September 25, 2025 • 23 mins
In Short History of England, Gilbert Keith Chesterton offers a captivating exploration of history through the lens of human interaction, framing it as an enduring struggle between civilization and barbarism. His insightful critique reveals the stark contrast between the narratives of recent centuries and the rich tapestry of the medieval era, which is often overlooked in popular histories. Chesterton‚As sharp intellect and mastery of paradox illuminate the absurdities in conventional arguments, making his reflections both thought-provoking and entertaining. This is not just a study of dates and events; it is a profound journey that challenges modern misconceptions while remaining relevant to today‚As world. (Summary by Ray Clare)
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. Or more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot org. A Short History of England by G. K. Chesterton,
(00:25):
Chapter fifteen, The War with the Great Republics. We cannot
understand the eighteenth century so long as we suppose that
rhetoric is artificial, because it is artistic. We do not
fall into this folly about any of the other arts.
We talk of a man picking out notes arranged in
(00:46):
ivory on a wooden piano with much feeling, or of
his pouring out his soul by scraping on catgut after
a training as careful as an acrobat's. But we are
still haunted with the press. It is that verbal form
and verbal effect must somehow be hypocritical when they are
the link between things so living as a man and
(01:08):
a mob We doubt the feelings of the old fashioned orator,
because his periods are so rounded and pointed as to
convey his feeling. Now, before any criticism of the eighteenth
century worthies must be put the proviso of their perfect
artistic sincerity. Their oratory was unrhymed, poetry and it had
(01:32):
the humanity of poetry. It was not even unmetrical poetry.
That century is full of great phrases, often spoken on
the spur of great moments, which have in them a
throb and recurrence of song, as of a man thinking
to a tune. Nelson's in honor I gained them, in
(01:52):
honor I will die with them has more rhythm than
muchis is called verse libres. Patrick Henry's give me liberty
or give me death might be a great line in
Walt Whitman. It is one of the many quaint perversities
of the English to pretend to be bad speakers, but
(02:13):
in fact the most English eighteenth century epic blazed with
brilliant speakers. There may have been finer writing. In France,
there was no such fine speaking as in England. The
parliament had false enough, but it was sincere enough to
be rhetorical. The parliament was corrupt, as it is now,
(02:34):
though the examples of corruption were then often really made
examples in the sense of warnings, where they are now
examples only in the sense of patterns. The parliament was
indifferent to the constituencies, as it is now, though perhaps
the constituencies were less indifferent to the parliament. The parliament
(02:54):
was snobbish as it is now, though perhaps more respectful
to mere rank and life, to mere wealth. But the
Parliament was a parliament. It did fulfill its name and
duty by talking and trying to talk well. It did
not merely do things because they do not bear talking about,
as it does now. It was, then, to the eternal
(03:17):
glory of our country, a great talking shop, not a
mere buying and selling shop for financial tips and official places.
And as with any other artist, the care of the
eighteenth century man expended on oratory is a proof of
his sincerity, not a disproof of it. An enthusiastic eulogym
(03:39):
by Burke is as rich and elaborate as a lover's sonnet,
but it is because Bert is really enthusiastic like the lover.
An angry sentence by Junius is as carefully compounded as
a Renaissance poison but it is because Junius is really
angry like the poisoner. Now, nobody who has realized this
(04:00):
psychological truth can doubt for a moment that many of
the English aristocrats of the eighteenth century had a real
enthusiasm for liberty. Their voices lift like the trumpets upon
the very word. Whatever their immediate forbearers may have meant,
these men meant what they said when they talked of
the high memory of Hampden or the majesty of Magna Carta.
(04:22):
These patriots, whom Walpole called the boys, included many who
really were patriots, or better still, who really were boys,
if we prefer to put it so. Among the Whig
aristocrats were many who really were Whigs. Whigs by all
the ideal definitions which identified the party with the defense
(04:45):
of law against tyrants and courtiers. But if anyone deduces
from the fact that the Whig aristocrats were Whigs any
doubt about whether the Whig aristocrats were aristocrats, there is
one practical test and reply. It might be to tested
in many ways, but the game laws and enclosure laws
they passed, or by the strict code of the duel
(05:06):
and definition of honor on which they all insisted. But
if it really be questioned whether I am right in
calling their whole world an aristocracy and the very reverse
of it a democracy, the true historical test is this,
that when republicanism really enter the world, they instantly waged
two great wars with it. Or if the view be preferred.
(05:30):
It instantly waged two great wars with them, America and France,
revealed the real nature of the English Parliament. Ice may sparkle,
but a real spark will show it is only ice.
So when the fire of the revolution touched the frosty
splendors of the Whigs, there was instantly a hissing and
(05:54):
a strife, a strife of the flame to melt the
ice of the water to quench the It has been
noted that one of the virtues of the aristocrats was liberty,
especially liberty among themselves. Might even be said that one
of the virtues of the aristocrats was cynicism. They were
(06:15):
not stuffed with our fashionable fiction, with its stiff and
wooden figures of a good man named Washington and a
bad man named Boney. They at least were aware that
Washington's cause was not so obviously white, nor Napoleon's so
obviously black, as most books in general circulation would indicate.
(06:36):
They had a natural admiration for the military genius of
Washington and Napoleon. They had the most unmixed contempt for
the German royal family. But they were as a class,
not only against both Washington and Napoleon, but against them
both for the same reason, and it was that they
both stood for democracy. Great injustice is done to the
(07:03):
English aristocratic government of the time through a failure to
realize this fundamental difference, especially in the case of America.
There is a wrong headed humor about the English which
appears especially in this that while they often, as in
the case of Ireland, make themselves out right where they
(07:23):
were entirely wrong, they are easily persuaded, as in the
case of America, to make themselves out entirely wrong where
there is at least a case for they having been
more or less right. George the Third's government laid certain
taxes on the colonial community on the eastern seaboard of America.
It was certainly not self evident in the sense of
(07:45):
law and precedent that the Imperial government could not lay
taxes on such colonists, Nor were the taxes themselves of
that practically oppressive sort which rightly raise everywhere the common
causistry of revolution. The Whig oligarchies had their faults but
utter lack of sympathy with liberty, especially local liberty, and
(08:08):
with their adventurous kindred beyond the seas was by no
means one of their faults. Chatham, the great chief of
the new and very national noblise, was typical of them
in being free from the faintest illiberality and irritation against
the colonies. As such, he would have made them free
and even favored colonies, if only he could have kept
(08:30):
them as colonies. Burke, who was then the eloquent voice
of Whiggism, and was destined later to show how holly
it was a voice of aristocracy, went, of course even
further even north compromise. And though George the Third, being
a fool, might himself have refused to compromise, he had
(08:51):
already failed to affect the Bolingbrook scheme of restitution of
the royal power. The case for the Americans, the real
reason for calling them right to the quarrel was something
much deeper than the coral. They were an issue not
with the dead monarchy, but with a living aristocracy. They
declared war on something much finer and more formidable than
(09:13):
poor old George. Nevertheless, the popular tradition, especially in America,
has pictured it primarily as the duel of George the
Third and George Washington. And as we have noticed more
than once. Such pictures, though figurative, are seldom false. King
George's head was not much more useful on the throne
than it was on the signboard of a tavern. Nevertheless,
(09:35):
the sign board was really a sign and a sign
of the times. It stood for a tavern that sold
not English but German beer. It stood for that side
of the Whig policy, which Chatham showed when he was
tolerant to America alone, but intolerant of America when allied
with France. That very wooden sign stood in shore for
(09:56):
the same thing as the juncture with Frederick the Great
stood for that Anglo German alliance which at a very
much later time in history was to turn into the
world Old Teutonic race. Roughly and frankly speaking, we may
(10:16):
say that America forced the quarrel. She wished to be separate,
which was to her but another phrase for wishing to
be free. She was not thinking of her wrongs as
a colony, but already of her rights as a republic.
The negative effect of so small a difference could never
have changed the world without the positive effect of a
(10:38):
great ideal, one may say, of a great new religion.
The real case for the colonists is that they felt
they could be something which they also felt and justly
that England would not help them to be. England would
probably have allowed the colonists all sorts of concessions and
constitutional privileges, but England could not allow the colonists equality.
(11:03):
I do not mean equality with her, but even with
each other. Chatham might have compromised with Washington, because Washington
was a gentleman, but Chatham could hardly have conceived a
country not governed by gentlemen. Burke was apparently ready to
grant everything to America, but he would not have been
ready to grant what America eventually gained. If he had
(11:26):
seen American democracy, he would have been as much appalled
by it as he was by French democracy, and would
always have been by any democracy. In a word, the
Whigs were liberal and even generous aristocrats, but they were aristocrats.
That is why their concessions were as vain as their conquests.
(11:49):
We talk with a humiliation too rare with us about
our dubious part in the secession of America. Whether it
increase or decreased the humiliated, I do not know, but
I strongly suspect that we had very little to do
with it. I believe we counted for uncommonly little. In
the case, we did not really drive away the American colonists,
(12:13):
nor were they driven. They were led on by a
light that went before that light came from France. Like
the armies of Lafayette that came to the help of Washington,
France was already in travail with the tremendous spiritual revolution
which was soon to reshape the world. Her doctrine disruptive
(12:34):
and creative was widely misunderstood at the time, and as
much misunderstood still, despite the splendid clarity of style in
which it was stated by Rousseau in the Contrast Social
and by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, say the
very wordy quality in many modern countries, and four hundred
fools will leap to their feet at once to explain
(12:55):
that some men can be found, on careful examination to
be taller or hence others. As if Danton had not
noticed that he was taller than Rope's spear, or as
if Washington was not well aware that he was handsomer
than Franklin. This is no place to expound a philosophy.
It will be enough to say, in passing by way
(13:16):
of a parable, that when we say that all pennies
are equal, we do not mean that they all look
exactly the same. We mean that they are absolutely equal
in the one absolute character, in the most important thing
about them. It may be put practically by saying that
they are coins of a certain value, twelve of which
(13:36):
go to a shilling. It may be put symbolically and
even mystically, by saying that they all bear the image
of the king. And though the most mystical, it is
also the most practical summary of equality, that all men
bear the image of kings. Indeed, it is of course
true that this idea had long underlain all Christianity, even
(13:57):
in institutions less popular in formed than were, for instance,
the mob of medieval republics in Italy. A dogma of
equal duties implies that of equal rights. I know of
no Christian authority that would not admit that it was
as wicked to murder a poor man as a rich man,
or as bad to burgle an inelegantly furnished house as
(14:20):
a tastefully furnished one. But the world had wandered further
and further from these truisms, and nobody in the world
was further from them than the group of the great
English aristocrats. The idea of the equality of men is,
in substance simply the idea of the importance of man.
(14:41):
It was precisely the notion of the importance of a
mere man, which seemed startling and indecent to a society
whose whole romance and religion now consisted of the importance
of a gentleman. It was as if a man had
walked naked into Parliament. There is no space here to
develop the moral issue, but this will suffice to show
(15:03):
that the critics concerned about the difference in human types
or talents are considerably wasting their time. If they can
understand how two coins can count the same, though one
is bright and the other brown, they might perhaps understand
how two men can vote the same, though one is
bright and the other dull. If, however, they are still
satisfied with their solid objection that some men are dull,
(15:26):
I can only gravely agree with them that some men
are very dull. But a few years after Lafayette had
returned from helping to found a republic in America, he
was flung over his own frontiers for resisting the foundation
of a republican France. So furious was the onward stride
of this new spirit that the republican of the new
(15:47):
world lived to be the reactionary of the old or
when France passed from theory to practice, the question was
put to the world in a way not thinkable, in
connection with the prefatory experiment of a thin population on
a colonial coast, the mightiest of human monarchies, like some monstrous,
(16:08):
immeasurable idol of iron, was melted down in a furnace
barely bigger than itself, and recast in a size equally colossal,
but in a shape men could not understand. Many at
least could not understand it, and least of all the
liberal aristocracy of England. There were, of course, practical reasons
for continuous foreign policy against France, whether royal or republican.
(16:33):
There was primarily the desire to keep any foreigner from
menacing us from the Flemish coast. There was, to a
much lesser extent, the colonial rivalry in which so much
English glory had been gained by the statesmanship of Chatham
and the arms of Wolfe and of Clive. The former
reason has returned on us with singular irony. For in
(16:53):
order to keep the French out of Flanders, we flung ourselves,
with increasing enthusiasm, into a furtiternity with the Germans. We
purposely fed and pampered the power which was destined in
the future to devour Belgium as France would never have
devoured it, and threatened us across the sea with terrors
of which no Frenchman would ever dream, when indeed, much
(17:16):
deeper things unified our attitude towards France before and after
the revolution. It is but one stride from despotism to
democracy in logic as well as in history, and oligarchy
is equally remote from both. The bast deal fell, and
it seemed to an Englishman merely that a despot had
turned into a demos. The young Bonaparte rose, and it
(17:39):
seemed to an Englishman merely that a demos had once
more turned into a despot. He was not wrong in
thinking these allotropic forms of the same alien thing, and
that thing was equality. For when millions are equally subject
to one law, it makes little difference if they are
also subject to one lawgiver. The general social life is
(18:00):
a level the one thing that the English have never
understood about Napoleon in all their myriad studies of his
mysterious personality, is how impersonal he was. I had almost
said how unimportant he was. He said himself, I shall
go down into history with my code in my hand,
but in practical effects, as distinct from mere name and renown.
(18:25):
It would be even truer to say that his code
will go down to history with his handset to it
in signature somewhat illegibly. Thus his testamentary law has broken
up big estates and encourage contented peasants in places where
his name is cursed, in places where his name is
almost unknown. In his lifetime, of course, it was natural
(18:48):
that the annihilating splendor of his military strokes should rivet
the eye like flashes of lightning. But his reign fell
more silently, and its refreshment remained. It is needless to
repeat here that after bursting one world coalition after another
by battles that are the masterpieces of the military art,
(19:09):
he was finally worn down by two comparatively popular causes,
the resistance of Russia and the resistance of Spain. The
former was largely like so much that is Russian religious
but in the latter appeared most conspicuously that which concerns
us here, the valor, vigilance and high national spirit of England.
(19:31):
In the eighteenth century, the Long Spanish Campaign tried and
made triumphant the great Irish soldier, afterwards known as Wellington,
who has become all the more symbolic since he was
finally confronted with Napoleon in the last defeat of the
latter at Waterloo. Wellington, though too logical to be at
(19:52):
all English, was in many ways typical of the aristocracy.
He had irony and independence of mind. But if we
we wish to realize how rigidly such men remained limited
by their class, how little they really knew what was
happening in their time, it is enough to note that
Wellington seems to have thought he had dismissed Napoleon by
(20:13):
saying that he was not really a gentleman. If an
acute and experienced Chinaman were to say of Chinese Gordon,
he is not actually a Mandarin, we should think that
the Chinese system deserved its reputation for being both rigid
and remote. But the very name of Wellington is enough
to suggest another and with it the reminder that this,
(20:36):
though true, is inadequate. There was some truth in the
idea that the Englishman was never so English as when
he was outside England, and never smacked so much of
the soil as when he was on the sea. There
has run through the national psychology something that has never
had a name, except the eccentric and indeed extraordinary name
(20:56):
of Robinson Crusoe, which is all the more English for
being quite undiscoverable in England. It may be doubted if
a French or German boy especially wishes that his Cornland
or Vineland were a desert, But many an english boy
has wished that his island were a desert island. But
we might even say that the Englishman was too insular
(21:19):
or an island. He awoke most to life when his
island was sundered from the foundations of the world, when
it hung like a planet and flew like a bird.
And by a contradiction, the real British army was in
the navy. The boldest of the islanders were scattered over
the moving archipelago of a great fleet there still lay
(21:42):
on it like an increasing light. The legend of the Armada.
It was a great fleet full of the glory of
having once been small one. Long before Wellington ever saw Waterloo,
the ships had done their work and chattered the French
navy in the Spanish seas, leaving like a light upon
the sea. The life and death of Nelson, who died
(22:04):
with his stars on his bosom and his heart upon
his sleeve. There is no word for the memory of
Nelson except to call him mythical. The very hour of
his death, the very name of his ship, are touched
with that epic completeness which critics call the long arm
of coincidence and profits the hand of God. His very
(22:25):
faults and failures were heroic, not in a loose but
in a classic sense, in that he fell only like
the legendary heroes, weakened to buy a woman, not foiled
by any foe among men. And he remains the incarnation
of a spirit in the English that is purely poetic,
so poetic that it fancies itself a thousand things, and
sometimes even fancies itself prosaic. At a recent date, in
(22:50):
an age of reason, in a country already calling itself
dull in business like, with top hats and factory chimneys,
already beginning to rise like towers of funereal efficient see
this country Clergyman's son moved to the last in a
luminous cloud, and acted a fairy tale. He shall remain
as a lesson to those who do not understand England,
(23:12):
and a mystery to those who think they do. In
outward action, he led his ships to victory and died
upon a foreign sea. But symbolically he established something indescribable
and intimate, something that sounds like a native proverb. He
was the man who burnt his ships, and who forever
set the Thames on fire. End of Chapter fifteen.
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. Or more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot org. A Short History of England by G. K. Chesterton,
(00:25):
Chapter fifteen, The War with the Great Republics. We cannot
understand the eighteenth century so long as we suppose that
rhetoric is artificial, because it is artistic. We do not
fall into this folly about any of the other arts.
We talk of a man picking out notes arranged in
(00:46):
ivory on a wooden piano with much feeling, or of
his pouring out his soul by scraping on catgut after
a training as careful as an acrobat's. But we are
still haunted with the press. It is that verbal form
and verbal effect must somehow be hypocritical when they are
the link between things so living as a man and
(01:08):
a mob We doubt the feelings of the old fashioned orator,
because his periods are so rounded and pointed as to
convey his feeling. Now, before any criticism of the eighteenth
century worthies must be put the proviso of their perfect
artistic sincerity. Their oratory was unrhymed, poetry and it had
(01:32):
the humanity of poetry. It was not even unmetrical poetry.
That century is full of great phrases, often spoken on
the spur of great moments, which have in them a
throb and recurrence of song, as of a man thinking
to a tune. Nelson's in honor I gained them, in
(01:52):
honor I will die with them has more rhythm than
muchis is called verse libres. Patrick Henry's give me liberty
or give me death might be a great line in
Walt Whitman. It is one of the many quaint perversities
of the English to pretend to be bad speakers, but
(02:13):
in fact the most English eighteenth century epic blazed with
brilliant speakers. There may have been finer writing. In France,
there was no such fine speaking as in England. The
parliament had false enough, but it was sincere enough to
be rhetorical. The parliament was corrupt, as it is now,
(02:34):
though the examples of corruption were then often really made
examples in the sense of warnings, where they are now
examples only in the sense of patterns. The parliament was
indifferent to the constituencies, as it is now, though perhaps
the constituencies were less indifferent to the parliament. The parliament
(02:54):
was snobbish as it is now, though perhaps more respectful
to mere rank and life, to mere wealth. But the
Parliament was a parliament. It did fulfill its name and
duty by talking and trying to talk well. It did
not merely do things because they do not bear talking about,
as it does now. It was, then, to the eternal
(03:17):
glory of our country, a great talking shop, not a
mere buying and selling shop for financial tips and official places.
And as with any other artist, the care of the
eighteenth century man expended on oratory is a proof of
his sincerity, not a disproof of it. An enthusiastic eulogym
(03:39):
by Burke is as rich and elaborate as a lover's sonnet,
but it is because Bert is really enthusiastic like the lover.
An angry sentence by Junius is as carefully compounded as
a Renaissance poison but it is because Junius is really
angry like the poisoner. Now, nobody who has realized this
(04:00):
psychological truth can doubt for a moment that many of
the English aristocrats of the eighteenth century had a real
enthusiasm for liberty. Their voices lift like the trumpets upon
the very word. Whatever their immediate forbearers may have meant,
these men meant what they said when they talked of
the high memory of Hampden or the majesty of Magna Carta.
(04:22):
These patriots, whom Walpole called the boys, included many who
really were patriots, or better still, who really were boys,
if we prefer to put it so. Among the Whig
aristocrats were many who really were Whigs. Whigs by all
the ideal definitions which identified the party with the defense
(04:45):
of law against tyrants and courtiers. But if anyone deduces
from the fact that the Whig aristocrats were Whigs any
doubt about whether the Whig aristocrats were aristocrats, there is
one practical test and reply. It might be to tested
in many ways, but the game laws and enclosure laws
they passed, or by the strict code of the duel
(05:06):
and definition of honor on which they all insisted. But
if it really be questioned whether I am right in
calling their whole world an aristocracy and the very reverse
of it a democracy, the true historical test is this,
that when republicanism really enter the world, they instantly waged
two great wars with it. Or if the view be preferred.
(05:30):
It instantly waged two great wars with them, America and France,
revealed the real nature of the English Parliament. Ice may sparkle,
but a real spark will show it is only ice.
So when the fire of the revolution touched the frosty
splendors of the Whigs, there was instantly a hissing and
(05:54):
a strife, a strife of the flame to melt the
ice of the water to quench the It has been
noted that one of the virtues of the aristocrats was liberty,
especially liberty among themselves. Might even be said that one
of the virtues of the aristocrats was cynicism. They were
(06:15):
not stuffed with our fashionable fiction, with its stiff and
wooden figures of a good man named Washington and a
bad man named Boney. They at least were aware that
Washington's cause was not so obviously white, nor Napoleon's so
obviously black, as most books in general circulation would indicate.
(06:36):
They had a natural admiration for the military genius of
Washington and Napoleon. They had the most unmixed contempt for
the German royal family. But they were as a class,
not only against both Washington and Napoleon, but against them
both for the same reason, and it was that they
both stood for democracy. Great injustice is done to the
(07:03):
English aristocratic government of the time through a failure to
realize this fundamental difference, especially in the case of America.
There is a wrong headed humor about the English which
appears especially in this that while they often, as in
the case of Ireland, make themselves out right where they
(07:23):
were entirely wrong, they are easily persuaded, as in the
case of America, to make themselves out entirely wrong where
there is at least a case for they having been
more or less right. George the Third's government laid certain
taxes on the colonial community on the eastern seaboard of America.
It was certainly not self evident in the sense of
(07:45):
law and precedent that the Imperial government could not lay
taxes on such colonists, Nor were the taxes themselves of
that practically oppressive sort which rightly raise everywhere the common
causistry of revolution. The Whig oligarchies had their faults but
utter lack of sympathy with liberty, especially local liberty, and
(08:08):
with their adventurous kindred beyond the seas was by no
means one of their faults. Chatham, the great chief of
the new and very national noblise, was typical of them
in being free from the faintest illiberality and irritation against
the colonies. As such, he would have made them free
and even favored colonies, if only he could have kept
(08:30):
them as colonies. Burke, who was then the eloquent voice
of Whiggism, and was destined later to show how holly
it was a voice of aristocracy, went, of course even
further even north compromise. And though George the Third, being
a fool, might himself have refused to compromise, he had
(08:51):
already failed to affect the Bolingbrook scheme of restitution of
the royal power. The case for the Americans, the real
reason for calling them right to the quarrel was something
much deeper than the coral. They were an issue not
with the dead monarchy, but with a living aristocracy. They
declared war on something much finer and more formidable than
(09:13):
poor old George. Nevertheless, the popular tradition, especially in America,
has pictured it primarily as the duel of George the
Third and George Washington. And as we have noticed more
than once. Such pictures, though figurative, are seldom false. King
George's head was not much more useful on the throne
than it was on the signboard of a tavern. Nevertheless,
(09:35):
the sign board was really a sign and a sign
of the times. It stood for a tavern that sold
not English but German beer. It stood for that side
of the Whig policy, which Chatham showed when he was
tolerant to America alone, but intolerant of America when allied
with France. That very wooden sign stood in shore for
(09:56):
the same thing as the juncture with Frederick the Great
stood for that Anglo German alliance which at a very
much later time in history was to turn into the
world Old Teutonic race. Roughly and frankly speaking, we may
(10:16):
say that America forced the quarrel. She wished to be separate,
which was to her but another phrase for wishing to
be free. She was not thinking of her wrongs as
a colony, but already of her rights as a republic.
The negative effect of so small a difference could never
have changed the world without the positive effect of a
(10:38):
great ideal, one may say, of a great new religion.
The real case for the colonists is that they felt
they could be something which they also felt and justly
that England would not help them to be. England would
probably have allowed the colonists all sorts of concessions and
constitutional privileges, but England could not allow the colonists equality.
(11:03):
I do not mean equality with her, but even with
each other. Chatham might have compromised with Washington, because Washington
was a gentleman, but Chatham could hardly have conceived a
country not governed by gentlemen. Burke was apparently ready to
grant everything to America, but he would not have been
ready to grant what America eventually gained. If he had
(11:26):
seen American democracy, he would have been as much appalled
by it as he was by French democracy, and would
always have been by any democracy. In a word, the
Whigs were liberal and even generous aristocrats, but they were aristocrats.
That is why their concessions were as vain as their conquests.
(11:49):
We talk with a humiliation too rare with us about
our dubious part in the secession of America. Whether it
increase or decreased the humiliated, I do not know, but
I strongly suspect that we had very little to do
with it. I believe we counted for uncommonly little. In
the case, we did not really drive away the American colonists,
(12:13):
nor were they driven. They were led on by a
light that went before that light came from France. Like
the armies of Lafayette that came to the help of Washington,
France was already in travail with the tremendous spiritual revolution
which was soon to reshape the world. Her doctrine disruptive
(12:34):
and creative was widely misunderstood at the time, and as
much misunderstood still, despite the splendid clarity of style in
which it was stated by Rousseau in the Contrast Social
and by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, say the
very wordy quality in many modern countries, and four hundred
fools will leap to their feet at once to explain
(12:55):
that some men can be found, on careful examination to
be taller or hence others. As if Danton had not
noticed that he was taller than Rope's spear, or as
if Washington was not well aware that he was handsomer
than Franklin. This is no place to expound a philosophy.
It will be enough to say, in passing by way
(13:16):
of a parable, that when we say that all pennies
are equal, we do not mean that they all look
exactly the same. We mean that they are absolutely equal
in the one absolute character, in the most important thing
about them. It may be put practically by saying that
they are coins of a certain value, twelve of which
(13:36):
go to a shilling. It may be put symbolically and
even mystically, by saying that they all bear the image
of the king. And though the most mystical, it is
also the most practical summary of equality, that all men
bear the image of kings. Indeed, it is of course
true that this idea had long underlain all Christianity, even
(13:57):
in institutions less popular in formed than were, for instance,
the mob of medieval republics in Italy. A dogma of
equal duties implies that of equal rights. I know of
no Christian authority that would not admit that it was
as wicked to murder a poor man as a rich man,
or as bad to burgle an inelegantly furnished house as
(14:20):
a tastefully furnished one. But the world had wandered further
and further from these truisms, and nobody in the world
was further from them than the group of the great
English aristocrats. The idea of the equality of men is,
in substance simply the idea of the importance of man.
(14:41):
It was precisely the notion of the importance of a
mere man, which seemed startling and indecent to a society
whose whole romance and religion now consisted of the importance
of a gentleman. It was as if a man had
walked naked into Parliament. There is no space here to
develop the moral issue, but this will suffice to show
(15:03):
that the critics concerned about the difference in human types
or talents are considerably wasting their time. If they can
understand how two coins can count the same, though one
is bright and the other brown, they might perhaps understand
how two men can vote the same, though one is
bright and the other dull. If, however, they are still
satisfied with their solid objection that some men are dull,
(15:26):
I can only gravely agree with them that some men
are very dull. But a few years after Lafayette had
returned from helping to found a republic in America, he
was flung over his own frontiers for resisting the foundation
of a republican France. So furious was the onward stride
of this new spirit that the republican of the new
(15:47):
world lived to be the reactionary of the old or
when France passed from theory to practice, the question was
put to the world in a way not thinkable, in
connection with the prefatory experiment of a thin population on
a colonial coast, the mightiest of human monarchies, like some monstrous,
(16:08):
immeasurable idol of iron, was melted down in a furnace
barely bigger than itself, and recast in a size equally colossal,
but in a shape men could not understand. Many at
least could not understand it, and least of all the
liberal aristocracy of England. There were, of course, practical reasons
for continuous foreign policy against France, whether royal or republican.
(16:33):
There was primarily the desire to keep any foreigner from
menacing us from the Flemish coast. There was, to a
much lesser extent, the colonial rivalry in which so much
English glory had been gained by the statesmanship of Chatham
and the arms of Wolfe and of Clive. The former
reason has returned on us with singular irony. For in
(16:53):
order to keep the French out of Flanders, we flung ourselves,
with increasing enthusiasm, into a furtiternity with the Germans. We
purposely fed and pampered the power which was destined in
the future to devour Belgium as France would never have
devoured it, and threatened us across the sea with terrors
of which no Frenchman would ever dream, when indeed, much
(17:16):
deeper things unified our attitude towards France before and after
the revolution. It is but one stride from despotism to
democracy in logic as well as in history, and oligarchy
is equally remote from both. The bast deal fell, and
it seemed to an Englishman merely that a despot had
turned into a demos. The young Bonaparte rose, and it
(17:39):
seemed to an Englishman merely that a demos had once
more turned into a despot. He was not wrong in
thinking these allotropic forms of the same alien thing, and
that thing was equality. For when millions are equally subject
to one law, it makes little difference if they are
also subject to one lawgiver. The general social life is
(18:00):
a level the one thing that the English have never
understood about Napoleon in all their myriad studies of his
mysterious personality, is how impersonal he was. I had almost
said how unimportant he was. He said himself, I shall
go down into history with my code in my hand,
but in practical effects, as distinct from mere name and renown.
(18:25):
It would be even truer to say that his code
will go down to history with his handset to it
in signature somewhat illegibly. Thus his testamentary law has broken
up big estates and encourage contented peasants in places where
his name is cursed, in places where his name is
almost unknown. In his lifetime, of course, it was natural
(18:48):
that the annihilating splendor of his military strokes should rivet
the eye like flashes of lightning. But his reign fell
more silently, and its refreshment remained. It is needless to
repeat here that after bursting one world coalition after another
by battles that are the masterpieces of the military art,
(19:09):
he was finally worn down by two comparatively popular causes,
the resistance of Russia and the resistance of Spain. The
former was largely like so much that is Russian religious
but in the latter appeared most conspicuously that which concerns
us here, the valor, vigilance and high national spirit of England.
(19:31):
In the eighteenth century, the Long Spanish Campaign tried and
made triumphant the great Irish soldier, afterwards known as Wellington,
who has become all the more symbolic since he was
finally confronted with Napoleon in the last defeat of the
latter at Waterloo. Wellington, though too logical to be at
(19:52):
all English, was in many ways typical of the aristocracy.
He had irony and independence of mind. But if we
we wish to realize how rigidly such men remained limited
by their class, how little they really knew what was
happening in their time, it is enough to note that
Wellington seems to have thought he had dismissed Napoleon by
(20:13):
saying that he was not really a gentleman. If an
acute and experienced Chinaman were to say of Chinese Gordon,
he is not actually a Mandarin, we should think that
the Chinese system deserved its reputation for being both rigid
and remote. But the very name of Wellington is enough
to suggest another and with it the reminder that this,
(20:36):
though true, is inadequate. There was some truth in the
idea that the Englishman was never so English as when
he was outside England, and never smacked so much of
the soil as when he was on the sea. There
has run through the national psychology something that has never
had a name, except the eccentric and indeed extraordinary name
(20:56):
of Robinson Crusoe, which is all the more English for
being quite undiscoverable in England. It may be doubted if
a French or German boy especially wishes that his Cornland
or Vineland were a desert, But many an english boy
has wished that his island were a desert island. But
we might even say that the Englishman was too insular
(21:19):
or an island. He awoke most to life when his
island was sundered from the foundations of the world, when
it hung like a planet and flew like a bird.
And by a contradiction, the real British army was in
the navy. The boldest of the islanders were scattered over
the moving archipelago of a great fleet there still lay
(21:42):
on it like an increasing light. The legend of the Armada.
It was a great fleet full of the glory of
having once been small one. Long before Wellington ever saw Waterloo,
the ships had done their work and chattered the French
navy in the Spanish seas, leaving like a light upon
the sea. The life and death of Nelson, who died
(22:04):
with his stars on his bosom and his heart upon
his sleeve. There is no word for the memory of
Nelson except to call him mythical. The very hour of
his death, the very name of his ship, are touched
with that epic completeness which critics call the long arm
of coincidence and profits the hand of God. His very
(22:25):
faults and failures were heroic, not in a loose but
in a classic sense, in that he fell only like
the legendary heroes, weakened to buy a woman, not foiled
by any foe among men. And he remains the incarnation
of a spirit in the English that is purely poetic,
so poetic that it fancies itself a thousand things, and
sometimes even fancies itself prosaic. At a recent date, in
(22:50):
an age of reason, in a country already calling itself
dull in business like, with top hats and factory chimneys,
already beginning to rise like towers of funereal efficient see
this country Clergyman's son moved to the last in a
luminous cloud, and acted a fairy tale. He shall remain
as a lesson to those who do not understand England,
(23:12):
and a mystery to those who think they do. In
outward action, he led his ships to victory and died
upon a foreign sea. But symbolically he established something indescribable
and intimate, something that sounds like a native proverb. He
was the man who burnt his ships, and who forever
set the Thames on fire. End of Chapter fifteen.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!