 10. A Norfolk Man Among the delights of historical study, which make it so curiously similar to travel and therefore so fatally attractive to men who cannot afford it, is the element of discovery and surprise, notably in little details. When in travel, one goes along a way one has never been before, one often comes upon something odd, which one could not dream was there. For instance, once I was in a room in a little house in the south, I thought there must be a machinery somewhere from the noise I heard, until a man in the house quietly lifted up the trapdoor on the floor and there, running under and through the house, a long way below, was a river, the River Garonne. It is the same way in historical study. You come upon the most extraordinary things, little things, but things whose unexpectedness is enormous. I had an example of this the other day as I was looking up some last details to make certain of the affair of all me. Most people have heard of the French Revolution and many people have heard of the Battle of Valmy, which decided the first fate of that movement when it was first threatened by war. But very few people have read about Valmy, so it is necessary to give some idea of the action to understand the astonishing little thing attaching to it which I am about to describe. The Canaanate of Valmy was exchanged between a French army with its back to a range of hills and a Prussian army about a mile away over against them. It was as though the French army had stretched from Leatherhead to Epsom and had engaged in a Canaanate with a Prussian army lying over against them in a position of straddle of the road to Kingston. Through this range of hills at the back of the French army lay a gap, just as there is a gap through the hills behind Leatherhead. Not only was that gap easily passable by an army, easily at least compared with the hill country on either side, but it had running through it the great road from Metz to Paris, so that advance along it was rapid and practical. It so happened that another force of the enemy, beside that which was cannonating the French in front, was advancing through this gap from behind, and it is evident that if this second force of the enemy had been able to get through the gap it would have been all up with the French. Dumouriz, who commanded the French, saw this well enough. He had ordered the gap to be strongly fortified and well gunned, and a camp to be formed there largely made up of volunteers and irregulars. On the proper conduct of that post depended everything. And here comes the fun. The commander of the post was not what you might expect a Frenchman of any one of the French types with which the revolution has made us familiar. Contrary wise he was an elderly private gentleman from the country of Novovo. His name was Money. That little is known about him is entertaining to a degree. His own words prove him to be like the person in the song, a very honest man, and luckily for us he has left in a book a record of the day and subsequent actions stamped vividly with his own character. John Money, called by his neighbors General John Money, not as you might expect General Money, a man devoted to the noble profession of arms and also eaten up with a passion for ballooning. I found it difficult to believe that he was first in action at the age of nine years, or that he held King George's commission as a coronet at the age of ten. He does not tell us so himself nor do any of his friends. The surmise is that of our universities, and it is worthy of them. Clap on ten years and you are nearer the mark. At any rate he was under fire in 1761, and he was a coronet in 1762, a coronet in the inskilling Dragoons with a commission dated on the 11th of March of that year. Then he transformed himself into a linesman, got his company in the ninth foot eight years later, and eight years later again at the outbreak of the American War he was a major. He was a quartermaster general under Burgoyne. He was taken prisoner I think at Saratoga, but anyhow during that disastrous advance upon the Hudson Valley. He got his lieutenant Colonelcy toward the end of the war. He retired from the army and never saw active service again. When the low countries revolted against Austria, he offered his services to the insurgents and was accepted, but the truly entertaining chapter of his adventures begins when he suggested himself to the French government as a very proper and likely man to command a brigade on the outbreak of the great war with the Empire and with Prussia. Very beautifully does he tell us in his preface what moved him to that act. Colonel Money, he says in the quiet third person of a self-respecting Norfolk gentleman, does not mean to assign any other reason for serving the armies of France than that he loves his profession and went there merely to improve himself in it. Spoken like a fellow. He dedicates the book, by the way, to the Marquis Townsend and carefully adds that he has not got permission to dedicate it to that exalted nobleman. Nay, that he fears that he would not get permission if he asked for it. For Lord Townsend is such a rattling good soldier that Colonel Money is quite sure he'll want to hear all about the war. On which account he has had this book so dedicated and printed by E. Harlow, a bookseller to Her Majesty in Paul Mall. Before beginning his narrative, the excellent fellow pathetically says that there was no war a little time before, nor apparently any likelihood of one. Colonel Money once intended to serve the Turks. From this whore had fade a Christian Providence delivered him and sent him to the defense of Gaul. His commission was dated on the 19th of July 1792. He is very proud of it, and he gives it in full. It ends up given in the year of grace 1792 by our reign, the 19th, and liberty the 4th, Louis. The phrase in the accompaniment with a signature and the date is not without irony. Colonel Money could never stomach certain traits in the French people. Before he left Paris for his command on the frontier, he was witness to the fighting when the palace was stormed by the populace, and he is our authority for the fact that the 5th Battalion of Paris Volunteers stationed in the Champs Elysees helped to massacre the Swiss Guard. The Lieutenant Colonel of this battalion writes honest John Money, who was under my command during part of the campaign, related to me the circumstances of this murder, and apparently with pleasure. He said that the unhappy people of Paris implored mercy, but added, we did not regard this. We put them all to death, and our men cut off most of their heads and fixed them on their bayonets. Colonel, or as he then was, General Money, disapproves of this. He also disapproves of the officer and commander, the Marseille, and says he was a tiger. It seems that the tiger was dining with the Théron de Mericourt and three English gentlemen in the very hotel where Money was stopping, and it occurs to him that they might have broken in from their drunken rebels next door and treated him unfriendly. Then he goes to the frontier, and after a good deal of complaint that he has not been given his proper command, he finds himself at the head of that very important post, which was the saving of the Army of Elmi. Dumerez, who always talked to him in English, for English was more widely known abroad than it is now, at least among gentlemen, had a very great opinion of Money, but he deplores the fact that Money's addresses to his soldiery was couched in a jargon which they could not even begin to understand. Money does not tell us that in his account of the fighting, but he does tell us some very interesting things which reveal him as a man at once energetic and exceedingly simple. He left the guns to Gaubald, remarking that no one but a gunner could attend to that sort of thing, which was sound sense, but the volunteers, the line and the cavalry he looked after himself, and when the first attack was made he gave the order to fire from the batteries, just as they were blazing away Dylan, who was far off but his superior, sent word to the batteries to cease firing. Why, nobody knows. At any rate the orderly galloped up and told Money that those were Dylan's orders, on which Money very charmingly writes, I told him to go back and tell General Dylan that I commanded there, and that whilst the enemy fired shot and shell on me, I should continue to fire back on them. A sentence that warms the heart. Having thus delivered himself to the orderly, he began pacing up and down the parapet to let my men see that there was not much to be apprehended from a cannonade. You may, if you will, make a little picture of this to yourselves. A great herd of volunteers, some of whom had never been under fire, the rest of whom had bolted miserably at Verdun a few days before, men not yet soldiers and almost without discipline, the batteries banging away in the wood behind them, in front of them a long earthwork at which the enemy were lobbing great round lumps of iron and exploding shells, and along the edge of this earthwork an elderly gentleman from Norfolk, in England, walking up and down undisturbed, occasionally giving orders to his army, and teaching his command a proper contempt for fire. He adds, as another reason why he did not cease fire when he was ordered, that without doubt the troops would have thought there was a treason in it, and I had probably been cut to pieces. He did not understand what had happened at Valmy, though he was so useful in securing the success of that day. All he noted was that after the cannonade, Kellerman had fallen back. He rode into St. Minnaud, where Dumorra's headquarters were, ran up to the top of the steeple, and surveyed the country around the enemy's camp with an enormous telescope, laid a bet at dinner of five to one that the enemy would attack again. They did not do so, and he had lost his bet. But he says nothing about paying it, and then heard that France had been decreed a republic. His comment on this piece of news is strong but cryptical. It was surprising, he says, to see what an effect this news had on the army. Every sentence betrays the personality. The keen eccentric character, which took to balloons just after the Montgolf years, and fell with his balloon into the North Sea, wrote his treatise on the use of such instruments in war, and was never happy unless he was seeing or doing something, preferably under arms. And in every sentence also there is that curious directness of statement, which is of such advantage to vivacity in any memoir. Thus of Gaubert, who served under him, he has a little footnote. This unfortunate young man lost his head at the same time General Dillon suffered, and a very reasonable young man he was, and an excellent officer. He ends his book in a phrase from which I think not a word could be taken, nor which a word could be added, without spoiling it. I will quote it in full. The reader, I trust, will excuse my having so often departed from the line of my profession in giving my opinion on subjects that are not military. For instance, his objections to the head-cutting business. But having had occasion to know the people of France, I freely venture to submit my judgments to the public, and have the satisfaction to find that they coincide with the opinion of those who know that extraordinary nation, still better than myself. CHAPTER X The People of Manamattapa, of whom I have written more than once, I have recently revisited, and I confess to an astonishment at the success with which they deal with the various difficulties and problems arising in their social life. Thus, in most countries the laws of property are complex in the extreme. Punishable acts in connection with them are numerous and often difficult to define. In Manamattapa, the whole thing is settled in a very simple manner. In the first place, instead of strict laws binding men down by written words, they appoint a number of citizens who shall have it in their discretion to decide whether a man's actions are worthy of punishment or no. And these appointed citizens have also the power to assign the punishment, which may vary from a single day's imprisonment to a lifetime. So, crime-less is the country, however, that in a population of over thirty millions, less than twenty such nominations are necessary. I must, however, admit that these scores are aided by several thousand minor judges who are appointed in a different manner. Their method of appointment is this. It is discovered as accurately as may be by a man's manner of dress and the hours of his labor and the size of the house he inhabits, whether he have more than a certain yearly revenue. Any man discovered to have more than this revenue is immediately appointed to the office of which I speak. The power of these assessors is limited, however, for though it is left to their discretion whether their fellow citizens are worthy of punishment or not, yet the total punishment they can inflict is limited to a certain number of years of imprisonment. In old times, this sort of minor judge was not appointed in Manomattapa, unless he could prove that he kept dogs in great numbers for the purpose of hunting, and at least three horses. But this foolish prejudice has broken down in the progress of modern enlightenment, and, as I have said, the test is now extended to a general consideration of clothes, the size of the house inhabited, and the amount of leisure enjoyed, the type of tobacco smoked, and other equally reasonable indications of judicial capacity. The men thus chosen to consider the actions of their fellow citizens in courts of law are rewarded in two ways. The first small body, who are the more powerful magistrates, are given 100 times the income of an ordinary citizen. For it is claimed that in this way not only are the best men for the purpose obtained, but further so large a salary makes all temptation to bribery impossible, and secures the strict impartiality between rich and poor. The lesser judges, on the other hand, are paid nothing. For it is wisely pointed out that a man who is paid nothing, and who volunteers his services to the state, will not be the kind of man who would take a bribe, or who would consider social differences in his judgments. It is further pointed out by the Manomattopans, I think very reasonably, that the kind of man who will give his services for nothing, even in the arduous work of imprisoning his fellow citizens, will probably be the best man for the job, and does not need to be alert to it by the promise of a great salary. In this way they obtain both kinds of judges, and oddly enough each kind speaks, acts, and lives much as does the other. I must next describe the methods by which this interesting and sensible people secure the ends of their criminal system. When one of their magistrates has come to the conclusion that on the whole he will have a fellow citizen imprisoned, that person is handed over to the guardianship of certain officials, whose business it is to see that the man does not die during a period for which he is entrusted to them. When someone of the numerous forms of torture, which they are permitted to use, has the effect of causing death, the official responsible is reprimanded and may even be dismissed. The object indeed of the whole system is to reform and amend the criminal. He is therefore forbidden to speak or to communicate in any way with human beings, and is segregated in a very small room, devoid of all ornament, with the exception of one hour a day, during which he is compelled to walk round and round the deep walled courtyard, designed for the purpose of such exercise. If, as is often the case, after some years of this treatment, the criminal shows no signs of mental or moral improvement, he is released. And if he is a man of property, lives unmolested on what he has, and usually in a quiet and retired way. But if he is devoid of property, the problem is indeed a difficult one, for it is the business of the police to forbid him to work, and they are rewarded if he is found committing any act which the judges or magistrates are likely to disapprove. In this way, even those who have failed to effect reform in their characters during the first term of imprisonment are commonly, if they are poor, re-incarcerated within a short time, so that the system works precisely as it was intended, giving the maximum amount of reformation to the worst and the hardest characters. I should add that the monomatopened character is such that in proportion to wealth a man's virtue increases, and it is remarkable that nearly all those who suffer the species of imprisonment I have described are of the poorer classes of society. Though they are so reasonable, and indeed afford so excellent a model to ourselves in most of their social relations, the people of monopetopa have, I confess, certain customs which I have never clearly understood and which my increasing study of them fails to explain to me. Thus in matters which with us are thought susceptible of positive proof, such as the taste and quality of cooking, or the mental abilities of a fellow citizen, the monomatopens establish their judgment in a transcendental or super-rational manner. The cooking in a restaurant or hotel is with them excellent in proportion not to the taste of the beyond subjected to it, but to the rental of the premises. And when a man desires the most delicious food, he does not consider where he has tasted such food in the past, but rather the situation and probable rateable value of the eating house, which will probably provide him with it. Nay, he is willing, if he understands that rateable value is high, to pay far more for the same article than he would in a humbler hostel ring. The same super-rational method, as I have called it, applies to the monopetopa judgment of political ability. For here it is not what a man has said or written, nor whether he has proved himself capable of foreseeing certain events of moment to the state. It is not these characters that determine his political career, but a measure of other indices, one of which is that his brother shall be younger than himself, another that when he speaks he shall strike the palm of his open left hand with his clenched right hand in a particular manner, by no means commonly or easily acquired. Another that he shall not wear at one and the same time a coat which is bifurcated, and a hat of hemispherical outline. Another that he shall keep silence upon certain types of foreigners who frequent the markets of monopetopa, and shall even pretend that they are not foreigners but monopetopans. And this index of statesmanship he must preserve under all circumstances, even when the foreigners in question cannot speak the monopetopan language. Some years ago it was required of every statesman that he should, for at least so many times in one year, extravagantly praise the virtues of these foreign merchants, and particularly allude to their intensely unforeign character. But this custom has recently fallen into abeyance, and silence upon the subject is the most that is demanded. A further social habit of these people, which we should find very strange and which I, for my part, think unaccountable, is their habit of judging the excellence of a literary production, not by the sense or even the sound of it, but by the ink in which it is printed, and the paper upon which it is impressed. And this applies not only to their letters, but also to their foreign information. And on this account they should, one would imagine, obtain but a very distorted view of the world. For if a good printer prints with excellent ink at five shillings a pound and with beautiful clear type upon the best linen paper, the statement that the British islands are uninhabited, while another in bad ink and upon flimsy paper and with worn type affirms that they contain over forty million souls, the first impression and not the second would be conveyed to the monopetopan mind. As a fact, however, they are not misinformed. For this singular frailty of theirs, as I conceive it to be, is moderated by one very wise, countervailing mental habit of theirs, which is to believe whatever they hear asserted more than twenty-six times, so that even if the assertion be conveyed to them in bad print and upon poor paper, they will believe it if they read it over and over again to the required limits of reiterations. No people in the world are fonder of animals than this genial race, but here again, curious limits to their affection are to be discovered. For while they will tear to pieces some abandoned wrench who beats a llama with a hazel twig for its correction, they will see nothing remarkable in tearing to pieces of an alpaca goat by dogs specially trained in that exercise. Generally speaking, the larger an animal is, the warmer is the affection born it by these people. Fleas and lice are crushed without pity. Black beetles with more hesitation. Small birds are spared entirely and so on upward until for calves. They have a special legislation to protect and cherish them. At the other end of the scale, microbes are piteously exterminated. Divorce is not common in monomatopa, but such divorces as take place are very rightly treated differently according to the wealth of the persons involved. Above a certain scale of wealth, divorce is only granted after a lengthy trial in a court of justice. But with the poor, it is established by the decree of a magistrate who usually shortly after pronouncing his sentence finds an occasion to imprison the innocent party. Moreover, the poor can be divorced in this manner if any magistrate feels inclined to exercise his power while for the divorce of the rich set conditions are laid down. I should add that the monomatopons have no religion, but the tolerance of their constitution is nowhere better shown than in this particular. For though they themselves regard religion as ridiculous, they will permit its exercise within the state and even occasionally give high office and emoluments to those who practice it. We have indeed much to learn in this matter of religion from the race whose habits I have discovered and here describe. Nothing perhaps has done more to warp our own story than the hidebound prejudice that a doctrine could not be both false and true at the same time and the unreasoning certitude inherited from the bad old days of clerical tyranny, that a thing either was or was not. No such narrowness troubles the monopotopon. He will prefer and very wisely prefer an opinion that renders him comfortable to one that in any way interferes with his appetites, and if two such opinions contradict each other he will not fall into silly causistry which would attempt to reconcile them. He will quietly accept both and serve the higher purpose with a contented mind. It is on this account that I have said that monopotopons regard religion as ridiculous. For true religion indeed as they phrase it they have the highest reverence than true religion consists in following the inclinations of an honest man, that is oneself. But religion in the sense of fixed doctrine as one of their priests explained to me is abhorrent to our free commonwealth. Thus such hair-splitting questions as whether God really exists or no, whether it be wrong to kill or steal, whether we owe any duties to the state, and if so what duties, are treated by the honest monopotopons with the contempt they deserve. They abandon such speculations for the worthy task of enjoying each man what his fortune permits him to enjoy. But as I have said above they do not persecute the small minority living in their midst to cling to the complexity of all starved minds to their fixed ideas, and if a man who professes certitude upon a doctrinal matter is useful in other ways they are very far from effusing his services to the state. I have known more than one, for instance, of this old-fashioned and bigoted lot who, when he offered a sum of money in order to be admitted to the senate of monopotopa, found it accepted as readily and cheerfully as though it had been offered by one of the broadest principles of the most liberal mind. Let no one be surprised that I have spoken of their priests, for though the monopotopons regard religion with due contempt, it does not follow that they will take away the livelihood of a very honest class of people who, in an older and barbaric state of affairs, were employed to maintain the structure of what was then a public worship. The priesthood, therefore, is very justly and properly retained by the monopotopons, subject only to formal duties and to a sacred intonation of voice, very distressing to those not accustomed to it. If I am asked in what occupation they are employed, I answer, the wealthier of them in such sports and utilities as attract the wealthy and the less wealthy in such futilities and sports as the less wealthy customarily enjoy. Nor is it a rigid law among them that the sons of priests should be priests, but only the custom, so far at least, as I have been able to discover. The end of Chapter 11 This is the LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibraVox.org On Something by Hilaire Belock Chapter 12 Letter of Advice and Apology to a Young Burglar My Dear Ormond Nothing was further from my thoughts. I had imagined you knew me well enough and, for the matter of that, all your mother's family to judge me better. Believe me, no conception of blaming your profession entered into my mind for a moment. Whether there be such a thing as property in the abstract I should leave it to the metaphysicians to decide. In practical affairs everything must be judged in its own surroundings. It was not upon any musty theological whimsy that I wrote. The definition of stealing or theft, I care not by what name you call it, is not for practical men to discuss. Nor was I concerned with the ethical discussion of burglary to give the matter its old legal and technical title. It was lack of judgment, sudden actions due to nothing but impulse, and what I think I may call the speculative side of a burglar's life. You have not as yet any great responsibilities. No one is dependent upon you. You have but yourself to provide for. You must remember that such responsibilities will arrive in their natural course and that if you form habits of rashness or obstinacy now you will cling to you through your life. We are all looking forward to a certain event when Anne is free again, in plain English my boy, we know your loyal heart and we shall bless the union. But I should feel easier in my mind if I saw you settled into one definite branch of the profession before you undertook the nurture of a family. Adventure tempts you because you are brave and something of a poet in you to unusual scenes of action. Well, youth has a right to its dreams. But beware of letting a dangerous chaoticism spoil your splendid chances. Take for example your breaking into Mr. Cowell's house. You may say Mr. Cowell was not a journalist but only a reviewer. The distinction is very thin. But let it pass. You know and I know that the houses of none in any way connected with the daily press should ever be approached. It is plain common sense. The journalist comes home at all hours of the night. His servant, if he keeps one, is often up before he is a bed. Do you think to enter such houses unobserved? Again in one capacity or another the journalist is dealing with our profession all day long. Some he serves and knows his masters. Others he is employed in denouncing at about 42 shillings for the 1600 words. Others again it is his business to interview and to pacify or cajole in the lobbies of the house. Do you think he would not know what you were if he found you in the kitchen with the dark lantern? There is another peril. I mean that of alienating friends. Mr. Cowell is an imperialist of a very pathetic type. He wears, as you will say, gold spectacles and he has a nervous cough. But he is an imperialist. I never said that it was wrong or even foolish to alienate such a man. I said that a great and powerful section of opinion sought a breach of honour in one of ours to do it. Do not run away with the first impression my words convey. I weigh them all. There has been so much misunderstanding that I hardly know what to choose. Take those watches. I did not say that watches were a mere distraction. You have put the words into my mouth. What I said was that watches especially watches at a terror-free form meeting were not worth the risk. Of course a hatful of watches such as your Uncle Robert would bring home from fires still such a load as your poor cousin Charles obtained upon Empire Day last year has value. But how many gold watches are there off the platform at a terror-free form meeting and what possible chance have you of getting on the platform. Now church and purses that is another thing. But your mid-devin adventure was simple-follying. Who is Lord Daryl? I never heard of him. For heaven's sake don't get caught by a title. Do you know any of the servants? His butler or his secretary? The fellow who catalogs the library is useful. Do recollect that lots of the ornaments in those Mayfair houses are fastened to the wall. That is where your dear father failed over the large Chinese jar in Park Street. Your mother would never forgive me if you were to get into another town. There is another little matter, my dear oarman, which I wish you to laid a heart very seriously. Now do take an old man's advice and do not get up on your chaotic hobby-horse the moment you sniff what it is. For I suppose you have guessed it already. Yes, it is what you feared. I want to urge you to follow your mother's ardent wish and add commissioned business to your other work. You must dream their dreams, but the world is what it is and after all there is nothing so very dreadful in the commissioned side of our profession. You do not come into direct relations with the collectors of curios and church ornaments. There is always an agent to break the crudeness of the connection and it is a certain and profitable source of income with none of the risks attached to it that the older branches of the profession may show. Moreover, it affords excellent opportunities for foreign travel and gives one a special position very difficult to define but easily appreciable among one's colleagues. George Burton made to my knowledge 3,000 pounds last year in a short season. He got this very large commission without the necessity of breaking into a single public house. He earned it entirely upon the profits taken out of churches upon the continent and in only three cases had he to pick a pocket. It would have hurt him very much with his knowledge and his taste to have had to break a stained glass window. Do consider this, my dear Ormond, for your mother's sake. Don't think for a moment that I am advising you to take up any of those forms of work which we both agree in despising and which are quite unworthy as for instance stealing pictures on commission out of the houses of dealers and then turning detective to recover them again. It is much too easy work for a man of your talents much too ill-paid and much too dangerous. It is all very well for the picture dealer to leave the door open but what if the policeman is not in the know? No, you will always find me on your side in your usual to have anything to do with this kind of business. Ormond, my dear lad, bear me no ill will. It is true of every profession of the bar and of the city of homicide, medicine, the services, even politics, everything, that success only comes slowly and that the experience of older men is the key to it. Tomorrow is Ascension Day and I am at Leisure. Sign with me at the Colonial Club at 8 or 8.15. I will show you a magnificent little tenegara I picked up yesterday and we will talk about the new prospectus. God bless you, your affectionate uncle. End of Chapter 12 This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibraVox.org On Something by Hilaer Bellach Chapter 13 The Monkey Question An Appeal to Common Sense A privileged body slips so easily into regarding its privileges as common rites that I fear the plea which the Simeon League repeats in this pamphlet will still sound strange in the ears of many though the work of the league has been increasingly successful and has reached yearly a wider circle of the educated public since its foundation by Lady Wayne in 1902. We desire to place before our fellow citizens the claims of monkeys and we hope once more that nothing we say may seem extreme or violent. For we know full well what poor weapons, violence and passion are in the debate of a practical political matter. Perhaps it is best to begin by pointing out how rarely even the best of us pause in our fevered race for wealth to consider the disabilities of any of our fellow creatures. When that truth is grasped it will be easier to plead the special cause of the Simeon. Were English men and women to realize the wrongs of the race or at any rate the illogical and therefore unjust position in which we have placed them? Were the just and thoughtful men and golden-hearted ladies who are ready in this country to support every good cause when it is properly presented? Were they to realize the disabilities of the monkey? I do not say as vividly as they realize the tragedies and misfortunes of London life. They could not, I think, avoid an ill ease, a prickling of conscience which would lead at last to some hearty and English effort for the relief of the cousin and forerunner of man. The attitude adopted toward monkeys by the mass of those who, after all, live in the same world and have much the same appetites and necessities and sufferings as they is an attitude I am persuaded not of heartlessness but of ignorance. To disturb the ignorance and in some way awaken a consciousness which perhaps they fear is not a grateful task but it is our duty and we will pursue it. Let the reader consider for one moment the aspect, not only of formal law but of the whole community and what is called public opinion towards this section of sentient beings. As things are now I and have been for centuries in this green England of ours a monkey may not marry he may not own land he may not fill any salaried post under the crown the papas themselves are debarred from no honor outside Ireland save the Lord Chancellor's ship monkeys who are responsible for no persecutions in the past whose religion presents no insult or outrage to our common reason and who differ little from ourselves in their general practice of life and thought are debarred from all a monkey may not be a member of parliament a civil servant an officer in either service or in the territorial army it is doubtful whether he may hold a commission for the peace true there is no statute upon the subject and the rural magistracy is perhaps the freest and most open of all our offices and the least restricted by artificial barriers of examination or test nevertheless it is considered opinion of the best legal authorities that no monkey could sit upon the bench and in any case and is purely academic for it is difficult to believe that any Lord Lieutenant under the ridiculous anachronism of our present constitution would nominate a monkey to such a position unless which is by law impossible he should be heir to an owner of a state of land nor is this all the mention of unpaid posts recalls the damning truth at all honorary positions in the diplomatic service and the purely formal stage in the foreign office are closed to the monkey the very court sinicures which admittedly require no talents are denied to our simian fellow creatures if not by law at least by custom and in practice there have been employed by the league in the British Museum the services of two ladies who feel most keenly upon this subject they are to the honor of their sex simply qualified as any person in this kingdom for the task which they have undertaken and they report to the executive commission after two months of minute research that with one doubtful exception occurring during the reign of her late majesty no monkey has held any position whatever at court all judicial positions are equally inaccessible to them for though perhaps in theory a monkey could be promoted to the bench by his party sufficiently long and faithfully in the House of Commons to which body he is admissible at least I can find no rule or custom let alone a statuette against it yet he is cut off from such an ambition at the very outset by his inadmissibility to a legal career the ins of court are monopolist and like all monopolists hopelessly conservative they have admitted first one class and then another though reluctantly to their privileges but it will be twenty or thirty years at least before they will give way in the matter of monkeys to be a physician a solicitor and engineer or a commissioner for ults is denied them as effectually as though they did not exist indeed no occupation has left them save that of manual labor and on this I would say a word it is fashionable to jeer at the monkeys disinclination to sustained physical effort and to concentrated toil but it is remarkable that those who affect such a contempt for the monkeys powers are the first to deny him access to the liberal professions in which they know though they dare not confess it he would be a serious rival to the European as it is in the few places open to monkeys the somewhat parasitical domestic occupation of companions and the more manly but still humiliating task of acting as assistants to organ grinders the monkey has won universal if grudging praise latterly since progress cannot be indefinitely delayed the monkey has indeed advanced by one poor step toward the civic equality which is his right and has appeared as an actor upon the boards in our music halls it should surely be a sufficient rebuke for those who continue to sneer at the Simeon League and such devoted pioneers as Miss Greeley and Lady Wayne that the monkey has been honorably admitted and has done first-rate work in a profession which his late gracious Majesty and his late Majesty's late revered mother, Queen Victoria have seen fit to honor by the bestowal of knighthoods and in one case where the recipient was childless a baronetcy the disabilities I have enumerated here by no means exhaustive a monkey may not sign or deliver a deed, he may not serve on a jury he may be ill-treated foresoothed and even killed by some cruel master and the law will refuse to protect him or to punish his oppressor he may be suggested to all the bylaws of a tyrannical or fanatical administration but in preventing such abuses he has no voice he may not enter our older universities at least as a member of the college that is he can only take a degree at Oxford or Cambridge under the implied and wholly unmerited stigma applying to the non-collegiate student and these iniquities apply not only to the great anthropoids whose strengths and grossness we might legitimately fear but to the most delicately organized types to the barbery ape the lemur and the ring-tailed baboon finally and this is the worst feature in the whole matter a monkey by a legal fiction at least as old as the 14th century is not a person in the eyes of the law we call England a free country yet at the present day and as you read these lines any monkey found at large may be summarily arrested he has no remedy no action for assault will lie he is not even allowed to call witnesses in his own defense or to establish an alibi it may be pleaded that these disabilities attach also to the Irish but we must remember that the Irish are allowed a certain though modified freedom of the press and have extended to them the incalculable advantage of sending representatives to Westminster the monkey has no such remedies he may be incarcerated nay chained yet he cannot sue out a writ for habeas corpus any more than can a British subject in time of war and worst of all through the connivance or impotence of the police cases have been brought forward and approved in which monkeys have been openly bought and sold we boast our sense of delicacy and perhaps rightly in view of our superiority over other nations in this particular yet we permit the monkey to exhibit revolting nakedness and we hardly heed the omission it is true that some monkeys are covered from time to time with little blue coats a cap has occasionally disdainfully permitted them and not infrequently they are permitted a pair of leather breeches through a hole in which the tail is permitted to protrude but no reasonable man will deny that these garments are regarded in the light of mere ornaments and rarely fulfill those functions which every decent Englishman requires of clothing and now we come to the most important section of our appeal what can be done we are a kindly people and we are a just people but we are also very conservative people the fate of all pioneers besets those who attempt to move in this matter they are jeered at or what is worse neglected one of the most prominent of the league's workers has been certified a lunatic by an authority whose bitter prejudice is well known and against whom we have as yet no grant of a mandamus and we have all noticed the quiet contempt the sort of organized boycott or conspiracy of silence with which a company at dinner will receive the subject when it is brought forward there are also to be met the violent prejudices with which the mass of the population is still filled in this regard these prejudices are of course more common among the uneducated poor than in the upper classes who in various relations come more and more often in contact with monkeys and who also have a wider and more tolerant because a better cultivated spirit but the prejudice is discernible in every class of society even in the very highest we have also a raid against us in our crusade for right and justice the dying but still formidable power of clericalism society is but half emancipated from its many evil trammels and the priest that eternal enemy of liberty can still put in his evil word against the rights of the simian let us not despair we can hope for nothing it is true until we have affected a profound change in public opinion and that change cannot be affected by laws it can only be brought about by a slow and almost imperceptible effort unsleeping, tireless and convinced something of the same sort as has destroyed the power of militarism upon the continent of Europe something of the same sort as has scotched landlordism at home something of the same sort as has freed the unhappy natives of the Congo from the misrule of depraved foreigners something of the same sort has produced the great wave in favor of temperance through the length and breadth of this land we must not attempt extremes or demand full justice to the exclusion of excellent hat measures no one condemns more strongly than do we the militant prosimians who have twice assaulted and once blinded for life a keeper in the zoological gardens we do not even approve of those whose ardent but in our opinion misguided spirits of the Simeon Freedom Society who publish side by side the photographs of Pongo the learned ape from the Gaboons and that of a certain Catholic minister accompanied by the legend which is which it is not by actions of this kind that we shall win the good fight but rather by a perseverance in reason combined with courtesy shall we obtain our end until at long last our brothers shall be free as for the excellent but somewhat provincial reactionaries who still object to us that the monkey differs fundamentally from the human race that he is not possessed of human speech and so forth we can afford to smile at their waning authority modern science has sufficiently dealt with them and if anyone bring out against the monkey the obscurantist insult that his hide is covered with hair we can at once point to the innumerable human beings fully recognized and endowed with civic rights who were they carefully examined would prove in no better case as to speech the monkey communicates in his own way as well or better than do we and for that matter if speech is to be the criterion are we to deny civic rights to the dumb we have it upon the authority of all our greatest scientific men that there is no substantial difference between the ape and the man one of the greatest has said that between himself and his poor fellow citizen there was a wider difference than that which separated them from the monkey hackle has testified that while there is a boundary there is no gulf between the corpse of professors to which he belongs and the chimpanzee the gorilla is universally accepted and if we have won the battle for the gorilla the rest will follow Tolstoy is with us Webb is with us Gorky is with us Zola and Ferrer were with us and fight for us from their graves the whole current of modern thought is with us we cannot fail questions submitted at the last election by the simian league one are you in favor of removing the present disabilities of monkeys two are you in favor of a short statue which should put adult monkeys upon the same footing as other subjects of his majesty as from the first of january 1912 and would you if necessary vote against your party in favor of such a measure three are you in favor of the inclusion of monkeys under the wild birds act a plain reply yes or no was to be written by the candidate under each of these questions and forwarded to the secretary Mr. Consul 73 Purbeck street before the 14th january 1910 no replies received after that date were admitted the simian league which has agents in every constituency acted according to the replies received and treated the lack of reply as negative of 1375 circular cent 309 remain unanswered 264 were answered in the negative 201 gave a qualified affirmative all the rest no less than 799 a clear and in some cases an enthusiastic adherence to our principles it is a sufficient proof of the power of the league and the growth of the cause of justice that in the 799 no less than 515 are members of the present house of commons the end of chapter 13 this is a LibraVox recording all LibraVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibraVox.org on something by Hilaire Bellock chapter 14 the empire builder we possess in this country a breed of men in whom we feel a pride so loyal, so strong, and so frank that were I to give further expression to it here I should justly be accused of insisting upon a hackneyed theme these are the empire builders the men efficient the agents whom we cannot but feel however reluctantly we admit it to be less strictly bound by the common laws of life than are we lesser ones but there is something about these men not hackneyed as a theme which is their youth by what process is the great mind developed of what sort is the empire builder when he is young the fellow commonly rises from below what was his experience there below in what school was he trained what accident of fortune how met or how surmounted or how used, produced at last the man who can in that inquiry there is food for very deep reflection it is here that our masters whose general motives are so open and so plain touch upon mystery that secret power of determining nourishment which is at the base of all organic life has in its own silent way built up the boyhood and the adolescence which we only know in their maturity I will not pretend to a full knowledge of that strange education of the mind which has produced so many similar men for the advancement of the race but I can point to one example which lately came straight across my vision an accident an illumination a revealing flash of how our time breeds the great type I was acquainted for some hours with the actions of a youth whose very name I am ignorant but whose face I am very certain will appear twenty years hence in a setting of glory recognized as yet one other of those superb spirits who will do all for England the occasion was a pageant no matter what pageant a great public pageant which passed through the strand and was to be witnessed by hundreds of thousands let us call it the function well I was walking down the strand three days before this function was to take place when I saw in an empty shop window about twenty-five wooden chairs arranged in tiers one above the other upon a sloping platform and lettered from A to Y in the window was a large notice very clearly printed and it was to this effect Why pay fancy prices which must inevitably fall in function seats in this window commanding a full view of the procession five shillings at a little desk in the gangway by which the chairs were approached set a dark pale child I can call him by no other name so frail and young did he seem and the delicacy of his complexion led me to wonder perhaps whether he was not one of those whom the climate of England strikes with consumption and the mysterious provinces of our race wander abroad in search of health and find a realm his alertness however and the brilliance of his eye his winning almost obsequious address and the hooked clutch of his gestures betrayed an energy that no physical weakness could conquer he invited me to enter and beg me to purchase a seat I had no need of one for I had made arrangements to spend the great day itself in the next at a small hotel in the extreme north of Sutherlandshire but I was arrested by the evident mental power of my new acquaintance and I wasted five shillings in buying the chair marked D it was with some difficulty that I could purchase it so eager was he that I should have the best place seeing said he that they are all one price and that you may as well benefit by being an early bird I noted the strict rectitude for which all that men ignorant of modern comments may say is at the basis of commercial success something so attracted me in the whole business that I was weak enough to take a chair in a tea shop opposite and watch all day the actions of the child of fate in less than an hour twenty different people mainly gentle folk had come in and bought places at the sensible price at which he offered them to each of them he gave a ticket corresponding to the number of the chair he was courteous to all and even expansive he explained the advantage of each particular seat so far so good but what was more astonishing in the second hour another twenty came and appeared to purchase in the third which was the busiest time of the day some forty first and last must have done business was the favorite of fortune I pondered upon these things very deeply and went home next morning the attraction which the place had for me drew me as with a magnet and I went somewhat stealthily I fear to the same tea shop and noticed with the greatest astonishment that the chairs were now not littered but numbered and that the boy was sitting at his little desk with a series of white cards bearing the figures from one to twenty five he was very early not ten o'clock the child was as spruce and neat as he had been in the afternoon of the day before he bore already that mark of energy combined with neatness which is the stamp of success I crossed the road and entered he recognized me at once their memory for faces is wonderful and he said cheerfully your D corresponds to number four I thanked him very much and asked him he had changed his system of notation he told me it was because several people had explained to him that they remembered figures more easily than letters then we talked to each other agreeing upon the maxims of simplicity and directness which are at the root of all mercantile stability he told me he required cash from all who bought his chairs and that there was no agreement no insurance no frills as he wittily called them it is as simple he said as buying a pound of tea and I am satisfied and they are satisfied as for the risk it is covered by the low price and if you ask me how I can let them at so low a price I will tell you it is because I have found exactly what was needed and have added nothing more moreover I did not buy the chairs but hired them I went back to my tea shop with head bent murmuring to myself those memorable lines we found in many a mighty state pray God we may never fail from craven fears of being great more words to that effect that day no less than 153 people did business with the youth next day I found among my morning letters a note from a politician of my acquaintance telling me that the function was postponed indefinitely I wasted not a moment I went at once to my post of observation my tea shop and I proceeded to watch the leader there was as yet no knowledge of the calamity in London my friends seemed to have noticed me at any rate a new and somewhat anxious look was apparent on his face with a firm and decided step I crossed the road to greet him and when he saw me he was all at his ease he told me that my seat had been specially asked for and that the higher price had been offered but a bargain he said was a bargain and so we felt the chatting when I mentioned among other subjects the very great success of his enterprise he gave a slight start which did not enter to his heart but he was of too stern a mould to give way he was of the temper of the pioneers I assured him at once that it was very far from my attention to reproach him for the talents which he had used with so much ability and energy I pointed out to him that even if I desired to injure him which I did not it would be impossible for me or for anyone to trace more than half a dozen at the most of his numerous clients it is frequently the case that men of small business capacity will perceive some important element in a commercial problem which escapes the eyes of genius and I could see that this simple application of mine had relieved him almost to tears before he could thank me a news boy appeared with a very large placard upon which was written postponed in a moment his mind grasps the whole meaning of that word but he went out with a steady step and paid the six pence which the news boy demanded even in that uncomplaining action the uncomplaining forfeiture of the comparatively large sum one could detect the financial grip which is the true arbiter of the fates of nations he needed the paper he did not haggle about the price he first mastered the exact words of the announcement and then looking up at me with a face of paper he said it is not only postponed but all this preparation is thrown away I have said that I have no commercial amplitude I admit that I was puzzled he said I this is exactly what you needed he shook his head still restraining by a powerful effort the natural expression of his grief and showed me, for all his answer a railway ticket to Boulogne which he had purchased and which was available for the night boat on the eve of the function I then understood what he meant when he said that all his preparations had been thrown away I do not know whether I did right or wrong I felt myself to be nothing more than a blind instrument in the hands of the superior power which governs the destinies of people how much did the ticket cost said I 30 Shilling City I pulled out a sovereign and a half sovereign from my pocket and said here is the money I have leisure and I would as soon go to Boulogne as to Sutherlandshire he did not thank me effusively and less efficient races but he grasped my hand and blessed me silently I then left him in the steamer to Boulogne as I was musing over this strange adventure a sturdy Anglo-Saxon man a true son of Drake or Raleigh came up and asked me for my ticket as I gave it to him I fell idly upon the price of the ticket he was 25 shillings but I had saved a directing and creative mind if he should come across these lines he will remember me he is probably in the House of Commons by now perhaps he has bought his peerage wherever he is I hope he will remember me the end of chapter 14 this is a LibraVox recording all LibraVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibraVox.org On Something by Hilaer Balog Chapter 15 Cadwala Cadwala, a prince out of Wales though some deny it, wandered in the Andreds' Wield he was 19 years of age and his heart was full of anger for wrong that had been done him by men of his own blood for he was rightfully heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Sussex and he was kept from it by the injustice of men a retinue went with him of that sort which will always follow adventure and exile these, the rich of the sea coast and of the Gwent called broken men but they loved their lord so he went hunting feeding upon what he slew and proceeding from steadying to steadying in the sparse woods of Andred where is sometimes an open heath and sometimes a mile of oak and often a clay swamp and seen from little lifted knolls of sand where the broom grows and the gorse the downs to the south like a wall as he so wandered upon one day he came upon another man of a very different fashion for Cadwala would have nothing to do with the cross of Christ nor with the customs of the towns nor with the talk of foreign men but this man was a bishop wandering and his name was Wilfred he also had his little retinue and by an accident of his office or of his exile he had proceeded to a steadying in the heaths and the woods of the wheeled where also was Cadwala so they met the pride and the bearing of Wilfred seeing that he was of a Roman town and an officer of the state and the bishop to boot nay a bishop above bishops was not the pride Cadwala loved and the young man bore himself with another sort of pride which was that of the mountains and of pagan men nevertheless Wilfred put before him with Roman rhetoric and with uplifted hands the story of our Lord and Cadwala keeping his face set during all that recital could not forbid this story to sink into the depths of his heart where for many years it remained and did no more than remain the kingdom of Sussex cultivated by men of various kinds received Wilfred the bishop wherever he went he did many things that do not here concern me and his chief work was to make the rich towns of the sea-plane and of Chichester and of Luz and of Arundel and of the steadings of the wheeled and of the wheeled in markets also Christian men that it was a mean thing to go about in a hairy way like pagans unacquainted with letters and of imperfect ability in the making of remit or the getting of victuals indeed as I have written in another place it was Saint Wilfred who taught the king of Sussex and his men how to catch fish in nets they revered him everywhere and when they had given up their shameful barbarism and decently accepted the rules of life and the religion of it Saint Wilfred that he should found a bishopric and that it should have a cathedral and a sea all of which things he had explained to them and he did this on celsy bill but today the sea has swallowed it all time passed and the young man Kedwala still a very young man in the twenties came to his own and he sat on the throne that was rightfully his in Chichester and he ruled all Sussex to its utmost boundaries and he was the king of much more as history shows but all the while he proudly refused in his young man's heart the remit and the manner of the thing which he had hated in his exile nor would he accept the lantern prayers nor bow to the name of the Christian God Kedwala still so young but now a king thought it shameful that he should rule no more than the empire God had given him and he was filled with the longing to cross the sea and to conquer new land wherefore, whether well or ill advised, he set out to cross the sea and to conquer the Isle of Wight of which story said that Wight the hero had established in his kingdom there in the old time before writing was and when there were only songs so Kedwala and his fighting men they landed in that island and they fought against the many inhabitants of it and they subdued it in these battles Kedwala was wounded it happened that the king of the island whose name was Atwal had two heirs youths whom it was pitifully hoped this conqueror would spare for they fled up the water to stone him but a monk who served God by the fort of Reeds which is near Hampton at the head of the water hearing that king Kedwala who was recovering of wounds he had had in the war with the men of Wight had heard of the youth's hiding place and had determined to kill them sought the king and begged him at least they might be instructed in the faith before they died saying to him king though you are not of the faith that is no reason that you should deprive others of such a gift let me therefore see that these young men are instructed and baptized after which you may exercise your cruel will and Kedwala assented these lads therefore were taken to a holy place up on Itchen where they were instructed in the truths and the mysteries of religion and while this so went forward Kedwala would ask from time to time whether they were yet Christians at last they had received all the knowledge the holy men could give them and they were baptized when they were so received into the fold Kedwala would wait no longer but had them slain and it is said that they went to death thinking it to be no more than the gate of immortality after such deeds Kedwala still reigned over the kingdom of Sussex and his other kingdoms nor did he by speech or manner give the rich or poor about him to understand whether anything was passing in his heart but while they sang mass in the cathedral of Celci and while the newcomers still came now more rarely for nearly all were enrolled the newcomers came, I say in their last numbers from the remotest parts of the forest ridge and from the loneliest combs of the towns to hear of Christ and his cross and his resurrection and salvation of men Kedwala sat in Chichester and consulted his own heart only and was a pagan king no one else you may say in all the land so kept himself apart his youth had been thus spent and he thus ruled when as his 30th year approached he gave forth the decision to his nobles and to his earls and to the Welsh speaking men and to the seafaring men and to the priests and to all his people he said I will take ship and I will go over the seat of Rome where I may worship at the tombs of the blessed apostles and there I will be baptized but since I am a king no one but the pope shall baptize me I will do penance for my sins I will lift up my eyes to things worthy of man I will put behind me what was dear to me and I will accept that which is to come and as they could not alter Kedwala in any of his previous decisions so they could not alter him in this but his people gave gladly for the furnishing of his journey and all the sheep of the towns and the fleece and all the wheat in the clay settings of the wheel and a little vineyards and the priests' garden that looked toward the sea and the fishermen and every sort in Sussex that sail or plow or clip or tend sheep or reap or forge iron at the hammer ponds gave of what they had to Kedwala so then he went forth with a good retinue and many provisions upon his journey to the tombs of the apostles when Kedwala came to Rome the pope received him and said I hear that you would be instructed in the faith to which king Kedwala answered that such was his desire and that he would crave baptism at the hands of the said pope and meanwhile Kedwala took up his good lodgings in Rome gave money to the poor and showed himself abroad as one who had come from the ends of the earth that is from the kingdom of Sussex which in those days was not yet famous Kedwala now being 30 years old and having learnt what one should learn in order to receive baptism was baptized and they put a white robe on him which he was to wear for certain days King Kedwala when he was thus made one with the unity of Christian men was very glad but he also said that before he had lost that white robe so given him death would come and take him though he was a young man and a warrior he was certain it was so and so indeed he came about for within the limit of days during which ritual demanded that the king should wear his white garment nay within that same week he died so those boys who had found death at his hands had died after baptism upon Lichen in Gwent when Kedwala the king had journeyed out of Sussex to conquer and to hold the white with his spear and his shield and his captains and his armored men now that you have done reading this story you may think that I have made it up or that it is a legend or that it comes out of some storyteller's book learn therefore that it is plain history like the battle of Waterloo or the licensing bill differing from the chronicle only in this that I have put living words into the miles of men and be assured that the history of England is a very wonderful thing the end of Chapter 15 this is a LibraVox recording all LibraVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibraVox.org on something by Hilaire Bellock Chapter 16 a unit of England England has been lucky in its type of subdivision all over western Europe the type of subdivision following in the fall of the empire has been of capital importance in the development of the great nations but while these have elsewhere been exaggerated to petty kingdoms or diminished to mere townships in Britain for centuries the counties have formed true and lasting local units and they have survived with more vigor than the corresponding divisions of the other provinces of Roman Europe that accident of the county molded and sustained local feeling during the generations when local government and local initiative were dying elsewhere it has preserved a sort of aristocratic independence the survival of custom and the differentiation of the state it is not necessarily as many historians unacquainted have taken for granted a supreme advantage for any people to escape from institution of strong central executive such a power is the normal fruit of all high civilizations it protects the weak against the strong it is necessary for rapid action in war and it makes for clarity and method during peace it secures a minimum for all and it forbids the illusions and vices of the rich to taint the whole commonwealth but though such an escape from strong central government and the substitution for it of a ruling class is not a supreme advantage it has advantages of its own which every foreign historian of England has recognized and it is the divisions into counties which after the change of religion in the 16th century was mainly responsible for the slow substitution of local and oligarchic for general central and bureaucratic government in England not all the counties by any means are true to type all the Welsh divisions for instance are more or less artificial and late with the exception of Anglesey and as for the non-Roman parts Ireland and the highlands of Scotland it goes without saying that the county never was and is not to this day a true unit and much of the west of England is the same that is the shires are cut as their name implies somewhat arbitrarily from the general mass of territory when one says arbitrarily one does not mean that no local sentiment found them or that they had not some natural basis for they had they were the territory of central towns Shrewsbury, Warwick, Derby Chester, Oxford, Buckingham Bedford, Nottingham but their life was not and has not since been strongly individual they have not continuous boundaries nor an early national root but all round these in a sort of ring run the counties which have had a true local life from the beginning Cornwall is utterly different from Devon and with a clear historic reason for the difference Devon again is a perfectly separate unit resulting from a definite political act of the early 19th century of Dorset and Hampshire one can say less but with Sussex you get a unit which has been one kingdom and one diocese set in true natural limits and lying within these same boundaries for much more than a thousand years Kent probably an original Roman division has been one unit for longer still Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex are equally old though not upon their land boundaries they are equally dend but perhaps the most sharply defined of all after Sussex at least was southern and central Lancashire its topography was like one of those ideal examples which military instructors take for their models when they wish to simplify a lesson upon terrain upon one side ran the long high and difficult range which is the backbone of England upon the other the sea and the sea and the mountains lent one towards the other making two sides of a triangle that met above more Cambie Bay how formidable the natural barriers of this triangle were it is not easy for the student of our time to recognize it needs a general survey of the past and a knowledge of many unfamiliar conditions in the present to appreciate it the difficulty of those eastern moors and hills for instance the resistance they offer to human passage meet you continually through English history the engineers of the modern railways could give a whole romance of it the story of every army that has had to cross them and of which we have record bears the same witness the illusion which the modern traveler may be under that the barrier is negligible is very soon dispelled when for his recreation he crosses it by any other method than the railway and perhaps in such an experience of travel nothing more impresses one the character of that barrier than the loneliness there is no other corresponding contrast of men in MTS than I know of in Europe the great towns lie enormous, pollulating million in the plains on either side they push their limbs up far into the valleys between them utterly deserted you have these miles and miles of bare upland like a roof of a house between two crowded streets merely to cross the pennines driving or on foot is sufficient to teach one this to go to the length of the hills along the watershed from the peak to cross fell few people have done it is to get an impression of desertion and separation which you will imagine nowhere else in travel nowhere else at least within touch and almost hearing of great towns the sea also was here more of a barrier than bond Ireland not Roman and later an enemy lay over against that shore its ports save one silted its slope from the shore was shallow the approach and the beaching of a fleet not easy its river miles were few and dangerous this triangle of Lancashire so cut off from the west and from the east had for its base a barrier that completed its isolation the barrier was the marshy valley of the mercy it could be outflanked only at its extreme eastern point where the valley rises to the hundred foot contour line from that point the valley rises so rapidly within a half dozen miles into the eastern hills that it was dry even under primitive conditions and the opportunity here afforded for a passage is marked by the topographical point of Stockport by that gate the main avenues of approach still enter the county through this gap passed the London road and passes today the London and Northwestern Railway it was this gate which gave its early strategic importance to Manchester lying just north of it and holding the whole of this corner historians have noted that to hold Manchester was ultimately to hold Lancashire itself it was not the industrial importance of the town for that was hardly existent until quite modern times it was its strange position which gave it such a character the Roman fort for the junction of the two rivers near Knot Mill represented the first good defensible position commanding this gate upon the southeast to enter the country anywhere west of the hundred foot contour and the mercy valley was for an army deprived of modern methods impossible a little organized destruction would make it impossible again two artificial causeways negotiated the valley each bears to this day at Stretford and at Stretton the proof of its old character for both words indicate the passage of a street that is of a hard made way over the soft and drowned land Stretford was but the approach to Manchester from Chester and Manchester thus commanded by the way the two southeastern approaches to the county the one natural the other artificial the approach by Stretton gave Warrington its strategic importance in the early history of the county the central point upon the mercy standing at a clear days march from Liverpool the port on the one hand and a clear days march from Manchester on the other it was from Warrington that Lord Strange marched upon Manchester at the very beginning of the Civil War and if by some accident this stretch of territory should again be a scene of warfare Warrington in spite of the close network of modern communications would be the strategic center of the county boundary so one might take the units out of which modern England has been built up one by one showing that their boundaries were fixed by nature and that their local separation was not the product of the pirate raids but is something infinitely older older than the Empire and very probably did we know what the Roman divisions of Britain were accepted under the Empire so one might prove or at least suggest that the strategic character of the English county and of its chief stronghold and barriers lay in an origin far beyond the limits of recorded history to produce such a study would be to add to the truth and of our history for England was not made nor even molded by the Danish and the Saxon raids the framework is far, far older and so strong that it still survives the end of chapter 16 this is a LibraVox recording all LibraVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibraVox.org On Something by Hilaer Bellach Chapter 17 The Relic It was upon an evening in Spain but with nothing which that word evokes for us in the north for it was merely a lessening of the light without dews, without mists and without skies and that I came up a stony valley and saw against the random line of the plateau at its head the road I traveled was but faintly marked and was often lost and mingled with the rough boulders and the sands and in the shallow depression of the valley there were but a few stagnant pools the shape of the dome was Italian and it should have stood in an Italian landscape drier indeed than that to which northerners are accustomed but still surrounded by trees and with a distance that could render things beautiful instead of that this large building stood in the complete waste which I have already described at such length which is so appalling and so new to a European from any other province of Europe as I approached the building I saw that there gathered round it a village or rather a group of dependent houses for the church was so much larger than anything in the place and the material of which the church itself and the habitations were built the flat old tiled roofs all mixed under the advance of darkness into so united a body that one would have said as was perhaps historically the truth that the church was not built for the needs of the place but that the borough had grown round the shrine and had served for little saved to house its servants when the long ascent was ended and the crest reached where the head of the valley merged into the upper plain I passed into the narrow first lanes it was now quite dark the darkness had come suddenly and to make all things consonant there was no moon and there were not any stars clouds had risen of an even and menacing sort and one could see no heaven here and there lights began to show in the houses but most people were in the street talking loudly from their doorstep to each other they watched me as I came along because I was a foreigner and I went down until I reached the central marketplace wondering how I should tell the best place for sleep but long before my choice could be made my thoughts were turned in another direction by finding myself at a turn of the irregular paving right in front of a vast facade and behind it somewhat belittled by the great length of the church itself the dome just showed I had come to the very steps of the church which had accompanied my thoughts and had been a goal before me during all the last hours of the day in the presence of so wonderful a thing I forgot the object of my journey and the immediate care of the moment and I went through the great doors that opened on the place these were carved and by the little that lingered of the light and the glimmer of the electric light on the neighboring wall where there is electric light everywhere in Spain but it is often of a red heat I could perceive that these doors were wonderfully carved already at Saragosa and several times during my walking south from thence I had noted that what the Spaniards did had a strange affinity to the work of Flanders the two districts differ altogether save in the human character of those who inhabit them the one is pastoral full of deep meadows and perpetual woods of minerals and of coal for modern energy of harbours and good tidal rivers for the industry of the Middle Ages the other is a desert land far up in the sky with an air like a knife and a complete absence of the creative sense in nature about one yet in both the creation of man runs riot in both there is a sort of endless imagination in both every detail that man achieves in art is carefully completed and different from its neighbor and in both there is an exuberance of the soul but with this difference that something in the Spanish temper has killed the grotesque both districts have been mingled in history yet it is not the Spaniard who has invigorated the delta of the Rhine and the high country to the south of it nor the Walloons and the Flemings who have taught the Spaniards but each of these highly separated peoples resembles the other when it comes to the outward expression of the soul why I cannot tell within there is not a complete darkness but a series of lights showing against the silence of the blackness of the nave and in the middle of the nave like a great funeral thing was the choir which the Spanish churches have preserved an intact tradition from the origins of the Christian faith go to the earliest of the Basilicas in Rome and you will see that sacred enclosure standing in the middle of the edifice and taking up a certain proportion of the whole we in the north where the faith lived uninterruptedly and after the 9th century with no great struggle dwindled this feature and extended the open and popular space keeping only the rude screen as a hint of what had once been the secret mysteries and the initiations of our origins but here in Spain the earliest forms of Christian externals crystallized as it were they were thrust like an insult or a challenge against the Asiatic as the reconquest of the desolated province proceeded and therefore in every Spanish church you have side by side with the Christian riot of art this original hierarchic and secret thing almost shocking to a northerner the choir the choral with high solemn walls shutting out the people from the priests and from the mysteries when the whole system was organized for defense against an inimical society around the silence of the place was not complete nor as I have said was the darkness at the far end of the choir behind the high altar was the light of many candles and there were people murmuring or whispering though not at prayers there was a young priest passing me at that moment and I said to him in Latin of the common sort that I could speak no Spanish I asked him if he could speak to me slowly in Latin as I was speaking to him he answered me with this word posissime which I easily understood then I asked him very carefully and speaking slowly whether benediction were about to be held and evening right but as I did not know the Latin for benediction I called it alternately benedicchio which is English and Salas which is French which is a nice CC which whether it were Italian or French or local I understood by the nodding of his head but at any rate he had not caught my meaning for when I came behind the high altar where the candles were and knelt there I clearly saw that no preparations for benediction were toward there was not even an altar all there was was a pair of cupboard doors as it were a very thickly carved wood very heavily gilded and very old indeed the pattern of the carving was barbaric and I think it must have dated from that turn of the dark into the middle ages when so much of our Christian work resembled the work of savages spirals and hideous heads and serpents and other things by this I was already enormously impressed and by a little group of people around of whom perhaps half were children when the young priest to whom I had spoken approached and calling a well-dressed man of the middle class who stood by and who had I suppose some local prominence went up the steps with him toward those wooden doors he fitted a key into the lock and opened them wide the candles shown at once through a thick clear glass upon a frame of jewels which flashed wonderfully and there midst was the head of a dead man cut off from the body leaning somewhat sideways and changed in a terrible manner from the expression of living men it was so changed not only by incalculable age but also I presume by the violence of his death to those inexperienced in the practice of such worship there might be more excuse for the novel impression which this site suddenly produced upon me our race from its very beginning nay, all the races of men have preserved the fleshly memorials of those to whom sanctity attached and I have seen such relics in many parts of Europe almost as common places but for some reason my emotions upon that evening were of a different kind the length of the way for I was miles and miles southwards over this desert waste the ignorance of the language which surrounded me the inhuman outline hour after hour under the glare of the sun or in the inhospitable darkness of this hard Iberian land the sternness of the faces the violent richness and the magnitude of the architecture about me and my knowledge of the trials through which the province had passed put me in this presence into a mood very different I think from that which pilgrimage is calculated to arouse there was in it much more of all and even of terror there seemed to re-arise in the presence of that distorted face the memories of active pain and of the unconquerable struggle by which this ruined land was recovered I wondered as I looked at that face whether he had fallen in protest against the Mohammedans or as have so many in a Spanish endurance of torture martyred by pagans in the pacific seas but no history of him was given to me nor do I know now as I write the words that made this head so great they said but a few prayers all familiar to me in the latin tongue then the our father and some few others which have always been recited in the vernacular they next in tone the Salve Regina but what an intonation had I not heard that chant often enough in my life to catch its meaning I had never heard it said to such a tune it was harsh and it was full of battle application in it throbbed with the present and physical agony had I cared less for the human beings about me so much suffering so much national tradition of suffering would have revolted as it did indeed upon me the chant came to an end and the three gracious epithets in which it closes were full of wailing and the children's voices were very high then the priest shut the doors and locked them and the girls out one by one and I went out into the marketplace fuller than ever of Spain the end of chapter 17 this is a LibraVox recording all LibraVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibraVox.org On Something by Hilaer Bellach Chapter 18 The Iron Monger When I was in the French army we came one day with the guns in July along a straight and dusty road and clattered into the village called Bardiloc of the details of such marches I have often written I wish now to speak of another thing which in long accounts of mere rumbling of guns one might never have time to tell but which is really the most important of all experiences under arms in France I mean the older civilians the fathers who made the French army who determined to recover from the defeats and to play once more that determined a game which makes up half French history the thesserization the gradual reaccumulation of power the general answer to such questions is to say the nation being beaten had to set to and recover its old position that answer is insufficient it deals in abstractions and tells you nothing plenty of political societies throughout history have sat down under disaster and consented to sink slowly many have done worse they have maintained after sharp warnings the pride of their blind years they have maintained that pride on into the great disasters and when these came they have sullenly died France neither consented to sink nor died by being over weaning some men must have been at work to force their sons into the conscription to consent to heavy taxation to be vigilant accumulative tenacious and as it were constantly eager there must have been classes in which unknown to themselves the stirp of the nation survived individuals who aiming at twenty different things managed as a resultant to carry up the army to the pitch in which I had known it and to lay a slow foundation for recovered vigor who were these men I had read of them in Birmingham when I was at school I had read of them in books when I read of the Hundred Years War and of the Revolution I was to read of them again in books at Oxford but on that Saturday at Bartoluc I saw one of them and by as much as the physical impression is worth more than the secondary effect of history my sight of them is worth writing down a man in my battery one Matthew told me he had to leave to go out for the evening and told me also to go and get leave he said his uncle had asked him to dine and bring a friend it seemed his uncle lived in a villa on the heights above the town he was an ironmonger who had retired I went to my sergeant and asked him for leave my sergeant was a noble who was working his way up through the ranks and when I found him he was checking off forage at a barn where some of our men were working he looked me hard in the eyes and said in a drawing lackadaisical voice you are the Englishman yes sergeant I said a little anxiously before I was very keen to get a good dinner in town after all that marching well said he as you are the Englishman you can go such is the logic of the service the army is no place to argue and I went I suppose what he meant was as we are both more or less in exile take my blessing and be off but he may merely have meant to be inconsequent for inconsequences the wit of schoolboys and soldiers I went up the hill with my friend the long twilight was still brought over the hill and the old houses of Barty Luck as we climbed it was night by the clock but one could have seen to read we were tired and talked of nothing in particular but such things as we said were full of the old refrain of conscripts dog of a trade when shall we be out of it but even as we spoke there was a pride in our breast at the noise of trumpets in the mist below along the river and the eighth making its presence known and our uniforms and our swords we stopped at last before a little square house with the lilacs painted on the gate there was a parched little lawn a little fountain a tripod supporting a globular mirror and we went in he was in a cotton suit walking about among his flowers and enjoying the evening he was a man of about fifty short, strong, brown and abrupt though it was already evening and one could see little we knew well enough that his eyes were steady and dark for he had the attitude and carriage of those men who invigorate France his self-confidence was evident in his sturdy legs and his arms akimbo his vulgarity and his gesture his narrowness in the forward and peering look his indomitable energy in every movement of his body it did not surprise me to learn in his later conversation that he was a republican he spoke at once to us both saying in a kind of grumbling shout well gunners then he spoke roughly to his nephew telling him we were late to me a little too politely saying he put no blame on me but only on his escaped grace of a nephew I said that our lateness was due to having to find the sergeant he answered one must always put the blame on someone else which was ranked bad manners he led the way into the house the dining room gave on to a veranda and beyond this was another little lawn with trees in the dark a few insects chirped and as the evening was warmish one smelt the flowers the windows had been left open everything was clean neat and bare on the walls were two excellent old prints a badly drawn certificate of membership in some society or other a still worse portrait of a local worthy and a watercolor painted I suppose by his daughter he introduced me to his wife a hard featured woman with thin hair full of duty busy and precise fresh from the kitchen we unhooked our swords with a conventional clatter and sat down to the meal I will confess that as we ate those excellent dishes they were all excellent and drank that ordinary wine I seemed to be living in a book rather than among living men here was I a young English boy thrust by accident into the French army fairly acquainted with this language though I spoke it with an accent taken of course by my host for a pure Englishman though half my blood was French here was I sitting at his side and watching things and learning as for him, men like him of whom England has some few left in forgotten villages and who are when they can be found the strength of a state they never bother about learning anything far removed from their realities I noticed the one servant going in and out rapidly bullied a good deal by her master deft but nervous I noticed how everything was solid and good the chairs, table, clock, clothes and especially the cooking I saw his local newspaper neatly folded on the mantelpiece I saw the pet dog of his retirement crouching at his side and I heard the chance sayings he threw to his nephew the maxim is granted to youth long ago I wondered how much that nephew would inherit I guessed about 10,000 pounds at the least and 20 at the most I was almost inclined to cross myself at the thought of such a lot of money my host grew more genial, he asked me questions on England, his wife also was interested in that country they both knew more about it than their class in England knows about France and this astonished me for in the gentry English gentlemen know more about France French gentlemen know about England he asked me if agriculture were still in a bad way why we had not more of the people at the universities why we allowed only lords into our parliament and whether there were more French commercial travelers in England than English commercial travelers in France in all these points I admitted supplemented and corrected and probably distorted his impressions he asked me if English gunners were good and I said I did not know but I thought so he replied that the English drivers had a high reputation in his country his brother, the brother of an ironmonger was a captain of the horse artillery and had told him so and this he said to me who wore a French uniform but whose heart was away up an air on valley in my own woods and at rest and alone in the last hour when we had to be getting back a certain tenderness came into his somewhat mercenary look he devoted himself more to his nephew he took him aside and with some ceremony gave him money he offered his cigars, we took one each his round French face became all wrinkles like a cracked plate he said Bah, take them by the pocket full we know what life is in the regiment and he crammed half a dozen each into the of our tunics but when he said we know what life is, he lied for he had only been a mobile in 70 he had voted but never suffered the conscription so we said good night to this man our host who had so regaled us I may be wrong but I fancy he was an anti-clerical he was a hard man just eager and attentive narrow as I have said and unconsciously as I have also said we love the nation there was the iron monger of Bartoloc and there are hundreds of thousands of the same kind the end of chapter 18