed by the old powers, the imagination is released. The divine right of kings goes in a fury of revolutionary flame: kings must henceforth rule by human right and answer at a human tribunal, which is more exacting and alert than the old tribunal. Yet the power of the dead tradition is amazing. In England men still bow reverently when the king addresses them as “my subjects” and talks of “my empire”: still crown every entertainment, spiritual or gastronomic, with fervent aspirations which would lead an ill-informed spectator to imagine that they regarded the king’s health as mystically connected with the health of the nation: still describe bishops and the heads of families which have been sufficiently long idle and wealthy as their “lords.”

These archæological survivals are, no doubt, innocuous, if irritating. The more serious feature is that they help to make so many people insensible of the miserable compromises we endure in our reorganised State. They are part of that superabundant ash which clogs and dulls the fire of the nation’s life. The nineteenth century, rightly and inevitably, adopted a democratic scheme of public administration. It was seen that, if the king were not so close a friend of the Almighty as had been supposed, there was no visible reason why the destinies of the nation should be entrusted to his judgment: which was, as a rule, not humanly impressive. Luckily, certain nations had won the right to do a good deal of talking before the king came to a decision, or the right to hold Parliaments, and Europe generally adopted this model. The Parliament House now towered upward in the city, and it did the real business of directing the nation’s affairs. The king became a kind of grand seal for the measures enacted by Parliament. Some nations, the number of which is increasing, regarded the seal as a costly and avoidable luxury, and abolished it: some kept the king, with all his stately language and pretty robes and sparkling jewellery, and abolished the “lords”: some kept the king and the lords, but deprived them of real power. The English nation, which is famous for its common-sense, its audacity, and its ability, belongs to the last group. It invented that remarkable phrase, “self-government”: which ingeniously preserves the fiction that someone has a right to govern other people, yet conciliates the modern spirit by intimating that the people really govern their governors.

Into the extraordinary confusion of forms and formulæ which has resulted from this compromise it would be waste of time to enter. Does it really matter that we allow our king to put on our coins a flattering portrait of himself, with an intimation that he rules as “by the grace of God”? He is quite conscious that he rules us—if his melodramatic relation to us may be called ruling—on the understanding that he never contradicts us. We are not now knocked on the head, except by an intoxicated patriot, if we refuse to stand while our neighbours chant their insincere incantation about his health: we go, not to the Tower, but to the ordinary law-court, if we mention his personal frailties; and the portentous seriousness with which he takes his robes and his formulæ injures none, and amuses many. No doubt, slovenly mental habits are always to be deplored, yet these things are not in themselves important enough to be included in a list of serious reforms. What we do need to examine critically is this scheme of self-government by which we now manage our national affairs: very badly, it appears.

This political machinery is divided into two sections: municipal government and national government. The former, from which every element of “government” except the name has departed, need not be considered at length. It consists of groups of citizens who are understood to excel in public spirit and self-sacrifice, so that they devote a large part of their time to the unpaid service of their fellow-citizens. Every few years a man, of whom you had probably never heard before, calls to implore you, with a quite painful humility and courtesy, to allow him to discharge this self-denying function. The next day another man, of whom also you had never heard before, calls to inform you, in discreet language, that his rival is a spendthrift, a rogue, or a fool; and that he is the man to represent you with due regard to economy and with absolute disinterestedness. You probably refrain from voting for either, since you have not the abundant leisure of a libel-court. Your streets will somehow get paved, and your children schooled, and you will pay the bill. But you may discover after a time that the air is thick with charges of “jobbery,” or that some local councillor has been promoted to the higher and more lucrative political world on the ground of “many years’ experience of local administration.”

If you happen to live in the Metropolis, where the intelligence of the nation is clotted, so to say, you find municipal life even more complex than this. The eager rivals who solicit the honour of doing your work for nothing are divided into bitterly hostile schools. Each school spends hundreds of thousands of pounds in a periodical effort to convince you that the other school is going to swindle you. Each plasters the wall with repulsive typical portraits of its exponents, and you see yourself depicted as a weak and amiable, but small-witted, figure (or, perhaps, as a burly and very stupid-looking farmer), whose pockets are being picked. Each produces a most exact statistical proof that its opponents have actually picked your pockets, and that the “reds” or “blues” are the only people with a really disinterested desire to spend some hours every day in the gratuitous discharge of public duties. They spend great sums of money every few years for the purpose of securing this thankless burden and facing the vituperation of their opponents. You seek illumination in the press, and you find, in rival journals, a mass of contradictory statements and mutual accusations of lying. However, the system is thoroughly British in its encouragement of individual action and public spirit, and you overtook all the direct and indirect corruption it fosters.

What is a man to do? One can at least search very rigorously the credentials and the public action of the man who “solicits your vote,” and encourage the appearance of really independent and fine-spirited men and women. I have, naturally, described the broad features and general abuses of the system, but there are, of course, large numbers of men in it who are sincerely disinterested. In the main, however, municipal politics is tainted and complicated by the party-system of the large political world, and to this we may turn.