Hilaire Belloc Part 10

In the monastic inst.i.tution of the sixth and seventh centuries Mr.

Belloc sees the power which re-created North and Western Europe.

This inst.i.tution [he says] did more work in Britain than in any other province of the Empire. And it had far more to do. It found a district utterly wrecked, perhaps half depopulated, and having lost all but a vague memory of the old Roman order; it had to remake, if it could, of all this part of a Europe. No other instrument was fitted for the purpose.

The chief difficulty of starting again the machine of civilization when its parts have been distorted by a barbarian interlude, whether external or internal in origin, is the acc.u.mulation of capital. The next difficulty is the preservation of such capital in the midst of continual petty feuds and raids, and the third is that general continuity of effort, and that treasuring up of proved experience, to which a barbaric time, succeeding upon the decline of a civilization, is particularly unfitted. For the surmounting of all these difficulties the monks of Western Europe were suited in a high degree. Fixed wealth could be acc.u.mulated in the hands of communities whose whole temptation was to gather, and who had no opportunity for spending in waste. The religious atmosphere in which they grew up forbade their spoliation, at least in the internal wars of a Christian people, and each of the great foundations provided a community of learning and treasuring up of experience which single families, especially families of barbaric chieftains, could never have achieved. They provided leisure for literary effort, and a strict disciplinary rule enforcing regular, continuous, and a.s.siduous labour, and they provided these in a society from which exact application of such a kind had all but disappeared.[12]

In this way the just heritage of "our own kind" was preserved for us.

The great monasteries suffered severely in the Danish invasions, "the pagan storm which all but repeated in Britain the disaster of the Saxon invasions, which all but overcame the mystic tenacity of Alfred and the positive mission of the town of Paris"; but they re-arose and were again exercising a strong civilizing influence "when civilization returned in fullness with the Norman Conquest."

The Conquest, in Mr. Belloc's view, is "almost as sharp a division in the history of England as is the landing of St. Augustine ... though ...

the re-entry of England into European civilization in the seventh century must count as a far greater and more decisive event than its first experience of united and regular government under the Normans in the eleventh." But it did not change the intimate philosophy of the people:

The Conquest found England Catholic, vaguely feudal, and, though in rather an isolated way, thoroughly European. The Normans organized that feudality, extirpated whatever was unorthodox or slack in the machinery of the religious system, and let in the full light of European civilization through a wide-open door, which had hitherto been half-closed.[13]

The organization of feudal government by the Normans brings us to a consideration of the territorial system of England which can be traced certainly from Saxon and conjecturally from Roman times.

In making the study of history, as does Mr. Belloc, living and organic, it is of capital importance to seize the fact that the fundamental economic inst.i.tution of pagan antiquity was slavery. Before the coming of the Christian Era, and even after its advent, slavery was taken for granted. Mr. Belloc says:

In no matter what field of the European past we make our research, we find, from two thousand years ago upwards one fundamental inst.i.tution whereupon the whole of society reposes; that fundamental inst.i.tution is Slavery.... Our European ancestry, those men from whom we are descended and whose blood runs with little admixture in our veins, took slavery for granted, made of it the economic pivot upon which the production of wealth should turn, and never doubted but that it was normal to all human society.[14]

With the growth of the Church, however, the servile inst.i.tution was for a time dissolved. This dissolution was a sub-conscious effect of the spread of Christianity and not the outcome of any direct attack of the Church upon slavery:

No dogma of the Church p.r.o.nounced Slavery to be immoral, or the sale and purchase of men to be a sin, or the imposition of compulsory labour upon a Christian to be a contravention of any human right.

Mr. Belloc traces the disappearance of this fundamental inst.i.tution rather as follows. He says:

The sale of Christians to Pagan masters was abhorrent to the later empire of the Barbarian Invasions, not because slavery in itself was condemned, but because it was a sort of treason to civilization to force men away from Civilization to Barbarism.[15]

The disappearance of slavery begins with the establishment as the fundamental unit of production of those great landed estates which were known to the Romans as _villae_ and were cultivated by slaves. In the last years of the Empire it became more convenient in the decay of communications and public power and more consonant with the social spirit of the time, to make sure of the slave's produce by asking him for no more than certain customary dues. In course of time this arrangement became a sort of bargain, and by the ninth century, when this process had been gradually at work for nearly three hundred years, what we now call the Manorial system was fairly firmly established. By the tenth century the system was crystallized and had become so natural to men that the originally servile character of the folk working on the land was forgotten. The labourer at the end of the Dark Ages was no longer a slave but a serf.

In the early Middle Ages, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, at the time, that is, of the Crusades and the Norman Conquest, the serf is already nearly a peasant. As the generations pa.s.s he becomes more and more free in the eyes of the courts and of society.

We see then that Saxon England, at the time the Conqueror landed, was organized on the Manorial system. This arrangement, with its village lords and their dependent serfs, was common to the whole of the West, and could be found on the Rhine, in Gaul and even in Italy; but the Manorial system in England differed from the Manorial system of Western Europe in one fatally important particular.

In Saxon England [says Mr. Belloc] there was no systematic organization by which the local landowner definitely recognized a feudal superior and through him the power of a Central Government.... When William landed, the whole system of tenure was in disorder in the sense that the local lord of the village was not accustomed to the interference of the superior, and that no groups of lords had come into existence by which the territorial system could be bound in sheaves, as it were, and the whole of it attached to one central point at the Royal Court.

Such a system of groups _had_ arisen in Gaul, and to that difference ultimately we owe the French territorial system of the present day, but William the Norman's new subjects had no comprehension of it.[16]

The order introduced by William was not strong enough to endure in face of the ancient customs of the populace and the lack of any bond between scattered and locally independent units. A recrudescence of the early independence of the landowners was felt in the reign of Henry II, while under John it blazed out into successful revolt. Throughout the Middle Ages we may see the village landlord gradually growing in independence and usurping, as a cla.s.s, the power of the Central Government.

What the outcome of this state of affairs would have been had events been allowed to develop without interruption, it is impossible to say.

Whether or not the peasant would have acquired freedom and wealth, at the expense of the landlord; whether then a strong Central Government would have arisen; whether property would have become more or less equally distributed and the State have been composed of a ma.s.s of small owners, all possessed of the means of production--these are things we can only guess. What we do know, and what Mr. Belloc has made abundantly clear, is that "with the close of the Middle Ages the societies of Western Christendom, and England among the rest, were economically free." In England the great ma.s.s of the populace was gradually becoming more and more possessed of property; but at the same time there existed a very considerable cla.s.s of large landowners, who were not only wealthy and powerful, but incapable of rigid control by the Crown.

This, then, was the state of England when an immediate and overwhelming change occurred. "Nothing like it," says Mr. Belloc, "has been known in European history." An artificial revolution was brought about which involved a transformation of a good quarter of the whole economic power of the nation. If we are to understand Mr. Belloc's view of the England of the present day, it is essential that we should grasp clearly his view of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, for from this operation, he says, "the whole economic future of England was to flow."

Mr. Belloc a.n.a.lyses the effect of the Dissolution of the Monasteries thus:

All over England men who already held in virtually absolute property from one-quarter to one-third of the soil and the ploughs and the barns of a village, became possessed in a very few years of a further great section of the means of production which turned the scale wholly in their favour. They added to that third a new and extra fifth. They became at a blow the owners of _half_ the land![17]

The effect of this increase in ownership was tremendous. The men of this landowning cla.s.s, says Mr. Belloc, "began to fill the universities, the judiciary. The Crown less and less decided between great and small. More and more the great could decide in their own favour."

The process was in full swing before Henry died, and because Henry had failed to keep the wealth of the monasteries in the hands of the Crown, as he undoubtedly intended to do, there existed in England, by about a century after his death, a Crown which, instead of disposing of revenues far greater than that of any subject, was dominated by a wealthy cla.s.s.

"By 1630-40 the economic revolution was finally accomplished and the new economic reality thrusting itself upon the old traditions of England was a powerful oligarchy of large owners overshadowing an impoverished and dwindled monarchy."

And this oligarchy, which was originally an oligarchy of birth as well as wealth, but which rapidly became an oligarchy of wealth alone--Mr.

Belloc cites as an example the history of the family of Williams (alias Cromwell)--not only so subjugated the power of the central government as to reduce the king, after 1660, to the level of a salaried puppet, but also, in course of time, ate up all the smaller owners until, by about 1700, "more than half of the English were dispossessed of capital and of land. Not one man in two, even if you reckon the very small owners, inhabited a house of which he was the secure possessor, or tilled land from which he could not be turned off."

Such a proportion [continues Mr. Belloc] may seem to us to-day a wonderfully free arrangement, and certainly if nearly one-half of our population were possessed of the means of production, we should be in a very different situation from that in which we find ourselves. But the point to seize is that, though the bad business was very far from completion in or about 1700, yet by that date England had already become capitalist. She had already permitted a vast section of her population to become _proletarian_, and it is this and _not_ the so-called "Industrial Revolution," a later thing, which accounts for the terrible social conditions in which we find ourselves to-day.[18]

It is perhaps Mr. Belloc's most valuable contribution to the study of modern English history that he has destroyed piecemeal that unintelligent, unhistorical and false statement, found in innumerable textbooks and taught so glibly in our schools and universities, that "the horrors of the industrial system were a blind and necessary product of material and impersonal forces"; and has shown us instead that:

The vast growth of the proletariat, the concentration of ownership into the hands of a few owners, and the exploitation by those owners of the ma.s.s of the community, had no fatal or necessary connection with the discovery of new and perpetually improving methods of production. The evil proceeded in direct historical sequence, proceeded patently and demonstrably, from the fact that England, the seed plot of the industrial system, was _already_ captured by a wealthy oligarchy _before_ the series of great discoveries began.[19]

We see then that the slave of the Roman villa, a being both economically and politically unfree, developed throughout North-Western Europe, in the course of the thousand years or more of the uninterrupted growth of the Church, first into the serf and then into the peasant, a being both economically and politically free:

The three forms under which labour was exercised--the serf, secure in his position, and burdened only with regular dues, which were but a fraction of his produce; the freeholder, a man independent save for money dues, which were more of a tax than a rent; the Guild, in which well-divided capital worked co-operatively for craft production, for transport and for commerce--all three between them were making for a society which should be based upon the principle of property. All, or most--the normal family--should own.

And on ownership the freedom of the State should repose.... Slavery had gone and in its place had come that establishment of free possession which seemed so normal to men, and so consonant to a happy human life. No particular name was then found for it. To-day, and now that it has disappeared, we must construct an awkward one, and say that the Middle Ages had instinctively conceived and brought into existence the Distributive State.[20]

By the mishandling of an artificial economic revolution which was so sudden as to be overwhelming, namely, the Dissolution of the Monasteries, an England which was economically free, was turned into the England we know to-day, "of which at least one-third is indigent, of which nineteen-twentieths are dispossessed of capital and of land, and of which the whole industry and national life is controlled upon its economic side by a few chance directors of millions, a few masters of unsocial and irresponsible monopolies."

Thus Mr. Belloc traces the growth and development of our economic conditions. In _The Servile State_ he goes further and shows what new conditions are rapidly developing out of those now in existence.

At the present time, we know, the economic freedom of nineteen-twentieths of the English people has disappeared. Will their political freedom also disappear?

To this question Mr. Belloc's answer is as decided as it is startling.

He does not argue that the political freedom of the proletariat may possibly disappear. He says that it has _already begun_ to disappear.

The Capitalist State, he argues, in which all are free but in which the means of production are in the hands of a few, grows unstable in proportion as it grows perfect. The internal strains which render it unstable are, first, the conflict between its social realities and its moral and legal basis, and, second, the insecurity to which it condemns free citizens; the fact, that is, that the few possessors can grant or withhold livelihood from the many non-possessors. There are only three solutions of this instability. These are, the distributive solution, the collectivist solution, and the servile solution. Of these three stable social arrangements the reformer, owing to the Christian traditions of society, will not advocate the introduction of the servile state, which Mr. Belloc defines as "that arrangement of society in which so considerable a number of the families and individuals are constrained by positive law to labour for the advantage of other families and individuals as to stamp the whole community with the mark of such labour." If this arrangement be not advocated, there remain only the distributive and the collectivist solutions. Collectivism being to a certain extent a natural development of Capitalism and appealing both to capitalist and proletarian, is apparently the easier solution. But, says Mr. Belloc--and this is the kernel of his whole thesis--the Collectivist theory _in action_ does not produce Collectivism, but something quite different; namely, the Servile State. There is only one way, according to Mr. Belloc's argument, in which Collectivism can be put into force, and that is by confiscation. The reformer is not allowed to confiscate, but he is allowed to do all he can to establish security and sufficiency for the non-owners. In attaining this object he inevitably establishes servile conditions.

In the last chapter of this extraordinarily valuable book Mr. Belloc points to various examples of servile legislation, either already to be found on the Statute Book or in process of being put there. He is convinced that the re-establishment of the servile status in industrial society is already upon us; but records it as an impression, though no more than an impression, that the Servile State, strong as the tide is making for it in Prussia and in England to-day, will be modified, checked, perhaps defeated in war, certainly halted in its attempt to establish itself completely by the strong reaction which such free societies as France and Ireland upon its flank will perpetually exercise.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 12: _Historic Thames_, p. 91.]

[Footnote 13: _Historic Thames_, p. 101.]

[Footnote 14: _Servile State_, p. 31.]

[Footnote 15: _Ib._, p. 41.]

[Footnote 16: _Historic Thames_, p. 141.]

[Footnote 17: _Servile State_, p. 64.]

[Footnote 18: _Servile State_, p. 68.]

[Footnote 19: _Ib._, p. 62.]