Prime Ministers and Some Others Part 14

We carried our Bill in 1884, and as the General Election of 1885 drew on, it was touching to feel the labourer's grat.i.tude to all who had helped him in the attainment of his rights. By that time Gladstone had lost a great deal of his popularity in the towns, where Chamberlain was the hero. But in the rural districts the people worshipped Gladstone, and neither knew nor cared for any other politician. His was the name to conjure with. His picture hung in every cottage. His speeches were studied and thumbed by hard hands till the paper was frayed into tatters. It was Gladstone who had won the vote for the labourer, and it was Gladstone who was to lead them into the Land of Promise. "Three Acres and a Cow,"

from being a joke, had pa.s.sed into a watchword, though Gladstone had never given it the faintest sanction. And the labourers vaguely believed that the possession of the vote would bring them some material benefit. So they voted for Gladstone with solid enthusiasm, and placed their Mirage in his return to power. But alas! they only realized a new and a more tragical disappointment. In January, 1886, an amendment to the Address embodying the principle of "Three Acres and a Cow" was carried against the Tory Government; Gladstone became Prime Minister, and the disconsolate labourers found that the Mirage had cheated them once again. It is not easy to depict the sorrow and mortification which ensued on this discovery. The vote, after all, was only a Dead Sea apple. The energies which were to have been bestowed on the creation of better surroundings for English labourers were suddenly transferred to the creation of an Irish Parliament, and in wide areas of rural population the labourers sank back again into hopelessness and inactivity. Once bit, twice shy. They had braved the wrath of their employers and all the banded influences of the Hall and the Vicarage in order to vote Liberal in December, 1885. They had got nothing by their constancy; and in six months, when they were again incited to the poll, they shook their heads and abstained. The disillusionment of the labourers gave the victory of 1886 to the Tories, and kept the Liberals out of power for twenty years.

II

_MIST_

"Mistiness is the Mother of Wisdom." If this sarcastic dogma be true, we are living in a generation pre-eminently wise. A "season of mists" it unquestionably is; whether it is equally marked by "mellow fruitfulness" is perhaps more disputable.

My path in life is metaphorically very much what Wordsworth's was literally. "I wander, lonely as a cloud that floats on high, o'er vales and hills." I find hills and vales alike shrouded in mist.

Everyone is befogged, and the guesses as to where exactly we are and whither we are tending are various and perplexing. While all are, in truth, equally bewildered, people take their bewilderment in different ways. Some honestly confess that they cannot see a yard in front of them; others profess a more penetrating vision, and affect to be quite sure of what lies ahead. It is a matter of temperament; but the professors of clear sight are certainly less numerous than they were three years ago.

We are like men standing on a mountain when the mist rolls up from the valley. At first we all are very cheerful, and a.s.sure one another that it will pa.s.s away in half an hour, leaving our path quite clear. Then by degrees we begin to say that it promises to be a more tedious business than we expected, and we must just wait in patience till the clouds roll by. At length we frankly confess to one another that we have completely lost our bearings, and that we dare not move a foot for fear we should tumble into the abyss.

In this awkward plight our "strength is to sit still"; but, even while we so sit, we try to keep ourselves warm by remembering that the most persistent mists do not last for ever.

In one section of society I hear voices of melancholy vaticination.

"I don't believe," said one lady in my hearing--"I don't believe that we shall ever again see six-feet footmen with powdered hair,"

and a silent gloom settled on the company, only deepened by another lady, also attached to the old order, who murmured: "Ah! and powdered footmen are not the only things that we shall never see again."

Within twenty-four hours of this depressing dialogue I encounter my democratic friend, the Editor of the _Red Flag_. He glories in the fact that Labour has "come into its own," and is quite sure that, unless it can get more to eat, it will cease to make munitions, and so will secure an early, if not a satisfactory, peace. In vain I suggest to my friend that his vision is obscured by the mist, and that the apparition which thus strangely exhilarates him is the creation of his own brain.

Then I turn to the politicians, and of these it is to be remarked that, however much befogged they may be, they always are certain that they see much more clearly than the world at large. This circ.u.mstance would invest their opinions with a peculiar authority, if only they did not contradict one another flat. We are doubling the electorate: what result will the General Election produce?

Politicians who belong to the family of Mr. Despondency and his daughter, Muchafraid, reply that Monarchy will be abolished, Capital "conscripted" (delightful verb), debt repudiated, and Anarchy enthroned.

Strangely dissimilar results are predicted by the Party-hacks, who, being by lifelong habit trained to applaud whatever Government does, announce with smug satisfaction that the British workman loves property, and will use his new powers to conserve it; adores the Crown, and feels that the House of Lords is the true protector of his liberties.

Again, there are publicists who (like myself) have all their lives proclaimed their belief in universal suffrage as the one guarantee of freedom. If we are consistent, we ought to rejoice in the prospect now unfolding itself before us; but perhaps the mist has got into our eyes. Our forefathers abolished the tyranny of the Crown. Successive Reform Acts have abolished the tyranny of cla.s.s. But what about the tyranny of capital? Is Democracy safe from it?

I do not pretend to be clearer-sighted than my neighbours; but in the mist each of us sees the form of some evil which he specially dislikes; and to my thinking Bureaucracy is just as grave a menace to Freedom as Militarism, and in some ways graver, as being more plausible. We used to call ourselves Collectivists, and we rejoiced in the prospect of the State doing for us what we ought to do for ourselves. We voted Political Economy a dismal science (which it is), and felt sure that, if only the Government would take in hand the regulation of supply and demand, the inequalities of life would be adjusted, everyone would be well fed, and everyone would be happy. As far as we can see through the blinding mist which now surrounds us, it looks as if the State were about as competent to control trade as to control the weather. Bureaucracy is having its fling, and when the mist clears off it will stand revealed as a well-meant (and well-paid) imposture.

Closely related to all these problems is the problem of the women's vote. Here the mist is very thick indeed. Those who have always favoured it are naturally sanguine of good results. Women will vote for peace; women will vote for temperance; women will vote for everything that guards the sanct.i.ty of the home. Those who have opposed the change see very different consequences. Women will vote for war; women will vote as the clergyman bids them; women will vote for Socialism. All this is sheer guess-work, and very misty guess-work too.

And yet once more. There are (though this may to some seem strange) people who consider the Church at least as important as the State, and even more so, inasmuch as its concernments relate to an eternal instead of a transitory order. What are the prospects of the Church?

Here the mists are thicker than ever. Is the ideal of the Free Church in the Free State any nearer realization than it was three years ago? All sorts of discordant voices reach me through the layers of cloud. Some cry, "Our one hope for national religion is to rivet tighter than ever the chains which bind the Church to the chariot-wheels of the State." Others reply, "Break those chains, and let us go free--even without a roof over our heads or a pound in our pockets." And there is a third section--the party which, as Newman said, attempts to steer between the Scylla of Aye and the Charybdis of No through the channel of no meaning, and this section cries for some reform which shall abolish the cynical mockery of the Conge d'elire, and secure to the Church, while still established and endowed, the self-governing rights of a Free Church. In ecclesiastical quarters the mist is always particularly thick.

Certainly at this moment, if ever in our national life, we must be content to "walk by faith and not by sight." This chapter began with imagery, and with imagery it shall end. "I have often stood on some mountain peak, some c.u.mbrian or Alpine hill, over which the dim mists rolled; and suddenly, through one mighty rent in that cloudy curtain, I have seen the blue heaven in all its beauty, and, far below my feet, the rivers and cities and cornfields of the plain sparkled in the heavenly sunlight."

That is, in a figure, the vision for which we must hope and pray.

III

"_DISSOLVING THROES_"

I borrow my t.i.tle from a poet.

"He grew old in an age he condemned; He looked on the rushing decay Of the times which had sheltered his youth; Felt the dissolving throes Of a social order he loved."

It seems odd that Matthew Arnold should have spoken thus about Wordsworth; for one would have expected that the man who wrote so gloriously of the French Revolution, "as it appeared to enthusiasts at its commencement," would have rejoiced in the new order which it established for all Europe. But the younger poet knew the elder with an intimacy which defies contradiction; and one must, I suppose, number Wordsworth among those who, in each succeeding age, have shed tears of useless regret over the unreturning past. Talleyrand said that, to know what an enjoyable thing life was capable of being, one must have been a member of the _ancienne n.o.blesse_ before the Revolution. It was the cynical and characteristic utterance of a nature singularly base; but even the divine Burke (though he had no personal or selfish interests in the matter) was convinced that the Revolution had not only destroyed political freedom, but also social welfare, and had "crushed everything respectable and virtuous in the nation." What, in the view of Burke and Talleyrand, the Revolution did for France, that, by a curious irony of fate, our attempt to defeat the Revolution did for England. Burke forced us into the Revolutionary War, and that war (as Gladstone once said in a letter to the present writer) "almost unmade the liberties, the Const.i.tution, even the material interests and prosperity, of our country." Patriots like William Cobbett and Sydney Smith, though absolutely convinced that the war was just and necessary, doubted if England could ever rally from the immense strain which it had imposed on her resources, or regain the freedom which, in order to beat France, she had so lightly surrendered.

At a time when Manchester was unrepresented and Gatton sent two Members to Parliament, it was steadily maintained by lovers of the established order that the proposed enlargement of the electorate was "incompatible with a just equality of civil rights, or with the necessary restraints of social obligation." If it were carried, religion, morality, and property would perish together, and our venerable Const.i.tution would topple down in ruins. "A thousand years have scarce sufficed to make England what she is: one hour may lay her in the dust." In 1861 J. W. Croker wrote to his patron, the great borough-monger Lord Hertford: "There can be no doubt that the Reform Bill is a stepping-stone in England to a republic, and in Ireland to separation. Both _may_ happen without the Bill, but with it they are inevitable." Next year the Bill became law.

Lord Bathurst cut off his pigtail, exclaiming: "Ichabod, for the glory is departed"--an exquisitely significant combination of act and word--and the Duke of Wellington announced that England had accomplished "a revolution by due course of law." In some sense the words were true. Political power had pa.s.sed from the aristocracy to the middle cla.s.s. The English equivalents of Talleyrand--the men who directly or in their ancestors had ruled England since 1688, had enjoyed power without responsibility, and privilege which alike Kings and mobs had questioned in vain--were filled with the wildest alarms. Emotional orators saw visions of the guillotine; calmer spirits antic.i.p.ated the ballot-box; and the one implement of anarchy was scarcely more dreaded than the other.

Sixteen years pa.s.sed. Property and freedom seemed pretty secure. Even privilege, though shaken, had not been overthrown; and a generation had grown up to which the fears of revolution seemed fantastic. Then suddenly came the uprising of the nations in '48; and once again "dissolving throes" were felt, with pain or joy according to the temperament of those who felt them. "We have seen," said Charles Greville, "such a stirring-up of all the elements of society as n.o.body ever dreamt of; we have seen a general saturnalia--ignorance, vanity, insolence, poverty, ambition, escaping from every kind of restraint, ranging over the world, and turning it topsy-turvy as it pleased. All Europe exhibits the result--a ma.s.s of ruin, terror, and despair." Matthew Arnold, young and ardent, and in some ways democratic, wrote in a different vein: "The hour of the hereditary peerage, and eldest sonship, and immense properties, has, I am convinced, as Lamartine would say, struck." Seventy years ago! And that "hour" has not struck yet!

The "dissolving throes" were lulled again, and I scarcely made themselves felt till 1866, when a mild attempt to admit the pick of the artisans to the electoral privileges of the middle cla.s.s woke the panic-stricken vehemence of Robert Lowe. "If," he asked, "you want venality, ignorance, drunkenness, and the means of intimidation; if you want impulsive, unreflecting, and violent people, where will you go to look for them--to the top or to the bottom?" Well might Bishop Wilberforce report to a friend, "It was enough to make the flesh creep to hear Bob Lowe's prognostications for the future of England."

Next year the artisans got the vote, though the great Lord Shaftesbury, who knew more than most of his peers about working-men, plainly told the House of Lords that "a large proportion of the working cla.s.ses have a deep and solemn conviction that property is not distributed as property ought to be; that some checks ought to be kept upon the acc.u.mulation of property in single hands; and that to take away by legislation that which is in excess with a view to bestowing it on those who have less, is not a breach of any law, human or Divine."

Yet once more. When in 1885 the agricultural labourers (of whom a Tory M.P. said that they were no fitter for a vote than the beasts they tended), were admitted to the franchise, the same terrors shook the squirearchy. We were warned that the land would soon be broken up into small holdings; that sport would become impossible; and that "the stately homes of England" must all be closed, for lack of money to keep them open. The country, we were told, had seen its best days, and "Merry England" had vanished for ever.

I only recall these "dissolving throes," real or imaginary, because I fancy that just now they are again making themselves felt, and perhaps with better reason than ever before in our history. People who venture to look ahead are asking themselves this question: If this war goes on much longer, what sort of England will emerge?

Some are looking forward with rapture to a new heaven and a new earth; others dread the impending destruction "of a social order they loved." Can we not trace something of this dread in Lord Lansdowne's much-canva.s.sed letter? He is one of the most patriotic and most experienced men in public life; he "looks on the rushing decay of the times which sheltered his youth"; and it may well be that he is striving to avert what seems to him a social catastrophe.

IV

_INSt.i.tUTIONS AND CHARACTER_

As a rule, I call a spade a spade. When I mean _The Times_, I say _The Times_, and I condemn the old-fashioned twaddle of talking about "a morning contemporary." But to-day I depart from my rule and content myself with saying that I lately read in an important newspaper a letter dealing with Mr. Asquith's distinction between "Prussian Militarism" and "German Democracy." For my own part, I did not think that distinction very sound. The experience of the last three years has led me to the conclusion that the German democracy is to the full as bellicose as the military caste, and that it has in no way dissociated itself from the abominable crimes against decency and humanity which the military caste has committed.

I hold that the German people, as we know it to-day, is brutalized; but when one thus frames an indictment against a whole nation, one is bound to ask oneself what it is that has produced so calamitous a result. How can a whole nation go wrong? Has any race a "double dose of original sin"? I do not believe it. Human nature as it leaves the Creator's hand is pretty much the same everywhere; and when we see it deformed and degraded, we must look for the influence which has been its bane. In dealing with individuals the enquiry is comparatively simple, and the answer not far to seek. But when we deal with nations we cannot, as a rule; point to a single figure, or even a group of figures, and say, "He, or they, did the mischief."

We are forced to look wider and deeper, and we shall be well advised if we learn from Burke to realize "the mastery of laws, inst.i.tutions, and government over the character and happiness of man." Let me apply Burke's teaching to the case before us.

The writer of the letter which I am discussing has a whole-hearted dislike of the Germans, and especially of the Prussians; charges them with "cruelty, brutal arrogance, deceit, cunning, manners and customs below those of savages"; includes in the indictment professors, commercial men, and women; recites the hideous list of crimes committed during the present war; and roundly says that, however you label him, "the Prussian will always remain a beast."

I dispute none of these propositions. I believe them to be sadly and bitterly true; but if I am to follow Burke's counsel, I must enquire into the "laws, inst.i.tutions, and government" which have prevailed in Germany, and which have exercised so disastrous a "mastery over the character and happiness of man." In this enquiry it would be obvious to touch military ascendency, despotic monarchy, representative inst.i.tutions deprived of effective power, administration made omnipotent, and bureaucratic interference with every detail of human life. Sydney Smith's words about unreformed England apply perfectly to modern Germany. "Of all ingenious instruments of despotism I most commend a popular a.s.sembly where the majority are paid and hired, and a few bold and able men, by their brave speeches, make the people believe they are free."

But for our present purpose I must concentrate attention on another inst.i.tution which has had an even more direct and practical bearing on the character of the German people--and this is the enforcement of military service. This, like every other inst.i.tution, must be judged by its effects on the character of those who are subject to it. The writer of the letter holds that "the only good thing about the German nation" is the "national service through which all men pa.s.s, and which makes soldiers of all not physically unfit, and which inculcates patriotism, loyalty, obedience, courage, discipline, duty." Now, these words, read in connexion with the description of the German people quoted above, suggest a puzzling problem. The Germans are cruel, brutally arrogant, deceitful, and cunning, and "the Prussian will always remain a beast." Yet these same people have all pa.s.sed through a discipline "which inculcates patriotism, loyalty, obedience, courage, discipline, duty." Doth a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter? Does the same system make men patriotic and cruel, loyal and arrogant, obedient and deceitful, courageous and cunning, dutiful and beastly?

Perhaps it does. I can conceive some of these pairs of qualities united in a single character. A man might be a zealous patriot, and yet horribly cruel; loyal to his Sovereign, but arrogant to his inferiors; obedient to authority, yet deceitful among coequals; courageous in danger, yet cunning in avoiding it; dutiful according to his own standard of duty, and yet as "beastly" as the torturers of Belgium. But a system which produces such a very chequered type of character is scarcely to be commended.

Now, the writer might reply, "I only said that the military system _inculcated_ certain virtues. I did not say that it ensured them."

Then it fails. If it has produced only the "vile German race" which the writer so justly dislikes, unredeemed by any of the virtues which it "inculcates," then it has nothing to say for itself. It stands confessed as an unmixed evil.

It is right to expose a logical fallacy, but I am not fond of the attempt to obscure by logic-chopping what is a writer's real meaning.

I will therefore say that, as far as I can make out, what this particular writer really believes is that the German people, through some innate and incurable frowardness of disposition, have turned the inestimable blessings of compulsory soldiership to their own moral undoing, and have made themselves wholly bad and beastly, in spite of a beneficent inst.i.tution which would have made them good and even pleasant.

Here I take leave to differ, and to range myself on the side of Burke. Great, indeed--nay, incalculable--is "the mastery of laws, inst.i.tutions, and government over the character and happiness of man." The system is known by its fruits. We may think as badly as we like of the Germans--as badly as they deserve--but we must remember the "laws, inst.i.tutions, and government" that have dominated their national development. And this is not only a matter of just and rational thinking, but is also a counsel of safety for ourselves. If, as a result of this war, we allow our personal and social liberties (rightly suspended for the moment) to be permanently abolished or restricted; and, above all, if we bend our necks to the yoke of a military despotism; we shall be inviting a profound degradation of our national character. It would indeed be a tragical consummation of our great fight for Freedom if, when it is over, the other nations could point to us and say: "England has sunk to the moral level of Germany."

V