While I Remember

by Stephen McKenna

The young liberals of those days, taught to feel that every human being must have a chance, through freedom, of attaining happiness, believed in their cause and in their leaders; through the pitched battles of the next four years their faith was undimmed. More than this dumb allegiance it was not yet easy for them to give: still little more than boys, most of them had careers to make before they could participate actively in politics. Later, as a few of them were ready to take their place in the line, a more urgent war burst upon them; democracy at home had to be left to take care of itself, though in August 1914 they hoped and expected their local democracy would be caught up in a greater democracy; they believed then that "a war to end war" would prepare the way for ultimate human brotherhood.

Was it so fantastic a dream? In 1914 less than one hundred and seventy years had passed since the last civil war in which Englishmen fought against Englishmen on British soil; now England was consolidated and uniform. Might there not soon be a time when Europe, disarmed and controlled by an international police, would be so far uniform and consolidated that war between any of its component states would be no less unthinkable than war in England between Lancashire and Cornwall? Until Ireland was driven to anarchy, the common conscience of Great Britain refused to tolerate disorder and free shooting; might there not be a time when the common conscience of Europe refused to tolerate periodical massacres? In 1914, though perforce their grip slackened on the reforms nearer at hand, the souls of the young men were touched for a moment by the universal spirit.

For the survivors who paced the quadrangles after dinner, peering at the familiar staircases and glancing up at the silent windows, every comer of the college was haunted by some one who would never see Oxford again. In 1910 very few believed that a European war was necessary; very many still believe that even by 1910 a different and more honest diplomacy could have averted it. In 1914, when war broke out, it was fancied that those who were offering their lives would be rewarded everlasting freedom from the fear of another war; could that still be fancied in 1920? It was felt and said, too, that, as these men were venturing all for one corner of the earth, they—if they came back—or their survivors should find it so swept and garnished that they would know they had ventured to good purpose. Oxford is still the kingdom of youth, and idealism still flourishes in its shelter; but, when the gathering speed of the London train cut short the last glimpse of Tom Tower and of the cathedral spire, it was not easy to feel that the sweeping and garnishing were complete.

II

"Whoever attempts to forecast the course systems of government will take," wrote Lord Bryce in Modern Democracies, "must ... begin from the two propositions that the only thing we know about the Future is that it will differ from the Past, and, that the only data we have for conjecturing what the Future may possibly bring with it are drawn from observations of the Past, or, in other words, from that study of the tendencies of human nature which gives ground for expecting from men certain kinds of action in certain states of fact. We cannot refrain from conjecture. Yet to realise how vain conjectures are, let us imagine ourselves to be in the place of those who only three or four generations ago failed to forecast what the next following generation would see. Let us suppose Burke, Johnson, and Gibbon sitting together at a dinner of The Club in 1769, the year when Napoleon and Wellington were born, and the talk falling on the politics of the European Continent. Did they have any presage of the future? The causes whence the American Revolution and the French Revolution were to spring, and which would break the sleep of the people in Germany and Italy, might, one would think, have already been discerned by three such penetrating observers, but the only remarks most of us recall as made then and for some years afterwards to note symptoms of coming dangers were made by a French traveller, who said that the extinction of French power in Canada had weakened the tie between the American colonies and Great Britain, and by an English traveller who saw signs of rottenness in the French Monarchy. Men stood on the edge of stupendous changes, not discerning the causes that were already in embryo beneath their feet, like seeds hidden under the snow of winter, which will shoot up under the April sunlight. How much more difficult has it now become to diagnose the symptoms of an age in which the interplay of economic forces, intellectual forces, moral and religious forces is more complex than ever heretofore, incomparably more complex than it had seemed to be before discovery had gone far in the spheres of chemistry, physics, and biology, before education had been diffused through all classes, before every part of the world had been drawn into relations with every other part so close that what affects one must affect the rest."

In ten years the men who hoped to beautify the world through the agency of politics had learned something of parliament and of its limitations; it is not the perfect instrument for a social reformation or a spiritual revival; such vain imaginings revealed the reformers' folly or at least their youth, but they were misled by the resonant beatitudes of public speeches. Parliament and the whole machine of government are, by their remoteness from the public life of the nation, always a little loftier in temper than the basest elements of the population: the House of Commons may be blind, greedy, vindictive or persecuting, but at such moments it is never so persecuting or vindictive, so greedy or blind as an incensed mob would like it to be. On the other hand, parliament and the whole machine of government never, in their most exalted moments, attain such a nobility of soul as the mob outside achieves in its disinterested moods. From the first day of war to the last and for all their lapses into panic and madness, the uninstructed silent masses were prompt in every crisis with more patience and fortitude, more philosophy and more capacity for sacrifice than parliament knew how to use. It is not through the House of Commons that England will be made a home for heroes.

"We had no conception of the quality of politics," wrote Wells of one character then aged fifteen, "nor how 'interests' came into such affairs; we believed men were swayed by purely intellectual convictions and were either right or wrong, honest or dishonest (in which case they deserved to be shot), good or bad. We knew nothing of mental inertia, and could imagine the opinion of a whole nation changed by one lucid and convincing exposition.... We rebuilt London by Act of Parliament, and once in a mood of hygienic enterprise we transferred its population en masse to the North Downs by an order of the Local Government Board. We thought nothing of throwing religious organisations out of employment or superseding all the newspapers by freely distributed bulletins. We could contemplate the possibility of laws abolishing whole classes; we were equal to such a dream as the peaceful and orderly proclamation of Communism from the steps of St. Paul's Cathedral, after the passing of a simply worded bill,—a close and not unnaturally an exciting division carrying the third reading.... We were not fools; it was simply that as yet we had gathered no experience at all of the limits and powers of legislation and conscious collective intention...."

At one-or two-and-twenty the "mental inertia" of their conservative opponents had discouraged the reformers from thinking that the more drastic and dramatic methods of the French Revolution could be applied to British legislation in 1910; of the entire efficacy of legislation no doubt was entertained. Everything, it was believed (and the liberal majority of 1906 believed it too), could be done by means of a simply worded bill; all that a reformer needed was those sure voters who would carry the third reading after "a close and not unnaturally an exciting division"; and they were to be found in Scotland and Wales, in the north of England and every other liberal stronghold not yet seduced by factious, independent labour.

In London, it was soon discovered, there was no help to be expected save in the poor fringe of Camberwell and Hornsey, Stratford and Battersea; the liberal oratory of the period taught that dukes and slum-landlords were identical; and the young liberal was convinced in those days that the London he knew was vehemently opposed to all amelioration of social conditions. If, later, he found that the most tory element in society had no greater liking than he for dirt, disease, crime, misery and hunger, he found, too, that the world in which his lot was cast for the next ten years was too busily engaged to spare anything but mental inertia for social reform. Its members displayed no ill-will; they subscribed hundreds of thousands every year to charity, they worked like slaves for the objects in which their interest had been aroused; but they did not see and they would not be made to see that Europe was an extension of England, that England was an extension of the village at their lodge-gates and that they were acquiescing in conditions of want and suffering, vice and crime which for very shame they would not allow among their own tenants.

In the course of those ten years young liberals often wondered what daily spur could be applied to imaginations and consciences which are active enough when once the spur has been applied. The work done for the relief of suffering is immense; the sums subscribed to charity are enormous; and yet by any standard they are insufficient. For want of a better postulate the reformers were agreed that it was incumbent on the state for every man and woman to be secured at least the minimum of essentials; in the search for a first principle of private conduct they would not have refused the criterion whether an act would increase or decrease, in any form or any degree, the world's total of unhappiness. To an agnostic, the value of Christian ethics lay less in the protection which they secured to the weak than in the chivalry which they demanded of the strong; and, if the mentally inert began with a test even so rudimentary as this, they might progress to a frame of mind in which a man would be pulled up short by the fear, that, whatever the gain to others, his act would cause pain to a single living creature.