 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A Short History of England by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 15 The War with the Great Republics We cannot understand the 18th century so long as we suppose that rhetoric is artificial because it is artistic. We do not fall into this folly about any of the other arts. We talk of a man picking out notes arranged in ivory on a wooden piano with much feeling, or of his pouring out his soul by scraping on cat-gut after a training as careful as an acrobat. But we are still haunted with the prejudice that verbal form and verbal effect must somehow be hypocritical when they are the link between things so living as a man and a mob. We doubt the feelings of the old-fashioned orator because his periods are so rounded and pointed as to convey his feeling. Now, before any criticism of the 18th century, worthy must be put the proviso of their perfect artistic sincerity. Their oratory was unrhymed poetry, and it had the humanity of poetry. It was not even unmetrical poetry. That century is full of great phrases, often spoken on the spur of great moments, which have in them a throb and recurrence of song, as of a man thinking to a tune. Nelson's, in honor I gain them, in honor I will die with them, has more rhythm than much is called verse libraries. Patrick Henry's Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death might be a great line in Walt Whitman. It is one of the many quaint perversities of the English to pretend to be bad speakers. But in fact, the most English 18th century epic, blazed with brilliant speakers. There may have been finer writing in France. There was no such fine speaking as in England. The Parliament had false enough, but it was sincere enough to be rhetorical. The Parliament was corrupt, as it is now, though the examples of corruption were then often really made examples in the sense of warnings, and they are now examples only in the sense of patterns. The Parliament was indifferent to the constituencies as it is now, though perhaps the constituencies were less indifferent to the Parliament. The Parliament was snobbish as it is now, though perhaps more respectful to mere rank and less to mere wealth. But the Parliament was a Parliament. It did fulfill its name and duty by talking and trying to talk well. It did not merely do things because they do not bear talking about, as it does now. It was then to the eternal glory of our country a great talking shop, not a mere buying and selling shop for financial tips and official places. And as with any other artist, the care of the 18th century man expended on oratory is a proof of his sincerity, not a disproof of it. An enthusiastic eulogym by Burt is as rich and elaborate as a lover's sonnet, but it is because Burt is really enthusiastic like a lover. An angry sentence by Junius is as carefully compounded as a Renaissance poison, but it is because Junius is really angry, like the Poisoner. Now nobody who has realized this psychological truth can doubt for a moment that many of the English aristocrats of the 18th century had a real enthusiasm for liberty. Their voices lift like the trumpets upon the very word. Whatever their immediate forebears may have meant, these men meant what they said when they talked of the high memory of Hampton or the majesty of Magna Carta. These patriots, whom Walpole called the boys, included many who really were patriots, or better still, who really were boys. If we prefer to put it so, among the Whig aristocrats were many who really were Whigs. Whigs by all the ideal definitions, which identified the party with the defense of law against tyrants and courtiers. But if anyone deduces from the fact that the Whig aristocrats were Whigs, and he doubt about whether the Whig aristocrats were aristocrats, there is one practical test and reply. It might be tested in many ways, but the game laws and enclosure laws they passed, or by the strict code of the duel and definition of honor on which they all insisted. But if it really be questioned whether I am right in calling their whole world an aristocracy, and the very reverse of it, a democracy, the true historical test is this. That when republicanism really entered the world, they instantly waged two great wars with it. Or if the view be preferred, it instantly waged two great wars with them. America and France revealed the real nature of the English parliament. Ice may sparkle, but a real spark will show it is only ice. So when the fire of the revolution touched the frosty splendors of the Whigs, there was instantly a hissing and a strife. A strife of the flame to melt the ice of the water to quench the flame. It has been noted that one of the virtues of the aristocrats was liberty, especially liberty among themselves. It might even be said that one of the virtues of the aristocrats was cynicism. They were not stuffed with our fashionable fiction, with its stiff and wooden figures of a good man named Washington, and a bad man named Boney. They at least were aware that Washington's cause was not so obviously white, nor Napoleon's so obviously black, as most books in general circulation would indicate. They had a natural admiration for the military genius of Washington and Napoleon. They had the most unmixed contempt for the German royal family. But they were as a class, not only against both Washington and Napoleon, but against them both for the same reason, and it was that they both stood for democracy. Great injustice is done to the English aristocratic government of the time through a failure to realize this fundamental difference, especially in the case of America. There is a wrong-headed humor about the English, which appears especially in this, that while they often, as in the case of Ireland, make themselves outright where they were entirely wrong, they are easily persuaded, as in the case of America, to make themselves out entirely wrong where there is at least a case where they haven't been more or less right. George III's government laid certain taxes on the colonial community on the eastern seaboard of America. It was certainly not self-evident in the sense of law and precedent that the imperial government could not lay taxes on such colonists, nor were the taxes themselves of that practically oppressive sort, which rightly raised everywhere the common cause history of revolution. The Whig oligarchies had their faults, but utter lack of sympathy with liberty, especially local liberty, and with their adventurous kindred beyond the seas was by no means one of their faults. Chatham, the great chief of the new and very national nobleness, was typical of them in being free from the faintest illiberality and irritation against the colonies as such. He would have made them free and even favored colonies if only he could have kept them as colonies. Burke, who was then the eloquent voice of Whigism and was destined later to show how holy it was a voice of aristocracy, went of course even further. Even North compromise, and though George III, being a fool, might himself have refused to compromise, he had already failed to affect the Balingbrook scheme of restitution of the royal power. The case for the Americans, the real reason for calling them right to the coral, was something much deeper than the coral. They were at issue not with the dead monarchy, but with a living aristocracy. They declared war on something much finer and more formidable than poor old George. Nevertheless, the popular tradition, especially in America, has pictured it primarily as the duel of George III and George Washington. And as we have noticed more than once, such pictures, though figurative, are seldom false. King George's head was not much more useful on the throne than it was on the signboard of a tavern. Nevertheless, the signboard was really a sign and a sign of the times. It stood for a tavern that sold not English but German beer. It stood for that side of the Whig policy which Chatham showed when he was tolerant to America alone, but intolerant of America when allied with France. That very wooden sign stood in short for the same thing as the juncture with Frederick the Great. It stood for that Anglo-German alliance, which had a very much later time in history, was to turn into the world old Teutonic race. Roughly and frankly speaking, we may say that America forced the coral. She wished to be separate, which was to her but another phrase for wishing to be free. She was not thinking of her wrongs as a colony, but already of her rights as a republic. The negative effect of so small a difference could never have changed the world without the positive effect of a great ideal, one may say of a great new religion. The real case for the colonists is that they felt they could be something which they also felt, and justly, that England would not help them to be. England would probably have allowed the colonists all sorts of concessions and constitutional privileges, but England could not allow the colonists equality. I do not mean equality with her, but even with each other. Chatham might have compromised with Washington because Washington was a gentleman, but Chatham could hardly have conceived a country not governed by gentlemen. Burke was apparently ready to grant everything to America, but he would not have been ready to grant what America eventually gained. If he had seen American democracy, he would have been as much appalled by it as he was by French democracy, and would always have been by any democracy. In a word, the Whigs were liberal and even generous aristocrats, but they were aristocrats. That is why their concessions were as vain as their contests. We talk with the humiliation too rare with us about our dubious part in the secession of America. Whether it increased or decreased the humiliation, I do not know. But I strongly suspect that we had very little to do with it. I believe we counted for uncommonly little in the case. We did not really drive away the American colonists, nor were they driven. They were led on by a light that went before. That light came from France, like the armies of Lafayette that came to the help of Washington. France was already in travail with the tremendous spiritual revolution which was soon to reshape the world. Her doctrine, disruptive and creative, was widely misunderstood at the time, and is much misunderstood still, despite the splendid clarity of style in which it was stated by Rousseau, in the Contrat Social, and by Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence. Say the very word equality in many modern countries and four hundred fools will leap to their feet at once to explain that some men can be found on careful examination to be taller or handsomer than others. As if Danton had not noticed that he was taller than Rope Spear, or as if Washington was not well aware that he was handsomer than Franklin. This is no place to expound a philosophy. It will be enough to say in passing, by way of a parable, that when we say that all pennies are equal, we do not mean that they all look exactly the same. We mean that they are absolutely equal in the one absolute character in the most important thing about them. It may be put practically by saying that they are coins of a certain value, twelve of which go to a shilling. It may be put symbolically and even mystically by saying that they all bear the image of the king. And though the most mystical, it is also the most practical summary of equality, that all men bear the image of kings. Indeed, it is of course true that this idea had long underlaying all Christianity, even in institutions less popular in form than were, for instance, the mob of medieval republics in Italy. A dogma of equal duties implies that of equal rights. I know of no Christian authority that would not admit that it was as wicked to murder a poor man as a rich man, or as bad to burgle an inelegantly furnished house as a tastefully furnished one. But the world had wandered further and further from these truisms and nobody in the world was further from them than the group of the great English aristocrats. The idea of the equality of men is in substance simply the idea of the importance of man. It was precisely the notion of the importance of a mere man which seems startling and indecent to a society whose whole romance and religion now consisted of the importance of a gentleman. It was as if a man had walked naked into Parliament. There is not space here to develop the moral issue in full, but this will suffice to show that the critics concerned about the difference in human types or talents are considerably wasting their time. If they can understand how two coins can count the same, though one is bright and the other brown, they might perhaps understand how two men can vote the same, though one is bright and the other dull. If however they are still satisfied with their solid objection that some men are dull, I can only gravely agree with them that some men are very dull. But a few years after Lafayette had returned from helping to found a Republic in America, he was flung over his own frontiers for resisting the foundation of a Republic in France. So furious was the onward stride of this new spirit that the Republican of the New World lived to be the reactionary of the old. Or when France passed from theory to practice, the question was put to the world in a way not thinkable in connection with the preparatory experiment of a thin population on a colonial coast. The mightiest of human monarchies, like some monstrous, immeasurable idol of iron, was melted down in a furnace barely bigger than itself and recast in a size equally colossal, but in a shape men could not understand. Many at least could not understand it, and least of all the liberal aristocracy of England. There were of course practical reasons for continuous foreign policy against France, whether royal or Republican. There was primarily the desire to keep any foreigner from menacing us from the Flemish coast. There was to a much lesser extent the colonial rivalry in which so much English glory had been gained by the statesmanship of Chatham and the arms of Wolf and of Clive. The former reason has returned on us with a singular irony for in order to keep the French out of Flanders, we flung ourselves with increasing enthusiasm into a fraternity with the Germans. We purposely fed and pampered the power which was destined in the future to devour Belgium as France would never have devoured it and threatened us across the sea with terrors of which no Frenchman would ever dream. But indeed much deeper things unified our attitude towards France before and after the revolution. It is but one strive from despotism to democracy, and logic as well as in history, and oligarchy is equally remote from both. The best deal fell, and it seemed to an Englishman merely that a despot had turned into a demos. The young Bonaparte rose, and it seemed to an Englishman merely that a demos had once more turned into a despot. He was not wrong in thinking these allotropic forms of the same alien thing, and that thing was equality. For when millions are equally subject to one law it makes little difference if they are also subject to one law-giver. The general social life is a level. The one thing that the English have never understood about Napoleon in all their myriad studies of his mysterious personality is how impersonal he was. I had almost said how unimportant he was. He said himself I shall go down into history with my code in my hand, but in practical effects, as distinct from mere name and renown, it would be even truer to say that his code will go down into history with his hands set to it in signature, somewhat illegibly. Thus his testamentary law has broken up big estates and encouraged contented peasants in places where his name is cursed, in places where his name is almost unknown. In his lifetime of course it was natural that the annihilating splendor of his military strokes should rivet the eyes like flashes of lightning, but his reign fell more silently and its refreshment remained. It is needless to repeat here that after bursting one world coalition after another by battles that are the masterpieces of the military art, he was finally worn down by two comparatively popular causes, the resistance of Russia and the resistance of Spain. The former was largely, like so much that is Russian, religious, but in the latter appeared most conspicuously that which concerns us here, the valor, vigilance, and high national spirit of England in the eighteenth century. The long Spanish campaign tried and made triumphant the great Irish soldier, afterwards known as Wellington, who has become all the more symbolic since he was finally confronted with Napoleon in the last defeat of the latter at Waterloo. Wellington, though too logical to be at all English, was in many ways typical of the aristocracy. He had irony and independence of mind, but if we wish to realize how rigidly such men remained limited by their class, how little they really knew what was happening in their time, it is enough to know that Wellington seems to have thought he had dismissed Napoleon by saying that he was not really a gentleman. If an acute and experienced Chinaman were to say of Chinese Gordon, he is not actually a Mandarin. We should think that the Chinese system deserved its reputation for being both rigid and remote, but the very name of Wellington is enough to suggest another, and with it the reminder that this, though true, is inadequate. There was some truth in the idea that the Englishman was never so English as when he was outside England and never smacked so much of the soil as when he was on the sea. There has run through the national psychology something that has never had a name except the eccentric and indeed extraordinary name of Robinson Caruso, which is all the more English for being quite undiscoverable in England. It may be doubted if a French or German boy especially wishes that his corn land or vine land were a desert, but many an English boy has wished that his island were a desert island. But we might even say that the Englishman was too insular for an island. He awoke most to life when his island was sundered from the foundations of the world, when it hung like a planet and flew like a bird, and by a contradiction the real British army was in the navy. The moldest of the islanders were scattered over the moving archipelago of a great fleet. There still lay on it like an increasing light the legend of the Armada. It was a great fleet full of the glory of having once been small one. Long before Wellington ever saw Waterloo, the ships had done their work and shattered the French navy in the Spanish seas, leaving like a light upon the sea the life and death of Nelson, who died with his stars on his bosom and his heart upon his sleeve. There is no word for the memory of Nelson except to call him mythical. The very hour of his death, the very name of his ship are touched with that epic completeness which critics call the long arm of coincidence and prophets the hand of God. His very faults and failures were heroic, not in a loose but in a classic sense in that he fell only like the legendary heroes, weakened by a woman, not foiled by any foe among men, and he remains the incarnation of a spirit in the English that is purely poetic, so poetic that it fancies itself a thousand things and sometimes even fancies itself prosaic. At a recent date in an age of reason, in a country already calling itself dull in business-like, with top hats and factory chimneys already beginning to rise like towers of funerial efficiency, this country clergyman's son moved to the last in a luminous cloud and acted a fairy tale. He shall remain as a lesson to those who do not understand England and a mystery to those who think they do. In outward action he led his ships to victory and died upon a foreign sea, but symbolically he established something indescribable and intimate, something that sounds like a native proverb. He was the man who burnt his ships and who forever set the tames on fire. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A SHORT HISTORY OF INGLAND by G. K. Chesterton CHAPTER XVI EROSTOCRACY AND THE DISCONTENSE It is a pathos of many hackneyed things that they are intrinsically delicate and are only mechanically made dull. Anyone who has seen the first white light when it comes in by a window knows that daylight is not only as beautiful but as mysterious as moonlight. It is the subtlety of the color of sunshine that seems to be colorless. So patriotism, and especially English patriotism, which is vulgarized with volumes of verbal fog and gas, is still in itself something as tenuous and tender as a climate. The name of Nelson, with which the last chapter ended, might very well summarize the matter, for his name is banged and beaten about like an old tin can, while his soul had something in it of a fine and fragile eighteenth-century vase. And it will be found that the most threadbare things, contemporary and connected with him, have a real truth to the tone and meaning of his life and time, though for us they have too often denigrated into dead jokes. The expression Hearts of Oak, for instance, is no unhappy phrase for the finer side of that England, of which he was the best expression. Even as a material metaphor it covers much of what I mean. Oak was by no means only made into bludgeons, or even only into battleships. And the English gentry did not think it business-like to pretend to be mere brutes. The mere name of Oak calls back like a dream those dark, the genial interiors of colleges and country houses, in which great gentlemen, not degenerate, almost made Latin in English language, and port in English wine. Some part of that world at least will not perish, for its autumnal glow passed into the brush of the great English portrait painters, whom more than any other men were given the power to commemorate the large humanity of their own land, immortalizing a mood as broad and soft as their own brushwork. Come naturally at the right emotional angle upon a canvas of Gainsborough, who painted ladies like landscapes as great and as unconscious with repose, and you will note how subtly the artist gives to dress flowing in the foreground, something of the divine quality of distance. Then you will understand another faded phrase, and words spoken far away upon the sea, there will rise up quite fresh before you, and be born upon a bar of music, like words you have never heard before, for England, home, and beauty. When I think of these things, I have no temptation to mere grumbling at the great entry that waged the great war of our fathers. But indeed the difficulty about it was something much deeper than could be dealt with by any grumbling. It was an exclusive class, but not an exclusive life. It was interested in all things, though not for all men. Or rather those things it failed to include through the limitations of this rationalist interval between medieval and modern mysticism, were at least not of the sort to shock us with superficial inhumanity. The greatest gap in their souls, for those who think it is a gap, was their complete and complacent paganism. All their very decencies assumed that the old faith was dead. Those who held it still, like the great Johnson, were considered eccentrics. The French Revolution was a riot that broke up the very formal funeral of Christianity and was followed by various other complications, including the corpse coming to life. But the skepticism was no mere oligarchy or g. It was not confined to the Hellfire Club, which might in virtue of its vivid name, be regarded as relatively orthodox. It is present in the mildest middle-class atmosphere, as in the middle-class masterpiece about Northanger Abbey, where we actually remember it is an antiquity without ever remembering it is an abbey. Indeed there is no clearer case of it than what can only be called the atheism of Jane Austen. Unfortunately it could truly be said of the English gentlemen, as of another gallant and gracious individual, that his honor stood rooted in dishonor. He was indeed somewhat in the position of such an aristocrat in a romance, whose splendor has the dark spot of a secret and sort of blackmail. There was to begin with an uncomfortable paradox in the tale of his pedigree. Many heroes have claimed to be descended from the gods, from beings greater than themselves, but he himself was far more heroic than his ancestors. His glory did not come from the Crusades, but from the Great Pillage. His fathers had not come over with William the Conqueror, but only assisted in a somewhat shuffling manner at the coming over of William of Orange. His own exploits were often really romantic in the cities of the Indian Sultans or the war of the wooden ships. It was the exploits of the far-off founders of his family that were painfully realistic. In this the Great Gentry were more in the position of Napoleonic marshals than of Norman knights, but their position was worse, for the marshals might be descended from peasants and shopkeepers. But the oligarchs were descended from usurers and thieves. That, for good or evil, was the paradox of England. The typical aristocrat was the typical upstart. But the secret was worse. Not only was such a family founded on stealing, but the family was stealing still. It is the grim truth that all through the 18th century, all through the great Whig speeches about liberty, all through the great Tory speeches about patriotism, through the period of Wanda Wash and Plassy, through the period of Trafalgar and Waterloo, one process was steadily going on in the central senate of the nation. Parliament was passing bill after bill for the enclosure by the great landlords of such of the common lands as had survived out of the great communal system of the Middle Ages. It is much more than a pun that is the prime political irony of our history that the commons were destroying the commons. The very word common, as we have before noted, lost its great moral meaning and became a mere topographical term for some remaining scrap of scrub or heath that was not worth stealing. In the 18th century, these last and lingering commons were connected only with stories about highwaymen which still linger in our literature. The romance of them was a romance of robbers and not of the real robbers. This was the mysterious sin of the English Squires that they remained human and yet ruined humanity all around them. Their own ideal, their own reality of life was really more generous and genial than the stiff savagery of Puritan captains and Prussian nobles. But the land withered under their smile is under an alien frown. Being still at least English, they were still in their way good-natured, but their position was false and a false position forces the good-natured into brutality. The French Revolution was the challenge that really revealed to the Whigs that they must make up their minds to be really Democrats or admit that they were really aristocrats. They decided, as in the case of their philosophic exponent Burke, to be really aristocrats. And the result was the white terror, the period of anti-Jacoban repression which revealed the real side of their sympathies more than any stricken fields in foreign lands. Cavett, the last and greatest of the yeoman of the small farming classes which the great estates were devouring daily, was thrown into prison merely for protesting against the flogging of English soldiers by German mercenaries. In that savage dispersal of a peaceful meeting which was called the Massacre of Peterloo, the English soldiers were indeed employed, though much more in the spirit of German ones. And it is one of the bitter satires to cling to the very continuity of our history that such suppression of the old yeoman spirit was the work of soldiers who still bore the title of the yeomanry. The name of Cavett is very important here. Indeed, it is generally ignored because it is important. Cavett was the one man who saw the tendency of the time as a whole and challenged it as a whole. Consequently, he went without support It is a mark of our whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet by the fight because it is a sham fight. Thus, most of us know by this time that the party system has been popular only in the same sense that a football match is popular. The division in Cavett's time was slightly more sincere but almost as superficial. It was a difference of sentiment about externals which divided the old agricultural gentry of the 18th century from the new mercantile gentry of the 19th. Through the first half of the 19th century there were some real disputes between the squire and the merchant. The merchant became converted to the important economic thesis of free trade and accused the squire of starving the poor by dear bread to keep up his agrarian privilege. Later the squire retorted, not ineffectively, by accusing the merchant to brutalizing the poor by overworking them in his factories to keep up his commercial success. The passing of the factory acts was a confession of the cruelty that underlay the new industrial experiments. Just as the repeal of the corn laws was a confession of the comparative weakness and unpopularity of the squires who had destroyed the last remnants of any peasantry that might have defended the field against the factory. These relatively real disputes would bring us to the middle of the Victorian era. But long before the beginning of the Victorian era, Cobbett had seen and said that the disputes were only relatively real. Or rather, he would have said in his more robust fashion that they were not real at all. He would have said that the agricultural pot and the industrial kettle were calling each other black when they had both been blackened in their position. And he would have been substantially right for the great industrial disciple of the kettle, James Watt who learned from it the lesson of the steam engine was typical of the age in this that he found the old trade guilds too fallen, unfashionable and out of touch with the times to help his discovery so that he had recourse to the rich minority which had worn on and weakened those guilds since the Reformation. There was no prosperous peasant's pot such as Henry of Navarre invoked to enter into alliance with the kettle. In other words, there was in the strict sense of the word no commonwealth because wealth though more and more wealthy was less and less common. Whether it be a credit or discredit industrial science and enterprise were invoked a new experiment of the old oligarchy and the old oligarchy had always been ready for new experiments beginning with the Reformation and it's characteristic of the clear mind which was hidden from many by the hot temper of Kabat that he did see the Reformation as the root of both squierarchy and industrialism and called on the people to break away from both. The people made more effort to do so than it has commonly realized there are many silences in our somewhat snobbish history educated class could easily suppress a revolt they can still more easily suppress the record of it it was so with some of the chief features of that great medieval revolution the failure of which or rather the betrayal of which was the real turning point of our history it was so with the revolts against the religious policy of Henry VIII and it was so with the Rick burning and frame breaking riots of Kabat's epic the real mob reappeared for a moment in our history for just long enough to show one of the immortal marks of the real mob ritualism there is nothing that strikes the undemocratic octranare so sharply about direct democratic action as the vanity or memory of the things done seriously in the daylight they astonish him by being as unpractical as a poem or a prayer the French Revolutionist stormed an empty prison merely because it was large and solid and difficult to storm and therefore symbolic of the mighty monarchial machinery of which it had been but the shed the English rioters laboriously broken pieces of perished grindstone merely because it was large and solid and difficult to break and therefore symbolic of the mighty oligarchial machinery which perpetually ground the faces of the poor they also put the oppressive agent of some landlord in a cart and escorted him around the country merely to exhibit his horrible personality to heaven and earth afterwards they let him go which marks perhaps for good or evil a certain national modification of the movement there is something very typical of an English revolution in having the tumbrill anyhow these embers of the revolutionary epic were trodden out very brutally the grindstone continued and continues to grind in the scriptural fashion above referred to and in most political crises since it is the crowd that has found itself in the cart but of course both the riot and repression in England were but shadows of the awful revolt and vengeance which crowned the parallel process in Ireland here the terrorism which was but a temporary and desperate tool of the aristocrats in England not deemed to do them justice at all consinent to their temperament which had neither the cruelty and morbidity nor the logic and fixity of terrorism became in a more spiritual atmosphere a flaming sword of religious and racial insanity Pitt, the son of Chatham was quite unfit to fill his father's place unfit indeed I cannot but think of his place commonly given him in history but if he was wholly worthy of his immortality his Irish expedience even if considered as immediately defensible have not been worthy of their immortality he was sincerely convinced of the national need to raise coalition after coalition against Napoleon by pouring the commercial wealth then rather peculiar to England upon her poor allies and he did this with indubitable talent and pertenacity he was at the same time faced with a hostile Irish rebellion and a partly or potentially hostile Irish parliament he broke the latter by the most indecent bribery and the former by the most indecent brutality but he may well have thought himself entitled to the tyrant's plea but not only were his expedience those of panic or at any rate apparel but what is less clearly realized it is the only real defense of them that they were those of panic and peril he was ready to emancipate Catholics as such or religious bigotry was not the vice of the oligarchy but he was not ready to emancipate Irishmen as such he did not really want to enlist Ireland like a recruit but simply to disarm Ireland like an enemy hence his settlement was from the first in a false position for settling anything the union may have been a necessity but the union was not a union it was not intended to be one and nobody has ever treated it as one we have not only never succeeded in making Ireland English as Burgundy has been made French but we have never tried Burgundy could boast of Cornel though Cornel wasn't Orman but we should smile if Ireland boasted of Shakespeare our vanity has involved us in a mere contradiction we have tried to combine identification with superiority it is simply weak-minded to sneer at an Irishman if he figures as an Englishman and rail at him if he figures as an Irishman so the union has never even applied English laws to Ireland but only coercions and concessions both specially designed for Ireland from Pith's time to our own this tottering alternation has continued from the time when the great O'Connell with his monster meetings forced our government to listen to Catholic emancipation to the time when the great Parnell with his obstruction forced it to listen to home rule our staggering equilibrium has been maintained by blows from without in the later 19th century the better sort of special treatment began on the whole to increase Gladstone, an idealistic though inconsistent liberal rather belatedly realized that the freedom he loved in Greece and Italy had its rights nearer home and maybe said to have found a second youth in the gateway of the grave in the eloquence and emphasis of his conversion and a statesman wearing the opposite label for what it is worth had the spiritual insight to see that Ireland, if resolved to be a nation was even more resolved to be a peasantry. George Wyndham, generous, imaginative a man among politicians insisted that the agrarian agony of evictions, shootings and rack-rentings should end with the individual Irish getting as Parnell had put it a grip on their farms in more ways than one his work rounds off almost romantically the tragedy of the rebellion against Pitt for Wyndham himself was of the blood of the leader of the rebels and he wrought the only reparation yet made for all the blood shamefully shed that flowed round the fall of its Gerald. The effect on England was less tragic indeed in a sense it was comic Wellington himself, an Irishman though of the narrower party was preeminently a realist and like many Irishmen was especially a realist about Englishmen he said the army he commanded was the scum of the earth and the remark is nonetheless valuable because that army proved itself useful enough to be called the salt of the earth but in truth it was in this something of a national symbol and the guardian as it were of a national secret there is a paradox about the English even as distinct from the Irish or the Scotch which makes any formal version of their plans and principles inevitably unjust to them England not only makes her ramparts out of rubbish but she finds ramparts in what she herself has cast away as rubbish if it be a tribute to a thing to say that even its failures have been successes there is truth in that tribute some of the best colonies were convict settlements and might be called abandoned convict settlements the army was largely an army of gold birds raised by gold delivery but it was a good army of bad men nay, it was a gay army of unfortunate men this is the color and the character that has run through the realities of English history and it can hardly be put in a book at least of all a historical book it has its flashes in our fantastic fiction and in the songs of the street but its true medium is conversation it has no name but incongruity an illogical laughter survives everything in the English soul it survived perhaps with only too much patience the time of terrorism in which the more serious Irish rose in revolt that time was full of a quiet topsy-turvy tyranny and the English humorous stood on his head to suit it indeed he often receives a quite irrational sentence in a police court by saying he will do it on his head so under Pitt's coercionous regime a man was sent to prison for saying that George IV was fat but we feel he must have been partly sustained in prison by the artistic contemplation of how fat he was that sort of liberty that sort of humanity and it is no mean sword did indeed survive all the drift and downward eddy of an evil economic system as well as the dragooning of a reactionary epic and the drearier menace of materialistic social science as embodied in the new Puritans who have purified themselves even of religion under this long process the worst that can be said is that the English humorist has been slowly driven downwards to the social scale false staff was a knight Sam Weller was a gentleman-servant and some of our recent restrictions seemed designed to drive Sam Weller to the status of the artful dodger but well it was for us that some such trampled tradition and dark memory of merry England survived well for us, as we shall see that all our social science failed and all our statesmanship broke down before it for there was to come the noise of a trumpet and a dreadful day of visitation in which all the daily workers of adult civilization were to be called out of their houses and their holes like resurrection of the dead and left naked under a strange sun with no religion but a sense of humor and men might know of what nation Shakespeare was who broke into puns and practical jokes of his passion of his tragedies if they had only heard those boys in France and Flanders who called out early doors themselves in a theatrical memory as they went so early in their youth to break down the doors of death 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 A Short History of England by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 17 The Return of the Barbarian The only way to write a popular history as we have already remarked would be to write it backwards It would be to take common objects of our own street and tell the tale of how each of them came to be in the street at all And for my immediate purpose it's really convenient to take two objects we have known all our lives as features of fashion or respectability One which has grown rarer recently is what we call a top hat The other which is still a customary formality is a pair of trousers The history of these humorous objects really does give a clue to what has happened in England for the last hundred years It's not necessary to be an esthete in order to regard both objects as the reverse of beautiful as tested by what may be called the rational side of beauty The lines of human limbs can be beautiful and so can the lines of loose drapery but not cylinders too loose to be the first and too tight to be the second Nor is a subtle sense of harmony needed to see that while there are hundreds of differently proportioned hats a hat that actually grows larger toward the top is somewhat top heavy But what is largely forgotten is this that these two fantastic objects which now strike the eye as unconscious freaks were originally conscious freaks Our ancestors to do them justice did not think them casual or commonplace They thought them if not ridiculous at least or cocoa The top hat was the top most point of a riot of regency dandyism and bucks wore trousers while businessmen were still wearing kneebridges It will not be fanciful to see a certain oriental touch in trousers which the later Romans also regarded as effeminately oriental It was an oriental touch found in many florid things of the time in Byron's poems or Brighton Pavilion Now the interesting point is that for a whole serious century these instantaneous fantasies have remained like fossils In the Carnival of the Regency a few fools got into fancy dress and we have all remained in fancy dress At least we have remained in the dress though we have lost the fancy I say this is typical of the most important thing that happened in the Victorian time For the most important thing was that nothing happened The very fuss that was made about minor modification brings into relief the rigidity with which the main lines of social life were left as they were at the French Revolution We talk of the French Revolution as something that changed the world but its most important relation to England is that it did not change England The student of our history is concerned rather with the effect it did not have than the effect it did If it be a splendid fate to have survived the flood the English oligarchy had that added splendor but even for the countries in which the revolution was a convulsion it was the last convulsion until that which shakes the world today It gave their character to all the Commonwealths which all talked about progress and were occupied in marking time Frenchmen under all superficial reactions remained Republican in spirit as they had been when they first wore top hats Englishmen under all superficial reforms remained oligarchial in spirit as they had been when they first wore trousers Only one power might be said to be growing and that in a plotting and prosaic fashion The power in the northeast whose name was Prussia and the English were more and more learning that this growth he'd cause him no alarm since the north Germans were their cousins in blood and their brothers in spirit The first thing to note then about the 19th century is that Europe remained herself as compared with the Europe of the Great War and that England especially remained herself as compared even with the rest of Europe Granted this we may give their proper analysis of this country the small conscious and the large unconscious changes Most of the conscious ones were much upon the model of an early one the great reform bill of 1832 and can be considered in the light of it First from the standpoint of most real reformers the chief thing about the reform bill was that it did not reform It had a huge tide of popular enthusiasm behind it which wholly disappeared when people found themselves in front of it It enfranchised large masses of the middle classes It disfranchised very definite bodies of the working classes and it so struck the balance between the conservative and the dangerous elements in the Commonwealth that the governing class was rather stronger than before The date however is important not at all because it was the beginning of democracy but because it was the beginning of the best ever discovered of evading and postponing democracy Here enters the homeopathic treatment of revolution since so often successful Well into the next generation Disraeli the brilliant Jewish adventurer who was the symbol of the English aristocracy being no longer genuine extended the franchise to the artisans partly indeed as a party move against his great rival Gladstone but more as the method by which popular pressure was first tired out and then toned down the politicians said the working class was now strong enough to be allowed votes it would be true to say it was now weak enough to be allowed votes so in more recent times payment of members which would once have been regarded and resisted as an inrush of popular forces was passed quietly and without resistance and regarded merely as an extension of parliamentary privileges the truth is that the old parliamentary aligarchy abandoned their first line of trenches because they had by that time constructed a second line of defense it consisted in the concentration of colossal political funds in the private and irresponsible power of the politicians collected by the sale of peerages and more important things and expended on the gerrymandering of the enormously expensive elections in the presence of this inner obstacle of vote became about as valuable as a railway ticket when there is a permanent block on the line the facade and outward form of this new secret government is the merely mechanical application of what is called the party system the party system does not consist as some suppose of two parties but of one if there were two real parties there could be no system but if this was the evolution of parliamentary reform as represented by the first reform bill we can see the other side of it in the social reform attacked immediately after the first reform bill it is the truth that should be a tower and a landmark that one of the first things done by the reform parliament was to establish those harsh and dehumanized work houses which both honest radicals and honest Tories branded with the black title of the new best deal this bitter name lingers in our literature and can be found by the curious in works of Carlisle and Hood but it is doubtless interesting rather as a note of contemporary indignation than as a correct comparison it is easy to imagine the logicians and legal orators of the parliamentary school of progress finding many points of differentiation and even of contrast the best deal was one central institution the work houses have been many and have everywhere transformed local life with whatever they have to give of social sympathy and inspiration man of high rank and great wealth were frequently sent to the best deal but no such mistake has ever been made by the more business administration of the work house the most capricious operations of the letters to Keshe there still hovered some hazy traditional idea that a man is put in prison to punish him for something it was the discovery of a later social science that men who cannot be punished can still be imprisoned but the deepest and most decisive difference lies in the better fortune of the new best deal or no mob has ever dared to storm it and it never fell the new poor law was indeed not wholly new in the sense that it was the culmination and clear enunciation of a principle foreshadowed in the earlier poor law of Elizabeth which was one of the many anti-popular effects of the great pillage when the monasteries were swept away and the medieval system of hospitality destroyed traps and beggars became a problem the solution of which has always tended towards slavery even when the question of slavery has been cleared of the irrelevant question of cruelty it is obvious that a desperate man might find Mr. Bumble and the Board of Guardians less cruel than cold weather and the bare ground even if he were allowed to sleep on the ground which by a veritable nightmare of nonsense and injustice he is not he is actually punished for sleeping under a bush on the specific and stated ground that he cannot afford a bed it is obvious however that he may find his best physical good by going into the workhouse as he often found the tin pagan times by selling himself into slavery the point is that the solution remains servile even when Mr. Bumble and the Board of Guardians cease to be in a common sense cruel the pagan might have the luck to sell himself to a kind of master the principle of the new poor law which has so far proved permanent in our society is that the man lost all his civic rights and lost them solely through poverty there is a touch of irony though hardly of mere hypocrisy in the fact that the parliament which affected this reform had just been abolishing black slavery by buying out the slave owners in the British colonies the slave owners were bought out at a price big enough to be called blackmail but it would be misunderstanding the national mentality to deny the sincerity of the sentiment Wilbur force represented in this the real wave of Wesleyan religion which had made a humane reaction against Calvinism and was in no mean sense philanthropic but there is something romantic in the English mind which can always see what is remote it is the strongest example of what men lose by being long-sighted it is fair to say that they gain many things also the poems that are like adventures and the adventures that are like poems it is a national saver and therefore in itself neither good nor evil and it depends on the application to find a scriptural text for it in the wish to take the wings of the morning and abide in the outermost parts of the sea or merely in the saying that the eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth anyhow the unconscious 19th century movement so slow that it seemed stationary was altogether in this direction of which workhouse philanthropy is the type nevertheless it had one national institution to combat and overcome one institution all the more intensely national because it was not official and in a sense not even political the modern trade union was the inspiration and creation of the English it is still largely known throughout Europe by its English name it was the English expression of the European effort to resist the tendency of capitalism to reach its natural culmination in slavery in this it has an almost weird psychological interest for it is a return to the past by men ignorant of the past like the subconscious action of some man who has lost his memory we say that history repeats itself and it is even more interesting when it unconsciously repeats itself no man on earth is kept so ignorant of the middle ages as the British workmen except perhaps the British businessman who employs him yet all who know even a little of the middle ages can see that the modern trade union is a groping for the ancient guild it is true that those who look to the trade union and even those clear-sighted enough to call it the guild are often without the faintest tinge of medieval mysticism or even of medieval morality but this fact is in itself the most striking and even staggering tribute to medieval morality it has all the clinching logic of coincidence if large numbers of the most hard-headed atheists had evolved out of their own inner consciousness the notion that a number of bachelors or spinsters ought to live together in celibate groups for the good of the poor or the observation of certain hours and offices it would be a very strong point in favor of the monasteries it would be all the stronger if the atheists had never heard of monasteries it would be strongest of all if they hated the very name of monasteries and it is all the stronger because the man who puts his trust in trade unions does not call himself a Catholic or even a Christian if he does call himself a guild socialist the trade union movement passed through many perils including a ludicrous attempt of certain lawyers to condemn as criminal conspiracy that trade union solidarity of which their own profession is the strongest and most startling example in the world the struggle culminated in gigantic strikes which split the country in every direction in the earlier part of the 20th century but another process with much more power at its back was also in operation the principle represented by the new poor law proceeded on its course in one important respect altered its course though it can hardly be said to have altered its object it can most correctly be stated by saying that the employers themselves who already organized business began to organize social reform it was more picturesquely expressed by a cynical aristocrat in parliament who said we're all socialists now the socialist, the body of completely sincere men led by several conspicuously brilliant men had long hammered into men's heads the hopeless sterility of mere non-interference in exchange the socialist proposed that the state should not merely interfere in business but should take over the business and pay all men as equal wage earners or at any rate as wage earners the employers were not willing to surrender their own position to the state because largely faded from politics the wiser of them were willing to pay better wages and they were especially willing to bestow various other benefits so long as they were bestowed after the manner of wages thus we had a series of social reforms which for good or evil all tended in the same direction the permission to employees to claim certain advantages as employees and as something permanently different for employers of these the obvious examples were employers liability old age pensions and as marking another and more decisive stride in the process the insurance act the latter in particular and the whole plan of the social reform in general were modeled upon Germany indeed the whole English life of this period was overshadowed by Germany we had now reached for good or evil the final fulfillment of that gathering influence which began to grow on us in the 17th century which was solidified by the military alliances of the 18th century and which in the 19th century had been turned into a philosophy not to say a mythology German metaphysics had thinned our theology so that many a man's most solemn conviction about good Friday was that Friday was named after Freyja German history had simply annexed English history so that it was almost counter the duty of any patriotic Englishman to be proud of being a German the genius of Carlisle the culture preached by Matthew Arnold would not persuasive as they were have alone produced this effect but for an external phenomena of great force our internal policy was transformed by our foreign policy and foreign policy was dominated by the more and more drastic steps which the Prussian now clearly the prince of all the German tribes was taking to extend the German influence in the world Denmark was robbed of two provinces France was robbed of two provinces and though the fall of Paris was felt almost everywhere as the fall of the capital of civilization a thing like the sacking of Rome by the Goths many of the most influential people in England still saw nothing in it but the solid success of our kinsmen and old allies of Waterloo the moral methods which achieved it the juggling with the Augustenburg claim the forgery of the M's telegram were either successfully concealed or were but cloudily appreciated the higher criticism had entered into our ethics as well as our theology our view of Europe was also distorted and made disproportionate by the accident of a natural concern for Constantinople and our route to India which led Palmerston and later premiers to support the Turk and see Russia as the only enemy this somewhat cynical reaction was summed up in the strange figure of Disraeli who made a pro-Turkish settlement full of his native indifference to the Christian subjects of Turkey and sealed it at Berlin in the presence of Bismarck Disraeli was not without insight into the inconsistencies and illusions of the English he said many sagacious things about them and one especially when he told the Manchester school that their motto was peace and plenty amid a starving people and with the world in arms but what he said about peace and plenty might well be parodied as a comment on what he himself said about peace with honour returning from that Berlin conference he should have said I bring you peace with honour peace with the seeds of the most horrible war of history and honour as the dupes and victims of the old bully in Berlin but it was as we have seen especially in social reform that Germany was believed to be leading the way and to have found the secret of dealing with the economic evil in the case of insurance which was the test case she was applauded for obliging all her workmen to set apart a portion of their wages for any time of sickness and numerous other provisions both in Germany and England pursued the same ideal which was that of protecting the poor themselves it everywhere involved an external power having a finger in the family pie but little attention was paid to any friction thus caused for all prejudices against the process were supposed to be the growth of ignorance and that ignorance was already being attacked by what was called education and enterprise also inspired largely by the example by the commercial competition of Germany it was pointed out that in Germany governments and great employers thought it well worth their while to apply the grandest scale of organisation and the minutest inquisition of detail to the instruction of the whole German race the government was the stronger for training its scholars as it trained its soldiers the big businesses were the stronger for manufacturing mind English education was made compulsory it was made free many good, earnest, and enthusiastic men laboured to create a ladder of standards and examinations which would connect the cleverest to the poor with the culture of the English universities and the current teaching in history or philosophy but it cannot be said that the connection was very complete or the achievement so thorough as the German achievement for whatever reason the poor Englishmen remained in many things much as his fathers had been and seemed to think the higher criticism too high for him even to criticise and then a day came and if we were wise we thank God that we had failed education if it had ever really been in question would doubtless have been a noble gift education in the sense of the central tradition of history it's freedom, it's family honour it's chivalry which is the flower of Christendom but what would our populace in our epic have actually learned if they had learned all that our schools and universities had to teach that England was but a little branch on a large teutonic tree that an unfathomable spiritual sympathy all encircling like the sea had always made us the natural allies of the great folk that all like came from Luther and Lutheran Germany whose science was still purging Christianity of its Greek and Roman accretions that Germany was a forest fated to grow that France was a dung heap fated to decay a dung heap with a crowing cock on it what would the ladder of education have led to except a platform on which a posturing professor proved that a cousin German was the same as a German cousin what would the gutter snipe have learned as a graduate except to embrace a Saxon because he was the other half of an Anglo-Saxon the day came and the ignorant fellow found he had other things to learn and he was quicker than his educated countrymen for he had nothing to unlearn he in whose honour all had been said and sung stirred and stepped across the border of Belgium then were spread out before Manzai's all the beauties of his culture and all the benefits of his organisation then we beheld under a lifting daybreak what light we had followed and after what image we had laboured to refashion ourselves nor in any story of mankind has the irony of God chosen the foolish things so catastrophically to confound the wise for the common crowd of poor and ignorant Englishmen because they only knew that they were Englishmen burst through the filthy cobwebs of four hundred years and stood where their fathers stood when they knew that they were Christian men the English poor broken in every revolt bullied by every fashion long despoiled of property and now being despoiled of liberty entered history with the noise of trumpets and turned themselves in two years into one of the iron armies of the world and when the critic of politics and literature feeling that this war is after all heroic looks around him to find the hero to point to nothing but a mob End of Chapter 17 This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org A Short History of England by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 18 Conclusion In so small a bulk on so large a matter finished hastily enough amid the necessities of an enormous national crisis it would be absurd to pretend to have achieved proportion but I will confess to some attempt to correct a disproportion We talk of historical perspective but I rather fancy there is too much perspective in history for perspective makes a giant to pygmy and a pygmy a giant the past is a giant foreshortened with his feet towards us and sometimes the feet are of clay We see too much merely the sunset of the middle ages even when we admire its colors and the study of a man like Napoleon is too often that of the last phase So there is a spirit that thinks it reasonable to deal in detail with old serum and would think it ridiculous to deal in detail with the use of serum or which erects in Kensington Gardens a golden monument to Elbert larger than anybody has ever erected to Alfred English history is misread especially I think because the crisis is missed it is usually put about the period of the stewards and many of the memorials of our past seem to suffer from the same visitation as the memorial of Mr. Dick but though the story of the stewards was a tragedy I think it was also an epilogue I make the guess for it can be no more that the change really came with the fall of Richard II following on his failure to use medieval despotism in the interests of medieval democracy England like the other nations of Christendom had been created not so much by the death of the ancient civilization as by its escape from death or by its refusal to die medieval civilization had arisen out of the resistance to the barbarians to the naked barbarianism from the north and the more subtle barbarianism from the east it increased in liberties and local government under kings who controlled the wider things of war and taxation and in the peasant war of the 14th century in England the king and the populace went for a moment into conscious alliance they both found that a third thing was already too strong for them that third thing was the aristocracy and it captured and called itself the parliament the House of Commons as its name implies had primarily consisted of plain men summoned by the king like jurymen but it soon became a very special jury it became for good or evil a great organ of government surviving the church the monarchy and the mob it did many great and not a few good things it created what we call the British Empire it created something which was really far more valuable a new and natural sort of aristocracy more humane and even humanitarian than most of the aristocracies of the world it had sufficient sense of the instincts of the people to feel lately to respect the liberty and especially the laughter that had become almost the religion of the race but in doing all this it deliberately did two other things which it thought a natural part of its policy it took the side of the Protestants and then partly as a consequence it took the side of the Germans until very lately most intelligent Englishmen were quite honestly convinced in both he was taking the side of progress against decay the question which many of them are now inevitably asking themselves and would ask whether I asked it or no is whether it did not rather take the side of barbarianism against civilization at least if there be anything valid in my own vision of these things we have returned to an origin and we are back in the war with the barbarians it falls as naturally for me that the Englishmen and the Frenchmen should be on the same side as that Alfred and Ebo should be on the same side in that black century when the barbarians wasted Wessex and besieged Paris but there are now perhaps less certain tests of the spiritual as distinct from the material victory of civilization ideas are more mixed are complicated by fine shades or covered by fine names and whether the retreating savage leaves behind him the soul of savagery like a sickness in the air I myself should judge primarily by one political and moral test the soul of savagery is slavery under all its mask of machinery and instruction the German regimentation of the poor was the relapse of barbarians into slavery I can see no escape from it ourselves in the ruts of our present reforms but only by doing what the medieval did after the other barbarian defeat beginning by guilds and small independent groups gradually to restore the personal property of the poor and the personal freedom of the family if the English really attempts that have at least shown in the war to anyone who doubted it that they have not lost the courage and capacity of their fathers and can carry it through if they will if they do not do so if they continue to move only with the dead momentum of the social discipline which we learned from Germany there is nothing before us but what Mr. Bellot the discoverer of this great sociological drift has called the Servile State and there are moods in which a man considering that conclusion of our story is half inclined to wish that the wave of Teutonic barbarism had washed out us and our armies together and that the world should never know anything more of the last of the English except that they died for liberty the end of Chapter 18 the end of a short history of England