CHESTERTON-UTOPIA OF USERS - THE NEW RAID
Something has come into our community, which is strong enough to save our
community; but which has not yet got a name. Let no one fancy I confess
any unreality when I confess the namelessness. The morality called
Puritanism, the tendency called Liberalism, the reaction called Tory
Democracy, had not only long been powerful, but had practically done most
of their work, before these actual names were attached to them.
Nevertheless, I think it would be a good thing to have some portable and
practicable way of referring to those who think as we do in our main
concern. Which is, that men in England are ruled, at this minute by the
clock, by brutes who refuse them bread, by liars who refuse them news, and
by fools who cannot govern, and therefore wish to enslave.
Let me explain first why I am not satisfied with the word commonly used,
which I have often used myself; and which, in some contexts, is quite the
right word to use. I mean the word "rebel." Passing over the fact that
many who understand the justice of our cause (as a great many at the
Universities) would still use the word "rebel" in its old and strict sense
as meaning only a disturber of just rule. I pass to a much more practical
point. The word "rebel" understates our cause. It is much too mild; it
lets our enemies off much too easily. There is a tradition in all western
life and letters of Prometheus defying the stars, of man at war with the
Universe, and dreaming what nature had never dared to dream. All this is
valuable in its place and proportion. But it has nothing whatever to do
with our ease; or rather it very much weakens it. The plutocrats will be
only too pleased if we profess to preach a new morality; for they know
jolly well that they have broken the old one. They will be only too
pleased to be able to say that we, by our own confession, are merely
restless and negative; that we are only what we call rebels and they call
cranks. But it is not true; and we must not concede it to them for a
moment. The model millionaire is more of a crank than the Socialists;
just as Nero was more of a crank than the Christians. And avarice has
gone mad in the governing class to-day, just as lust went mad in the
circle of Nero. By all the working and orthodox standards of sanity,
capitalism is insane. I should not say to Mr. Rockefeller "I am a rebel."
I should say "I am a respectable man: and you are not."
But the vital point is that the confession of mere rebellion softens the
startling lawlessness of our enemies. Suppose a publisher's clerk
politely asked his employer for a rise in his salary; and, on being
refused, said he must leave the employment? Suppose the employer knocked
him down with a ruler, tied him up as a brown paper parcel, addressed him
(in a fine business hand) to the Governor of Rio Janeiro and then asked
the policeman to promise never to arrest him for what he had done? That
is a precise copy, in every legal and moral principle, of the "deportation
of the strikers." They were assaulted and kidnapped for not accepting a
contract, and for nothing else; and the act was so avowedly criminal that
the law had to be altered afterwards to cover the crime. Now suppose
some postal official, between here and Rio Janeiro, had noticed a faint
kicking inside the brown paper parcel, and had attempted to ascertain the
cause. And suppose the clerk could only explain, in a muffled voice
through the brown paper, that he was by constitution and temperament a
Rebel. Don't you see that he would be rather understating his case?
Don't you see he would be bearing his injuries much too meekly? They
might take him out of the parcel; but they would very possibly put him
into a mad-house instead. Symbolically speaking, that is what they would
like to do with us. Symbolically speaking, the dirty misers who rule us
will put us in a mad-house--unless we can put them there.
Or suppose a bank cashier were admittedly allowed to take the money out of
the till, and put it loose in his pocket, more or less mixed up with his
own money; afterwards laying some of both (at different odds) on "Blue
Murder" for the Derby. Suppose when some depositor asked mildly what day
the accountants came, he smote that astonished inquirer on the nose,
crying: "Slanderer! Mud-slinger!" and suppose he then resigned his
position. Suppose no books were shown. Suppose when the new cashier
came to be initiated into his duties, the old cashier did not tell him
about the money, but confided it to the honour and delicacy of his own
maiden aunt at Cricklewood. Suppose he then went off in a yacht to visit
the whale fisheries of the North Sea. Well, in every moral and legal
principle, that is a precise account of the dealings with the Party Funds.
But what would the banker say? What would the clients say? One thing, I
think, I can venture to promise; the banker would not march up and down
the office exclaiming in rapture, "I'm a rebel! That's what I am, a rebel!"
And if he said to the first indignant depositor "You are a rebel," I
fear the depositor might answer, "You are a robber." We have no need to
elaborate arguments for breaking the law. The capitalists have broken the
law. We have no need of further moralities. They have broken their own
morality. It is as if you were to run down the street shouting,
"Communism! Communism! Share! Share!" after a man who had run away with
your watch.
We want a term that will tell everybody that there is, by the common
standard, frank fraud and cruelty pushed to their fierce extreme; and that
we are fighting THEM. We are not in a state of "divine discontent"; we are
in an entirely human and entirely reasonable rage. We say we have been
swindled and oppressed, and we are quite ready and able to prove it before
any tribunal that allows us to call a swindler a swindler. It is the
protection of the present system that most of its tribunals do not. I
cannot at the moment think of any party name that would particularly
distinguish us from our more powerful and prosperous opponents, unless it
were the name the old Jacobites gave themselves; the Honest Party.
I think it is plain that for the purpose of facing these new and infamous
modern facts, we cannot, with any safety, depend on any of the old
nineteenth century names; Socialist, or Communist, or Radical, or Liberal,
or Labour. They are all honourable names; they all stand, or stood, for
things in which we may still believe; we can still apply them to other
problems; but not to this one. We have no longer a monopoly of these
names. Let it be understood that I am not speaking here of the
philosophical problem of their meaning, but of the practical problem of
their use. When I called myself a Radical I knew Mr. Balfour would not
call himself a Radical; therefore there was some use in the word. When I
called myself a Socialist I knew Lord Penrhyn would not call himself a
Socialist; therefore there was some use in the word. But the capitalists,
in that aggressive march which is the main fact of our time, have captured
our standards, both in the military and philosophic sense of the word.
And it is useless for us to march under colours which they can carry as
well as we.
Do you believe in Democracy? The devils also believe and tremble. Do you
believe in Trades Unionism? The Labour Members also believe; and tremble
like a falling teetotum. Do you believe in the State? The Samuels also
believe, and grin. Do you believe in the centralisation of Empire? So
did Beit. Do you believe in the decentralisation of Empire? So does Albu.
Do you believe in the brotherhood of men: and do you, dear brethren,
believe that Brother Arthur Henderson does not? Do you cry, "The world
for the workers!" and do you imagine Philip Snowden would not? What we
need is a name that shall declare, not that the modern treason and tyranny
are bad, but that they are quite literally, intolerable: and that we mean
to act accordingly. I really think "the Limits" would be as good a name
as any. But, anyhow, something is born among us that is as strong as an
infant Hercules: and it is part of my prejudices to want it christened. I
advertise for godfathers and godmothers.
A thing which does not exist and which is very much wanted is "A
Working-Man's History of England." I do not mean a history written for
working men (there are whole dustbins of them), I mean a history, written
by working men or from the working men's standpoint. I wish five
generations of a fisher's or a miner's family could incarnate themselves
in one man and tell the story.
It is impossible to ignore altogether any comment coming from so eminent a
literary artist as Mr. Laurence Housman, but I do not deal here so
specially with his well known conviction about Votes for Women, as with
another idea which is, I think, rather at the back of it, if not with him
at least with others; and which concerns this matter of the true story of
England. For the true story is so entirely different from the false
official story that the official classes tell that by this time the
working class itself has largely forgotten its own experience. Either
story can be quite logically linked up with Female Suffrage, which,
therefore, I leave where it is for the moment; merely confessing that, so
long as we get hold of the right story and not the wrong story, it seems
to me a matter of secondary importance whether we link it up with Female
Suffrage or not.
Now the ordinary version of recent English history that most moderately
educated people have absorbed from childhood is something like this. That
we emerged slowly from a semi-barbarism in which all the power and wealth
were in the hands of Kings and a few nobles; that the King's power was
broken first and then in due time that of the nobles, that this piece-meal
improvement was brought about by one class after another waking up to a
sense of citizenship and demanding a place in the national councils,
frequently by riot or violence; and that in consequence of such menacing
popular action, the franchise was granted to one class after another and
used more and more to improve the social conditions of those classes,
until we practically became a democracy, save for such exceptions as that
of the women. I do not think anyone will deny that something like that is
the general idea of the educated man who reads a newspaper and of the
newspaper that he reads. That is the view current at public schools and
colleges; it is part of the culture of all the classes that count for much
in government; and there is not one word of truth in it from beginning to
end.
Wealth and political power were very much more popularly distributed in
the Middle Ages than they are now; but we will pass all that and consider
recent history. The franchise has never been largely and liberally
granted in England; half the males have no vote and are not likely to get
one. It was never granted in reply to pressure from awakened sections
of the democracy; in every case there was a perfectly clear motive for
granting it solely for the convenience of the aristocrats. The Great
Reform Bill was not passed in response to such riots as that which
destroyed a Castle; nor did the men who destroyed the Castle get any
advantage whatever out of the Great Reform Bill. The Great Reform Bill
was passed in order to seal an alliance between the landed aristocrats and
the rich manufacturers of the north (an alliance that rules us still); and
the chief object of that alliance was to prevent the English populace
getting any political power in the general excitement after the French
Revolution. No one can read Macaulay's speech on the Chartists, for
instance, and not see that this is so. Disraeli's further extension of
the suffrage was not effected by the intellectual vivacity and pure
republican theory of the mid-Victorian agricultural labourer; it was
effected by a politician who saw an opportunity to dish the Whigs, and
guessed that certain orthodoxies in the more prosperous artisan might yet
give him a balance against the commercial Radicals. And while this very
thin game of wire-pulling with the mere abstraction of the vote was being
worked entirely by the oligarchs and entirely in their interests, the
solid and real thing that was going on was the steady despoiling of the
poor of all power or wealth, until they find themselves to-day upon the
threshold of slavery. That is The Working Man's History of England.
Now, as I have said, I care comparatively little what is done with the
mere voting part of the matter, so long as it is not claimed in such a way
as to allow the plutocrat to escape his responsibility for his crimes, by
pretending to be much more progressive, or much more susceptible to
popular protest, than he ever has been. And there is this danger in many
of those who have answered me. One of them, for instance, says that women
have been forced into their present industrial situations by the same iron
economic laws that have compelled men. I say that men have not been
compelled by iron economic laws, but in the main by the coarse and
Christless cynicism of other men. But, of course, this way of talking is
exactly in accordance with the fashionable and official version of English
history. Thus, you will read that the monasteries, places where men of
the poorest origin could be powerful, grew corrupt and gradually decayed.
Or you will read that the mediaeval guilds of free workmen yielded at last
to an inevitable economic law. You will read this; and you will be
reading lies. They might as well say that Julius Caesar gradually
decayed at the foot of Pompey's statue. You might as well say that
Abraham Lincoln yielded at last to an inevitable economic law. The free
mediaeval guilds did not decay; they were murdered. Solid men with solid
guns and halberds, armed with lawful warrants from living statesmen broke
up their corporations and took away their hard cash from them. In the
same way the people in Cradley Heath are no more victims of a necessary
economic law than the people in Putumayo. They are victims of a very
terrible creature, of whose sins much has been said since the beginning of
the world; and of whom it was said of old, "Let us fall into the hands of
God, for His mercies are great; but let us not fall into the hands of Man."
Now it is this offering of a false economic excuse for the sweater that is
the danger in perpetually saying that the poor woman will use the vote and
that the poor man has not used it. The poor man is prevented from using
it; prevented by the rich man, and the poor woman would be prevented in
exactly the same gross and stringent style. I do not deny, of course,
that there is something in the English temperament, and in the heritage of
the last few centuries that makes the English workman more tolerant of
wrong than most foreign workmen would be. But this only slightly modifies
the main fact of the moral responsibility. To take an imperfect parallel,
if we said that negro slaves would have rebelled if negroes had been more
intelligent, we should be saying what is reasonable. But if we were to
say that it could by any possibility be represented as being the negro's
fault that he was at that moment in America and not in Africa, we should
be saying what is frankly unreasonable. It is every bit as unreasonable
to say the mere supineness of the English workmen has put them in the
capitalist slave-yard. The capitalist has put them in the capitalist
slaveyard; and very cunning smiths have hammered the chains. It is just
this creative criminality in the authors of the system that we must not
allow to be slurred over. The capitalist is in the dock to-day; and so
far as I at least can prevent him, he shall not get out of it.
It will be long before the poison of the Party System is worked out of the
body politic. Some of its most indirect effects are the most dangerous.
One that is very dangerous just now is this: that for most Englishmen the
Party System falsifies history, and especially the history of revolutions.
It falsifies history because it simplifies history. It paints everything
either Blue or Buff in the style of its own silly circus politics: while a
real revolution has as many colours as the sunrise--or the end of the
world. And if we do not get rid of this error we shall make very bad
blunders about the real revolution which seems to grow more and more
probable, especially among the Irish. And any human familiarity with
history will teach a man this first of all: that Party practically does
not exist in a real revolution. It is a game for quiet times.
If you take a boy who has been to one of those big private schools which
are falsely called the Public Schools, and another boy who has been to one
of those large public schools which are falsely called the Board Schools,
you will find some differences between the two, chiefly a difference in
the management of the voice. But you will find they are both English in a
special way, and that their education has been essentially the same. They
are ignorant on the same subjects. They have never heard of the same
plain facts. They have been taught the wrong answer to the same confusing
question. There is one fundamental element in the attitude of the Eton
master talking about "playing the game," and the elementary teacher
training gutter-snipes to sing, "What is the Meaning of Empire Day?" And
the name of that element is "unhistoric." It knows nothing really about
England, still less about Ireland or France, and, least of all, of course,
about anything like the French Revolution.
Now what general notion does the ordinary English boy, thus taught to
utter one ignorance in one of two accents, get and keep through life about
the French Revolution? It is the notion of the English House of Commons
with an enormous Radical majority on one side of the table and a small
Tory minority on the other; the majority voting solid for a Republic, the
minority voting solid for a Monarchy; two teams tramping through two
lobbies with no difference between their methods and ours, except that
(owing to some habit peculiar to Gaul) the brief intervals were brightened
by a riot or a massacre, instead of by a whisky and soda and a Marconi tip.
Novels are much more reliable than histories in such matters. For
though an English novel about France does not tell the truth about France,
it does tell the truth about England; and more than half the histories
never tell the truth about anything. And popular fiction, I think, bears
witness to the general English impression. The French Revolution is a
snap division with an unusual turnover of votes. On the one side stand a
king and queen who are good but weak, surrounded by nobles with rapiers
drawn; some of whom are good, many of whom are wicked, all of whom are
good-looking. Against these there is a formless mob of human beings,
wearing red caps and seemingly insane, who all blindly follow ruffians who
are also rhetoricians; some of whom die repentant and others unrepentant
towards the end of the fourth act. The leaders of this boiling mass of
all men melted into one are called Mirabeau, Robespierre, Danton, Marat,
and so on. And it is conceded that their united frenzy may have been
forced on them by the evils of the old regime.
That, I think, is the commonest English view of the French Revolution; and
it will not survive the reading of two pages of any real speech or letter
of the period. These human beings were human; varied, complex and
inconsistent. But the rich Englishman, ignorant of revolutions, would
hardly believe you if you told him some of the common human subtleties of
the case. Tell him that Robespierre threw the red cap in the dirt in
disgust, while the king had worn it with a broad grin, so to speak; tell
him that Danton, the fierce founder of the Republic of the Terror, said
quite sincerely to a noble, "I am more monarchist than you;" tell him that
the Terror really seems to have been brought to an end chiefly by the
efforts of people who particularly wanted to go on with it--and he will
not believe these things. He will not believe them because he has no
humility, and therefore no realism. He has never been inside himself; and
so could never be inside another man. The truth is that in the French
affair everybody occupied an individual position. Every man talked
sincerely, if not because he was sincere, then because he was angry.
Robespierre talked even more about God than about the Republic because he
cared even more about God than about the Republic. Danton talked even
more about France than about the Republic because he cared even more about
France than about the Republic. Marat talked more about Humanity than
either, because that physician (though himself somewhat needing a
physician) really cared about it. The nobles were divided, each man from
the next. The attitude of the king was quite different from the attitude
of the queen; certainly much more different than any differences between
our Liberals and Tories for the last twenty years. And it will sadden
some of my friends to remember that it was the king who was the Liberal
and the queen who was the Tory. There were not two people, I think, in
that most practical crisis who stood in precisely the same attitude
towards the situation. And that is why, between them, they saved Europe.
It is when you really perceive the unity of mankind that you really
perceive its variety. It is not a flippancy, it is a very sacred truth,
to say that when men really understand that they are brothers they
instantly begin to fight.
Now these things are repeating themselves with an enormous reality in the
Irish Revolution. You will not be able to make a Party System out of the
matter. Everybody is in revolt; therefore everybody is telling the truth.
The Nationalists will go on caring most for the nation, as Danton and
the defenders of the frontier went on caring most for the nation. The
priests will go on caring most for religion, as Robespierre went on caring
most for religion. The Socialists will go on caring most for the cure of
physical suffering, as Marat went on caring most for it. It is out of
these real differences that real things can be made, such as the modern
French democracy. For by such tenacity everyone sees at last that there
is something in the other person's position. And those drilled in party
discipline see nothing either past or present. And where there is nothing
there is Satan.
For a long time past in our politics there has not only been no real
battle, but no real bargain. No two men have bargained as Gladstone and
Parnell bargained--each knowing the other to be a power. But in real
revolutions men discover that no one man can really agree with another man
until he has disagreed with him.
There is a certain daily paper in England towards which I feel very much
as Tom Pinch felt towards Mr. Pecksniff immediately after he had found him
out. The war upon Dickens was part of the general war on all democrats,
about the eighties and nineties, which ushered in the brazen plutocracy of
to-day. And one of the things that it was fashionable to say of Dickens
in drawing-rooms was that he had no subtlety, and could not describe a
complex frame of mind. Like most other things that are said in
drawing-rooms, it was a lie. Dickens was a very unequal writer, and his
successes alternate with his failures; but his successes are subtle quite
as often as they are simple. Thus, to take "Martin Chuzzlewit" alone, I
should call the joke about the Lord No-zoo a simple joke: but I should
call the joke about Mrs. Todgers's vision of a wooden leg a subtle joke.
And no frame of mind was ever so selfcontradictory and yet so realistic as
that which Dickens describes when he says, in effect, that, though Pinch
knew now that there had never been such a person as Pecksniff, in his
ideal sense, he could not bring himself to insult the very face and form
that had contained the legend. The parallel with Liberal journalism is
not perfect; because it was once honest; and Pecksniff presumably never
was. And even when I come to feel a final incompatibility of temper,
Pecksniff was not so Pecksniffian as he has since become. But the
comparison is complete in so far as I share all the reluctance of Mr.
Pinch. Some old heathen king was advised by one of the Celtic saints, I
think, to burn what he had adored and adore what he had burnt. I am quite
ready, if anyone will prove I was wrong, to adore what I have burnt; but I
do really feel an unwillingness verging upon weakness to burning what I
have adored. I think it is a weakness to be overcome in times as bad as
these, when (as Mr. Orage wrote with something like splendid common sense
the other day) there is such a lot to do and so few people who will do it.
So I will devote this article to considering one case of the astounding
baseness to which Liberal journalism has sunk.
One of the two or three streaks of light on our horizon can be perceived
in this: that the moral breakdown of these papers has been accompanied by
a mental breakdown also. The contemporary official paper, like the "Daily
News" or the "Daily Chronicle" (I mean in so far as it deals with
politics), simply cannot argue; and simply does not pretend to argue. It
considers the solution which it imagines that wealthy people want, and it
signifies the same in the usual manner; which is not by holding up its
hand, but by falling on its face. But there is no more curious quality in
its degradation than a sort of carelessness, at once of hurry and fatigue,
with which it flings down its argument--or rather its refusal to argue.
It does not even write sophistry: it writes anything. It does not so much
poison the reader's mind as simply assume that the reader hasn't got one.
For instance, one of these papers printed an article on Sir Stuart Samuel,
who, having broken the great Liberal statute against corruption, will
actually, perhaps, be asked to pay his own fine--in spite of the fact that
he can well afford to do so. The article says, if I remember aright, that
the decision will cause general surprise and some indignation. That any
modern Government making a very rich capitalist obey the law will cause
general surprise, may be true. Whether it will cause general indignation
rather depends on whether our social intercourse is entirely confined to
Park Lane, or any such pigsties built of gold. But the journalist
proceeds to say, his neck rising higher and higher out of his collar, and
his hair rising higher and higher on his head, in short, his resemblance
to the Dickens' original increasing every instant, that he does not mean
that the law against corruption should be less stringent, but that the
burden should be borne by the whole community. This may mean that
whenever a rich man breaks the law, all the poor men ought to be made to
pay his fine. But I will suppose a slightly less insane meaning. I will
suppose it means that the whole power of the commonwealth should be used
to prosecute an offender of this kind. That, of course, can only mean
that the matter will be decided by that instrument which still pretends to
represent the whole power of the commonwealth. In other words, the
Government will judge the Government.
Now this is a perfectly plain piece of brute logic. We need not go into
the other delicious things in the article, as when it says that "in old
times Parliament had to be protected against Royal invasion by the man in
the street." Parliament has to be protected now against the man in the
street. Parliament is simply the most detested and the most detestable of
all our national institutions: all that is evident enough. What is
interesting is the blank and staring fallacy of the attempted reply.
A long while ago, before all the Liberals died, a Liberal introduced a
Bill to prevent Parliament being merely packed with the slaves of
financial interests. For that purpose he established the excellent
democratic principle that the private citizen, as such, might protest
against public corruption. He was called the Common Informer. I believe
the miserable party papers are really reduced to playing on the
degradation of the two words in modern language. Now the word "comnon" in
"Common Informer" means exactly what it means in "common sense" or "Book
of Common Prayer," or (above all) in "House of Commons." It does not mean
anything low or vulgar; any more than they do. The only difference is
that the House of Commons really is low and vulgar; and the Common
Informer isn't. It is just the same with the word "Informer." It does
not mean spy or sneak. It means one who gives information. It means what
"journalist" ought to mean. The only difference is that the Common
Informer may be paid if he tells the truth. The common journalist will be
ruined if he does.
Now the quite plain point before the party journalist is this: If he
really means that a corrupt bargain between a Government and a contractor
ought to be judged by public opinion, he must (nowadays) mean Parliament;
that is, the caucus that controls Parliament. And he must decide between
one of two views. Either he means that there can be no such thing as a
corrupt Government. Or he means that it is one of the characteristic
qualities of a corrupt Government to denounce its own corruption. I laugh;
and I leave him his choice.
Why is the modern party political journalism so bad? It is worse even
than it intends to be. It praises its preposterous party leaders through
thick and thin; but it somehow succeeds in making them look greater fools
than they are. This clumsiness clings even to the photographs of public
men, as they are snapshotted at public meetings. A sensitive politician
(if there is such a thing) would, I should think, want to murder the man
who snapshots him at those moments. For our general impression of a man's
gesture or play of feature is made up of a series of vanishing instants,
at any one of which he may look worse than our general impression records.
Mr. Augustine Birrell may have made quite a sensible and amusing speech,
in the course of which his audience would hardly have noticed that he
resettled his necktie. Snapshot him, and he appears as convulsively
clutching his throat in the agonies of strangulation, and with his head
twisted on one side as if he had been hanged. Sir Edward Carson might
make a perfectly good speech, which no one thought wearisome, but might
himself be just tired enough to shift from one leg to the other. Snapshot
him, and he appears as holding one leg stiffly in the air and yawning
enough to swallow the audience. But it is in the prose narratives of the
Press that we find most manifestations of this strange ineptitude; this
knack of exhibiting your own favourites in an unlucky light. It is not so
much that the party journalists do not tell the truth as that they tell
just enough of it to make it clear that they are telling lies. One of
their favourite blunders is an amazing sort of bathos. They begin by
telling you that some statesman said something brilliant in style or
biting in wit, at which his hearers thrilled with terror or thundered with
applause. And then they tell you what it was that he said. Silly asses!
CHESTERTON-UTOPIA OF USERS - THE NEW RAID