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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Crimes of England, by G.K. Chesterton
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Crimes of England
+
+Author: G.K. Chesterton
+
+Release Date: March 13, 2004 [EBook #11554]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Robert Shimmin, Caitlin and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CRIMES OF
+ENGLAND
+
+BY
+GILBERT K. CHESTERTON
+
+MCMXVI
+
+1916
+
+
+_CONTENTS_
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+SOME WORDS TO PROFESSOR WHIRLWIND
+
+The German Professor, his need of Education
+for Debate--Three Mistakes of German
+Controversialists--The Multiplicity of
+Excuses--Falsehood against Experience--
+Kultur preached by Unkultur--The Mistake
+about Bernard Shaw--German Lack of
+Welt-Politik--Where England is really
+Wrong.
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE PROTESTANT HERO
+
+Suitable Finale for the German Emperor--Frederick
+II. and the Power of
+Fear--German Influence in England since
+Lather--Our German Kings and Allies--
+Triumph of Frederick the Great.
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE ENIGMA OF WATERLOO
+
+How we helped Napoleon--The Revolution
+and the Two Germanics--Religious
+Resistance of Austria and Russia--Irreligious
+Resistance of Prussia and England--Negative
+Irreligion of England--its Idealism
+in Snobbishness--Positive Irreligion of
+Prussia; no Idealism in Anything--Allegory
+and the French Revolution--The Dual
+Personality of England; the Double Battle--Triumph
+of Blucher.
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE COMING OF THE JANISSARIES
+
+The Sad Story of Lord Salisbury--Ireland
+and Heligoland--The Young Men of
+Ireland--The Dirty Work--The Use of
+German Mercenaries--The Unholy Alliance--Triumph
+of the German Mercenaries.
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE LOST ENGLAND
+
+Truth about England and Ireland--Murder
+and the Two Travellers--Real Defence
+of England--The Lost Revolution--Story
+of Cobbett and the Germans--Historical
+Accuracy of Cobbett--Violence of the English
+Language--Exaggerated Truths versus
+Exaggerated Lies--Defeat of the People--Triumph
+of the German Mercenaries.
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+HAMLET AND THE DANES
+
+Degeneration of Grimm's Fairy Tales--From
+Tales of Terror to Tales of Terrorism--German
+Mistake of being Deep--The
+Germanisation of Shakespeare--Carlyle and
+the Spoilt Child--The Test of Teutonism--
+Hell or Hans Andersen--Causes of English
+Inaction--Barbarism and Splendid Isolation--
+The Peace of the Plutocrats--Hamlet
+the Englishman--The Triumph of Bismarck.
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE MIDNIGHT OF EUROPE
+
+The Two Napoleons--Their Ultimate
+Success--The Interlude of Sedan--The
+Meaning of an Emperor--The Triumph of
+Versailles--The True Innocence of England--
+Triumph of the Kaiser.
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE WRONG HORSE
+
+Lord Salisbury Again--The Influence of
+1870--The Fairy Tale of Teutonism--The
+Adoration of the Crescent--The Reign of
+the Cynics--Last Words to Professor
+Whirlwind.
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE AWAKENING OF ENGLAND
+
+The March of Montenegro--The Anti-Servile
+State--The Prussian Preparation--The
+Sleep of England--The Awakening of
+England.
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE BATTLE OF THE MARNE
+
+The Hour of Peril--The Human Deluge--The
+English at the Marne.
+
+
+THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
+
+
+
+I--_Some Words to Professor Whirlwind_
+
+
+DEAR PROFESSOR WHIRLWIND,
+
+Your name in the original German is too much for me; and this is the
+nearest I propose to get to it: but under the majestic image of pure
+wind marching in a movement wholly circular I seem to see, as in a
+vision, something of your mind. But the grand isolation of your thoughts
+leads you to express them in such words as are gratifying to yourself,
+and have an inconspicuous or even an unfortunate effect upon others. If
+anything were really to be made of your moral campaign against the
+English nation, it was clearly necessary that somebody, if it were only
+an Englishman, should show you how to leave off professing philosophy
+and begin to practise it. I have therefore sold myself into the Prussian
+service, and in return for a cast-off suit of the Emperor's clothes (the
+uniform of an English midshipman), a German hausfrau's recipe for poison
+gas, two penny cigars, and twenty-five Iron Crosses, I have consented
+to instruct you in the rudiments of international controversy. Of this
+part of my task I have here little to say that is not covered by a
+general adjuration to you to observe certain elementary rules. They are,
+roughly speaking, as follows:--
+
+First, stick to one excuse. Thus if a tradesman, with whom your social
+relations are slight, should chance to find you toying with the coppers
+in his till, you may possibly explain that you are interested in
+Numismatics and are a Collector of Coins; and he may possibly believe
+you. But if you tell him afterwards that you pitied him for being
+overloaded with unwieldy copper discs, and were in the act of replacing
+them by a silver sixpence of your own, this further explanation, so far
+from increasing his confidence in your motives, will (strangely enough)
+actually decrease it. And if you are so unwise as to be struck by yet
+another brilliant idea, and tell him that the pennies were all bad
+pennies, which you were concealing to save him from a police prosecution
+for coining, the tradesman may even be so wayward as to institute a
+police prosecution himself. Now this is not in any way an exaggeration
+of the way in which you have knocked the bottom out of any case you may
+ever conceivably have had in such matters as the sinking of the
+_Lusitania_. With my own eyes I have seen the following explanations,
+apparently proceeding from your pen, (i) that the ship was a troop-ship
+carrying soldiers from Canada; (ii) that if it wasn't, it was a
+merchant-ship unlawfully carrying munitions for the soldiers in France;
+(iii) that, as the passengers on the ship had been warned in an
+advertisement, Germany was justified in blowing them to the moon; (iv)
+that there were guns, and the ship had to be torpedoed because the
+English captain was just going to fire them off; (v) that the English or
+American authorities, by throwing the _Lusitania_ at the heads of the
+German commanders, subjected them to an insupportable temptation; which
+was apparently somehow demonstrated or intensified by the fact that the
+ship came up to schedule time, there being some mysterious principle by
+which having tea at tea-time justifies poisoning the tea; (vi) that the
+ship was not sunk by the Germans at all but by the English, the English
+captain having deliberately tried to drown himself and some thousand of
+his own countrymen in order to cause an exchange of stiff notes between
+Mr. Wilson and the Kaiser. If this interesting story be true, I can only
+say that such frantic and suicidal devotion to the most remote interests
+of his country almost earns the captain pardon for the crime. But do you
+not see, my dear Professor, that the very richness and variety of your
+inventive genius throws a doubt upon each explanation when considered in
+itself? We who read you in England reach a condition of mind in which it
+no longer very much matters what explanation you offer, or whether you
+offer any at all. We are prepared to hear that you sank the _Lusitania_
+because the sea-born sons of England would live more happily as deep-sea
+fishes, or that every person on board was coming home to be hanged. You
+have explained yourself so completely, in this clear way, to the
+Italians that they have declared war on you, and if you go on explaining
+yourself so clearly to the Americans they may quite possibly do the
+same.
+
+Second, when telling such lies as may seem necessary to your
+international standing, do not tell the lies to the people who know the
+truth. Do not tell the Eskimos that snow is bright green; nor tell the
+negroes in Africa that the sun never shines in that Dark Continent.
+Rather tell the Eskimos that the sun never shines in Africa; and then,
+turning to the tropical Africans, see if they will believe that snow is
+green. Similarly, the course indicated for you is to slander the
+Russians to the English and the English to the Russians; and there are
+hundreds of good old reliable slanders which can still be used against
+both of them. There are probably still Russians who believe that every
+English gentleman puts a rope round his wife's neck and sells her in
+Smithfield. There are certainly still Englishmen who believe that every
+Russian gentleman takes a rope to his wife's back and whips her every
+day. But these stories, picturesque and useful as they are, have a limit
+to their use like everything else; and the limit consists in the fact
+that they are not _true_, and that there necessarily exists a group of
+persons who know they are not true. It is so with matters of fact about
+which you asseverate so positively to us, as if they were matters of
+opinion. Scarborough might be a fortress; but it is not. I happen to
+know it is not. Mr. Morel may deserve to be universally admired in
+England; but he is not universally admired in England. Tell the Russians
+that he is by all means; but do not tell us. We have seen him; we have
+also seen Scarborough. You should think of this before you speak.
+
+Third, don't perpetually boast that you are cultured in language which
+proves that you are not. You claim to thrust yourself upon everybody on
+the ground that you are stuffed with wit and wisdom, and have enough for
+the whole world. But people who have wit enough for the whole world,
+have wit enough for a whole newspaper paragraph. And you can seldom get
+through even a whole paragraph without being monotonous, or irrelevant,
+or unintelligible, or self-contradictory, or broken-minded generally. If
+you have something to teach us, teach it to us now. If you propose to
+convert us after you have conquered us, why not convert us before you
+have conquered us? As it is, we cannot believe what you say about your
+superior education because of the way in which you say it. If an
+Englishman says, "I don't make no mistakes in English, not me," we can
+understand his remark; but we cannot endorse it. To say, "Je parler le
+Frenche language, non demi," is comprehensible, but not convincing. And
+when you say, as you did in a recent appeal to the Americans, that the
+Germanic Powers have sacrificed a great deal of "red fluid" in defence
+of their culture, we point out to you that cultured people do not employ
+such a literary style. Or when you say that the Belgians were so
+ignorant as to think they were being butchered when they weren't, we
+only wonder whether _you_ are so ignorant as to think you are being
+believed when you aren't. Thus, for instance, when you brag about
+burning Venice to express your contempt for "tourists," we cannot think
+much of the culture, as culture, which supposes St. Mark's to be a thing
+for tourists instead of historians. This, however, would be the least
+part of our unfavourable judgment. That judgment is complete when we
+have read such a paragraph as this, prominently displayed in a paper in
+which you specially spread yourself: "That the Italians have a perfect
+knowledge of the fact that this city of antiquities and tourists is
+subject, and rightly subject, to attack and bombardment, is proved by
+the measures they took at the beginning of the war to remove some of
+their greatest art treasures." Now culture may or may not include the
+power to admire antiquities, and to restrain oneself from the pleasure
+of breaking them like toys. But culture does, presumably, include the
+power to think. For less laborious intellects than your own it is
+generally sufficient to think once. But if you will think twice or
+twenty times, it cannot but dawn on you that there is something wrong in
+the reasoning by which the placing of diamonds in a safe proves that
+they are "rightly subject" to a burglar. The incessant assertion of such
+things can do little to spread your superior culture; and if you say
+them too often people may even begin to doubt whether you have any
+superior culture after all. The earnest friend now advising you cannot
+but grieve at such incautious garrulity. If you confined yourself to
+single words, uttered at intervals of about a month or so, no one could
+possibly raise any rational objection, or subject them to any rational
+criticism. In time you might come to use whole sentences without
+revealing the real state of things.
+
+Through neglect of these maxims, my dear Professor, every one of your
+attacks upon England has gone wide. In pure fact they have not touched
+the spot, which the real critics of England know to be a very vulnerable
+spot. We have a real critic of England in Mr. Bernard Shaw, whose name
+you parade but apparently cannot spell; for in the paper to which I have
+referred he is called Mr. Bernhard Shaw. Perhaps you think he and
+Bernhardi are the same man. But if you quoted Mr. Bernard Shaw's
+statement instead of misquoting his name, you would find that his
+criticism of England is exactly the opposite of your own; and naturally,
+for it is a rational criticism. He does not blame England for being
+against Germany. He does most definitely blame England for not being
+sufficiently firmly and emphatically on the side of Russia. He is not
+such a fool as to accuse Sir Edward Grey of being a fiendish Machiavelli
+plotting against Germany; he accuses him of being an amiable
+aristocratic stick who failed to frighten the Junkers from their plan of
+war. Now, it is not in the least a question of whether we happen to like
+this quality or that: Mr. Shaw, I rather fancy, would dislike such
+verbose compromise more than downright plotting. It is simply the fact
+that Englishmen like Grey are open to Mr. Shaw's attack and are not open
+to yours. It is not true that the English were sufficiently clearheaded
+or self-controlled to conspire for the destruction of Germany. Any man
+who knows England, any man who hates England as one hates a living
+thing, will tell you it is not true. The English may be snobs, they may
+be plutocrats, they may be hypocrites, but they are not, as a fact,
+plotters; and I gravely doubt whether they could be if they wanted to.
+The mass of the people are perfectly incapable of plotting at all, and
+if the small ring of rich people who finance our politics were plotting
+for anything, it was for peace at almost any price. Any Londoner who
+knows the London streets and newspapers as he knows the Nelson column or
+the Inner Circle, knows that there were men in the governing class and
+in the Cabinet who were literally thirsting to defend Germany until
+Germany, by her own act, became indefensible. If they said nothing in
+support of the tearing up of the promise of peace to Belgium, it is
+simply because there was nothing to be said.
+
+You were the first people to talk about World-Politics; and the first
+people to disregard them altogether. Even your foreign policy is
+domestic policy. It does not even apply to any people who are not
+Germans; and of your wild guesses about some twenty other peoples, not
+one has gone right even by accident. Your two or three shots at my own
+not immaculate land have been such that you would have been much nearer
+the truth if you had tried to invade England by crossing the Caucasus,
+or to discover England among the South Sea Islands. With your first
+delusion, that our courage was calculated and malignant when in truth
+our very corruption was timid and confused, I have already dealt. The
+case is the same with your second favourite phrase; that the British
+army is mercenary. You learnt it in books and not in battlefields; and I
+should like to be present at a scene in which you tried to bribe the
+most miserable little loafer in Hammersmith as if he were a cynical
+condottiere selling his spear to some foreign city. It is not the fact,
+my dear sir. You have been misinformed. The British Army is not at this
+moment a hireling army any more than it is a conscript army. It is a
+volunteer army in the strict sense of the word; nor do I object to your
+calling it an amateur army. There is no compulsion, and there is next to
+no pay. It is at this moment drawn from every class of the community,
+and there are very few classes which would not earn a little more money
+in their ordinary trades. It numbers very nearly as many men as it would
+if it were a conscript army; that is with the necessary margin of men
+unable to serve or needed to serve otherwise. Ours is a country in which
+that democratic spirit which is common to Christendom is rather
+unusually sluggish and far below the surface. And the most genuine and
+purely popular movement that we have had since the Chartists has been
+the enlistment for this war. By all means say that such vague and
+sentimental volunteering is valueless in war if you think so; or even
+if you don't think so. By all means say that Germany is unconquerable
+and that we cannot really kill you. But if you say that we do not really
+want to kill you, you do us an injustice. You do indeed.
+
+I need not consider the yet crazier things that some of you have said;
+as that the English intend to keep Calais and fight France as well as
+Germany for the privilege of purchasing a frontier and the need to keep
+a conscript army. That, also, is out of books, and pretty mouldy old
+books at that. It was said, I suppose, to gain sympathy among the
+French, and is therefore not my immediate business, as they are
+eminently capable of looking after themselves. I merely drop one word in
+passing, lest you waste your powerful intellect on such projects. The
+English may some day forgive you; the French never will. You Teutons are
+too light and fickle to understand the Latin seriousness. My only
+concern is to point out that about England, at least, you are invariably
+and miraculously wrong.
+
+Now speaking seriously, my dear Professor, it will not do. It could be
+easy to fence with you for ever and parry every point you attempt to
+make, until English people began to think there was nothing wrong with
+England at all. But I refuse to play for safety in this way. There is a
+very great deal that is really wrong with England, and it ought not to
+be forgotten even in the full blaze of your marvellous mistakes. I
+cannot have my countrymen tempted to those pleasures of intellectual
+pride which are the result of comparing themselves with you. The deep
+collapse and yawning chasm of your ineptitude leaves me upon a perilous
+spiritual elevation. Your mistakes are matters of fact; but to enumerate
+them does not exhaust the truth. For instance, the learned man who
+rendered the phrase in an English advertisement "cut you dead" as "hack
+you to death," was in error; but to say that many such advertisements
+are vulgar is not an error. Again, it is true that the English poor are
+harried and insecure, with insufficient instinct for armed revolt,
+though you will be wrong if you say that they are occupied literally in
+shooting the moon. It is true that the average Englishman is too much
+attracted by aristocratic society; though you will be in error if you
+quote dining with Duke Humphrey as an example of it. In more ways than
+one you forget what is meant by idiom.
+
+I have therefore thought it advisable to provide you with a catalogue of
+the real crimes of England; and I have selected them on a principle
+which cannot fail to interest and please you. On many occasions we have
+been very wrong indeed. We were very wrong indeed when we took part in
+preventing Europe from putting a term to the impious piracies of
+Frederick the Great. We were very wrong indeed when we allowed the
+triumph over Napoleon to be soiled with the mire and blood of Blucher's
+sullen savages. We were very wrong indeed when we allowed the peaceful
+King of Denmark to be robbed in broad daylight by a brigand named
+Bismarck; and when we allowed the Prussian swashbucklers to enslave and
+silence the French provinces which they could neither govern nor
+persuade. We were very wrong indeed when we flung to such hungry
+adventurers a position so important as Heligoland. We were very wrong
+indeed when we praised the soulless Prussian education and copied the
+soulless Prussian laws. Knowing that you will mingle your tears with
+mine over this record of English wrong-doing, I dedicate it to you, and
+I remain,
+
+Yours reverently,
+
+G. K. CHESTERTON
+
+
+
+II--_The Protestant Hero_
+
+
+A question is current in our looser English journalism touching what
+should be done with the German Emperor after a victory of the Allies.
+Our more feminine advisers incline to the view that he should be shot.
+This is to make a mistake about the very nature of hereditary monarchy.
+Assuredly the Emperor William at his worst would be entitled to say to
+his amiable Crown Prince what Charles II. said when his brother warned
+him of the plots of assassins: "They will never kill me to make you
+king." Others, of greater monstrosity of mind, have suggested that he
+should be sent to St. Helena. So far as an estimate of his
+historical importance goes, he might as well be sent to Mount Calvary.
+What we have to deal with is an elderly, nervous, not unintelligent
+person who happens to be a Hohenzollern; and who, to do him justice,
+does think more of the Hohenzollerns as a sacred caste than of his own
+particular place in it. In such families the old boast and motto of
+hereditary kingship has a horrible and degenerate truth. The king never
+dies; he only decays for ever.
+
+If it were a matter of the smallest importance what happened to the
+Emperor William when once his house had been disarmed, I should satisfy
+my fancy with another picture of his declining years; a conclusion that
+would be peaceful, humane, harmonious, and forgiving.
+
+In various parts of the lanes and villages of South England the
+pedestrian will come upon an old and quiet public-house, decorated with
+a dark and faded portrait in a cocked hat and the singular inscription,
+"The King of Prussia." These inn signs probably commemorate the visit of
+the Allies after 1815, though a great part of the English middle classes
+may well have connected them with the time when Frederick II. was
+earning his title of the Great, along with a number of other territorial
+titles to which he had considerably less claim. Sincere and
+simple-hearted Dissenting ministers would dismount before that sign (for
+in those days Dissenters drank beer like Christians, and indeed
+manufactured most of it) and would pledge the old valour and the old
+victory of him whom they called the Protestant Hero. We should be using
+every word with literal exactitude if we said that he was really
+something devilish like a hero. Whether he was a Protestant hero or not
+can be decided best by those who have read the correspondence of a
+writer calling himself Voltaire, who was quite shocked at Frederick's
+utter lack of religion of any kind. But the little Dissenter drank his
+beer in all innocence and rode on. And the great blasphemer of Potsdam
+would have laughed had he known; it was a jest after his own heart. Such
+was the jest he made when he called upon the emperors to come to
+communion, and partake of the eucharistic body of Poland. Had he been
+such a Bible reader as the Dissenter doubtless thought him, he might
+haply have foreseen the vengeance of humanity upon his house. He might
+have known what Poland was and was yet to be; he might have known that
+he ate and drank to his damnation, discerning not the body of God.
+
+Whether the placing of the present German Emperor in charge of one of
+these wayside public-houses would be a jest after _his_ own heart
+possibly remains to be seen. But it would be much more melodious and
+fitting an end than any of the sublime euthanasias which his enemies
+provide for him. That old sign creaking above him as he sat on the bench
+outside his home of exile would be a much more genuine memory of the
+real greatness of his race than the modern and almost gimcrack stars and
+garters that were pulled in Windsor Chapel. From modern knighthood has
+departed all shadow of chivalry; how far we have travelled from it can
+easily be tested by the mere suggestion that Sir Thomas Lipton, let us
+say, should wear his lady's sleeve round his hat or should watch his
+armour in the Chapel of St. Thomas of Canterbury. The giving and
+receiving of the Garter among despots and diplomatists is now only part
+of that sort of pottering mutual politeness which keeps the peace in an
+insecure and insincere state of society. But that old blackened wooden
+sign is at least and after all the sign of something; the sign of the
+time when one solitary Hohenzollern did not only set fire to fields and
+cities, but did truly set on fire the minds of men, even though it were
+fire from hell.
+
+Everything was young once, even Frederick the Great. It was an
+appropriate preface to the terrible epic of Prussia that it began with
+an unnatural tragedy of the loss of youth. That blind and narrow savage
+who was the boy's father had just sufficient difficulty in stamping out
+every trace of decency in him, to show that some such traces must have
+been there. If the younger and greater Frederick ever had a heart, it
+was a broken heart; broken by the same blow that broke his flute. When
+his only friend was executed before his eyes, there were two corpses to
+be borne away; and one to be borne on a high war-horse through victory
+after victory: but with a small bottle of poison in the pocket. It is
+not irrelevant thus to pause upon the high and dark house of his
+childhood. For the peculiar quality which marks out Prussian arms and
+ambitions from all others of the kind consists in this wrinkled and
+premature antiquity. There is something comparatively boyish about the
+triumphs of all the other tyrants. There was something better than
+ambition in the beauty and ardour of the young Napoleon. He was at
+least a lover; and his first campaign was like a love-story. All that
+was pagan in him worshipped the Republic as men worship a woman, and all
+that was Catholic in him understood the paradox of Our Lady of
+Victories. Henry VIII., a far less reputable person, was in his early
+days a good knight of the later and more florid school of chivalry; we
+might almost say that he was a fine old English gentleman so long as he
+was young. Even Nero was loved in his first days: and there must have
+been some cause to make that Christian maiden cast flowers on his
+dishonourable grave. But the spirit of the great Hohenzollern smelt from
+the first of the charnel. He came out to his first victory like one
+broken by defeats; his strength was stripped to the bone and fearful as
+a fleshless resurrection; for the worst of what could come had already
+befallen him. The very construction of his kingship was built upon the
+destruction of his manhood. He had known the final shame; his soul had
+surrendered to force. He could not redress that wrong; he could only
+repeat it and repay it. He could make the souls of his soldiers
+surrender to his gibbet and his whipping-post; he could 'make the souls
+of the nations surrender to his soldiers. He could only break men in as
+he had been broken; while he could break in, he could never break out.
+He could not slay in anger, nor even sin with simplicity. Thus he stands
+alone among the conquerors of their kind; his madness was not due to a
+mere misdirection of courage. Before the whisper of war had come to him
+the foundations of his audacity had been laid in fear.
+
+Of the work he did in this world there need be no considerable debate.
+It was romantic, if it be romantic that the dragon should swallow St.
+George. He turned a small country into a great one: he made a new
+diplomacy by the fulness and far-flung daring of his lies: he took away
+from criminality all reproach of carelessness and incompleteness. He
+achieved an amiable combination of thrift and theft. He undoubtedly gave
+to stark plunder something of the solidity of property. He protected
+whatever he stole as simpler men protect whatever they have earned or
+inherited. He turned his hollow eyes with a sort of loathsome affection
+upon the territories which had most reluctantly become his: at the end
+of the Seven Years' War men knew as little how he was to be turned out
+of Silesia as they knew why he had ever been allowed in it. In Poland,
+like a devil in possession, he tore asunder the body he inhabited; but
+it was long before any man dreamed that such disjected limbs could live
+again. Nor were the effects of his break from Christian tradition
+confined to Christendom; Macaulay's world-wide generalisation is very
+true though very Macaulayese. But though, in a long view, he scattered
+the seeds of war all over the world, his own last days were passed in a
+long and comparatively prosperous peace; a peace which received and
+perhaps deserved a certain praise: a peace with which many European
+peoples were content. For though he did not understand justice, he could
+understand moderation. He was the most genuine and the most wicked of
+pacifists. He did not want any more wars. He had tortured and beggared
+all his neighbours; but he bore them no malice for it.
+
+The immediate cause of that spirited disaster, the intervention of
+England on behalf of the new Hohenzollern throne, was due, of course,
+to the national policy of the first William Pitt. He was the kind of man
+whose vanity and simplicity are too easily overwhelmed by the obvious.
+He saw nothing in a European crisis except a war with France; and
+nothing in a war with France except a repetition of the rather fruitless
+glories of Agincourt and Malplaquet. He was of the Erastian Whigs,
+sceptical but still healthy-minded, and neither good enough nor bad
+enough to understand that even the war of that irreligious age was
+ultimately a religious war. He had not a shade of irony in his whole
+being; and beside Frederick, already as old as sin, he was like a rather
+brilliant schoolboy.
+
+But the direct causes were not the only causes, nor the true ones. The
+true causes were connected with the triumph of one of the two traditions
+which had long been struggling in England. And it is pathetic to record
+that the foreign tradition was then represented by two of the ablest men
+of that age, Frederick of Prussia and Pitt; while what was really the
+old English tradition was represented by two of the stupidest men that
+mankind ever tolerated in any age, George III. and Lord Bute. Bute was
+the figurehead of a group of Tories who set about fulfilling the fine if
+fanciful scheme for a democratic monarchy sketched by Bolingbroke in
+"The Patriot King." It was bent in all sincerity on bringing men's minds
+back to what are called domestic affairs, affairs as domestic as George
+III. It might have arrested the advancing corruption of Parliaments and
+enclosure of country-sides, by turning men's minds from the foreign
+glories of the great Whigs like Churchill and Chatham; and one of its
+first acts was to terminate the alliance with Prussia. Unfortunately,
+whatever was picturesque in the piracy of Potsdam was beyond the
+imagination of Windsor. But whatever was prosaic in Potsdam was already
+established at Windsor; the economy of cold mutton, the heavy-handed
+taste in the arts, and the strange northern blend of boorishness with
+etiquette. If Bolingbroke's ideas had been applied by a spirited person,
+by a Stuart, for example, or even by Queen Elizabeth (who had real
+spirit along with her extraordinary vulgarity), the national soul might
+have broken free from its new northern chains. But it was the irony of
+the situation that the King to whom Tories appealed as a refuge from
+Germanism was himself a German.
+
+We have thus to refer the origins of the German influence in England
+back to the beginning of the Hanoverian Succession; and thence back to
+the quarrel between the King and the lawyers which had issue at Naseby;
+and thence again to the angry exit of Henry VIII. from the mediaeval
+council of Europe. It is easy to exaggerate the part played in the
+matter by that great and human, though very pagan person, Martin Luther.
+Henry VIII. was sincere in his hatred for the heresies of the German
+monk, for in speculative opinions Henry was wholly Catholic; and the two
+wrote against each other innumerable pages, largely consisting of terms
+of abuse, which were pretty well deserved on both sides. But Luther was
+not a Lutheran. He was a sign of the break-up of Catholicism; but he was
+not a builder of Protestantism. The countries which became corporately
+and democratically Protestant, Scotland, for instance, and Holland,
+followed Calvin and not Luther. And Calvin was a Frenchman; an
+unpleasant Frenchman, it is true, but one full of that French capacity
+for creating official entities which can really act, and have a kind of
+impersonal personality, such as the French Monarchy or the Terror.
+Luther was an anarchist, and therefore a dreamer. He made that which is,
+perhaps, in the long run, the fullest and most shining manifestation of
+failure; he made a name. Calvin made an active, governing, persecuting
+thing, called the Kirk. There is something expressive of him in the fact
+that he called even his work of abstract theology "The Institutes."
+
+In England, however, there were elements of chaos more akin to Luther
+than to Calvin. And we may thus explain many things which appear rather
+puzzling in our history, notably the victory of Cromwell not only over
+the English Royalists but over the Scotch Covenanters. It was the
+victory of that more happy-go-lucky sort of Protestantism, which had in
+it much of aristocracy but much also of liberty, over that logical
+ambition of the Kirk which would have made Protestantism, if possible,
+as constructive as Catholicism had been. It might be called the victory
+of Individualist Puritanism over Socialist Puritanism. It was what
+Milton meant when he said that the new presbyter was an exaggeration of
+the old priest; it was his _office_ that acted, and acted very harshly.
+The enemies of the Presbyterians were not without a meaning when they
+called themselves Independents. To this day no one can understand
+Scotland who does not realise that it retains much of its mediaeval
+sympathy with France, the French equality, the French pronunciation of
+Latin, and, strange as it may sound, is in nothing so French as in its
+Presbyterianism.
+
+In this loose and negative sense only it may be said that the great
+modern mistakes of England can be traced to Luther. It is true only in
+this, that both in Germany and England a Protestantism softer and less
+abstract than Calvinism was found useful to the compromises of courtiers
+and aristocrats; for every abstract creed does something for human
+equality. Lutheranism in Germany rapidly became what it is to-day--a
+religion of court chaplains. The reformed church in England became
+something better; it became a profession for the younger sons of
+squires. But these parallel tendencies, in all their strength and
+weakness, reached, as it were, symbolic culmination when the mediaeval
+monarchy was extinguished, and the English squires gave to what was
+little more than a German squire the damaged and diminished crown.
+
+It must be remembered that the Germanics were at that time used as a
+sort of breeding-ground for princes. There is a strange process in
+history by which things that decay turn into the very opposite of
+themselves. Thus in England Puritanism began as the hardest of creeds,
+but has ended as the softest; soft-hearted and not unfrequently
+soft-headed. Of old the Puritan in war was certainly the Puritan at his
+best; it was the Puritan in peace whom no Christian could be expected to
+stand. Yet those Englishmen to-day who claim descent from the great
+militarists of 1649 express the utmost horror of militarism. An
+inversion of an opposite kind has taken place in Germany. Out of the
+country that was once valued as providing a perpetual supply of kings
+small enough to be stop-gaps, has come the modern menace of the one
+great king who would swallow the kingdoms of the earth. But the old
+German kingdoms preserved, and were encouraged to preserve, the good
+things that go with small interests and strict boundaries, music,
+etiquette, a dreamy philosophy, and so on. They were small enough to be
+universal. Their outlook could afford to be in some degree broad and
+many-sided. They had the impartiality of impotence. All this has been
+utterly reversed, and we find ourselves at war with a Germany whose
+powers are the widest and whose outlook is the narrowest in the world.
+
+It is true, of course, that the English squires put themselves over the
+new German prince rather than under him. They put the crown on him as an
+extinguisher. It was part of the plan that the new-comer, though royal,
+should be almost rustic. Hanover must be one of England's possessions
+and not England one of Hanover's. But the fact that the court became a
+German court prepared the soil, so to speak; English politics were
+already subconsciously committed to two centuries of the belittlement of
+France and the gross exaggeration of Germany. The period can be
+symbolically marked out by Carteret, proud of talking German at the
+beginning of the period, and Lord Haldane, proud of talking German at
+the end of it. Culture is already almost beginning to be spelt with a k.
+But all such pacific and only slowly growing Teutonism was brought to a
+crisis and a decision when the voice of Pitt called us, like a trumpet,
+to the rescue of the Protestant Hero.
+
+Among all the monarchs of that faithless age, the nearest to a man was a
+woman. Maria Theresa of Austria was a German of the more generous sort,
+limited in a domestic rather than a national sense, firm in the ancient
+faith at which all her own courtiers were sneering, and as brave as a
+young lioness. Frederick hated her as he hated everything German and
+everything good. He sets forth in his own memoirs, with that clearness
+which adds something almost superhuman to the mysterious vileness of his
+character, how he calculated on her youth, her inexperience and her lack
+of friends as proof that she could be despoiled with safety. He invaded
+Silesia in advance of his own declaration of war (as if he had run on
+ahead to say it was coming) and this new anarchic trick, combined with
+the corruptibility of nearly all the other courts, left him after the
+two Silesian wars in possession of the stolen goods. But Maria Theresa
+had refused to submit to the immorality of nine points of the law. By
+appeals and concessions to France, Russia, and other powers, she
+contrived to create something which, against the atheist innovator even
+in that atheist age, stood up for an instant like a spectre of the
+Crusades. Had that Crusade been universal and whole-hearted, the great
+new precedent of mere force and fraud would have been broken; and the
+whole appalling judgment which is fallen upon Christendom would have
+passed us by. But the other Crusaders were only half in earnest for
+Europe; Frederick was quite in earnest for Prussia; and he sought for
+allies, by whose aid this weak revival of good might be stamped out, and
+his adamantine impudence endure for ever. The allies he found were the
+English. It is not pleasant for an Englishman to have to write the
+words.
+
+This was the first act of the tragedy, and with it we may leave
+Frederick, for we are done with the fellow though not with his work. It
+is enough to add that if we call all his after actions satanic, it is
+not a term of abuse, but of theology. He was a Tempter. He dragged the
+other kings to "partake of the body of Poland," and learn the meaning of
+the Black Mass. Poland lay prostrate before three giants in armour, and
+her name passed into a synonym for failure. The Prussians, with their
+fine magnanimity, gave lectures on the hereditary maladies of the man
+they had murdered. They could not conceive of life in those limbs; and
+the time was far off when they should be undeceived. In that day five
+nations were to partake not of the body, but of the spirit of Poland;
+and the trumpet of the resurrection of the peoples should be blown from
+Warsaw to the western isles.
+
+
+
+III--_The Enigma of Waterloo_
+
+
+That great Englishman Charles Fox, who was as national as Nelson, went
+to his death with the firm conviction that England had made Napoleon. He
+did not mean, of course, that any other Italian gunner would have done
+just as well; but he did mean that by forcing the French back on their
+guns, as it were, we had made their chief gunner necessarily their chief
+citizen. Had the French Republic been left alone, it would probably have
+followed the example of most other ideal experiments; and praised peace
+along with progress and equality. It would almost certainly have eyed
+with the coldest suspicion any adventurer who appeared likely to
+substitute his personality for the pure impersonality of the Sovereign
+People; and would have considered it the very flower of republican
+chastity to provide a Brutus for such a Caesar. But if it was
+undesirable that equality should be threatened by a citizen, it was
+intolerable that it should be simply forbidden by a foreigner. If
+France could not put up with French soldiers she would very soon have to
+put up with Austrian soldiers; and it would be absurd if, having decided
+to rely on soldiering, she had hampered the best French soldier even on the
+ground that he was not French. So that whether we regard Napoleon as a
+hero rushing to the country's help, or a tyrant profiting by the
+country's extremity, it is equally clear that those who made the war
+made the war-lord; and those who tried to destroy the Republic were
+those who created the Empire. So, at least, Fox argued against that much
+less English prig who would have called him unpatriotic; and he threw
+the blame upon Pitt's Government for having joined the anti-French
+alliance, and so tipped up the scale in favour of a military France. But
+whether he was right or no, he would have been the readiest to admit
+that England was not the first to fly at the throat of the young
+Republic. Something in Europe much vaster and vaguer had from the first
+stirred against it. What was it then that first made war--and made
+Napoleon? There is only one possible answer: the Germans. This is the
+second act of our drama of the degradation of England to the level of
+Germany. And it has this very important development; that Germany means
+by this time _all_ the Germans, just as it does to-day. The savagery of
+Prussia and the stupidity of Austria are now combined. Mercilessness and
+muddleheadedness are met together; unrighteousness and unreasonableness
+have kissed each other; and the tempter and the tempted are agreed. The
+great and good Maria Theresa was already old. She had a son who was a
+philosopher of the school of Frederick; also a daughter who was more
+fortunate, for she was guillotined. It was natural, no doubt, that her
+brother and relatives should disapprove of the incident; but it occurred
+long after the whole Germanic power had been hurled against the new
+Republic. Louis XVI. himself was still alive and nominally ruling when
+the first pressure came from Prussia and Austria, demanding that the
+trend of the French emancipation should be reversed. It is impossible to
+deny, therefore, that what the united Germanics were resolved to destroy
+was the reform and not even the Revolution. The part which Joseph of
+Austria played in the matter is symbolic. For he was what is called an
+enlightened despot, which is the worst kind of despot. He was as
+irreligious as Frederick the Great, but not so disgusting or amusing.
+The old and kindly Austrian family, of which Maria Theresa was the
+affectionate mother, and Marie Antoinette the rather uneducated
+daughter, was already superseded and summed up by a rather dried-up
+young man self-schooled to a Prussian efficiency. The needle is already
+veering northward. Prussia is already beginning to be the captain of the
+Germanics "in shining armour." Austria is already becoming a loyal
+_sekundant_.
+
+But there still remains one great difference between Austria and Prussia
+which developed more and more as the energy of the young Napoleon was
+driven like a wedge between them. The difference can be most shortly
+stated by saying that Austria did, in some blundering and barbaric way,
+care for Europe; but Prussia cared for nothing but Prussia. Austria is
+not a nation; you cannot really find Austria on the map. But Austria is
+a kind of Empire; a Holy Roman Empire that never came, an expanding and
+contracting-dream. It does feel itself, in a vague patriarchal way, the
+leader, not of a nation, but of nations. It is like some dying Emperor
+of Rome in the decline; who should admit that the legions had been
+withdrawn from Britain or from Parthia, but would feel it as
+fundamentally natural that they should have been there, as in Sicily or
+Southern Gaul. I would not assert that the aged Francis Joseph imagines
+that he is Emperor of Scotland or of Denmark; but I should guess that he
+retains some notion that if he did rule both the Scots and the Danes, it
+would not be more incongruous than his ruling both the Hungarians and
+the Poles. This cosmopolitanism of Austria has in it a kind of shadow of
+responsibility for Christendom. And it was this that made the difference
+between its proceedings and those of the purely selfish adventurer from
+the north, the wild dog of Pomerania.
+
+It may be believed, as Fox himself came at last to believe, that
+Napoleon in his latest years was really an enemy to freedom, in the
+sense that he was an enemy to that very special and occidental form of
+freedom which we call Nationalism. The resistance of the Spaniards, for
+instance, was certainly a popular resistance. It had that peculiar,
+belated, almost secretive strength with which war is made by the people.
+It was quite easy for a conqueror to get into Spain; his great
+difficulty was to get out again. It was one of the paradoxes of history
+that he who had turned the mob into an army, in defence of its rights
+against the princes, should at last have his army worn down, not by
+princes but by mobs. It is equally certain that at the other end of
+Europe, in burning Moscow and on the bridge of the Beresina, he had
+found the common soul, even as he had found the common sky, his enemy.
+But all this does not affect the first great lines of the quarrel, which
+had begun before horsemen in Germanic uniform had waited vainly upon the
+road to Varennes or had failed upon the miry slope up to the windmill of
+Valmy. And that duel, on which depended all that our Europe has since
+become, had great Russia and gallant Spain and our own glorious island
+only as subordinates or seconds. That duel, first, last, and for ever,
+was a duel between the Frenchman and the German; that is, between the
+citizen and the barbarian.
+
+It is not necessary nowadays to defend the French Revolution, it is not
+necessary to defend even Napoleon, its child and champion, from
+criticisms in the style of Southey and Alison, which even at the time
+had more of the atmosphere of Bath and Cheltenham than of Turcoing and
+Talavera. The French Revolution was attacked because it was democratic
+and defended because it was democratic; and Napoleon was not feared as
+the last of the iron despots, but as the first of the iron democrats.
+What France set out to prove France has proved; not that common men are
+all angels, or all diplomatists, or all gentlemen (for these inane
+aristocratic illusions were no part of the Jacobin theory), but that
+common men can all be citizens and can all be soldiers; that common men
+can fight and can rule. There is no need to confuse the question with
+any of those escapades of a floundering modernism which have made
+nonsense of this civic common-sense. Some Free Traders have seemed to
+leave a man no country to fight for; some Free Lovers seem to leave a
+man no household to rule. But these things have not established
+themselves either in France or anywhere else. What has been established
+is not Free Trade or Free Love, but Freedom; and it is nowhere so
+patriotic or so domestic as in the country from which it came. The poor
+men of France have not loved the land less because they have shared it.
+Even the patricians are patriots; and if some honest Royalists or
+aristocrats are still saying that democracy cannot organise and cannot
+obey, they are none the less organised by it and obeying it, nobly
+living or splendidly dead for it, along the line from Switzerland to the
+sea.
+
+But for Austria, and even more for Russia, there was this to be said;
+that the French Republican ideal was incomplete, and that they
+possessed, in a corrupt but still positive and often popular sense, what
+was needed to complete it. The Czar was not democratic, but he was
+humanitarian. He was a Christian Pacifist; there is something of the
+Tolstoyan in every Russian. It is not wholly fanciful to talk of the
+White Czar: for Russia even destruction has a deathly softness as of
+snow. Her ideas are often innocent and even childish; like the idea of
+Peace. The phrase Holy Alliance was a beautiful truth for the Czar,
+though only a blasphemous jest for his rascally allies, Metternich and
+Castlereagh. Austria, though she had lately fallen to a somewhat
+treasonable toying with heathens and heretics of Turkey and Prussia,
+still retained something of the old Catholic comfort for the soul.
+Priests still bore witness to that mighty mediaeval institution which
+even its enemies concede to be a noble nightmare. All their hoary
+political iniquities had not deprived them of that dignity. If they
+darkened the sun in heaven, they clothed it with the strong colours of
+sunrise in garment or gloriole; if they had given men stones for bread,
+the stones were carved with kindly faces and fascinating tales. If
+justice counted on their shameful gibbets hundreds of the innocent dead,
+they could still say that for them death was more hopeful than life for
+the heathen. If the new daylight discovered their vile tortures, there
+had lingered in the darkness some dim memory that they were tortures of
+Purgatory and not, like those which Parisian and Prussian diabolists
+showed shameless in the sunshine, of naked hell. They claimed a truth
+not yet disentangled from human nature; for indeed earth is not even
+earth without heaven, as a landscape is not a landscape without the sky.
+And in, a universe without God there is not room enough for a man.
+
+It may be held, therefore, that there must in any case have come a
+conflict between the old world and the new; if only because the old are
+often broad, while the young are always narrow. The Church had learnt,
+not at the end but at the beginning of her centuries, that the funeral
+of God is always a premature burial. If the bugles of Bonaparte raised
+the living populace of the passing hour, she could blow that yet more
+revolutionary trumpet that shall raise all the democracy of the dead.
+But if we concede that collision was inevitable between the new Republic
+on the one hand and Holy Russia and the Holy Roman Empire on the other,
+there remain two great European forces which, in different attitudes and
+from very different motives, determined the ultimate combination.
+Neither of them had any tincture of Catholic mysticism. Neither of them
+had any tincture of Jacobin idealism. Neither of them, therefore, had
+any real moral reason for being in the war at all. The first was
+England, and the second was Prussia.
+
+It is very arguable that England must, in any case, have fought to keep
+her influence on the ports of the North Sea. It is quite equally
+arguable that if she had been as heartily on the side of the French
+Revolution as she was at last against it, she could have claimed the
+same concessions from the other side. It is certain that England had no
+necessary communion with the arms and tortures of the Continental
+tyrannies, and that she stood at the parting of the ways. England was
+indeed an aristocracy, but a liberal one; and the ideas growing in the
+middle classes were those which had already made America, and were
+remaking France. The fiercest Jacobins, such as Danton, were deep in the
+liberal literature of England. The people had no religion to fight for,
+as in Russia or La Vendee. The parson was no longer a priest, and had
+long been a small squire. Already that one great blank in our land had
+made snobbishness the only religion of South England; and turned rich
+men into a mythology. The effect can be well summed up in that decorous
+abbreviation by which our rustics speak of "Lady's Bedstraw," where they
+once spoke of "Our Lady's Bedstraw." We have dropped the comparatively
+democratic adjective, and kept the aristocratic noun. South England is
+still, as it was called in the Middle Ages, a garden; but it is the kind
+where grow the plants called "lords and ladies."
+
+We became more and more insular even about our continental conquests; we
+stood upon our island as if on an anchored ship. We never thought of
+Nelson at Naples, but only eternally at Trafalgar; and even that Spanish
+name we managed to pronounce wrong. But even if we regard the first
+attack upon Napoleon as a national necessity, the general trend remains
+true. It only changes the tale from a tragedy of choice to a tragedy of
+chance. And the tragedy was that, for a second time, we were at one with
+the Germans.
+
+But if England had nothing to fight for but a compromise, Prussia had
+nothing to fight for but a negation. She was and is, in the supreme
+sense, the spirit that denies. It is as certain that she was fighting
+against liberty in Napoleon as it is that she was fighting against
+religion in Maria Theresa. What she was fighting for she would have
+found it quite impossible to tell you. At the best, it was for Prussia;
+if it was anything else, it was tyranny. She cringed to Napoleon when he
+beat her, and only joined in the chase when braver people had beaten
+him. She professed to restore the Bourbons, and tried to rob them while
+she was restoring them. For her own hand she would have wrecked the
+Restoration with the Revolution. Alone in all that agony of peoples, she
+had not the star of one solitary ideal to light the night of her
+nihilism.
+
+The French Revolution has a quality which all men feel; and which may be
+called a sudden antiquity. Its classicalism was not altogether a cant.
+When it had happened it seemed to have happened thousands of years ago.
+It spoke in parables; in the hammering of spears and the awful cap of
+Phrygia. To some it seemed to pass like a vision; and yet it seemed
+eternal as a group of statuary. One almost thought of its most strenuous
+figures as naked. It is always with a shock of comicality that we
+remember that its date was so recent that umbrellas were fashionable
+and top-hats beginning to be tried. And it is a curious fact, giving a
+kind of completeness to this sense of the thing as something that
+happened outside the world, that its first great act of arms and also
+its last were both primarily symbols; and but for this visionary
+character, were in a manner vain. It began with the taking of the old
+and almost empty prison called the Bastille; and we always think of it
+as the beginning of the Revolution, though the real Revolution did not
+come till some time after. And it ended when Wellington and Blucher met
+in 1815; and we always think of it as the end of Napoleon; though
+Napoleon had really fallen before. And the popular imagery is right, as
+it generally is in such things: for the mob is an artist, though not a
+man of science. The riot of the 14th of July did not specially deliver
+prisoners inside the Bastille, but it did deliver the prisoners outside.
+Napoleon when he returned was indeed a _revenant_, that is, a ghost. But
+Waterloo was all the more final in that it was a spectral resurrection
+and a second death. And in this second case there were other elements
+that were yet more strangely symbolic. That doubtful and double battle
+before Waterloo was like the dual personality in a dream. It
+corresponded curiously to the double mind of the Englishman. We connect
+Quatre Bras with things romantically English to the verge of
+sentimentalism, with Byron and "The Black Brunswicker." We naturally
+sympathise with Wellington against Ney. We do not sympathise, and even
+then we did not really sympathise, with Blucher against Napoleon.
+Germany has complained that we passed over lightly the presence of
+Prussians at the decisive action. And well we might. Even at the time
+our sentiment was not solely jealousy, but very largely shame.
+Wellington, the grimmest and even the most unamiable of Tories, with no
+French sympathies and not enough human ones, has recorded his opinion of
+his Prussian allies in terms of curt disgust. Peel, the primmest and
+most snobbish Tory that ever praised "our gallant Allies" in a frigid
+official speech, could not contain himself about the conduct of
+Blucher's men. Our middle classes did well to adorn their parlours with
+the picture of the "Meeting of Wellington and Blucher." They should
+have hung up a companion piece of Pilate and Herod shaking hands. Then,
+after that meeting amid the ashes of Hougomont, where they dreamed they
+had trodden out the embers of all democracy, the Prussians rode on
+before, doing after their kind. After them went that ironical aristocrat
+out of embittered Ireland, with what thoughts we know; and Blucher, with
+what thoughts we care not; and his soldiers entered Paris, and stole the
+sword of Joan of Arc.
+
+
+
+IV--_The Coming of the Janissaries_
+
+
+The late Lord Salisbury, a sad and humorous man, made many public and
+serious remarks that have been proved false and perilous, and many
+private and frivolous remarks which were valuable and ought to be
+immortal. He struck dead the stiff and false psychology of "social
+reform," with its suggestion that the number of public-houses made
+people drunk, by saying that there were a number of bedrooms at
+Hatfield, but they never made him sleepy. Because of this it is possible
+to forgive him for having talked about "living and dying nations":
+though it is of such sayings that living nations die. In the same spirit
+he included the nation of Ireland in the "Celtic fringe" upon the west
+of England. It seems sufficient to remark that the fringe is
+considerably broader than the garment. But the fearful satire of time
+has very sufficiently avenged the Irish nation upon him, largely by the
+instrumentality of another fragment of the British robe which he cast
+away almost contemptuously in the North Sea. The name of it is
+Heligoland; and he gave it to the Germans.
+
+The subsequent history of the two islands on either side of England has
+been sufficiently ironical. If Lord Salisbury had foreseen exactly what
+would happen to Heligoland, as well as to Ireland, he might well have
+found no sleep at Hatfield in one bedroom or a hundred. In the eastern
+isle he was strengthening a fortress that would one day be called upon
+to destroy us. In the western isle he was weakening a fortress that
+would one day be called upon to save us. In that day his trusted ally,
+William Hohenzollern, was to batter our ships and boats from the Bight
+of Heligoland; and in that day his old and once-imprisoned enemy, John
+Redmond, was to rise in the hour of English jeopardy, and be thanked in
+thunder for the free offer of the Irish sword. All that Robert Cecil
+thought valueless has been our loss, and all that he thought feeble our
+stay. Among those of his political class or creed who accepted and
+welcomed the Irish leader's alliance, there were some who knew the real
+past relations between England and Ireland, and some who first felt
+them in that hour. All knew that England could no longer be a mere
+mistress; many knew that she was now in some sense a suppliant. Some
+knew that she deserved to be a suppliant. These were they who knew a
+little of the thing called history; and if they thought at all of such
+dead catchwords as the "Celtic fringe" for a description of Ireland, it
+was to doubt whether we were worthy to kiss the hem of her garment. If
+there be still any Englishman who thinks such language extravagant, this
+chapter is written to enlighten him.
+
+In the last two chapters I have sketched in outline the way in which
+England, partly by historical accident, but partly also by false
+philosophy, was drawn into the orbit of Germany, the centre of whose
+circle was already at Berlin. I need not recapitulate the causes at all
+fully here. Luther was hardly a heresiarch for England, though a hobby
+for Henry VIII. But the negative Germanism of the Reformation, its drag
+towards the north, its quarantine against Latin culture, was in a sense
+the beginning of the business. It is well represented in two facts; the
+barbaric refusal of the new astronomical calendar merely because it was
+invented by a Pope, and the singular decision to pronounce Latin as if
+it were something else, making it not a dead language but a new
+language. Later, the part played by particular royalties is complex and
+accidental; "the furious German" came and passed; the much less
+interesting Germans came and stayed. Their influence was negative but
+not negligible; they kept England out of that current of European life
+into which the Gallophil Stuarts might have carried her. Only one of the
+Hanoverians was actively German; so German that he actually gloried in
+the name of Briton, and spelt it wrong. Incidentally, he lost America.
+It is notable that all those eminent among the real Britons, who spelt
+it right, respected and would parley with the American Revolution,
+however jingo or legitimist they were; the romantic conservative Burke,
+the earth-devouring Imperialist Chatham, even, in reality, the jog-trot
+Tory North. The intractability was in the Elector of Hanover more than
+in the King of England; in the narrow and petty German prince who was
+bored by Shakespeare and approximately inspired by Handel. What really
+clinched the unlucky companionship of England and Germany was the first
+and second alliance with Prussia; the first in which we prevented the
+hardening tradition of Frederick the Great being broken up by the Seven
+Years' War; the second in which we prevented it being broken up by the
+French Revolution and Napoleon. In the first we helped Prussia to escape
+like a young brigand; in the second we helped the brigand to adjudicate
+as a respectable magistrate. Having aided his lawlessness, we defended
+his legitimacy. We helped to give the Bourbon prince his crown, though
+our allies the Prussians (in their cheery way) tried to pick a few
+jewels out of it before he got it. Through the whole of that period, so
+important in history, it must be said that we were to be reckoned on for
+the support of unreformed laws and the rule of unwilling subjects. There
+is, as it were, an ugly echo even to the name of Nelson in the name of
+Naples. But whatever is to be said of the cause, the work which we did
+in it, with steel and gold, was so able and strenuous that an Englishman
+can still be proud of it. We never performed a greater task than that
+in which we, in a sense, saved Germany, save that in which a hundred
+years later, we have now, in a sense, to destroy her. History tends to
+be a facade of faded picturesqueness for most of those who have not
+specially studied it: a more or less monochrome background for the drama
+of their own day. To these it may well seem that it matters little
+whether we were on one side or the other in a fight in which all the
+figures are antiquated; Bonaparte and Blucher are both in old cocked
+hats; French kings and French regicides are both not only dead men but
+dead foreigners; the whole is a tapestry as decorative and as arbitrary
+as the Wars of the Roses. It was not so: we fought for something real
+when we fought for the old world against the new. If we want to know
+painfully and precisely what it was, we must open an old and sealed and
+very awful door, on a scene which was called Ireland, but which then
+might well have been called hell.
+
+Having chosen our part and made war upon the new world, we were soon
+made to understand what such spiritual infanticide involved; and were
+committed to a kind of Massacre of the Innocents. In Ireland the young
+world was represented by young men, who shared the democratic dream of
+the Continent, and were resolved to foil the plot of Pitt; who was
+working a huge machine of corruption to its utmost to absorb Ireland
+into the Anti-Jacobin scheme of England. There was present every
+coincidence that could make the British rulers feel they were mere
+abbots of misrule. The stiff and self-conscious figure of Pitt has
+remained standing incongruously purse in hand; while his manlier rivals
+were stretching out their hands for the sword, the only possible resort
+of men who cannot be bought and refuse to be sold. A rebellion broke out
+and was repressed; and the government that repressed it was ten times
+more lawless than the rebellion. Fate for once seemed to pick out a
+situation in plain black and white like an allegory; a tragedy of
+appalling platitudes. The heroes were really heroes; and the villains
+were nothing but villains. The common tangle of life, in which good men
+do evil by mistake and bad men do good by accident, seemed suspended for
+us as for a judgment. We had to do things that not only were vile, but
+felt vile. We had to destroy men who not only were noble, but looked
+noble. They were men like Wolfe Tone, a statesman in the grand style who
+was not suffered to found a state; and Robert Emmet, lover of his land
+and of a woman, in whose very appearance men saw something of the eagle
+grace of the young Napoleon. But he was luckier than the young Napoleon;
+for he has remained young. He was hanged; not before he had uttered one
+of those phrases that are the hinges of history. He made an epitaph of
+the refusal of an epitaph: and with a gesture has hung his tomb in
+heaven like Mahomet's coffin. Against such Irishmen we could only
+produce Castlereagh; one of the few men in human records who seem to
+have been made famous solely that they might be infamous. He sold his
+own country, he oppressed ours; for the rest he mixed his metaphors, and
+has saddled two separate and sensible nations with the horrible mixed
+metaphor called the Union. Here there is no possible see-saw of
+sympathies as there can be between Brutus and Caesar or between Cromwell
+and Charles I.: there is simply nobody who supposes that Emmet was out
+for worldly gain, or that Castlereagh was out for anything else. Even
+the incidental resemblances between the two sides only served to sharpen
+the contrast and the complete superiority of the nationalists. Thus,
+Castlereagh and Lord Edward Fitzgerald were both aristocrats. But
+Castlereagh was the corrupt gentleman at the Court, Fitzgerald the
+generous gentleman upon the land; some portion of whose blood, along
+with some portion of his spirit, descended to that great gentleman,
+who--in the midst of the emetic immoralism of our modern politics--gave
+back that land to the Irish peasantry. Thus again, all such
+eighteenth-century aristocrats (like aristocrats almost anywhere) stood
+apart from the popular mysticism and the shrines of the poor; they were
+theoretically Protestants, but practically pagans. But Tone was the type
+of pagan who refuses to persecute, like Gallio: Pitt was the type of
+pagan who consents to persecute; and his place is with Pilate. He was an
+intolerant indifferentist; ready to enfranchise the Papists, but more
+ready to massacre them. Thus, once more, the two pagans, Tone and
+Castlereagh, found a pagan end in suicide. But the circumstances were
+such that any man, of any party, felt that Tone had died like Cato and
+Castlereagh had died like Judas.
+
+The march of Pitt's policy went on; and the chasm between light and
+darkness deepened. Order was restored; and wherever order spread, there
+spread an anarchy more awful than the sun has ever looked on. Torture
+came out of the crypts of the Inquisition and walked in the sunlight of
+the streets and fields. A village vicar was slain with inconceivable
+stripes, and his corpse set on fire with frightful jests about a roasted
+priest. Rape became a mode of government. The violation of virgins
+became a standing order of police. Stamped still with the same terrible
+symbolism, the work of the English Government and the English settlers
+seemed to resolve itself into animal atrocities against the wives and
+daughters of a race distinguished for a rare and detached purity, and of
+a religion which makes of innocence the Mother of God. In its bodily
+aspects it became like a war of devils upon angels; as if England could
+produce nothing but torturers, and Ireland nothing but martyrs. Such
+was a part of the price paid by the Irish body and the English soul, for
+the privilege of patching up a Prussian after the sabre-stroke of Jena.
+
+But Germany was not merely present in the spirit: Germany was present in
+the flesh. Without any desire to underrate the exploits of the English
+or the Orangemen, I can safely say that the finest touches were added by
+soldiers trained in a tradition inherited from the horrors of the Thirty
+Years' War, and of what the old ballad called "the cruel wars of High
+Germanie." An Irishman I know, whose brother is a soldier, and who has
+relatives in many distinguished posts of the British army, told me that
+in his childhood the legend (or rather the truth) of '98 was so
+frightfully alive that his own mother would not have the word "soldier"
+spoken in her house. Wherever we thus find the tradition alive we find
+that the hateful soldier means especially the German soldier. When the
+Irish say, as some of them do say, that the German mercenary was worse
+than the Orangemen, they say as much as human mouth can utter. Beyond
+that there is nothing but the curse of God, which shall be uttered in
+an unknown tongue.
+
+The practice of using German soldiers, and even whole German regiments,
+in the make-up of the British army, came in with our German princes, and
+reappeared on many important occasions in our eighteenth-century
+history. They were probably among those who encamped triumphantly upon
+Drumossie Moor, and also (which is a more gratifying thought) among
+those who ran away with great rapidity at Prestonpans. When that very
+typical German, George III., narrow, serious, of a stunted culture and
+coarse in his very domesticity, quarrelled with all that was spirited,
+not only in the democracy of America but in the aristocracy of England,
+German troops were very fitted to be his ambassadors beyond the
+Atlantic. With their well-drilled formations they followed Burgoyne in
+that woodland march that failed at Saratoga; and with their wooden faces
+beheld our downfall. Their presence had long had its effect in various
+ways. In one way, curiously enough, their very militarism helped England
+to be less military; and especially to be more mercantile. It began to
+be felt, faintly of course and never consciously, that fighting was a
+thing that foreigners had to do. It vaguely increased the prestige of
+the Germans as the military people, to the disadvantage of the French,
+whom it was the interest of our vanity to underrate. The mere mixture of
+their uniforms with ours made a background of pageantry in which it
+seemed more and more natural that English and German potentates should
+salute each other like cousins, and, in a sense, live in each other's
+countries. Thus in 1908 the German Emperor was already regarded as
+something of a menace by the English politicians, and as nothing but a
+madman by the English people. Yet it did not seem in any way disgusting
+or dangerous that Edward VII. should appear upon occasion in a Prussian
+uniform. Edward VII. was himself a friend to France, and worked for the
+French Alliance. Yet his appearance in the red trousers of a French
+soldier would have struck many people as funny; as funny as if he had
+dressed up as a Chinaman.
+
+But the German hirelings or allies had another character which (by that
+same strain of evil coincidence which we are tracing in this book)
+encouraged all that was worst in the English conservatism and
+inequality, while discouraging all that was best in it. It is true that
+the ideal Englishman was too much of a squire; but it is just to add
+that the ideal squire was a good squire. The best squire I know in
+fiction is Duke Theseus in "The Midsummer Night's Dream," who is kind to
+his people and proud of his dogs; and would be a perfect human being if
+he were not just a little bit prone to be kind to both of them in the
+same way. But such natural and even pagan good-nature is consonant with
+the warm wet woods and comfortable clouds of South England; it never had
+any place among the harsh and thrifty squires in the plains of East
+Prussia, the land of the East Wind. They were peevish as well as proud,
+and everything they created, but especially their army, was made
+coherent by sheer brutality. Discipline was cruel enough in all the
+eighteenth-century armies, created long after the decay of any faith or
+hope that could hold men together. But the state that was first in
+Germany was first in ferocity. Frederick the Great had to forbid his
+English admirers to follow his regiments during the campaign, lest they
+should discover that the most enlightened of kings had only excluded
+torture from law to impose it without law. This influence, as we have
+seen, left on Ireland a fearful mark which will never be effaced.
+English rule in Ireland had been bad before; but in the broadening light
+of the revolutionary century I doubt whether it could have continued as
+bad, if we had not taken a side that forced us to flatter barbarian
+tyranny in Europe. We should hardly have seen such a nightmare as the
+Anglicising of Ireland if we had not already seen the Germanising of
+England. But even in England it was not without its effects; and one of
+its effects was to rouse a man who is, perhaps, the best English witness
+to the effect on the England of that time of the Alliance with Germany.
+With that man I shall deal in the chapter that follows.
+
+
+
+V--_The Lost England_
+
+
+Telling the truth about Ireland is not very pleasant to a patriotic
+Englishman; but it is very patriotic. It is the truth and nothing but
+the truth which I have but touched on in the last chapter. Several
+times, and especially at the beginning of this war, we narrowly escaped
+ruin because we neglected that truth, and would insist on treating our
+crimes of the '98 and after as very distant; while in Irish feeling, and
+in fact, they are very near. Repentance of this remote sort is not at
+all appropriate to the case, and will not do. It may be a good thing to
+forget and forgive; but it is altogether too easy a trick to forget and
+be forgiven.
+
+The truth about Ireland is simply this: that the relations between
+England and Ireland are the relations between two men who have to travel
+together, one of whom tried to stab the other at the last stopping-place
+or to poison the other at the last inn. Conversation may be courteous,
+but it will be occasionally forced. The topic of attempted murder, its
+examples in history and fiction, may be tactfully avoided in the
+sallies; but it will be occasionally present in the thoughts. Silences,
+not devoid of strain, will fall from time to time. The partially
+murdered person may even think an assault unlikely to recur; but it is
+asking too much, perhaps, to expect him to find it impossible to
+imagine. And even if, as God grant, the predominant partner is really
+sorry for his former manner of predominating, and proves it in some
+unmistakable manner--as by saving the other from robbers at great
+personal risk--the victim may still be unable to repress an abstract
+psychological wonder about when his companion first began to feel like
+that. Now this is not in the least an exaggerated parable of the
+position of England towards Ireland, not only in '98, but far back from
+the treason that broke the Treaty of Limerick and far onwards through
+the Great Famine and after. The conduct of the English towards the Irish
+after the Rebellion was quite simply the conduct of one man who traps
+and binds another, and then calmly cuts him about with a knife. The
+conduct during the Famine was quite simply the conduct of the first man
+if he entertained the later moments of the second man, by remarking in a
+chatty manner on the very hopeful chances of his bleeding to death. The
+British Prime Minister publicly refused to stop the Famine by the use of
+English ships. The British Prime Minister positively spread the Famine,
+by making the half-starved populations of Ireland pay for the starved
+ones. The common verdict of a coroner's jury upon some emaciated wretch
+was "Wilful murder by Lord John Russell": and that verdict was not only
+the verdict of Irish public opinion, but is the verdict of history. But
+there were those in influential positions in England who were not
+content with publicly approving the act, but publicly proclaimed the
+motive. The _Times_, which had then a national authority and
+respectability which gave its words a weight unknown in modern
+journalism, openly exulted in the prospect of a Golden Age when the kind
+of Irishman native to Ireland would be "as rare on the banks of the
+Liffey as a red man on the banks of the Manhattan." It seems
+sufficiently frantic that such a thing should have been said by one
+European of another, or even of a Red Indian, if Red Indians had
+occupied anything like the place of the Irish then and since; if there
+were to be a Red Indian Lord Chief Justice and a Red Indian
+Commander-in-Chief, if the Red Indian Party in Congress, containing
+first-rate orators and fashionable novelists, could have turned
+Presidents in and out; if half the best troops of the country were
+trained with the tomahawk and half the best journalism of the capital
+written in picture-writing, if later, by general consent, the Chief
+known as Pine in the Twilight, was the best living poet, or the Chief
+Thin Red Fox, the ablest living dramatist. If that were realised, the
+English critic probably would not say anything scornful of red men;
+or certainly would be sorry he said it. But the extraordinary avowal
+does mark what was most peculiar in the position. This has not been the
+common case of misgovernment. It is not merely that the institutions we
+set up were indefensible; though the curious mark of them is that they
+were literally indefensible; from Wood's Halfpence to the Irish Church
+Establishment. There can be no more excuse for the method used by Pitt
+than for the method used by Pigott. But it differs further from
+ordinary misrule in the vital matter of its object. The coercion was not
+imposed that the people might live quietly, but that the people might
+die quietly. And then we sit in an owlish innocence of our sin, and
+debate whether the Irish might conceivably succeed in saving Ireland.
+We, as a matter of fact, have not even failed to save Ireland. We have
+simply failed to destroy her.
+
+It is not possible to reverse this judgment or to take away a single
+count from it. Is there, then, anything whatever to be said for the
+English in the matter? There is: though the English never by any chance
+say it. Nor do the Irish say it; though it is in a sense a weakness as
+well as a defence. One would think the Irish had reason to say anything
+that can be said against the English ruling class, but they have not
+said, indeed they have hardly discovered, one quite simple fact--that it
+rules England. They are right in asking that the Irish should have a say
+in the Irish government, but they are quite wrong in supposing that the
+English have any particular say in English government. And I seriously
+believe I am not deceived by any national bias, when I say that the
+common Englishman would be quite incapable of the cruelties that were
+committed in his name. But, most important of all, it is the historical
+fact that there was another England, an England consisting of common
+Englishmen, which not only certainly would have done better, but
+actually did make some considerable attempt to do better. If anyone asks
+for the evidence, the answer is that the evidence has been destroyed, or
+at least deliberately boycotted: but can be found in the unfashionable
+corners of literature; and, when found, is final. If anyone asks for the
+great men of such a potential democratic England, the answer is that the
+great men are labelled small men, or not labelled at all; have been
+successfully belittled as the emancipation of which they dreamed has
+dwindled. The greatest of them is now little more than a name; he is
+criticised to be underrated and not to be understood; but he presented
+all that alternative and more liberal Englishry; and was enormously
+popular because he presented it. In taking him as the type of it we may
+tell most shortly the whole of this forgotten tale. And, even when I
+begin to tell it, I find myself in the presence of that ubiquitous evil
+which is the subject of this book. It is a fact, and I think it is not a
+coincidence, that in standing for a moment where this Englishman stood,
+I again find myself confronted by the German soldier.
+
+The son of a small Surrey farmer, a respectable Tory and churchman,
+ventured to plead against certain extraordinary cruelties being
+inflicted on Englishmen whose hands were tied, by the whips of German
+superiors; who were then parading in English fields their stiff foreign
+uniforms and their sanguinary foreign discipline. In the countries from
+which they came, of course, such torments were the one monotonous means
+of driving men on to perish in the dead dynastic quarrels of the north;
+but to poor Will Cobbett, in his provincial island, knowing little but
+the low hills and hedges around the little church where he now lies
+buried, the incident seemed odd--nay, unpleasing. He knew, of course,
+that there was then flogging in the British army also; but the German
+standard was notoriously severe in such things, and was something of an
+acquired taste. Added to which he had all sorts of old grandmotherly
+prejudices about Englishmen being punished by Englishmen, and notions of
+that sort. He protested, not only in speech, but actually in print. He
+was soon made to learn the perils of meddling in the high politics of
+the High Dutch militarists. The fine feelings of the foreign mercenaries
+were soothed by Cobbett being flung into Newgate for two years and
+beggared by a fine of L1000. That small incident is a small transparent
+picture of the Holy Alliance; of what was really meant by a country,
+once half liberalised, taking up the cause of the foreign kings. This,
+and not "The Meeting of Wellington and Blucher," should be engraved as
+the great scene of the war. From this intemperate Fenians should learn
+that the Teutonic mercenaries did not confine themselves solely to
+torturing Irishmen. They were equally ready to torture Englishmen: for
+mercenaries are mostly unprejudiced. To Cobbett's eye we were suffering
+from allies exactly as we should suffer from invaders. Boney was a
+bogey; but the German was a nightmare, a thing actually sitting on top
+of us. In Ireland the Alliance meant the ruin of anything and
+everything Irish, from the creed of St. Patrick to the mere colour
+green. But in England also it meant the ruin of anything and everything
+English, from the Habeas Corpus Act to Cobbett.
+
+After this affair of the scourging, he wielded his pen like a scourge
+until he died. This terrible pamphleteer was one of those men who exist
+to prove the distinction between a biography and a life. From his
+biographies you will learn that he was a Radical who had once been a
+Tory. From his life, if there were one, you would learn that he was
+always a Radical because he was always a Tory. Few men changed less; it
+was round him that the politicians like Pitt chopped and changed, like
+fakirs dancing round a sacred rock. His secret is buried with him; it is
+that he really cared about the English people. He was conservative
+because he cared for their past, and liberal because he cared for their
+future. But he was much more than this. He had two forms of moral
+manhood very rare in our time: he was ready to uproot ancient successes,
+and he was ready to defy oncoming doom. Burke said that few are the
+partisans of a tyranny that has departed: he might have added that fewer
+still are the critics of a tyranny that has remained. Burke certainly
+was not one of them. While lashing himself into a lunacy against the
+French Revolution, which only very incidentally destroyed the property
+of the rich, he never criticised (to do him justice, perhaps never saw)
+the English Revolution, which began with the sack of convents, and ended
+with the fencing in of enclosures; a revolution which sweepingly and
+systematically destroyed the property of the poor. While rhetorically
+putting the Englishman in a castle, politically he would not allow him
+on a common. Cobbett, a much more historical thinker, saw the beginning
+of Capitalism in the Tudor pillage and deplored it; he saw the triumph
+of Capitalism in the industrial cities and defied it. The paradox he was
+maintaining really amounted to the assertion that Westminster Abbey is
+rather more national than Welbeck Abbey. The same paradox would have led
+him to maintain that a Warwickshire man had more reason to be proud of
+Stratford-on-Avon than of Birmingham. He would no more have thought of
+looking for England in Birmingham than of looking for Ireland in
+Belfast.
+
+The prestige of Cobbett's excellent literary style has survived the
+persecution of his equally excellent opinions. But that style also is
+underrated through the loss of the real English tradition. More cautious
+schools have missed the fact that the very genius of the English tongue
+tends not only to vigour, but specially to violence. The Englishman of
+the leading articles is calm, moderate, and restrained; but then the
+Englishman of the leading articles is a Prussian. The mere English
+consonants are full of Cobbett. Dr. Johnson was our great man of letters
+when he said "stinks," not when he said "putrefaction." Take some common
+phrase like "raining cats and dogs," and note not only the extravagance
+of imagery (though that is very Shakespearean), but a jagged energy in
+the very spelling. Say "chats" and "chiens" and it is not the same.
+Perhaps the old national genius has survived the urban enslavement most
+spiritedly in our comic songs, admired by all men of travel and
+continental culture, by Mr. George Moore as by Mr. Belloc. One (to
+which I am much attached) had a chorus--
+
+  "O wind from the South
+  Blow mud in the mouth
+  Of Jane, Jane, Jane."
+
+Note, again, not only the tremendous vision of clinging soils carried
+skywards in the tornado, but also the suitability of the mere sounds.
+Say "bone" and "bouche" for mud and mouth and it is not the same.
+Cobbett was a wind from the South; and if he occasionally seemed to stop
+his enemies' mouths with mud, it was the real soil of South England.
+
+And as his seemingly mad language is very literary, so his seemingly mad
+meaning is very historical. Modern people do not understand him because
+they do not understand the difference between exaggerating a truth and
+exaggerating a lie. He did exaggerate, but what he knew, not what he did
+not know. He only appears paradoxical because he upheld tradition
+against fashion. A paradox is a fantastic thing that is said once: a
+fashion is a more fantastic thing that is said a sufficient number of
+times. I could give numberless examples in Cobbett's case, but I will
+give only one. Anyone who finds himself full in the central path of
+Cobbett's fury sometimes has something like a physical shock. No one who
+has read "The History of the Reformation" will ever forget the passage
+(I forget the precise words) in which he says the mere thought of such a
+person as Cranmer makes the brain reel, and, for an instant, doubt the
+goodness of God; but that peace and faith flow back into the soul when
+we remember that he was burned alive. Now this is extravagant. It takes
+the breath away; and it was meant to. But what I wish to point out is
+that a much more extravagant view of Cranmer was, in Cobbett's day, the
+accepted view of Cranmer; not as a momentary image, but as an immovable
+historical monument. Thousands of parsons and penmen dutifully set down
+Cranmer among the saints and martyrs; and there are many respectable
+people who would do so still. This is not an exaggerated truth, but an
+established lie. Cranmer was not such a monstrosity of meanness as
+Cobbett implies; but he was mean. But there is no question of his being
+less saintly than the parsonages believed; he was not a saint at all;
+and not very attractive even as a sinner. He was no more a martyr for
+being burned than Crippen for being hanged.
+
+Cobbett was defeated because the English people was defeated. After the
+frame-breaking riots, men, as men, were beaten: and machines, as
+machines, had beaten them. Peterloo was as much the defeat of the
+English as Waterloo was the defeat of the French. Ireland did not get
+Home Rule because England did not get it. Cobbett would not forcibly
+incorporate Ireland, least of all the corpse of Ireland. But before his
+defeat Cobbett had an enormous following; his "Register" was what the
+serial novels of Dickens were afterwards to be. Dickens, by the way,
+inherited the same instinct for abrupt diction, and probably enjoyed
+writing "gas and gaiters" more than any two other words in his works.
+But Dickens was narrower than Cobbett, not by any fault of his own, but
+because in the intervening epoch of the triumph of Scrooge and Gradgrind
+the link with our Christian past had been lost, save in the single
+matter of Christmas, which Dickens rescued romantically and by a
+hair's-breadth escape. Cobbett was a yeoman; that is, a man free and
+farming a small estate. By Dickens's time, yeomen seemed as antiquated
+as bowmen. Cobbett was mediaeval; that is, he was in almost every way
+the opposite of what that word means to-day. He was as egalitarian as
+St. Francis, and as independent as Robin Hood. Like that other yeoman in
+the ballad, he bore in hand a mighty bow; what some of his enemies would
+have called a long bow. But though he sometimes overshot the mark of
+truth, he never shot away from it, like Froude. His account of that
+sixteenth century in which the mediaeval civilisation ended, is not more
+and not less picturesque than Froude's: the difference is in the dull
+detail of truth. That crisis was _not_ the foundling of a strong Tudor
+monarchy, for the monarchy almost immediately perished; it _was_ the
+founding of a strong class holding all the capital and land, for it
+holds them to this day. Cobbett would have asked nothing better than to
+bend his mediaeval bow to the cry of "St. George for Merry England," for
+though he pointed to the other and uglier side of the Waterloo medal,
+he was patriotic; and his premonitions were rather against Blucher than
+Wellington. But if we take that old war-cry as his final word (and he
+would have accepted it) we must note how every term in it points away
+from what the modern plutocrats call either progress or empire. It
+involves the invocation of saints, the most popular and the most
+forbidden form of mediaevalism. The modern Imperialist no more thinks of
+St. George in England than he thinks of St. John in St. John's Wood. It
+is nationalist in the narrowest sense; and no one knows the beauty and
+simplicity of the Middle Ages who has not seen St. George's Cross
+separate, as it was at Crecy or Flodden, and noticed how much finer a
+flag it is than the Union Jack. And the word "merry" bears witness to an
+England famous for its music and dancing before the coming of the
+Puritans, the last traces of which have been stamped out by a social
+discipline utterly un-English. Not for two years, but for ten decades
+Cobbett has been in prison; and his enemy, the "efficient" foreigner,
+has walked about in the sunlight, magnificent, and a model for men. I
+do not think that even the Prussians ever boasted about "Merry Prussia."
+
+
+
+VI--_Hamlet and the Danes_
+
+
+In the one classic and perfect literary product that ever came out of
+Germany--I do not mean "Faust," but Grimm's Fairy Tales--there is a
+gorgeous story about a boy who went through a number of experiences
+without learning how to shudder. In one of them, I remember, he was
+sitting by the fireside and a pair of live legs fell down the chimney
+and walked about the room by themselves. Afterwards the rest fell down
+and joined up; but this was almost an anti-climax. Now that is very
+charming, and full of the best German domesticity. It suggests truly
+what wild adventures the traveller can find by stopping at home. But it
+also illustrates in various ways how that great German influence on
+England, which is the matter of these essays, began in good things and
+gradually turned to bad. It began as a literary influence, in the lurid
+tales of Hoffmann, the tale of "Sintram," and so on; the revisualising
+of the dark background of forest behind our European cities. That old
+German darkness was immeasurably livelier than the new German light. The
+devils of Germany were much better than the angels. Look at the Teutonic
+pictures of "The Three Huntsmen" and observe that while the wicked
+huntsman is effective in his own way, the good huntsman is weak in every
+way, a sort of sexless woman with a face like a teaspoon. But there is
+more in these first forest tales, these homely horrors. In the earlier
+stages they have exactly this salt of salvation, that the boy does _not_
+shudder. They are made fearful that he may be fearless, not that he may
+fear. As long as that limit is kept, the barbaric dreamland is decent;
+and though individuals like Coleridge and De Quincey mixed it with worse
+things (such as opium), they kept that romantic rudiment upon the whole.
+But the one disadvantage of a forest is that one may lose one's way in
+it. And the one danger is not that we may meet devils, but that we may
+worship them. In other words, the danger is one always associated, by
+the instinct of folk-lore, with forests; it is _enchantment_, or the
+fixed loss of oneself in some unnatural captivity or spiritual
+servitude. And in the evolution of Germanism, from Hoffmann to
+Hauptmann, we do see this growing tendency to take horror seriously,
+which is diabolism. The German begins to have an eerie abstract sympathy
+with the force and fear he describes, as distinct from their objective.
+The German is no longer sympathising with the boy against the goblin,
+but rather with the goblin against the boy. There goes with it, as
+always goes with idolatry, a dehumanised seriousness; the men of the
+forest are already building upon a mountain the empty throne of the
+Superman. Now it is just at this point that I for one, and most men who
+love truth as well as tales, begin to lose interest. I am all for "going
+out into the world to seek my fortune," but I do not want to find
+it--and find it is only being chained for ever among the frozen figures
+of the Sieges Allees. I do not want to be an idolator, still less an
+idol. I am all for going to fairyland, but I am also all for coming
+back. That is, I will admire, but I will not be magnetised, either by
+mysticism or militarism. I am all for German fantasy, but I will resist
+German earnestness till I die. I am all for Grimm's Fairy Tales; but if
+there is such a thing as Grimm's Law, I would break it, if I knew what
+it was. I like the Prussian's legs (in their beautiful boots) to fall
+down the chimney and walk about my room. But when he procures a head and
+begins to talk, I feel a little bored. The Germans cannot really be deep
+because they will not consent to be superficial. They are bewitched by
+art, and stare at it, and cannot see round it. They will not believe
+that art is a light and slight thing--a feather, even if it be from an
+angelic wing. Only the slime is at the bottom of a pool; the sky is on
+the surface. We see this in that very typical process, the Germanising
+of Shakespeare. I do not complain of the Germans forgetting that
+Shakespeare was an Englishman. I complain of their forgetting that
+Shakespeare was a man; that he had moods, that he made mistakes, and,
+above all, that he knew his art was an art and not an attribute of
+deity. That is what is the matter with the Germans; they cannot "ring
+fancy's knell"; their knells have no gaiety. The phrase of Hamlet about
+"holding the mirror up to nature" is always quoted by such earnest
+critics as meaning that art is nothing if not realistic. But it really
+means (or at least its author really thought) that art is nothing if not
+artificial. Realists, like other barbarians, really _believe_ the
+mirror; and therefore break the mirror. Also they leave out the phrase
+"as 'twere," which must be read into every remark of Shakespeare, and
+especially every remark of Hamlet. What I mean by believing the mirror,
+and breaking it, can be recorded in one case I remember; in which a
+realistic critic quoted German authorities to prove that Hamlet had a
+particular psycho-pathological abnormality, which is admittedly nowhere
+mentioned in the play. The critic was bewitched; he was thinking of
+Hamlet as a real man, with a background behind him three dimensions
+deep--which does not exist in a looking-glass. "The best in this kind
+are but shadows." No German commentator has ever made an adequate note
+on that. Nevertheless, Shakespeare was an Englishman; he was nowhere
+more English than in his blunders; but he was nowhere more successful
+than in the description of very English types of character. And if
+anything is to be said about Hamlet, beyond what Shakespeare has said
+about him, I should say that Hamlet was an Englishman too. He was as
+much an Englishman as he was a gentleman, and he had the very grave
+weaknesses of both characters. The chief English fault, especially in
+the nineteenth century, has been lack of decision, not only lack of
+decision in action, but lack of the equally essential decision in
+thought--which some call dogma. And in the politics of the last century,
+this English Hamlet, as we shall see, played a great part, or rather
+refused to play it.
+
+There were, then, two elements in the German influence; a sort of pretty
+playing with terror and a solemn recognition of terrorism. The first
+pointed to elfland, and the second to--shall we say, Prussia. And by
+that unconscious symbolism with which all this story develops, it was
+soon to be dramatically tested, by a definite political query, whether
+what we really respected was the Teutonic fantasy or the Teutonic fear.
+
+The Germanisation of England, its transition and turning-point, was well
+typified by the genius of Carlyle. The original charm of Germany had
+been the charm of the child. The Teutons were never so great as when
+they were childish; in their religious art and popular imagery the
+Christ-Child is really a child, though the Christ is hardly a man. The
+self-conscious fuss of their pedagogy is half-redeemed by the
+unconscious grace which called a school not a seed-plot of citizens, but
+merely a garden of children. All the first and best forest-spirit is
+infancy, its wonder, its wilfulness, even its still innocent fear.
+Carlyle marks exactly the moment when the German child becomes the
+spoilt child. The wonder turns to mere mysticism; and mere mysticism
+always turns to mere immoralism. The wilfulness is no longer liked, but
+is actually obeyed. The fear becomes a philosophy. Panic hardens into
+pessimism; or else, what is often equally depressing, optimism.
+
+Carlyle, the most influential English writer of that time, marks all
+this by the mental interval between his "French Revolution" and his
+"Frederick the Great." In both he was Germanic. Carlyle was really as
+sentimental as Goethe; and Goethe was really as sentimental as Werther.
+Carlyle understood everything about the French Revolution, except that
+it was a French revolution. He could not conceive that cold anger that
+comes from a love of insulted truth. It seemed to him absurd that a man
+should die, or do murder, for the First Proposition of Euclid; should
+relish an egalitarian state like an equilateral triangle; or should
+defend the Pons Asinorum as Codes defended the Tiber bridge. But anyone
+who does not understand that does not understand the French
+Revolution--nor, for that matter, the American Revolution. "We hold
+these truths to be self-evident": it was the fanaticism of truism. But
+though Carlyle had no real respect for liberty, he had a real reverence
+for anarchy. He admired elemental energy. The violence which repelled
+most men from the Revolution was the one thing that attracted him to it.
+While a Whig like Macaulay respected the Girondists but deplored the
+Mountain, a Tory like Carlyle rather liked the Mountain and quite unduly
+despised the Girondists. This appetite for formless force belongs, of
+course, to the forests, to Germany. But when Carlyle got there, there
+fell upon him a sort of spell which is his tragedy and the English
+tragedy, and, in no small degree, the German tragedy too. The real
+romance of the Teutons was largely a romance of the Southern Teutons,
+with their castles, which are almost literally castles in the air, and
+their river which is walled with vineyards and rhymes so naturally to
+wine. But as Carlyle's was rootedly a romance of conquest, he had to
+prove that the thing which conquered in Germany was really more poetical
+than anything else in Germany. Now the thing that conquered in Germany
+was about the most prosaic thing of which the world ever grew weary.
+There is a great deal more poetry in Brixton than in Berlin. Stella said
+that Swift could write charmingly about a broom-stick; and poor Carlyle
+had to write romantically about a ramrod. Compare him with Heine, who
+had also a detached taste in the mystical grotesques of Germany, but who
+saw what was their enemy: and offered to nail up the Prussian eagle like
+an old crow as a target for the archers of the Rhine. Its prosaic
+essence is not proved by the fact that it did not produce poets: it is
+proved by the more deadly fact that it did. The actual written poetry of
+Frederick the Great, for instance, was not even German or barbaric, but
+simply feeble--and French. Thus Carlyle became continually gloomier as
+his fit of the blues deepened into Prussian blues; nor can there be any
+wonder. His philosophy had brought out the result that the Prussian was
+the first of Germans, and, therefore, the first of men. No wonder he
+looked at the rest of us with little hope.
+
+But a stronger test was coming both for Carlyle and England. Prussia,
+plodding, policing, as materialist as mud, went on solidifying and
+strengthening after unconquered Russia and unconquered England had
+rescued her where she lay prostrate under Napoleon. In this interval the
+two most important events were the Polish national revival, with which
+Russia was half inclined to be sympathetic, but Prussia was implacably
+coercionist; and the positive refusal of the crown of a united Germany
+by the King of Prussia, simply because it was constitutionally offered
+by a free German Convention. Prussia did not want to lead the Germans:
+she wanted to conquer the Germans. And she wanted to conquer other
+people first. She had already found her brutal, if humorous, embodiment
+in Bismarck; and he began with a scheme full of brutality and not
+without humour. He took up, or rather pretended to take up, the claim of
+the Prince of Augustenberg to duchies which were a quite lawful part of
+the land of Denmark. In support of this small pretender he enlisted two
+large things, the Germanic body called the Bund and the Austrian Empire.
+It is possibly needless to say that after he had seized the disputed
+provinces by pure Prussian violence, he kicked out the Prince of
+Augustenberg, kicked out the German Bund, and finally kicked out the
+Austrian Empire too, in the sudden campaign of Sadowa. He was a good
+husband and a good father; he did not paint in water colours; and of
+such is the Kingdom of Heaven. But the symbolic intensity of the
+incident was this. The Danes expected protection from England; and if
+there had been any sincerity in the ideal side of our Teutonism they
+ought to have had it. They ought to have had it even by the pedantries
+of the time, which already talked of Latin inferiority: and were never
+weary of explaining that the country of Richelieu could not rule and the
+country of Napoleon could not fight. But if it was necessary for
+whosoever would be saved to be a Teuton, the Danes were more Teuton than
+the Prussians. If it be a matter of vital importance to be descended
+from Vikings, the Danes really were descended from Vikings, while the
+Prussians were descended from mongrel Slavonic savages. If Protestantism
+be progress, the Danes were Protestant; while they had attained quite
+peculiar success and wealth in that small ownership and intensive
+cultivation which is very commonly a boast of Catholic lands. They had
+in a quite arresting degree what was claimed for the Germanics as
+against Latin revolutionism: quiet freedom, quiet prosperity, a simple
+love of fields and of the sea. But, moreover, by that coincidence which
+dogs this drama, the English of that Victorian epoch had found their
+freshest impression of the northern spirit of infancy and wonder in the
+works of a Danish man of genius, whose stories and sketches were so
+popular in England as almost to have become English. Good as Grimm's
+Fairy Tales were, they had been collected and not created by the modern
+German; they were a museum of things older than any nation, of the
+dateless age of once-upon-a-time. When the English romantics wanted to
+find the folk-tale spirit still alive, they found it in the small
+country of one of those small kings, with whom the folk-tales are almost
+comically crowded. There they found what we call an original writer, who
+was nevertheless the image of the origins. They found a whole fairyland
+in one head and under one nineteenth-century top hat. Those of the
+English who were then children owe to Hans Andersen more than to any of
+their own writers, that essential educational emotion which feels that
+domesticity is not dull but rather fantastic; that sense of the
+fairyland of furniture, and the travel and adventure of the farmyard.
+His treatment of inanimate things as animate was not a cold and awkward
+allegory: it was a true sense of a dumb divinity in things that are.
+Through him a child did feel that the chair he sat on was something like
+a wooden horse. Through him children and the happier kind of men did
+feel themselves covered by a roof as by the folded wings of some vast
+domestic fowl; and feel common doors like great mouths that opened to
+utter welcome. In the story of "The Fir Tree" he transplanted to
+England a living bush that can still blossom into candles. And in his
+tale of "The Tin Soldier" he uttered the true defence of romantic
+militarism against the prigs who would forbid it even as a toy for the
+nursery. He suggested, in the true tradition of the folk-tales, that the
+dignity of the fighter is not in his largeness but rather in his
+smallness, in his stiff loyalty and heroic helplessness in the hands of
+larger and lower things. These things, alas, were an allegory. When
+Prussia, finding her crimes unpunished, afterwards carried them into
+France as well as Denmark, Carlyle and his school made some effort to
+justify their Germanism, by pitting what they called the piety and
+simplicity of Germany against what they called the cynicism and ribaldry
+of France. But nobody could possibly pretend that Bismarck was more
+pious and simple than Hans Andersen; yet the Carlyleans looked on with
+silence or approval while the innocent toy kingdom was broken like a
+toy. Here again, it is enormously probable that England would have
+struck upon the right side, if the English people had been the English
+Government. Among other coincidences, the Danish princess who had
+married the English heir was something very like a fairy princess to the
+English crowd. The national poet had hailed her as a daughter of the
+sea-kings; and she was, and indeed still is, the most popular royal
+figure in England. But whatever our people may have been like, our
+politicians were on the very tamest level of timidity and the fear of
+force to which they have ever sunk. The Tin Soldier of the Danish army
+and the paper boat of the Danish navy, as in the story, were swept away
+down the great gutter, down that colossal _cloaca_ that leads to the
+vast cesspool of Berlin.
+
+Why, as a fact, did not England interpose? There were a great many
+reasons given, but I think they were all various inferences from one
+reason; indirect results and sometimes quite illogical results, of what
+we have called the Germanisation of England. First, the very insularity
+on which we insisted was barbaric, in its refusal of a seat in the
+central senate of the nations. What we called our splendid isolation
+became a rather ignominious sleeping-partnership with Prussia. Next, we
+were largely trained in irresponsibility by our contemporary historians,
+Freeman and Green, teaching us to be proud of a possible descent from
+King Arthur's nameless enemies and not from King Arthur. King Arthur
+might not be historical, but at least he was legendary. Hengist and
+Horsa were not even legendary, for they left no legend. Anybody could
+see what was obligatory on the representative of Arthur; he was bound to
+be chivalrous, that is, to be European. But nobody could imagine what
+was obligatory on the representative of Horsa, unless it were to be
+horsy. That was perhaps the only part of the Anglo-Saxon programme that
+the contemporary English really carried out. Then, in the very real
+decline from Cobbett to Cobden (that is, from a broad to a narrow
+manliness and good sense) there had grown up the cult of a very curious
+kind of peace, to be spread all over the world not by pilgrims, but by
+pedlars. Mystics from the beginning had made vows of peace--but they
+added to them vows of poverty. Vows of poverty were not in the
+Cobdenite's line. Then, again, there was the positive praise of Prussia,
+to which steadily worsening case the Carlyleans were already committed.
+But beyond these, there was something else, a spirit which had more
+infected us as a whole. That spirit was the spirit of Hamlet. We gave
+the grand name of "evolution" to a notion that things do themselves. Our
+wealth, our insularity, our gradual loss of faith, had so dazed us that
+the old Christian England haunted us like a ghost in whom we could not
+quite believe. An aristocrat like Palmerston, loving freedom and hating
+the upstart despotism, must have looked on at its cold brutality not
+without that ugly question which Hamlet asked himself--am I a coward?
+
+                      It cannot be
+  But I am pigeon-livered and lack gall
+  To make oppression bitter; or 'ere this
+  I should have fatted all the region kites
+  With this slave's offal.
+
+We made dumb our anger and our honour; but it has not brought us peace.
+
+
+
+VII--_The Midnight of Europe_
+
+
+Among the minor crimes of England may be classed the shallow criticism
+and easy abandonment of Napoleon III. The Victorian English had a very
+bad habit of being influenced by words and at the same time pretending
+to despise them. They would build their whole historical philosophy upon
+two or three titles, and then refuse to get even the titles right. The
+solid Victorian Englishman, with his whiskers and his Parliamentary
+vote, was quite content to say that Louis Napoleon and William of
+Prussia both became Emperors--by which he meant autocrats. His whiskers
+would have bristled with rage and he would have stormed at you for
+hair-splitting and "lingo," if you had answered that William was German
+Emperor, while Napoleon was not French Emperor, but only Emperor of the
+French. What could such mere order of the words matter? Yet the same
+Victorian would have been even more indignant if he had been asked to
+be satisfied with an Art Master, when he had advertised for a Master of
+Arts. His irritation would have increased if the Art Master had promised
+him a sea-piece and had brought him a piece of the sea; or if, during
+the decoration of his house, the same aesthetic humourist had undertaken
+to procure some Indian Red and had produced a Red Indian.
+
+The Englishman would not see that if there was only a verbal difference
+between the French Emperor and the Emperor of the French, so, if it came
+to that, it was a verbal difference between the Emperor and the
+Republic, or even between a Parliament and no Parliament. For him an
+Emperor meant merely despotism; he had not yet learned that a Parliament
+may mean merely oligarchy. He did not know that the English people would
+soon be made impotent, not by the disfranchising of their constituents,
+but simply by the silencing of their members; and that the governing
+class of England did not now depend upon rotten boroughs, but upon
+rotten representatives. Therefore he did not understand Bonapartism. He
+did not understand that French democracy became more democratic, not
+less, when it turned all France into one constituency which elected one
+member. He did not understand that many dragged down the Republic
+because it was not republican, but purely senatorial. He was yet to
+learn how quite corruptly senatorial a great representative assembly can
+become. Yet in England to-day we hear "the decline of Parliament" talked
+about and taken for granted by the best Parliamentarians--Mr. Balfour,
+for instance--and we hear the one partly French and wholly Jacobin
+historian of the French Revolution recommending for the English evil a
+revival of the power of the Crown. It seems that so far from having left
+Louis Napoleon far behind in the grey dust of the dead despotisms, it is
+not at all improbable that our most extreme revolutionary developments
+may end where Louis Napoleon began.
+
+In other words, the Victorian Englishman did not understand the words
+"Emperor of the French." The type of title was deliberately chosen to
+express the idea of an elective and popular origin; as against such a
+phrase as "the German Emperor," which expresses an almost
+transcendental tribal patriarchate, or such a phrase as "King of
+Prussia," which suggests personal ownership of a whole territory. To
+treat the _Coup d'etat_ as unpardonable is to justify riot against
+despotism, but forbid any riot against aristocracy. Yet the idea
+expressed in "The Emperor of the French" is not dead, but rather risen
+from the dead. It is the idea that while a government may pretend to be
+a popular government, only a person can be really popular. Indeed, the
+idea is still the crown of American democracy, as it was for a time the
+crown of French democracy. The very powerful official who makes the
+choice of that great people for peace or war, might very well be called,
+not the President of the United States, but the President of the
+Americans. In Italy we have seen the King and the mob prevail over the
+conservatism of the Parliament, and in Russia the new popular policy
+sacramentally symbolised by the Czar riding at the head of the new
+armies. But in one place, at least, the actual form of words exists; and
+the actual form of words has been splendidly justified. One man among
+the sons of men has been permitted to fulfil a courtly formula with
+awful and disastrous fidelity. Political and geographical ruin have
+written one last royal title across the sky; the loss of palace and
+capital and territory have but isolated and made evident the people that
+has not been lost; not laws but the love of exiles, not soil but the
+souls of men, still make certain that five true words shall yet be
+written in the corrupt and fanciful chronicles of mankind: "The King of
+the Belgians."
+
+It is a common phrase, recurring constantly in the real if rabid
+eloquence of Victor Hugo, that Napoleon III. was a mere ape of Napoleon
+I. That is, that he had, as the politician says, in "L'Aiglon," "le
+petit chapeau, mais pas la tete"; that he was merely a bad imitation.
+This is extravagantly exaggerative; and those who say it, moreover,
+often miss the two or three points of resemblance which really exist in
+the exaggeration. One resemblance there certainly was. In both Napoleons
+it has been suggested that the glory was not so great as it seemed; but
+in both it can be emphatically added that the eclipse was not so great
+as it seemed either. Both succeeded at first and failed at last. But
+both succeeded at last, even after the failure. If at this moment we owe
+thanks to Napoleon Bonaparte for the armies of united France, we also
+owe some thanks to Louis Bonaparte for the armies of united Italy. That
+great movement to a freer and more chivalrous Europe which we call
+to-day the Cause of the Allies, had its forerunners and first victories
+before our time; and it not only won at Arcola, but also at Solferino.
+Men who remembered Louis Napoleon when he mooned about the Blessington
+_salon_, and was supposed to be almost mentally deficient, used to say
+he deceived Europe twice; once when he made men think him an imbecile,
+and once when he made them think him a statesman. But he deceived them a
+third time; when he made them think he was dead; and had done nothing.
+
+In spite of the unbridled verse of Hugo and the even more unbridled
+prose of Kinglake, Napoleon III. is really and solely discredited in
+history because of the catastrophe of 1870. Hugo hurled any amount of
+lightning on Louis Napoleon; but he threw very little light on him. Some
+passages in the "Chatiments" are really caricatures carved in eternal
+marble. They will always be valuable in reminding generations too vague
+and soft, as were the Victorians, of the great truth that hatred is
+beautiful, when it is hatred of the ugliness of the soul. But most of
+them could have been written about Haman, or Heliogabalus, or King John,
+or Queen Elizabeth, as much as about poor Louis Napoleon; they bear no
+trace of any comprehension of his quite interesting aims, and his quite
+comprehensible contempt for the fat-souled senatorial politicians. And
+if a real revolutionist like Hugo did not do justice to the
+revolutionary element in Caesarism, it need hardly be said that a rather
+Primrose League Tory like Tennyson did not. Kinglake's curiously acrid
+insistence upon the _Coup d'etat_ is, I fear, only an indulgence in one
+of the least pleasing pleasures of our national pen and press, and one
+which afterwards altogether ran away with us over the Dreyfus case. It
+is an unfortunate habit of publicly repenting for other people's sins.
+If this came easy to an Englishman like Kinglake, it came, of course,
+still easier to a German like Queen Victoria's husband and even to
+Queen Victoria herself, who was naturally influenced by him. But in so
+far as the sensible masses of the English nation took any interest in
+the matter, it is probable that they sympathised with Palmerston, who
+was as popular as the Prince Consort was unpopular. The black mark
+against Louis Napoleon's name until now, has simply been Sedan; and it
+is our whole purpose to-day to turn Sedan into an interlude. If it is
+not an interlude, it will be the end of the world. But we have sworn to
+make an end of that ending: warring on until, if only by a purgatory of
+the nations and the mountainous annihilation of men, the story of the
+world ends well.
+
+There are, as it were, valleys of history quite close to us, but hidden
+by the closer hills. One, as we have seen, is that fold in the soft
+Surrey hills where Cobbett sleeps with his still-born English
+Revolution. Another is under that height called The Spy of Italy, where
+a new Napoleon brought back the golden eagles against the black eagles
+of Austria. Yet that French adventure in support of the Italian
+insurrection was very important; we are only beginning to understand
+its importance. It was a defiance to the German Reaction and 1870 was a
+sort of revenge for it, just as the Balkan victory was a defiance to the
+German Reaction and 1914 was the attempted revenge for it. It is true
+that the French liberation of Italy was incomplete, the problem of the
+Papal States, for instance, being untouched by the Peace of Villafranca.
+The volcanic but fruitful spirit of Italy had already produced that
+wonderful, wandering, and almost omnipresent personality whose red shirt
+was to be a walking flag: Garibaldi. And many English Liberals
+sympathised with him and his extremists as against the peace. Palmerston
+called it "the peace that passeth all understanding": but the profanity
+of that hilarious old heathen was nearer the mark than he knew: there
+were really present some of those deep things which he did not
+understand. To quarrel with the Pope, but to compromise with him, was an
+instinct with the Bonapartes; an instinct no Anglo-Saxon could be
+expected to understand. They knew the truth; that Anti-Clericalism is
+not a Protestant movement, but a Catholic mood. And after all the
+English Liberals could not get their own Government to risk what the
+French Government had risked; and Napoleon III. might well have retorted
+on Palmerston, his rival in international Liberalism, that half a war
+was better than no fighting. Swinburne called Villafranca "The Halt
+before Rome," and expressed a rhythmic impatience for the time when the
+world
+
+  "Shall ring to the roar of the lion
+  Proclaiming Republican Rome."
+
+But he might have remembered, after all, that it was not the British
+lion, that a British poet should have the right to say so imperiously,
+"Let him roar again. Let him roar again."
+
+It is true that there was no clear call to England from Italy, as there
+certainly was from Denmark. The great powers were not bound to help
+Italy to become a nation, as they were bound to support the unquestioned
+fact that Denmark was one. Indeed the great Italian patriot was to
+experience both extremes of the English paradox, and, curiously enough,
+in connection with both the two national and anti-German causes. For
+Italy he gained the support of the English, but not the support of
+England. Not a few of our countrymen followed the red shirt; but not in
+the red coat. And when he came to England, not to plead the cause of
+Italy but the cause of Denmark, the Italian found he was more popular
+with the English than any Englishman. He made his way through a forest
+of salutations, which would willingly have turned itself into a forest
+of swords. But those who kept the sword kept it sheathed. For the ruling
+class the valour of the Italian hero, like the beauty of the Danish
+Princess, was a thing to be admired, that is enjoyed, like a novel--or a
+newspaper. Palmerston was the very type of Pacifism, because he was the
+very type of Jingoism. In spirit as restless as Garibaldi, he was in
+practice as cautious as Cobden. England had the most prudent
+aristocracy, but the most reckless democracy in the world. It was, and
+is, the English contradiction, which has so much misrepresented us,
+especially to the Irish. Our national captains were carpet knights; our
+knights errant were among the dismounted rabble. When an Austrian
+general who had flogged women in the conquered provinces appeared in
+the London streets, some common draymen off a cart behaved with the
+direct quixotry of Sir Lancelot or Sir Galahad. He had beaten women and
+they beat him. They regarded themselves simply as avengers of ladies in
+distress, breaking the bloody whip of a German bully; just as Cobbett
+had sought to break it when it was wielded over the men of England. The
+boorishness was in the Germanic or half-Germanic rulers who wore crosses
+and spurs: the gallantry was in the gutter. English draymen had more
+chivalry than Teuton aristocrats--or English ones.
+
+I have dwelt a little on this Italian experiment because it lights up
+Louis Napoleon as what he really was before the eclipse, a
+politician--perhaps an unscrupulous politician--but certainly a
+democratic politician. A power seldom falls being wholly faultless; and
+it is true that the Second Empire became contaminated with cosmopolitan
+spies and swindlers, justly reviled by such democrats as Rochefort as
+well as Hugo. But there was no French inefficiency that weighed a hair
+in the balance compared with the huge and hostile efficiency of
+Prussia; the tall machine that had struck down Denmark and Austria, and
+now stood ready to strike again, extinguishing the lamp of the world.
+There was a hitch before the hammer stroke, and Bismarck adjusted it, as
+with his finger, by a forgery--for he had many minor accomplishments.
+France fell: and what fell with her was freedom, and what reigned in her
+stead only tyrants and the ancient terror. The crowning of the first
+modern Kaiser in the very palace of the old French kings was an
+allegory; like an allegory on those Versailles walls. For it was at once
+the lifting of the old despotic diadem and its descent on the low brow
+of a barbarian. Louis XI. had returned, and not Louis IX.; and Europe
+was to know that sceptre on which there is no dove.
+
+The instant evidence that Europe was in the grip of the savage was as
+simple as it was sinister. The invaders behaved with an innocent impiety
+and bestiality that had never been known in those lands since Clovis was
+signed with the cross. To the naked pride of the new men nations simply
+were not. The struggling populations of two vast provinces were simply
+carried away like slaves into captivity, as after the sacking of some
+prehistoric town. France was fined for having pretended to be a nation;
+and the fine was planned to ruin her forever. Under the pressure of such
+impossible injustice France cried out to the Christian nations, one
+after another, and by name. Her last cry ended in a stillness like that
+which had encircled Denmark.
+
+One man answered; one who had quarrelled with the French and their
+Emperor; but who knew it was not an emperor that had fallen. Garibaldi,
+not always wise but to his end a hero, took his station, sword in hand,
+under the darkening sky of Christendom, and shared the last fate of
+France. A curious record remains, in which a German commander testifies
+to the energy and effect of the last strokes of the wounded lion of
+Aspromonte. But England went away sorrowful, for she had great
+possessions.
+
+
+
+VIII--_The Wrong Horse_
+
+
+In another chapter I mentioned some of the late Lord Salisbury's remarks
+with regret, but I trust with respect; for in certain matters he
+deserved all the respect that can be given to him. His critics said that
+he "thought aloud"; which is perhaps the noblest thing that can be said
+of a man. He was jeered at for it by journalists and politicians who had
+not the capacity to think or the courage to tell their thoughts. And he
+had one yet finer quality which redeems a hundred lapses of anarchic
+cynicism. He could change his mind upon the platform: he could repent in
+public. He could not only think aloud; he could "think better" aloud.
+And one of the turning-points of Europe had come in the hour when he
+avowed his conversion from the un-Christian and un-European policy into
+which his dexterous Oriental master, Disraeli, had dragged him; and
+declared that England had "put her money on the wrong horse." When he
+said it, he referred to the backing we gave to the Turk under a
+fallacious fear of Russia. But I cannot but think that if he had lived
+much longer, he would have come to feel the same disgust for his long
+diplomatic support of the Turk's great ally in the North. He did not
+live, as we have lived, to feel that horse run away with us, and rush on
+through wilder and wilder places, until we knew that we were riding on
+the nightmare.
+
+What was this thing to which we trusted? And how may we most quickly
+explain its development from a dream to a nightmare, and the
+hair's-breadth escape by which it did not hurl us to destruction, as it
+seems to be hurling the Turk? It is a certain spirit; and we must not
+ask for too logical a definition of it, for the people whom it possesses
+disown logic; and the whole thing is not so much a theory as a confusion
+of thought. Its widest and most elementary character is adumbrated in
+the word Teutonism or Pan-Germanism; and with this (which was what
+appeared to win in 1870) we had better begin. The nature of
+Pan-Germanism may be allegorised and abbreviated somewhat thus:
+
+The horse asserts that all other creatures are morally bound to
+sacrifice their interests to his, on the specific ground that he
+possesses all noble and necessary qualities, and is an end in himself.
+It is pointed out in answer that when climbing a tree the horse is less
+graceful than the cat; that lovers and poets seldom urge the horse to
+make a noise all night like the nightingale; that when submerged for
+some long time under water, he is less happy than the haddock; and that
+when he is cut open pearls are less often found in him than in an
+oyster. He is not content to answer (though, being a muddle-headed
+horse, he does use this answer also) that having an undivided hoof is
+more than pearls or oceans or all ascension or song. He reflects for a
+few years on the subject of cats; and at last discovers in the cat "the
+characteristic equine quality of caudality, or a tail"; so that cats
+_are_ horses, and wave on every tree-top the tail which is the equine
+banner. Nightingales are found to have legs, which explains their power
+of song. Haddocks are vertebrates; and therefore are sea-horses. And
+though the oyster outwardly presents dissimilarities which seem to
+divide him from the horse, he is by the all-filling nature-might of the
+same horse-moving energy sustained.
+
+Now this horse is intellectually the wrong horse. It is not perhaps
+going too far to say that this horse is a donkey. For it is obviously
+within even the intellectual resources of a haddock to answer, "But if a
+haddock is a horse, why should I yield to you any more than you to me?
+Why should that singing horse commonly called the nightingale, or that
+climbing horse hitherto known as the cat, fall down and worship you
+because of your horsehood? If all our native faculties are the
+accomplishments of a horse--why then you are only another horse without
+any accomplishments." When thus gently reasoned with, the horse flings
+up his heels, kicks the cat, crushes the oyster, eats the haddock and
+pursues the nightingale, and that is how the war began.
+
+This apologue is not in the least more fantastic than the facts of the
+Teutonic claim. The Germans do really say that Englishmen are only
+Sea-Germans, as our haddocks were only sea-horses. They do really say
+that the nightingales of Tuscany or the pearls of Hellas must somehow be
+German birds or German jewels. They do maintain that the Italian
+Renaissance was really the German Renaissance, pure Germans having
+Italian names when they were painters, as cockneys sometimes have when
+they are hair-dressers. They suggest that Jesus and the great Jews were
+Teutonic. One Teutonist I read actually explained the fresh energy of
+the French Revolution and the stale privileges of its German enemies by
+saying that the Germanic soul awoke in France and attacked the Latin
+influence in Germany. On the advantages of this method I need not dwell:
+if you are annoyed at Jack Johnson knocking out an English
+prize-fighter, you have only to say that it was the whiteness of the
+black man that won and the blackness of the white man that was beaten.
+But about the Italian Renaissance they are less general and will go into
+detail. They will discover (in their researches into 'istry, as Mr.
+Gandish said) that Michael Angelo's surname was Buonarotti; and they
+will point out that the word "roth" is very like the word "rot." Which,
+in one sense, is true enough. Most Englishmen will be content to say it
+is all rot and pass on. It is all of a piece with the preposterous
+Prussian history, which talks, for instance, about the "perfect
+religious tolerance of the Goths"; which is like talking about the legal
+impartiality of chicken-pox. He will decline to believe that the Jews
+were Germans; though he may perhaps have met some Germans who were Jews.
+But deeper than any such practical reply, lies the deep inconsistency of
+the parable. It is simply this; that if Teutonism be used for
+comprehension it cannot be used for conquest. If all intelligent peoples
+are Germans, then Prussians are only the least intelligent Germans. If
+the men of Flanders are as German as the men of Frankfort, we can only
+say that in saving Belgium we are helping the Germans who are in the
+right against the Germans who are in the wrong. Thus in Alsace the
+conquerors are forced into the comic posture of annexing the people for
+being German and then persecuting them for being French. The French
+Teutons who built Rheims must surrender it to the South German Teutons
+who have partly built Cologne; and these in turn surrender Cologne to
+the North German Teutons, who never built anything, except the wooden
+Aunt Sally of old Hindenburg. Every Teuton must fall on his face before
+an inferior Teuton; until they all find, in the foul marshes towards the
+Baltic, the very lowest of all possible Teutons, and worship him--and
+find he is a Slav. So much for Pan-Germanism.
+
+But though Teutonism is indefinable, or at least is by the Teutons
+undefined, it is not unreal. A vague but genuine soul does possess all
+peoples who boast of Teutonism; and has possessed ourselves, in so far
+as we have been touched by that folly. Not a race, but rather a
+religion, the thing exists; and in 1870 its sun was at noon. We can most
+briefly describe it under three heads.
+
+The victory of the German arms meant before Leipzic, and means now, the
+overthrow of a certain idea. That idea is the idea of the Citizen. This
+is true in a quite abstract and courteous sense; and is not meant as a
+loose charge of oppression. Its truth is quite compatible with a view
+that the Germans are better governed than the French. In many ways the
+Germans are very well governed. But they might be governed ten thousand
+times better than they are, or than anybody ever can be, and still be
+as far as ever from governing. The idea of the Citizen is that his
+individual human nature shall be constantly and creatively active in
+_altering_ the State. The Germans are right in regarding the idea as
+dangerously revolutionary. Every Citizen _is_ a revolution. That is, he
+destroys, devours and adapts his environment to the extent of his own
+thought and conscience. This is what separates the human social effort
+from the non-human; the bee creates the honey-comb, but he does not
+criticise it. The German ruler really does feed and train the German as
+carefully as a gardener waters a flower. But if the flower suddenly
+began to water the gardener, he would be much surprised. So in Germany
+the people really are educated; but in France the people educates. The
+French not only make up the State, but make the State; not only make it,
+but remake it. In Germany the ruler is the artist, always painting the
+happy German like a portrait; in France the Frenchman is the artist,
+always painting and repainting France like a house. No state of social
+good that does not mean the Citizen _choosing_ good, as well as getting
+it, has the idea of the Citizen at all. To say the Germanies are
+naturally at war with this idea is merely to respect them and take them
+seriously: otherwise their war on the French Revolution would be only an
+ignorant feud. It is this, to them, risky and fanciful notion of the
+critical and creative Citizen, which in 1870 lay prostrate under United
+Germany--under the undivided hoof.
+
+Nevertheless, when the German says he has or loves freedom, what he says
+is not false. He means something; and what he means is the second
+principle, which I may summarise as the Irresponsibility of Thought.
+Within the iron framework of the fixed State, the German has not only
+liberty but anarchy. Anything can be said although, or rather because,
+nothing can be done. Philosophy is really free. But this practically
+means only that the prisoner's cell has become the madman's cell: that
+it is scrawled all over inside with stars and systems, so that it looks
+like eternity. This is the contradiction remarked by Dr. Sarolea, in his
+brilliant book, between the wildness of German theory and the tameness
+of German practice. The Germans _sterilise_ thought, making it active
+with a wild virginity; which can bear no fruit.
+
+But though there are so many mad theories, most of them have one root;
+and depend upon one assumption. It matters little whether we call it,
+with the German Socialists, "the Materialist Theory of History"; or,
+with Bismarck, "blood and iron." It can be put most fairly thus: that
+all _important_ events of history are biological, like a change of
+pasture or the communism of a pack of wolves. Professors are still
+tearing their hair in the effort to prove somehow that the Crusaders
+were migrating for food like swallows; or that the French Revolutionists
+were somehow only swarming like bees. This works in two ways often
+accounted opposite; and explains both the German Socialist and the
+Junker. For, first, it fits in with Teutonic Imperialism; making the
+"blonde beasts" of Germania into lions whose nature it is to eat such
+lambs as the French. The highest success of this notion in Europe is
+marked by praise given to a race famous for its physical firmness and
+fighting breed, but which has frankly pillaged and scarcely pretended
+to rule; the Turk, whom some Tories called "the gentleman of Europe."
+The Kaiser paused to adore the Crescent on his way to patronise the
+Cross. It was corporately embodied when Greece attempted a solitary
+adventure against Turkey and was quickly crushed. That English guns
+helped to impose the mainly Germanic policy of the Concert upon Crete,
+cannot be left out of mind while we are making appeals to Greece--or
+considering the crimes of England.
+
+But the same principle serves to keep the internal politics of the
+Germans quiet, and prevent Socialism being the practical hope or peril
+it has been in so many other countries. It operates in two ways; first,
+by a curious fallacy about "the time not being ripe"--as if _time_ could
+ever be ripe. The same savage superstition from the forests had infected
+Matthew Arnold pretty badly when he made a personality out of the
+Zeitgeist--perhaps the only ghost that was ever entirely fabulous. It is
+tricked by a biological parallel, by which the chicken always comes out
+of the egg "at the right time." He does not; he comes out when he comes
+out. The Marxian Socialist will not strike till the clock strikes; and
+the clock is made in Germany, and never strikes. Moreover, the theory of
+all history as a search for food makes the masses content with having
+food and physic, but not freedom. The best working model in the matter
+is the system of Compulsory Insurance; which was a total failure and
+dead letter in France but has been, in the German sense, a great success
+in Germany. It treats employed persons as a fixed, separate, and lower
+caste, who must not themselves dispose of the margin of their small
+wages. In 1911 it was introduced into England by Mr. Lloyd George, who
+had studied its operations in Germany, and, by the Prussian prestige in
+"social reform," was passed.
+
+These three tendencies cohere, or are cohering, in an institution which
+is not without a great historical basis and not without great modern
+conveniences. And as France was the standard-bearer of citizenship in
+1798, Germany is the standard-bearer of this alternative solution in
+1915. The institution which our fathers called Slavery fits in with, or
+rather logically flows from, all the three spirits of which I have
+spoken, and promises great advantages to each of them. It can give the
+individual worker everything except the power to alter the State--that
+is, his own status. Finality (or what certain eleutheromaniacs would
+call hopelessness) of status is the soul of Slavery--and of Compulsory
+Insurance. Then again, Germany gives the individual exactly the liberty
+that has always been given to a slave--the liberty to think, the liberty
+to dream, the liberty to rage; the liberty to indulge in any
+intellectual hypotheses about the unalterable world and state--such as
+have always been free to slaves, from the stoical maxims of Epictetus to
+the skylarking fairy tales of Uncle Remus. And it has been truly urged
+by all defenders of slavery that, if history has merely a material test,
+the material condition of the subordinate under slavery tends to be good
+rather than bad. When I once pointed out how precisely the "model
+village" of a great employer reproduces the safety and seclusion of an
+old slave estate, the employer thought it quite enough to answer
+indignantly that he had provided baths, playing-grounds, a theatre,
+etc., for his workers. He would probably have thought it odd to hear a
+planter in South Carolina boast that he had provided banjos, hymn-books,
+and places suitable for the cake-walk. Yet the planter must have
+provided the banjos, for a slave cannot own property. And if this
+Germanic sociology is indeed to prevail among us, I think some of the
+broad-minded thinkers who concur in its prevalence owe something like an
+apology to many gallant gentlemen whose graves lie where the last battle
+was fought in the Wilderness; men who had the courage to fight for it,
+the courage to die for it and, above all, the courage to call it by its
+name.
+
+With the acceptance by England of the German Insurance Act, I bring this
+sketch of the past relations of the two countries to an end. I have
+written this book because I wish, once and for all, to be done with my
+friend Professor Whirlwind of Prussia, who has long despaired of really
+defending his own country, and has fallen back upon abusing mine. He has
+dropped, amid general derision, his attempt to call a thing right when
+even the Chancellor who did it called it wrong. But he has an idea that
+if he can show that somebody from England somewhere did another wrong,
+the two wrongs may make a right. Against the cry of the Roman Catholic
+Poles the Prussian has never done, or even pretended to do, anything but
+harden his heart; but he has (such are the lovable inconsistencies of
+human nature) a warm corner in his heart for the Roman Catholic Irish.
+He has not a word to say for himself about the campaign in Belgium, but
+he still has many wise, reproachful words to utter about the campaign in
+South Africa. I propose to take those words out of his mouth. I will
+have nothing to do with the fatuous front-bench pretensions that our
+governors always govern well, that our statesmen are never whitewashed
+and never in need of whitewash. The only moral superiority I claim is
+that of not defending the indefensible. I most earnestly urge my
+countrymen not to hide behind thin official excuses, which the sister
+kingdoms and the subject races can easily see through. We can confess
+that our crimes have been as mountains, and still not be afraid of the
+present comparison. There may be, in the eyes of some, a risk in
+dwelling in this dark hour on our failures in the past: I believe
+profoundly that the risk is all the other way. I believe that the most
+deadly danger to our arms to-day lies in any whiff of that self-praise,
+any flavour of that moral cowardice, any glimpse of that impudent and
+ultimate impenitence, that may make one Boer or Scot or Welshman or
+Irishman or Indian feel that he is only smoothing the path for a second
+Prussia. I have passed the great part of my life in criticising and
+condemning the existing rulers and institutions of my country: I think
+it is infinitely the most patriotic thing that a man can do. I have no
+illusions either about our past or our present. _I_ think our whole
+history in Ireland has been a vulgar and ignorant hatred of the
+crucifix, expressed by a crucifixion. I think the South African War was
+a dirty work which we did under the whips of moneylenders. I think
+Mitchelstown was a disgrace; I think Denshawi was a devilry.
+
+Yet there is one part of life and history in which I would assert the
+absolute spotlessness of England. In one department we wear a robe of
+white and a halo of innocence. Long and weary as may be the records of
+our wickedness, in one direction we have done nothing but good. Whoever
+we may have wronged, we have never wronged Germany. Again and again we
+have dragged her from under the just vengeance of her enemies, from the
+holy anger of Maria Teresa, from the impatient and contemptuous common
+sense of Napoleon. We have kept a ring fence around the Germans while
+they sacked Denmark and dismembered France. And if we had served our God
+as we have served _their_ kings, there would not be to-day one remnant
+of them in our path, either to slander or to slay us.
+
+
+
+IX--_The Awakening of England_
+
+
+In October 1912 silent and seemingly uninhabited crags and chasms in the
+high western region of the Balkans echoed and re-echoed with a single
+shot. It was fired by the hand of a king--real king, who sat listening
+to his people in front of his own house (for it was hardly a palace),
+and who, in consequence of his listening to the people, not unfrequently
+imprisoned the politicians. It is said of him that his great respect for
+Gladstone as the western advocate of Balkan freedom was slightly
+shadowed by the fact that Gladstone did not succeed in effecting the
+bodily capture of Jack the Ripper. This simple monarch knew that if a
+malefactor were the terror of the mountain hamlets, his subjects would
+expect him personally to take arms and pursue the ruffian; and if he
+refused to do so, would very probably experiment with another king. And
+the same primitive conception of a king being kept for some kind of
+purpose, led them also to expect him to lead in a foreign campaign, and
+it was with his own hand that he fired the first shot of the war which
+brought down into the dust the ancient empire of the Grand Turk.
+
+His kingdom was little more than the black mountain after which it was
+named: we commonly refer to it under its Italian translation of
+Montenegro. It is worth while to pause for a moment upon his picturesque
+and peculiar community, because it is perhaps the simplest working model
+of all that stood in the path of the great Germanic social machine I
+have described in the last chapter--stood in its path and was soon to be
+very nearly destroyed by its onset. It was a branch of the Serbian stock
+which had climbed into this almost inaccessible eyrie, and thence, for
+many hundred years, had mocked at the predatory empire of the Turks. The
+Serbians in their turn were but one branch of the peasant Slavs,
+millions of whom are spread over Russia and subject on many sides to
+empires with which they have less sympathy; and the Slavs again, in the
+broad features which are important here, are not merely Slavonic but
+simply European. But a particular picture is generally more pointed and
+intelligible than tendencies which elsewhere are mingled with subtler
+tendencies; and of this unmixed European simplicity Montenegro is an
+excellent model.
+
+Moreover, the instance of one small Christian State will serve to
+emphasise that this is not a quarrel between England and Germany, but
+between Europe and Germany. It is my whole purpose in these pages not to
+spare my own country where it is open to criticism; and I freely admit
+that Montenegro, morally and politically speaking, is almost as much in
+advance of England as it is of Germany. In Montenegro there are no
+millionaires--and therefore next to no Socialists. As to why there are
+no millionaires, it is a mystery, and best studied among the mysteries
+of the Middle Ages. By some of the dark ingenuities of that age of
+priestcraft a curious thing was discovered--that if you kill every
+usurer, every forestaller, every adulterater, every user of false
+weights, every fixer of false boundaries, every land-thief, every
+water-thief, you afterwards discover by a strange indirect miracle, or
+disconnected truth from heaven, that you have no millionaires. Without
+dwelling further on this dark matter, we may say that this great gap in
+the Montenegrin experience explains the other great gap--the lack of
+Socialists. The Class-conscious Proletarian of All Lands is curiously
+absent from this land. The reason (I have sometimes fancied) is that the
+Proletarian is class-conscious, not because he is a Proletarian of All
+Lands, but because he is a Proletarian with no lands. The poor people in
+Montenegro have lands--not landlords. They have roots; for the peasant
+is the root of the priest, the poet, and the warrior. And _this_, and
+not a mere recrimination about acts of violence, is the ground of the
+age-long Balkan bitterness against the Turkish conqueror. Montenegrins
+are patriotic for Montenegro; but Turks are not patriotic for Turkey.
+They never heard of it, in fact. They are Bedouins, as homeless as the
+desert. The "wrong horse" of Lord Salisbury was an Arab steed, only
+stabled in Byzantium. It is hard enough to rule vagabond people, like
+the gypsies. To be ruled by them is impossible.
+
+Nevertheless what was called the nineteenth century, and named with a
+sort of transcendental faith (as in a Pythagorean worship of number),
+was wearing to its close with reaction everywhere, and the Turk, the
+great type of reaction, stronger than ever in the saddle. The most
+civilised of the Christian nations overshadowed by the Crescent dared to
+attack it and was overwhelmed in a catastrophe that seemed as
+unanswerable as Hittin. In England Gladstone and Gladstonism were dead;
+and Mr. Kipling, a less mystical Carlyle, was expending a type of praise
+upon the British Army which would have been even more appropriate to the
+Prussian Army. The Prussian Army ruled Prussia; Prussia ruled Germany;
+Germany ruled the Concert of Europe. She was planting everywhere the
+appliances of that new servile machinery which was her secret; the
+absolute identification of national subordination with business
+employment; so that Krupp could count on Kaiser and Kaiser on Krupp.
+Every other commercial traveller was pathetically proud of being both a
+slave and a spy. The old and the new tyrants had taken hands. The "sack"
+of the boss was as silent and fatal as the sack of the Bosphorus. And
+the dream of the citizen was at an end.
+
+It was under a sky so leaden and on a road so strewn with bones that the
+little mountain democracy with its patriarchal prince went out, first
+and before all its friends, on the last and seemingly the most hopeless
+of the rebellions against the Ottoman Empire. Only one of the omens
+seemed other than disastrous; and even that was doubtful. For the
+successful Mediterranean attack on Tripoli while proving the gallantry
+of the Italians (if that ever needed proving) could be taken in two
+ways, and was seen by many, and probably most, sincere liberals as a
+mere extension of the Imperialist reaction of Bosnia and Paardeberg, and
+not as the promise of newer things. Italy, it must be remembered, was
+still supposed to be the partner of Prussia and the Hapsburgs. For days
+that seemed like months the microscopic state seemed to be attempting
+alone what the Crusades had failed to accomplish. And for days Europe
+and the great powers were thunderstruck, again and yet again, by the
+news of Turkish forts falling, Turkish cohorts collapsing, the
+unconquerable Crescent going down in blood. The Serbians, the
+Bulgarians, the Greeks had gathered and risen from their lairs; and men
+knew that these peasants had done what all the politicians had long
+despaired of doing, and that the spirit of the first Christian Emperor
+was already standing over the city that is named after his name.
+
+For Germany this quite unexpected rush was a reversal of the whole tide
+of the world. It was as if the Rhine itself had returned from the ocean
+and retired into the Alps. For a long time past every important
+political process in Europe had been produced or permitted by Prussia.
+She had pulled down ministers in France and arrested reforms in Russia.
+Her ruler was acclaimed by Englishmen like Rhodes, and Americans like
+Roosevelt, as the great prince of the age. One of the most famous and
+brilliant of our journalists called him "the Lord Chief Justice of
+Europe." He was the strongest man in Christendom; and he had confirmed
+and consecrated the Crescent. And when he had consecrated it a few hill
+tribes had risen and trampled it like mire. One or two other things
+about the same time, less important in themselves, struck in the
+Prussian's ear the same new note of warning and doubt. He sought to
+obtain a small advantage on the north-west coast of Africa; and England
+seemed to show a certain strange stiffness in insisting on its
+abandonment. In the councils over Morocco, England agreed with France
+with what did not seem altogether an accidental agreement. But we shall
+not be wrong if we put the crucial point of the German surprise and
+anger at the attack from the Balkans and the fall of Adrianople. Not
+only did it menace the key of Asia and the whole Eastern dream of German
+commerce; not only did it offer the picture of one army trained by
+France and victorious, and another army trained by Germany and beaten.
+There was more than the material victory of the Creusot over the Krupp
+gun. It was also the victory of the peasant's field over the Krupp
+factory. By this time there was in the North German brain an awful
+inversion of all the legends and heroic lives that the human race has
+loved. Prussia _hated_ romance. Chivalry was not a thing she neglected;
+it was a thing that tormented her as any bully is tormented by an
+unanswered challenge. That weird process was completed of which I have
+spoken on an earlier page, whereby the soul of this strange people was
+everywhere on the side of the dragon against the knight, of the giant
+against the hero. Anything unexpected--the forlorn hopes, the
+eleventh-hour inspirations, by which the weak can elude the strong, and
+which take the hearts of happier men like trumpets--filled the Prussian
+with a cold fury, as of a frustrated fate. The Prussian felt as a
+Chicago pork butcher would feel if the pigs not only refused to pass
+through his machine, but turned into romantic wild boars, raging and
+rending, calling for the old hunting of princes and fit to be the crests
+of kings.
+
+The Prussian saw these things and his mind was made up. He was silent;
+but he laboured: laboured for three long years without intermission at
+the making of a military machine that should cut out of the world for
+ever such romantic accident or random adventure; a machine that should
+cure the human pigs for ever of any illusion that they had wings. That
+he did so plot and prepare for an attack that should come from him,
+anticipating and overwhelming any resistance, is now, even in the
+documents he has himself published, a fact of common sense. Suppose a
+man sells all his lands except a small yard containing a well; suppose
+in the division of the effects of an old friend he particularly asks for
+his razors; suppose when a corded trunk is sent him he sends back the
+trunk, but keeps the cord. And then suppose we hear that a rival of his
+has been lassoed with a rope, his throat then cut, apparently with a
+razor, and his body hidden in a well, we do not call in Sherlock Holmes
+to project a preliminary suspicion about the guilty party. In the
+discussions held by the Prussian Government with Lord Haldane and Sir
+Edward Grey we can now see quite as plainly the meaning of the things
+that were granted and the things that were withheld, the things that
+would have satisfied the Prussian plotter and the things that did not
+satisfy him. The German Chancellor refused an English promise not to be
+aggressive and asked instead for an English promise to be neutral. There
+is no meaning in the distinction, except in the mind of an aggressor.
+Germany proposed a pacific arrangement which forbade England to form a
+fighting alliance with France, but permitted Germany to retain her old
+fighting alliance with Austria. When the hour of war came she used
+Austria, used the old fighting alliance and tried to use the new idea of
+English neutrality. That is to say, she used the rope, the razor, and
+the well.
+
+But it was either by accident or by individual diplomatic skill that
+England at the end of the three years even had her own hands free to
+help in frustrating the German plot. The mass of the English people had
+no notion of such a plot; and indeed regarded the occasional suggestion
+of it as absurd. Nor did even the people who knew best know very much
+better. Thanks and even apologies are doubtless due to those who in the
+deepest lull of our sleeping partnership with Prussia saw her not as a
+partner but a potential enemy; such men as Mr. Blatchford, Mr. Bart
+Kennedy, or the late Emil Reich. But there is a distinction to be made.
+Few even of these, with the admirable and indeed almost magical
+exception of Dr. Sarolea, saw Germany as she was; occupied mainly with
+Europe and only incidentally with England; indeed, in the first stages,
+not occupied with England at all. Even the Anti-Germans were too
+insular. Even those who saw most of Germany's plan saw too much of
+England's part in it. They saw it almost wholly as a commercial and
+colonial quarrel; and saw its issue under the image of an invasion of
+England, which is even now not very probable. This fear of Germany was
+indeed a very German fear of Germany. This also conceived the English as
+Sea-Germans. It conceived Germany as at war with something like
+itself--practical, prosaic, capitalist, competitive Germany, prepared to
+cut us up in battle as she cut us out in business. The time of our
+larger vision was not yet, when we should realise that Germany was more
+deeply at war with things quite unlike herself, things from which we
+also had sadly strayed. Then we should remember what we were and see
+whence we also had come; and far and high upon that mountain from which
+the Crescent was cast down, behold what was everywhere the real enemy of
+the Iron Cross--the peasant's cross, which is of wood.
+
+Even our very slight ripples of panic, therefore, were provincial, and
+even shallow; and for the most part we were possessed and convinced of
+peace. That peace was not a noble one. We had indeed reached one of the
+lowest and flattest levels of all our undulating history; and it must be
+admitted that the contemptuous calculation with which Germany counted on
+our submission and abstention was not altogether unfounded, though it
+was, thank God, unfulfilled. The full fruition of our alliances against
+freedom had come. The meek acceptance of Kultur in our books and schools
+had stiffened what was once a free country with a German formalism and a
+German fear. By a queer irony, even the same popular writer who had
+already warned us against the Prussians, had sought to preach among the
+populace a very Prussian fatalism, pivoted upon the importance of the
+charlatan Haeckel. The wrestle of the two great parties had long
+slackened into an embrace. The fact was faintly denied, and a pretence
+was still made that no pact: existed beyond a common patriotism. But the
+pretence failed altogether; for it was evident that the leaders on
+either side, so far from leading in divergent directions, were much
+closer to each other than to their own followers. The power of these
+leaders had enormously increased; but the distance between them had
+diminished, or, rather, disappeared. It was said about 1800, in derision
+of the Foxite rump, that the Whig Party came down to Parliament in a
+four-wheeler. It might literally be said in 1900 that the Whig Party and
+the Tory Party came to Parliament in a hansom cab. It was not a case of
+two towers rising into different roofs or spires, but founded in the
+same soil. It was rather the case of an arch, of which the
+foundation-stones on either side might fancy they were two buildings;
+but the stones nearest the keystone would know there was only one. This
+"two-handed engine" still stood ready to strike, not, indeed, the other
+part of itself, but anyone who ventured to deny that it was doing so. We
+were ruled, as it were, by a Wonderland king and queen, who cut off our
+heads, not for saying they quarrelled but for saying they didn't. The
+libel law was now used, not to crush lies about private life, but to
+crush truths about public life. Representation had become mere
+misrepresentation; a maze of loopholes. This was mainly due to the
+monstrous presence of certain secret moneys, on which alone many men
+could win the ruinous elections of the age, and which were contributed
+and distributed with less check or record than is tolerated in the
+lowest trade or club. Only one or two people attacked these funds;
+nobody defended them. Through them the great capitalists had the handle
+of politics, as of everything else. The poor were struggling hopelessly
+against rising prices; and their attempts at collective bargaining, by
+the collective refusal of badly-paid work, were discussed in the press,
+Liberal and Tory, as attacks upon the State. And so they were; upon the
+Servile State.
+
+Such was the condition of England in 1914, when Prussia, now at last
+armed to the teeth and secure of triumph, stood up before the world, and
+solemnly, like one taking a sacrament, consecrated her campaign with a
+crime. She entered by a forbidden door, one which she had herself
+forbidden--marching upon France through neutralised Belgium, where every
+step was on her broken word. Her neutralised neighbours resisted, as
+indeed they, like ourselves, were pledged to do. Instantly the whole
+invasion was lit up with a flame of moral lunacy, that turned the
+watching nations white who had never known the Prussian. The statistics
+of non-combatants killed and tortured by this time only stun the
+imagination. But two friends of my own have been in villages sacked by
+the Prussian march. One saw a tabernacle containing the Sacrament
+patiently picked out in pattern by shot after shot. The other saw a
+rocking-horse and the wooden toys in a nursery laboriously hacked to
+pieces. Those two facts together will be enough to satisfy some of us of
+the name of the Spirit that had passed.
+
+And then a strange thing happened. England, that had not in the modern
+sense any army at all, was justified of all her children. Respected
+institutions and reputations did indeed waver and collapse on many
+sides: though the chief of the states replied worthily to a bribe from
+the foreign bully, many other politicians were sufficiently wild and
+weak, though doubtless patriotic in intention. One was set to restrain
+the journalists, and had to be restrained himself, for being more
+sensational than any of them. Another scolded the working-classes in the
+style of an intoxicated temperance lecturer. But England was saved by a
+forgotten thing--the English. Simple men with simple motives, the chief
+one a hate of injustice which grows simpler the longer we stare at it,
+came out of their dreary tenements and their tidy shops, their fields
+and their suburbs and their factories and their rookeries, and asked for
+the arms of men. In a throng that was at last three million men, the
+islanders went forth from their island, as simply as the mountaineers
+had gone forth from their mountain, with their faces to the dawn.
+
+
+
+X--_The Battle of the Marne_
+
+
+The impression produced by the first week of war was that the British
+contingent had come just in time for the end of the world. Or rather,
+for any sensitive and civilised man, touched by the modern doubt but by
+the equally modern mysticism, that old theocratic vision fell far short
+of the sickening terror of the time. For it was a day of judgment in
+which upon the throne in heaven and above the cherubim, sat not God, but
+another.
+
+The British had been posted at the extreme western end of the allied
+line in the north. The other end rested on the secure city and fortress
+of Namur; their end rested upon nothing. It is not wholly a sentimental
+fancy to say that there was something forlorn in the position of that
+loose end in a strange land, with only the sad fields of Northern France
+between them and the sea. For it was really round that loose end that
+the foe would probably fling the lasso of his charge; it was here that
+death might soon be present upon every side. It must be remembered that
+many critics, including many Englishmen, doubted whether a rust had not
+eaten into this as into other parts of the national life, feared that
+England had too long neglected both the ethic and the technique of war,
+and would prove a weak link in the chain. The enemy was absolutely
+certain that it was so. To these men, standing disconsolately amid the
+hedgeless plains and poplars, came the news that Namur was gone, which
+was to their captains one of the four corners of the earth. The two
+armies had touched; and instantly the weaker took an electric shock
+which told of electric energy, deep into deep Germany, battery behind
+battery of abysmal force. In the instant it was discovered that the
+enemy was more numerous than they had dreamed. He was actually more
+numerous even than they discovered. Every oncoming horseman doubled as
+in a drunkard's vision; and they were soon striving without speech in a
+nightmare of numbers. Then all the allied forces at the front were
+overthrown in the tragic battle of Mons; and began that black retreat,
+in which so many of our young men knew war first and at its worst in
+this terrible world; and so many never returned.
+
+In that blackness began to grow strange emotions, long unfamiliar to our
+blood. Those six dark days are as full of legends as the six centuries
+of the Dark Ages. Many of these may be exaggerated fancies, one was
+certainly an avowed fiction, others are quite different from it and more
+difficult to dissipate into the daylight. But one curious fact remains
+about them if they were all lies, or even if they were all deliberate
+works of art. Not one of them referred to those close, crowded, and
+stirring three centuries which are nearest to us, and which alone are
+covered in this sketch, the centuries during which the Teutonic
+influence had expanded itself over our islands. Ghosts were there
+perhaps, but they were the ghosts of forgotten ancestors. Nobody saw
+Cromwell or even Wellington; nobody so much as thought about Cecil
+Rhodes. Things were either seen or said among the British which linked
+them up, in matters deeper than any alliance, with the French, who spoke
+of Joan of Arc in heaven above the fated city; or the Russians who
+dreamed of the Mother of God with her hand pointing to the west. They
+were the visions or the inventions of a mediaeval army; and a prose poet
+was in line with many popular rumours when he told of ghostly archers
+crying "Array, Array," as in that long-disbanded yeomanry in which I
+have fancied Cobbett as carrying a bow. Other tales, true or only
+symptomatic, told of one on a great white horse who was not the victor
+of Blenheim or even the Black Prince, but a faint figure out of far-off
+martyrologies--St. George. One soldier is asserted to have claimed to
+identify the saint because he was "on every quid." On the coins, St.
+George is a Roman soldier.
+
+But these fancies, if they were fancies, might well seem the last sickly
+flickerings of an old-world order now finally wounded to the death. That
+which was coming on, with the whole weight of a new world, was something
+that had never been numbered among the Seven Champions of Christendom.
+Now, in more doubtful and more hopeful days, it is almost impossible to
+repicture what was, for those who understood, the gigantic finality of
+the first German strides. It seemed as if the forces of the ancient
+valour fell away to right and left; and there opened a grand, smooth
+granite road right to the gate of Paris, down which the great Germania
+moved like a tall, unanswerable sphinx, whose pride could destroy all
+things and survive them. In her train moved, like moving mountains,
+Cyclopean guns that had never been seen among men, before which walled
+cities melted like wax, their mouths set insolently upwards as if
+threatening to besiege the sun. Nor is it fantastic to speak so of the
+new and abnormal armaments; for the soul of Germany was really expressed
+in colossal wheels and cylinders; and her guns were more symbolic than
+her flags. Then and now, and in every place and time, it is to be noted
+that the German superiority has been in a certain thing and of a certain
+kind. It is _not_ unity; it is not, in the moral sense, discipline.
+Nothing can be more united in a moral sense than a French, British, or
+Russian regiment. Nothing, for that matter, could be more united than a
+Highland clan at Killiecrankie or a rush of religious fanatics in the
+Soudan. What such engines, in such size and multiplicity, really meant
+was this: they meant a type of life naturally intolerable to happier and
+more healthy-minded men, conducted on a larger scale and consuming
+larger populations than had ever been known before. They meant cities
+growing larger than provinces, factories growing larger than cities;
+they meant the empire of the slum. They meant a degree of detailed
+repetition and dehumanised division of labour, to which no man born
+would surrender his brief span in the sunshine, if he could hope to beat
+his ploughshare into a sword. The nations of the earth were not to
+surrender to the Kaiser; they were to surrender to Krupp, his master and
+theirs; the French, the British, the Russians were to surrender to Krupp
+as the Germans themselves, after a few swiftly broken strikes, had
+already surrendered to Krupp. Through every cogwheel in that
+incomparable machinery, through every link in that iron and unending
+chain, ran the mastery and the skill of a certain kind of artist; an
+artist whose hands are never idle through dreaming or drawn back in
+disgust or lifted in wonder or in wrath; but sure and tireless in their
+touch upon the thousand little things that make the invisible machinery
+of life. That artist was there in triumph; but he had no name. The
+ancient world called him the Slave.
+
+From this advancing machine of millions, the slighter array of the
+Allies, and especially the British at their ultimate outpost, saved
+themselves by a succession of hair's-breadth escapes and what must have
+seemed to the soldiers the heartrending luck of a mouse before a cat.
+Again and again Von Kluck's cavalry, supported by artillery and
+infantry, clawed round the end of the British force, which eluded it as
+by leaping back again and again. Sometimes the pursuer was, so to speak,
+so much on top of his prey that it could not even give way to him; but
+had to hit such blows as it could in the hope of checking him for the
+instant needed for escape. Sometimes the oncoming wave was so close that
+a small individual accident, the capture of one man, would mean the
+washing out of a whole battalion. For day after day this living death
+endured. And day after day a certain dark truth began to be revealed,
+bit by bit, certainly to the incredulous wonder of the Prussians, quite
+possibly to the surprise of the French, and quite as possibly to the
+surprise of themselves; that there was something singular about the
+British soldiers. That singular thing may be expressed in a variety of
+ways; but it would be almost certainly expressed insufficiently by
+anyone who had not had the moral courage to face the facts about his
+country in the last decades before the war. It may perhaps be best
+expressed by saying that some thousands of Englishmen were dead: and
+that England was not.
+
+The fortress of Maubeuge had gaped, so to speak, offering a refuge for
+the unresting and tormented retreat; the British Generals had refused it
+and continued to fight a losing fight in the open for the sake of the
+common plan. At night an enormous multitude of Germans had come
+unexpectedly through the forest and caught a smaller body of the British
+in Landrecies; failed to dislodge them and lost a whole battalion in
+that battle of the darkness. At the extreme end of the line
+Smith-Dorrien's division, who seemed to be nearly caught or cut off, had
+fought with one gun against four, and so hammered the Germans that they
+were forced to let go their hold; and the British were again free. When
+the blowing up of a bridge announced that they had crossed the last
+river, something other than that battered remnant was saved; it was the
+honour of the thing by which we live.
+
+The driven and defeated line stood at last almost under the walls of
+Paris; and the world waited for the doom of the city. The gates seemed
+to stand open; and the Prussian was to ride into it for the third and
+the last time: for the end of its long epic of liberty and equality was
+come. And still the very able and very French individual on whom rested
+the last hope of the seemingly hopeless Alliance stood unruffled as a
+rock, in every angle of his sky-blue jacket and his bulldog figure. He
+had called his bewildered soldiers back when they had broken the
+invasion at Guise; he had silently digested the responsibility of
+dragging on the retreat, as in despair, to the last desperate leagues
+before the capital; and he stood and watched. And even as he watched the
+whole huge invasion swerved.
+
+Out through Paris and out and around beyond Paris, other men in dim blue
+coats swung out in long lines upon the plain, slowly folding upon Von
+Kluck like blue wings. Von Kluck stood an instant; and then, flinging a
+few secondary forces to delay the wing that was swinging round on him,
+dashed across the Allies' line at a desperate angle, to smash it in the
+centre as with a hammer. It was less desperate than it seemed; for he
+counted, and might well count, on the moral and physical bankruptcy of
+the British line and the end of the French line immediately in front of
+him, which for six days and nights he had chased before him like autumn
+leaves before a whirlwind. Not unlike autumn leaves, red-stained,
+dust-hued, and tattered, they lay there as if swept into a corner. But
+even as their conquerors wheeled eastwards, their bugles blew the
+charge; and the English went forward through the wood that is called
+Crecy, and stamped it with their seal for the second time, in the
+highest moment of all the secular history of man.
+
+But it was not now the Crecy in which English and French knights had met
+in a more coloured age, in a battle that was rather a tournament. It was
+a league of all knights for the remains of all knighthood, of all
+brotherhood in arms or in arts, against that which is and has been
+radically unknightly and radically unbrotherly from the beginning. Much
+was to happen after--murder and flaming folly and madness in earth and
+sea and sky; but all men knew in their hearts that the third Prussian
+thrust had failed, and Christendom was delivered once more. The empire
+of blood and iron rolled slowly back towards the darkness of the
+northern forests; and the great nations of the West went forward; where
+side by side as after a long lover's quarrel, went the ensigns of St.
+Denys and St. George.
+
+
+
+_NOTE ON THE WORD "ENGLISH"_
+
+
+_The words "England" and "English" as used here require a word of
+explanation, if only to anticipate the ire of the inevitable Scot. To
+begin with, the word "British" involves a similar awkwardness. I have
+tried to use it in the one or two cases that referred to such things as
+military glory and unity: though I am sure I have failed of full
+consistency in so complex a matter. The difficulty is that this sense of
+glory and unity, which should certainly cover the Scotch, should also
+cover the Irish. And while it is fairly safe to call a Scotsman a North
+Briton (despite the just protest of Stevenson), it is very unsafe indeed
+to call an Irishman a West Briton. But there is a deeper difficulty. I
+can assure the Scot that I say "England," not because I deny Scottish
+nationality, but because I affirm it. And I can say, further, that I
+could not here include Scots in the thesis, simply because I could not
+include them in the condemnation. This book is a study, not of a disease
+but rather of a weakness, which has only been predominant in the
+predominant partner. It would not be true, for instance, to say either
+of Ireland or Scotland that the populace lacked a religion; but I do
+think that British policy as a whole has suffered from the English lack
+of one, with its inevitable result of plutocracy and class contempt_.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Crimes of England, by G.K. Chesterton
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