Europe-Whither Bound? Part 14

"Why is that?" I murmured.

"Hercules is in the ascendant this month. That always means more even numbers."

You do not see the humour of such a remark whilst you are in the Casino. The strain on the minds of the gamblers tells on your mind, too. It is terribly tiring for every one taking part, and this is noticeable in the drawn and fatigued-looking faces. Even the croupiers have to be changed every hour. The strain is utterly exhausting.

It would doubtless be different in these fine high halls if there were currents of air, but there are not. It is thousand-times-breathed gamblers' breath that you are breathing, suffused with the heavy odour of the expensive perfumes on the women. What a change when you step outside into the fresh air once more. You realize what it feels like when the Casino closes, and the maniacs with their hot heads are actually forced to leave the tables and come out.

To think that at ten in the morning there are queues waiting to get in and get seats at the tables, and that men and women are ready to remain at the tables all day, and can live on it and die at it!

Up on the heights above, at Rocco Bruna, is a Saracen-built little town with strange dark people who seldom come down from the heights. You go by shady steps between high white walls to a little chapel, and there on Sunday a beloved _cure_ beguiles an innocent little flock with a murmuring, heavenly, sing-song voice, whilst the children with untroubled voices are like larks in a heaven above Monte Carlo, singing, "_Sancta, sancta, nostra Dama priez pour nous!_"

I'd rather live at Rocca Bruna than in the main seat of the Princ.i.p.ality of Monaco. So would we all. But the devil has got such a terrible pull.

LETTERS OF TRAVEL

XVI. FROM LONDON

You would hardly think that the greatest drama in world history is being played out in Europe, and that England was taking a part. You would hardly think that England herself was in mortal danger. London astonishes the traveller. It seems entirely given over to trivial and alien interest. Betting on horses has never reached such dimensions.

Whilst the street-criers of Belgrade keep calling "_Politika, Politika!_" and the attention of Berlin is ruefully pinned down to Reparations, and Paris is dignified and serious and national in both newspapers and conversation, you hear nothing in the streets of London but, "What's the latest, Bill?" and "I can tell you of a 'orse."

In the vestry of a fashionable church the admirers of a certain earnest preacher come to see him after the sermon. Says a lady, "Well, padre, can you tell us the great secret?"

The priest pauses and reflects.

"I suppose by the great secret you mean the love of G.o.d? I could not tell you that at once."

"Oh, no," says the lady, "I don't mean that. I mean who will be winner on June the first."

Derby Day is given in the Press the prominence of a grand European event. Descriptions of what the ladies wear at Ascot occupy as many columns in the newspaper as the condition of four million unemployed occupy lines. The attention of the public is engulfed in second-rate sport. It is not as if there were a real boom in sport. The war has effected men's physique and their nerves so that most sporting exhibitions are of the second cla.s.s. Strictly speaking, it is not an interesting cricket year. But the interest in the county compet.i.tions has been whipped up by the Press till people buy special editions of papers, not for the latest news from Silesia or Turkey, or of the great strikes, but to know how Middles.e.x or Lancashire is getting on.

England versus Australia is greatly starred. England loses matches, and the nation seems as much plunged in gloom as she was at the failures of the old South African War. In the golf and tennis and polo compet.i.tions there is a similar neurotic interest in the supposed sporting rivalry of England and America. It seems even fortunate for the _mens sana_ of old Britain that she has failed in boxing, and that the Dempsey-Carpentier match in America did not affect our national status in our own esteem.

But even our secondary public interests are not in vital matters. The traveller returning to London in the summer of 1921 plunges into a whole series of unsavoury divorce cases being threshed out in public.

Divorce is applied for, considered, granted, in every capital in Europe, but nowhere does it receive the publicity in the Press that it does in England. Its unseemly details are left in the obscurity of private life elsewhere, and not brought forward for public consideration as in England. One arrives in London just in time to hear the Lord Chief Justice make a grand summing-up of a nullity suit, and to hear two other judges court the public eye with detailed remarks in levity of moral conduct and the immodesty of women. We sometimes in England refer to the poisonous daily Press of Paris, but Paris, with all its men-and-women troubles, has no salacious columns in its papers comparable to those of England. It would not at present pay in Paris; the people are not so much interested.

Sport is the first interest; divorce second; and only third comes the great coal strike which threatens a revolution in industrial life.

Fourth in interest come anti-waste crusades directed against an unpopular Government. Then the Irish trouble, and after that probably European affairs.

"They're writing so much about sport just to keep people's minds off the coal strike and more serious matters," says a comfortably-minded citizen. "The Government gives the papers a hint every day as to the line to take."

The idea that the Government prompts the Press came with the war and the efforts of the Press Bureau, and has come perhaps to stay.

Journalists have made great efforts since 1918 to regain for the British Press that independence and freedom it had before the war.

Fleet Street has been hard hit, and the free-lancers who live outside Fleet Street hit harder still. Not that the writing profession has been beaten by the manipulators of public opinion. It is fighting hard in London and will ultimately win.

But some one is responsible for a perversion of public interest at this time, and for leading the mind of the nation away from the real points of vital significance. It is not mere commerce. Papers could have been sold in even greater numbers on the strength of the stupendous political events of England and the Continent.

England is a democracy, but what is the virtue of a democracy which languishes in ignorance? Of all countries Britain has now the broadest basis of franchise. We can vote, but what is the use of voting when you know nothing of the issues at stake, and when even the candidates are ignorant of affairs and try to win by making sentimental popular appeals to varying prejudices? England is low. It is a humiliating plat.i.tude. England stands far lower to-day than the level of her national sacrifices.

The civil service and army and police are carrying on the administration of Great Britain and Ireland, and foreign and imperial policy. Politicians and statesmen seem to be inferior in mind and training to the civil servants who keep the machine going. The gifts requisite for getting into power in England are not the same gifts which are needed for wise government. What the undistinguished have learned painfully at school our leaders somehow have missed. One could forgive the politician if he understood the elements of political economy. But the unforgiveable confronts us, and our new system of government has admitted to power people capable of abrogating penny post and abolishing penny-a-mile railway travel, and of raising telephone charges because the more the subscribers the more the expense. If they are capable of these elementary mistakes it is not surprising that they should have failed to ward off the great trade depression, and failed to help Europe to get together. The accessibility of markets in Europe does not interest politicians except in the most casual way.

A remarkable phenomenon of the time is the continuation of the grand traffic in public honours which reached such dimensions during the war.

It cannot be thought that the party funds of the politicians in power are so low that they have to be supplemented two or three times a year.

Yet on June 4th, for instance, behold once more new Barons, Baronets, Knights, Orders of the Bath, and Privy Councillors in columns of names.

Over and above the heads of the ordinary English people a new aristocracy, if one can call it so, is being built up from the ranks of business men. The ordinary British citizen begins to feel in a vague way that there are now many thousands of new t.i.tled people up above.

One wonders what it means for the future. Is England going to develop a new caste system which the commonalty will have to fight? There are now six barons of the Press, and "The Times" and "Daily Mail," the "Daily Telegraph," the "Sunday Herald," the "Express," the "News of the World," the "Daily Chronicle," and "Pall Mall Gazette," are, as it were, feudal castles and feudal organizations in our new England. It is enough to start a new War of the Roses. Lord Northcliffe has much in common with the king-maker if prime ministers are uncrowned kings.

These Press barons in their way are remarkable men, but as the gates were opened to let them in a whole host of other people slipped through. It is a human weakness to desire decorations. It ought to be the function of a strong, wise Government to save us from ourselves.

In the sixteenth century Spaniards gave coloured beads to Indians in exchange for gold. In the twentieth century something similar obtains in England where successful gentlemen part with large sums in exchange for tiny decorations.

Perhaps the matter is not so important as it might seem to the theorist. j.a.panese students of our life make many strange deductions from such phenomena as the extensive manufacture of new t.i.tles of n.o.bility. But whether they are right or wrong in their far-drawn conclusions it must be admitted that so much honour bestowed in such unremarkable days has made us flabby as a nation.

Indeed, we suffer by comparison with the French and the Americans who have notably increased the dignity of simple citizenship. And yet another contrast strikes one after a tour of Europe in 1921 and that is that in England, despite protests about taxes, there are more people of independent means than in any other country. The _pensionnaires_ of the State and of industry have increased with us, whilst in many countries they have almost disappeared. Fewer people are actually earning their living in England than in any other country; more people are just pa.s.sengers on the economic machine. The working part of the population carries a ma.s.s of non-workers on its back all the while.

Anyone who did well in the great war could reasonably hope to lay by 25,000 pounds which gave him an income of 1,000 pounds a year tax free.

That 1,000 pounds a year tax free has now to be earned by those who work and given to those who work not. In Germany, in Austria, there were also those who did well in the war and invested in war loans and the like. But their currency depreciated to such an extent that what would have been an income equivalent to 1,000 pounds a year had Germany won, became in Germany 80 pounds a year, and in Austria only 7 pounds or 8 pounds. They have to work nowadays. So have all the old moneyed cla.s.s. And even in France and Italy incomes have been reduced by one-half and two-thirds. England is fortunate no doubt; but in another sense she is unfortunate. We cannot exactly afford so many idle hands; nor can we afford the number of empty minds that England has to-day.

And more time and trouble is being given to the education of children who will not do anything for England than to the education of the middle and working cla.s.ses. The teachers generally are very enthusiastic for their profession and their work. Like the journalists they would make for real values, but they are obstructed by forces which prove too great for them.

The remedy which is generally propounded is "revolution," and revolution of a kind is bound to come. It is difficult to believe in the suggestion of Chesterton, "Our wrath come after Russia's wrath, and our wrath prove the worst." It may not be wrath but it will be change.

A few men on Clydeside and a few in South Wales are of the dangerous stuff, but most people in Great Britain are pa.s.sive to a fault. A great economic change brought about by business depression is more probable than a stampede to the barricades.

Strangely enough, all winter, spring, and summer of 1921 the "cost of living" decreased in England. No doubt, if England resolved to live on European food instead of colonial food, and if she could get that food in sufficient quant.i.ties, and if she could import all the goods she requires, the "cost of living" would still go down for quite an appreciable time. Down also would go the pound, and eventually up--very rapidly up--would go the cost of living.

The position of the pound is in any case against nature. Money and the cost of materials tend like water to find a common level. The majestic pound is standing up on end like the waters of the Red Sea to let the Israelites pa.s.s over dry-shod out of Egypt. When they get to the other side down will come the pound.

There is besides the economic element of revolution a political one also. If England follows her parliamentary inst.i.tutions and does not suspend them as Czecho-Slovakia has done hers, there is bound to be a great change soon. Adult franchise of male and female ought certainly to bring Labour into power. But the spirit of England will overcome the greed and vulgarity of the age.

England still preserves a fine reputation on the Continent. That is because of the code of a gentleman. The man who keeps his word, lives cleanly, and is generally reserved in conversation, is admired in every capital. The political efforts made to ease the peace treaty and help the Germans, have done England's reputation no harm. The English fill the imagination as men of honour.

It is difficult, however, to relate England to Europe. In terms of England's honour we are nearer than we were, and _Perfide Albion_ is not nearly so perfidious. But as a business people we are out of touch. We have more bad types of business men than formerly. There are a lot of commercial rogues, who, at least, call themselves English, though their mothers may have played false. On the other hand, the stalwart, honest type does not get on so well as he did. The war has confused his mind a little. Many still want to punish the Germans.

And in punishing the ex-enemy they punish themselves.

One would think that the supposed "nation of shopkeepers" would be appealed to on grounds of commercial sagacity. A nation that has made the experiment of a business government might be expected to live by a business code. It is well known in business that good-will is the foundation of prosperous trade, and that hostile relationships do not pay.

How often has one read this type of appeal in England. The sentences are taught in English commercial correspondence cla.s.ses:

"I want to make a proposition to you, a strictly commercial proposition. How can we help one another to do more business? How can we be mutually serviceable to one another? Think it over. I do you a good turn now because I know you are certain to be in a position by and by to do me a good turn."

It has been open for England to say this to Germany, France, Serbia, Czecho-Slovakia, the United States, and to many other countries, but for some reason or other we have held off. We have subst.i.tuted another and not very worthy phrase, "Let them stew in their own juice,"

forgetting that if we let them stew there we shall stew, too, in ours.

And it is not likely to be a very good stew.

"The Times" has given its powerful influence to promote the idea of an alliance with France. But it came at a moment when France had just been thwarted by Great Britain in her European policy. Moreover, it was not inspired by either the people or the Government of England.

France understood this. "The Times" also has been developing the idea of Anglo-American friendship, and that has made more progress there.

The many t.i.tled American women in England naturally desire it, and collectively they have considerable power. Most American writers in England and English writers in America work for it.

"If we can't run together, we of the same blood and of the same tongue," says Sinclair Lewis, to a literary club one June night, "let's give it up. Let's cry off altogether and admit that we are all a lot of savages."

The English ma.s.ses are indifferent to the idea of alliance. The real opposition to it is not in England, but in America where Anglophobes abound. There are more haters of England in America than in the countries of Europe--more lovers also. Both are sensitive, and the game of mortifying one another goes on.