What's Wrong with the World
the English peasant his three acres and a cow on advanced grounds, if
they cannot refuse it longer on reactionary grounds. They will deny him
the three acres on grounds of State Ownership. They will forbid him the
cow on grounds of humanitarianism.
And this brings us to the ultimate analysis of this singular influence
that has prevented doctrinal demands by the English people. There are,
I believe, some who still deny that England is governed by an oligarchy.
It is quite enough for me to know that a man might have gone to sleep
some thirty years ago over the day’s newspaper and woke up last week
over the later newspaper, and fancied he was reading about the same
people. In one paper he would have found a Lord Robert Cecil, a Mr.
Gladstone, a Mr. Lyttleton, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Trevelyan,
an Acland. In the other paper he would find a Lord Robert Cecil, a Mr.
Gladstone, a Mr. Lyttleton, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Trevelyan, an
Acland. If this is not being governed by families I cannot imagine
what it is. I suppose it is being governed by extraordinary democratic
coincidences.
*****
X. OPPRESSION BY OPTIMISM
But we are not here concerned with the nature and existence of the
aristocracy, but with the origin of its peculiar power, why is it the
last of the true oligarchies of Europe; and why does there seem no
very immediate prospect of our seeing the end of it? The explanation is
simple though it remains strangely unnoticed. The friends of aristocracy
often praise it for preserving ancient and gracious traditions.
The enemies of aristocracy often blame it for clinging to cruel
or antiquated customs. Both its enemies and its friends are wrong.
Generally speaking the aristocracy does not preserve either good or bad
traditions; it does not preserve anything except game. Who would dream
of looking among aristocrats anywhere for an old custom? One might
as well look for an old costume! The god of the aristocrats is not
tradition, but fashion, which is the opposite of tradition. If you
wanted to find an old-world Norwegian head-dress, would you look for it
in the Scandinavian Smart Set? No; the aristocrats never have customs;
at the best they have habits, like the animals. Only the mob has
customs.
The real power of the English aristocrats has lain in exactly the
opposite of tradition. The simple key to the power of our upper classes
is this: that they have always kept carefully on the side of what is
called Progress. They have always been up to date, and this comes quite
easy to an aristocracy. For the aristocracy are the supreme instances
of that frame of mind of which we spoke just now. Novelty is to them a
luxury verging on a necessity. They, above all, are so bored with the
past and with the present, that they gape, with a horrible hunger, for
the future.
But whatever else the great lords forgot they never forgot that it was
their business to stand for the new things, for whatever was being most
talked about among university dons or fussy financiers. Thus they were
on the side of the Reformation against the Church, of the Whigs against
the Stuarts, of the Baconian science against the old philosophy, of
the manufacturing system against the operatives, and (to-day) of the
increased power of the State against the old-fashioned individualists.
In short, the rich are always modern; it is their business. But the
immediate effect of this fact upon the question we are studying is
somewhat singular.
In each of the separate holes or quandaries in which the ordinary
Englishman has been placed, he has been told that his situation is, for
some particular reason, all for the best. He woke up one fine morning
and discovered that the public things, which for eight hundred years
he had used at once as inns and sanctuaries, had all been suddenly and
savagely abolished, to increase the private wealth of about six or seven
men. One would think he might have been annoyed at that; in many places
he was, and was put down by the soldiery. But it was not merely the
army that kept him quiet. He was kept quiet by the sages as well as the
soldiers; the six or seven men who took away the inns of the poor told
him that they were not doing it for themselves, but for the religion
of the future, the great dawn of Protestantism and truth. So whenever a
seventeenth century noble was caught pulling down a peasant’s fence and
stealing his field, the noble pointed excitedly at the face of Charles I
or James II (which at that moment, perhaps, wore a cross expression) and
thus diverted the simple peasant’s attention. The great Puritan lords
created the Commonwealth, and destroyed the common land. They saved
their poorer countrymen from the disgrace of paying Ship Money,
by taking from them the plow money and spade money which they were
doubtless too weak to guard. A fine old English rhyme has immortalized
this easy aristocratic habit--
You prosecute the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common,
But leave the larger felon loose Who steals the common from the goose.
But here, as in the case of the monasteries, we confront the strange
problem of submission. If they stole the common from the goose, one can
only say that he was a great goose to stand it. The truth is that they
reasoned with the goose; they explained to him that all this was needed
to get the Stuart fox over seas. So in the nineteenth century the great
nobles who became mine-owners and railway directors earnestly assured
everybody that they did not do this from preference, but owing to a
newly discovered Economic Law. So the prosperous politicians of our own
generation introduce bills to prevent poor mothers from going about with
their own babies; or they calmly forbid their tenants to drink beer in
public inns. But this insolence is not (as you would suppose) howled at
by everybody as outrageous feudalism. It is gently rebuked as Socialism.
For an aristocracy is always progressive; it is a form of going the
pace. Their parties grow later and later at night; for they are trying
to live to-morrow.
*****
XI. THE HOMELESSNESS OF JONES
Thus the Future of which we spoke at the beginning has (in England at
least) always been the ally of tyranny. The ordinary Englishman has been
duped out of his old possessions, such as they were, and always in the
name of progress. The destroyers of the abbeys took away his bread and
gave him a stone, assuring him that it was a precious stone, the white
pebble of the Lord’s elect. They took away his maypole and his original
rural life and promised him instead the Golden Age of Peace and Commerce
inaugurated at the Crystal Palace. And now they are taking away the
little that remains of his dignity as a householder and the head of a
family, promising him instead Utopias which are called (appropriately
enough) “Anticipations” or “News from Nowhere.” We come back, in fact,
to the main feature which has already been mentioned. The past is
communal: the future must be individualist. In the past are all the
evils of democracy, variety and violence and doubt, but the future is
pure despotism, for the future is pure caprice. Yesterday, I know I was
a human fool, but to-morrow I can easily be the Superman.
The modern Englishman, however, is like a man who should be perpetually
kept out, for one reason after another, from the house in which he had
meant his married life to begin. This man (Jones let us call him) has
always desired the divinely ordinary things; he has married for love, he
has chosen or built a small house that fits like a coat; he is ready
to be a great grandfather and a local god. And just as he is moving
in, something goes wrong. Some tyranny, personal or political, suddenly
debars him from the home; and he has to take his meals in the front
garden. A passing philosopher (who is also, by a mere coincidence, the
man who turned him out) pauses, and leaning elegantly on the railings,
explains to him that he is now living that bold life upon the bounty of
nature which will be the life of the sublime future. He finds life in
the front garden more bold than bountiful, and has to move into mean
lodgings in the next spring. The philosopher (who turned him out),
happening to call at these lodgings, with the probable intention of
raising the rent, stops to explain to him that he is now in the real
life of mercantile endeavor; the economic struggle between him and the
landlady is the only thing out of which, in the sublime future, the
wealth of nations can come. He is defeated in the economic struggle, and
goes to the workhouse. The philosopher who turned him out (happening at
that very moment to be inspecting the workhouse) assures him that he is
now at last in that golden republic which is the goal of mankind; he is
in an equal, scientific, Socialistic commonwealth, owned by the State
and ruled by public officers; in fact, the commonwealth of the sublime
future.
Nevertheless, there are signs that the irrational Jones still dreams
at night of this old idea of having an ordinary home. He asked for so
little, and he has been offered so much. He has been offered bribes
of worlds and systems; he has been offered Eden and Utopia and the New
Jerusalem, and he only wanted a house; and that has been refused him.
Such an apologue is literally no exaggeration of the facts of English
history. The rich did literally turn the poor out of the old guest house
on to the road, briefly telling them that it was the road of
progress. They did literally force them into factories and the modern
wage-slavery, assuring them all the time that this was the only way to
wealth and civilization. Just as they had dragged the rustic from the
convent food and ale by saying that the streets of heaven were paved
with gold, so now they dragged him from the village food and ale by
telling him that the streets of London were paved with gold. As he
entered the gloomy porch of Puritanism, so he entered the gloomy porch
of Industrialism, being told that each of them was the gate of the
future. Hitherto he has only gone from prison to prison, nay, into
darkening prisons, for Calvinism opened one small window upon heaven.
And now he is asked, in the same educated and authoritative tones, to
enter another dark porch, at which he has to surrender, into unseen
hands, his children, his small possessions and all the habits of his
fathers.
Whether this last opening be in truth any more inviting than the old
openings of Puritanism and Industrialism can be discussed later. But
there can be little doubt, I think, that if some form of Collectivism is
imposed upon England it will be imposed, as everything else has been, by
an instructed political class upon a people partly apathetic and
partly hypnotized. The aristocracy will be as ready to “administer”
Collectivism as they were to administer Puritanism or Manchesterism; in
some ways such a centralized political power is necessarily attractive
to them. It will not be so hard as some innocent Socialists seem to
suppose to induce the Honorable Tomnoddy to take over the milk supply as
well as the stamp supply--at an increased salary. Mr. Bernard Shaw
has remarked that rich men are better than poor men on parish councils
because they are free from “financial timidity.” Now, the English ruling
class is quite free from financial timidity. The Duke of Sussex will be
quite ready to be Administrator of Sussex at the same screw. Sir William
Harcourt, that typical aristocrat, put it quite correctly. “We” (that
is, the aristocracy) “are all Socialists now.”
But this is not the essential note on which I desire to end. My main
contention is that, whether necessary or not, both Industrialism and
Collectivism have been accepted as necessities--not as naked ideals or