September 25, 2025 • 26 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)
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit libravox dot org. A Short History of England by G. K. Chesterton,
(00:26):
Chapter seventeen, The Return of the Barbarian. The only way
to write a popular history, as we have already remarked,
would be to write it backwards. It would be to
take common objects of our own street and tell the
tale of how each of them came to be in
the street at all. And for my immediate purposes, really
(00:48):
convenient to take two objects we have known all our
lives as features of fashion or respectability. One, which has
grown rarer recently is what we call a top hat.
The other, which is still a customary formality, is a
pair of trousers. The history of these humorous objects really
(01:09):
does give a clue to what has happened in England
for the last hundred years. It's not necessary to be
an esthete in order to regard both objects as the
reverse of beautiful, as tested by what may be called
the rational side of beauty. The lines of human limbs
can be beautiful, and so can the lines of loose drapery.
(01:30):
But not cylinders too loose to be the first and
too tight to be the second. Nor is a subtle
sense of harmony needed to see that, while there are
hundreds of differently proportioned hats, a hat that actually grows
larger toward the top is somewhat top heavy. But what
is largely forgotten is this. Yet, these two fantastic objects,
(01:53):
which now strike the eye as unconscious freaks, were originally
conscious freaks. Ancestors, to do them justice, did not think
them casual or commonplace. They thought them, if not ridiculous,
at least rococo. The top hat was the topmost point
of a riot of regency dandyism, and bucks wore trousers
(02:16):
while business men were still wearing knee breeches. It will
not be fancible to see a certain oriental touch in trousers,
which the later Romans also regarded as effeminately oriental. It
was an oriental touch found in many florid things of
the time, in Byron's poems or brightened pavilion. Now, the
(02:38):
interesting point is that for a whole serious century, these
instantaneous fantasies have remained like fossils in the carnival of
the regency, a few fools got into fancy dress, and
we have all remained in fancy dress. At least we
have remained in the dress, though we have lost the fancy.
(03:00):
I say this is typical of the most important thing
that happened in the Victorian time. For the most important
thing was that nothing happened. The very fuss that was
made about minor modification brings into relief the rigidity with
which the main lines of social life were left as
they were at the French Revolution. We talk of the
(03:22):
French Revolution as something that changed the world, but its
most important relation to England is that it did not
change England. A student of our history is concerned rather
with the effect it did not have than the effect
it did. If it be a splendid fate to have
survived the flood, the English oligarchy had that added splendor.
(03:45):
But even for the countries in which the revolution was
a convulsion, it was the last convulsion until that which
shakes the world to day. It gave their character to
all the commonwealths, which all talked about progress and were
occupied in marking time. Frenchmen, under all superficial reactions, remained
(04:07):
republican in spirit, as they had been when they first
wore top hats. Englishmen, under all superficial reforms remained oligarchical
in spirit, as they had been when they first wore trousers.
Only one power might be said to be growing, and
that in a plotting and prosaic fashion, the power in
(04:27):
the northeast, whose name was Prussia. And the English were
more and more learning that this growth may cause him
no alarm, since the North Germans were their cousins in
blood and their brothers in spirit. The first thing to
note that about the nineteenth century is that Europe remained
herself as compared with the Europe of the Great War,
(04:49):
and that England especially remained herself as compared even with
the rest of Europe. Granted this, we may give their
proper importance to the cautious internal changes of this country,
the small conscious and the large unconscious changes. Most of
the conscious ones were much upon the model of an
early one, the Great Reform Bill of eighteen thirty two,
(05:11):
and can be considered in the light of it. First
from the standpoint of most real reformers. The chief thing
about the Reform Bill was that it did not reform.
It had a huge tide of popular enthusiasm behind it,
which wholly disappeared when the people found themselves in front
of it. It enfranchised large masses of the middle classes,
(05:33):
it disfranchised very definite bodies of the working classes. And
it so struck the balance between the conservative and the
dangerous elements in the Commonwealth that the governing class was
rather stronger than before. The date. However, is important not
at all because it was the beginning of democracy, but
(05:54):
because it was the beginning of the best way ever
discovered of evading and postponing democracy. Here enters the homeopathic
treatment of revolution, since so often successful well into the
next generation. Disraeli, the brilliant Jewish adventurer, who was the
symbol of the English aristocracy being no longer genuine, extended
(06:15):
the franchise to the artisans, partly indeed as a party
move against his great rival Gladstone, but more as the
method by which the old popular pressure was first tired
out and then toned down. The politicians said the working
class was now strong enough to be allowed votes, it
(06:37):
would be true to say it was now weak enough
to be allowed votes. So in more recent times payment
of members which would once have been regarded and resisted
as an inrush of popular forces, was passed quietly and
without resistance, and regarded merely as an extension of parliamentary privileges.
(07:00):
The truth is that the old parliamentary alligarchy abandoned their
first line of trenches because they had by that time
constructed a second line of defense. It consisted in the
concentration of colossal political funds, in the private and irresponsible
power of the politicians, collected by the sale of peerages
and more important things, and expended on the gerrymandering of
(07:23):
the enormously expensive elections. In the presence of this inner obstacle,
a vote became about as valuable as a railway ticket
when there is a permanent block on the line. The
facade and outward form of this new secret government is
the merely mechanical application of what is called the party system.
(07:45):
The party system does not consist, as some suppose, of
two parties, but of one. If there were two real parties,
there could be no system. But if this was the
evolution of parliamentary reform, as represented by the First Reform Bill,
we can see the other side of it in the
social reform attacked immediately after the First Reform Bill. It
(08:08):
is a truth which should be a tower and a landmark,
that one of the first things done by the Reform
Parliament was to establish those harsh and dehumanized workhouses, which
both honest radicals and honest stories branded with the black
title of the new Basque Deal. This bitter name lingers
(08:29):
in our literature and can be found by the curious
in works of Carlile and Hood, but it is doubtless
interesting rather as a note of contemporary indignation than as
a correct comparison. It is easy to imagine the logicians
and legal orators of the parliamentary school of progress finding
(08:50):
many points of differentiation, and even of contrast. The beastial
was one central institution. The workhouses have been many, and
have every where transformed local life with whatever they have
to give of social sympathy and inspiration. Men of high
rank and great wealth were frequently sent to the best deal,
(09:11):
but no such mistake has ever been made by the
more business administration of the workhouse. Over the most capricious
operations of the Letters to Cachet, there still hovered some
hazy traditional idea that a man is put in prison
to punish him for something. It was the discovery of
a later social science that men who cannot be punished
(09:35):
can still be imprisoned. But the deepest and most decisive
difference lies in the better fortune of the new best deal,
for no mob has ever dared to storm it, and
it never fell. The new poor law was indeed not
wholly new, in the sense that it was the culmination
and clear renunciation of a principle foreshadowed in the earlier
(09:58):
poor Law of Elizabeth, which was one of the many
anti popular effects of the Great Pillage. When the monasteries
were swept away and a medieval system of hospitality destroyed,
tramps and beggars became a problem, the solution of which
has always tended towards slavery. Even when the question of
(10:21):
slavery has been cleared of the irrelevant question of cruelty,
it is obvious that a desperate man might find mister
Bumble and the board of Guardians less cruel than cold
weather and the bare ground, even if he were allowed
to sleep on the ground, which, by a veritable nightmare
of nonsense and injustice, he is not. He is actually
(10:45):
punished for sleeping under a bush on the specific and
stated ground that he cannot afford a bid. It is obvious, however,
that he may find his best physical good by going
into the workhouse, as he often found the tint pagan times,
by selling himself into slavery. The point is that the
(11:07):
solution remains servile even when mister Bumple and the Board
of Guardians ceased to be in a common sense cruel.
The pagan might have the luck to sell himself to
a kind master. The principle of the new poor law,
which has so far proved permanent in our society, is
that the man lost all his civic rights, and lost
(11:29):
them solely through poverty. There is a touch of irony,
though hardly of mere hypocrisy, in the fact that the
Parliament which effected this reform had just been abolishing black
slavery by buying out the slave owners in the British colonies.
The slave owners were bought out at a price big
(11:50):
enough to be called blackmail. But it would be misunderstanding
the national mentality to deny the sincerity of the sentiment.
Wilberforce represented in this the real wave of Wesleyan religion,
which had made a humane reaction against Calvinism, and was
in no mean sense philanthropic. But there is something romantic
(12:14):
in the English mind which can always see what is remote.
It is the strongest example of what men lose by
being longsighted. It is fair to say that they gain
many things also, the poems that are like adventures, and
the adventures that are like poems. It is a national saber,
(12:35):
and therefore in itself neither good nor evil. And it
depends on the application whether we find a scriptural text
for it, in the wish to take the wings of
the morning and abide in the outermost parts of the sea,
or merely in the saying that the eyes of a
fool are in the ends of the earth. Anyhow, the
(12:57):
unconscious nineteenth century movement, so slow that it seems stationary,
was altogether in this direction of which workhouse philanthropy is
the type. Nevertheless, it had one national institution to combat
and overcome, one institution, all the more intensely national because
it was not official and in a sense not even political.
(13:21):
The modern trade union was the inspiration and creation of
the English It is still largely known throughout Europe by
its English name. It was the English expression of the
European effort to resist the tendency of capitalism to reach
its natural culmination in slavery. In this it has an
almost weird psychological interest, for it is a return to
(13:44):
the past by men ignorant of the past, like the
sub conscious action of some man who has lost his memory.
We say that history repeats itself, and it is even
more interesting when it unconsciously repeats itself. No man on
earth is kept so ignorant to the Middle Ages as
the British workmen, except perhaps the British business man who
(14:08):
employs him. Yet all who know even a little of
the Middle Ages can see that the modern trade union
is a groping for the ancient guild. It is true
that those who look to the trade union, and even
those clear sighted enough to call it the guild, are
often without the faintest tinge of medieval mysticism, or even
of medieval morality. But this fact is in itself the
(14:31):
most striking and even staggering tribute to medieval morality. It
is all the clinching logic of coincidence. If large numbers
of the most hard headed atheists had evolved out of
their own inner consciousness, the notion that a number of
bachelors or spinsters ought to live together in celibate groups
for the good of the poor, or the observation of
(14:53):
certain hours and offices. It would be a very strong
point in favor of the monasteries. It be all the
stronger if the atheist had never heard of monasteries. It
would be strongest of all if they hated the very
name of monasteries. And it is all the stronger because
the man who puts his trust in trades unions does
(15:14):
not call himself a Catholic or even a Christian, if
he does call himself a guild socialist. The trade union
movement passed through many perils, including a ludicrous attempt of
certain lawyers to condemn as criminal conspiracy that trade union solidarity,
(15:34):
of which their own profession is the strongest and most
startling example in the world. The struggle culminated in gigantic
strikes which split the country in every direction in the
earlier part of the twentieth century, but another process, with
much more power at its back, was also in operation.
(15:56):
The principle represented by the New Poor Law proceeded on
its court and in one important respect altered its course.
Though it can hardly be said to have altered its object,
it can most correctly be stated by saying that the
employers themselves, who already organized business, began to organize social reform.
(16:19):
It was more picturesquely expressed by a cynical aristocrat in
Parliament who said, we are all socialists now. The socialists,
the body of completely sincere men, led by several conspicuously
brilliant men, had long hammered into men's heads the hopeless
sterility of mere non interference in exchange. The socialists proposed
(16:42):
that the states should not merely interfere in business, but
should take over the business and pay all men as
equal way journers, or at any rate as wayjourners. The
employers were not willing to surrender their own position to
the state, and this project has largely faded from politics.
Viser of them were willing to pay better wages, and
(17:03):
they were especially willing to bestow various other benefits, so
long as they were bestowed after the manner of wages.
Thus we had a series of social reforms which, for
good or evil, all tended in the same direction. The
permission to employees to claim certain advantages as employees and
as something permanently different from employers. Of these the obvious
(17:27):
examples were employer's liability, old age pensions, and as marking
another and more decisive stride in the process, the Insurance Act.
The latter in particular and the whole plan of the
social reform in general, were modeled upon Germany. Indeed, the
(17:48):
whole English life of this period was overshadowed by Germany.
We had now reached, for good or evil, the final
fulfillment of that gathering influence which began to grow on
us in the seventeenth century, which was solidified by the
military alliances of the eighteenth century, and which in the
nineteenth century had been turned into a philosophy, not to
(18:10):
say a mythology. German metaphysics had thinned our theology, so
that many a man's most solemn conviction about Good Friday
was that Friday was named after Freya. German history had
simply annexed English history, so that it was almost counted
the duty of any patriotic Englishman to be proud of
(18:32):
being a German. The genius of Carlisle the culture preached
by Matthew Arnold would not persuasive as they were, have
alone produced this effect, but for an external phenomena of
great force our internal policy was transformed by our foreign policy,
and foreign policy was dominated by the more and more
(18:54):
drastic steps which the Prussian, now clearly the prince of
all the German tribes, was taking to extend the German
influence in the world. Denmark was robbed of two provinces,
France was robbed of two provinces. And though the fall
of Paris was felt almost everywhere as the fall of
(19:18):
the capital of civilization, a thing like the sacking of
Rome by the Goths, many of the most influential people
in England still saw nothing in it but the solid
success of our kinsman and old allies of Waterlooth, the
moral methods which achieved it, the juggling with the Augustinburg claim,
(19:39):
the forgery of the MS telegram were either successfully concealed
or were but cloudily appreciated. The higher criticism had entered
into our ethics as well as our theology. Our view
of Europe was also distorted and made disproportionate by the
accident of a natural can concerned for Constantinople and our
(20:02):
route to India, which led Palmerston and later premiers to
support the Turk and see Russia as the only enemy
This somewhat cynical reaction was summed up in the strange
figure of Disraeli, who made a pro Turkish settlement, full
of his native indifference to the Christian subjects of Turkey,
(20:24):
and sealed it at Berlin in the presence of Bismarck.
Disraeli was not without insight into the inconsistencies and illusions
of the English. He said many sagacious things about them,
and one especially when he told the Manchester School that
their motto was peace and plenty amid a starving people
(20:45):
and with the world in arms. But what he said
about peace and plenty might well be parodied as a
comment on what he himself said about peace with honor.
Returning from that Berlin conference. He should have said, I
bring you peace with honor, Peace with the seeds of
the most horrible war of history, and honor as the
(21:07):
dupes and victims of the old Bully in Berlin. But
it was, as we have seen, especially in social reform,
that Germany was believed to be leading the way and
to have found the secret of dealing with the economic evil.
In the case of insurance, which was a test case,
she was applauded for obliging all her workmen to set
(21:28):
apart a portion of their wages for any time of sickness,
and numerous other provisions both in Germany and England pursued
the same ideal, which was that of protecting the poor
against themselves. It everywhere involved an external power having a
finger in the family pie, but little attention was paid
(21:49):
to any friction thus caused. For all prejudices against the
process were supposed to be the growth of ignorance, and
that ignorance was already being attacked by what was called education,
an enterprise also inspired largely by the example and partly
by the commercial competition of Germany. It was pointed out
(22:12):
that in Germany governments and great employers thought it well
worth their while to apply the grandest scale of organization
and the minutest inquisition of detail to the instruction of
the whole German race. The government was the stronger for
training its scholars as it trained its soldiers. The big
businesses were the stronger for manufacturing mind as they manufactured material.
(22:36):
English education was made compulsory, it was made free. Many good,
earnest and enthusiastic men labored to create a ladder of
standards and examinations which would connect the cleverest to the
poor with the culture of the English universities and the
current teaching in history or philosophy. But it cannot be
(22:57):
said that the connection is very complete, or the itch
even so thorough as the German achievement. For whatever reason,
the poor Englishman remained in many things much as his
fathers had been, and seemed to think the higher criticism
too high for him even to criticize. And then a
(23:17):
day came, and if we were wise, we thanked God
that we had failed. Education, if it had ever really
been in question, would doubtless have been a noble gift,
education in the sense of the central tradition of history,
with its freedom, its family honor, its chivalry, which is
the flower of Christendom. But what would our populace in
(23:40):
our epic have actually learned if they had learned all
that our schools and universities had to teach. That England
was but a little branch on a large Teutonic tree,
That an unfathomable spiritual sympathy, all encircling like the sea,
had always made us the natural allies of the great
folk by the the flowing rind, that all light came
(24:02):
from luther and Lutheran Germany, whose science was still purging
Christianity of its Greek and Roman accretions, that Germany was
a forest faded to grow, that France was a dung
heap faded to decay, a dung heap with a crowing
cock on it. What would the latter of education have
(24:23):
led to except a platform on which a posturing professor
proved that a cousin German was the same as a
German cousin. What would the goutters Knife have learned as
a graduate except to embrace a Saxon because he was
the other half of an Anglo saxon. The day came
(24:43):
and the ignorant fellow found he had other things to learn,
and he was quicker than his educated countrymen, for he
had nothing to unlearn. He in whose honor all had
been said and sung, stirred, and stepped across the border
of Belgium, then were spread out before men's eyes all
(25:04):
the beauties of his culture and all the benefits of
his organization. Then we beheld under a lifting daybreak what
light we had followed, and after what image we had
labored to refashion ourselves, Nor in any story of mankind.
Has the irony of God chosen the foolish things so
(25:26):
catastrophically to confound the wise. For the common crowd of
poor and ignorant Englishmen, because they only knew that they
were Englishmen, burst through the filthy cobwebs of four hundred
years and stood where their fathers stood when they knew
that they were Christian men. The English poor, broken in
(25:51):
every revolt, bullied by every fashion, long despoiled of property,
and now being despoiled of liberty, entered history with a
noise of trumpets, and turned themselves in two years into
one of the iron armies of the world. And when
the critic of politics and literature, feeling that this war
(26:14):
is after all heroic, looks around him to find the hero,
he can point to nothing but a mob. End of
Chapter seventeen.
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit libravox dot org. A Short History of England by G. K. Chesterton,
(00:26):
Chapter seventeen, The Return of the Barbarian. The only way
to write a popular history, as we have already remarked,
would be to write it backwards. It would be to
take common objects of our own street and tell the
tale of how each of them came to be in
the street at all. And for my immediate purposes, really
(00:48):
convenient to take two objects we have known all our
lives as features of fashion or respectability. One, which has
grown rarer recently is what we call a top hat.
The other, which is still a customary formality, is a
pair of trousers. The history of these humorous objects really
(01:09):
does give a clue to what has happened in England
for the last hundred years. It's not necessary to be
an esthete in order to regard both objects as the
reverse of beautiful, as tested by what may be called
the rational side of beauty. The lines of human limbs
can be beautiful, and so can the lines of loose drapery.
(01:30):
But not cylinders too loose to be the first and
too tight to be the second. Nor is a subtle
sense of harmony needed to see that, while there are
hundreds of differently proportioned hats, a hat that actually grows
larger toward the top is somewhat top heavy. But what
is largely forgotten is this. Yet, these two fantastic objects,
(01:53):
which now strike the eye as unconscious freaks, were originally
conscious freaks. Ancestors, to do them justice, did not think
them casual or commonplace. They thought them, if not ridiculous,
at least rococo. The top hat was the topmost point
of a riot of regency dandyism, and bucks wore trousers
(02:16):
while business men were still wearing knee breeches. It will
not be fancible to see a certain oriental touch in trousers,
which the later Romans also regarded as effeminately oriental. It
was an oriental touch found in many florid things of
the time, in Byron's poems or brightened pavilion. Now, the
(02:38):
interesting point is that for a whole serious century, these
instantaneous fantasies have remained like fossils in the carnival of
the regency, a few fools got into fancy dress, and
we have all remained in fancy dress. At least we
have remained in the dress, though we have lost the fancy.
(03:00):
I say this is typical of the most important thing
that happened in the Victorian time. For the most important
thing was that nothing happened. The very fuss that was
made about minor modification brings into relief the rigidity with
which the main lines of social life were left as
they were at the French Revolution. We talk of the
(03:22):
French Revolution as something that changed the world, but its
most important relation to England is that it did not
change England. A student of our history is concerned rather
with the effect it did not have than the effect
it did. If it be a splendid fate to have
survived the flood, the English oligarchy had that added splendor.
(03:45):
But even for the countries in which the revolution was
a convulsion, it was the last convulsion until that which
shakes the world to day. It gave their character to
all the commonwealths, which all talked about progress and were
occupied in marking time. Frenchmen, under all superficial reactions, remained
(04:07):
republican in spirit, as they had been when they first
wore top hats. Englishmen, under all superficial reforms remained oligarchical
in spirit, as they had been when they first wore trousers.
Only one power might be said to be growing, and
that in a plotting and prosaic fashion, the power in
(04:27):
the northeast, whose name was Prussia. And the English were
more and more learning that this growth may cause him
no alarm, since the North Germans were their cousins in
blood and their brothers in spirit. The first thing to
note that about the nineteenth century is that Europe remained
herself as compared with the Europe of the Great War,
(04:49):
and that England especially remained herself as compared even with
the rest of Europe. Granted this, we may give their
proper importance to the cautious internal changes of this country,
the small conscious and the large unconscious changes. Most of
the conscious ones were much upon the model of an
early one, the Great Reform Bill of eighteen thirty two,
(05:11):
and can be considered in the light of it. First
from the standpoint of most real reformers. The chief thing
about the Reform Bill was that it did not reform.
It had a huge tide of popular enthusiasm behind it,
which wholly disappeared when the people found themselves in front
of it. It enfranchised large masses of the middle classes,
(05:33):
it disfranchised very definite bodies of the working classes. And
it so struck the balance between the conservative and the
dangerous elements in the Commonwealth that the governing class was
rather stronger than before. The date. However, is important not
at all because it was the beginning of democracy, but
(05:54):
because it was the beginning of the best way ever
discovered of evading and postponing democracy. Here enters the homeopathic
treatment of revolution, since so often successful well into the
next generation. Disraeli, the brilliant Jewish adventurer, who was the
symbol of the English aristocracy being no longer genuine, extended
(06:15):
the franchise to the artisans, partly indeed as a party
move against his great rival Gladstone, but more as the
method by which the old popular pressure was first tired
out and then toned down. The politicians said the working
class was now strong enough to be allowed votes, it
(06:37):
would be true to say it was now weak enough
to be allowed votes. So in more recent times payment
of members which would once have been regarded and resisted
as an inrush of popular forces, was passed quietly and
without resistance, and regarded merely as an extension of parliamentary privileges.
(07:00):
The truth is that the old parliamentary alligarchy abandoned their
first line of trenches because they had by that time
constructed a second line of defense. It consisted in the
concentration of colossal political funds, in the private and irresponsible
power of the politicians, collected by the sale of peerages
and more important things, and expended on the gerrymandering of
(07:23):
the enormously expensive elections. In the presence of this inner obstacle,
a vote became about as valuable as a railway ticket
when there is a permanent block on the line. The
facade and outward form of this new secret government is
the merely mechanical application of what is called the party system.
(07:45):
The party system does not consist, as some suppose, of
two parties, but of one. If there were two real parties,
there could be no system. But if this was the
evolution of parliamentary reform, as represented by the First Reform Bill,
we can see the other side of it in the
social reform attacked immediately after the First Reform Bill. It
(08:08):
is a truth which should be a tower and a landmark,
that one of the first things done by the Reform
Parliament was to establish those harsh and dehumanized workhouses, which
both honest radicals and honest stories branded with the black
title of the new Basque Deal. This bitter name lingers
(08:29):
in our literature and can be found by the curious
in works of Carlile and Hood, but it is doubtless
interesting rather as a note of contemporary indignation than as
a correct comparison. It is easy to imagine the logicians
and legal orators of the parliamentary school of progress finding
(08:50):
many points of differentiation, and even of contrast. The beastial
was one central institution. The workhouses have been many, and
have every where transformed local life with whatever they have
to give of social sympathy and inspiration. Men of high
rank and great wealth were frequently sent to the best deal,
(09:11):
but no such mistake has ever been made by the
more business administration of the workhouse. Over the most capricious
operations of the Letters to Cachet, there still hovered some
hazy traditional idea that a man is put in prison
to punish him for something. It was the discovery of
a later social science that men who cannot be punished
(09:35):
can still be imprisoned. But the deepest and most decisive
difference lies in the better fortune of the new best deal,
for no mob has ever dared to storm it, and
it never fell. The new poor law was indeed not
wholly new, in the sense that it was the culmination
and clear renunciation of a principle foreshadowed in the earlier
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poor Law of Elizabeth, which was one of the many
anti popular effects of the Great Pillage. When the monasteries
were swept away and a medieval system of hospitality destroyed,
tramps and beggars became a problem, the solution of which
has always tended towards slavery. Even when the question of
(10:21):
slavery has been cleared of the irrelevant question of cruelty,
it is obvious that a desperate man might find mister
Bumble and the board of Guardians less cruel than cold
weather and the bare ground, even if he were allowed
to sleep on the ground, which, by a veritable nightmare
of nonsense and injustice, he is not. He is actually
(10:45):
punished for sleeping under a bush on the specific and
stated ground that he cannot afford a bid. It is obvious, however,
that he may find his best physical good by going
into the workhouse, as he often found the tint pagan times,
by selling himself into slavery. The point is that the
(11:07):
solution remains servile even when mister Bumple and the Board
of Guardians ceased to be in a common sense cruel.
The pagan might have the luck to sell himself to
a kind master. The principle of the new poor law,
which has so far proved permanent in our society, is
that the man lost all his civic rights, and lost
(11:29):
them solely through poverty. There is a touch of irony,
though hardly of mere hypocrisy, in the fact that the
Parliament which effected this reform had just been abolishing black
slavery by buying out the slave owners in the British colonies.
The slave owners were bought out at a price big
(11:50):
enough to be called blackmail. But it would be misunderstanding
the national mentality to deny the sincerity of the sentiment.
Wilberforce represented in this the real wave of Wesleyan religion,
which had made a humane reaction against Calvinism, and was
in no mean sense philanthropic. But there is something romantic
(12:14):
in the English mind which can always see what is remote.
It is the strongest example of what men lose by
being longsighted. It is fair to say that they gain
many things also, the poems that are like adventures, and
the adventures that are like poems. It is a national saber,
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and therefore in itself neither good nor evil. And it
depends on the application whether we find a scriptural text
for it, in the wish to take the wings of
the morning and abide in the outermost parts of the sea,
or merely in the saying that the eyes of a
fool are in the ends of the earth. Anyhow, the
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unconscious nineteenth century movement, so slow that it seems stationary,
was altogether in this direction of which workhouse philanthropy is
the type. Nevertheless, it had one national institution to combat
and overcome, one institution, all the more intensely national because
it was not official and in a sense not even political.
(13:21):
The modern trade union was the inspiration and creation of
the English It is still largely known throughout Europe by
its English name. It was the English expression of the
European effort to resist the tendency of capitalism to reach
its natural culmination in slavery. In this it has an
almost weird psychological interest, for it is a return to
(13:44):
the past by men ignorant of the past, like the
sub conscious action of some man who has lost his memory.
We say that history repeats itself, and it is even
more interesting when it unconsciously repeats itself. No man on
earth is kept so ignorant to the Middle Ages as
the British workmen, except perhaps the British business man who
(14:08):
employs him. Yet all who know even a little of
the Middle Ages can see that the modern trade union
is a groping for the ancient guild. It is true
that those who look to the trade union, and even
those clear sighted enough to call it the guild, are
often without the faintest tinge of medieval mysticism, or even
of medieval morality. But this fact is in itself the
(14:31):
most striking and even staggering tribute to medieval morality. It
is all the clinching logic of coincidence. If large numbers
of the most hard headed atheists had evolved out of
their own inner consciousness, the notion that a number of
bachelors or spinsters ought to live together in celibate groups
for the good of the poor, or the observation of
(14:53):
certain hours and offices. It would be a very strong
point in favor of the monasteries. It be all the
stronger if the atheist had never heard of monasteries. It
would be strongest of all if they hated the very
name of monasteries. And it is all the stronger because
the man who puts his trust in trades unions does
(15:14):
not call himself a Catholic or even a Christian, if
he does call himself a guild socialist. The trade union
movement passed through many perils, including a ludicrous attempt of
certain lawyers to condemn as criminal conspiracy that trade union solidarity,
(15:34):
of which their own profession is the strongest and most
startling example in the world. The struggle culminated in gigantic
strikes which split the country in every direction in the
earlier part of the twentieth century, but another process, with
much more power at its back, was also in operation.
(15:56):
The principle represented by the New Poor Law proceeded on
its court and in one important respect altered its course.
Though it can hardly be said to have altered its object,
it can most correctly be stated by saying that the
employers themselves, who already organized business, began to organize social reform.
(16:19):
It was more picturesquely expressed by a cynical aristocrat in
Parliament who said, we are all socialists now. The socialists,
the body of completely sincere men, led by several conspicuously
brilliant men, had long hammered into men's heads the hopeless
sterility of mere non interference in exchange. The socialists proposed
(16:42):
that the states should not merely interfere in business, but
should take over the business and pay all men as
equal way journers, or at any rate as wayjourners. The
employers were not willing to surrender their own position to
the state, and this project has largely faded from politics.
Viser of them were willing to pay better wages, and
(17:03):
they were especially willing to bestow various other benefits, so
long as they were bestowed after the manner of wages.
Thus we had a series of social reforms which, for
good or evil, all tended in the same direction. The
permission to employees to claim certain advantages as employees and
as something permanently different from employers. Of these the obvious
(17:27):
examples were employer's liability, old age pensions, and as marking
another and more decisive stride in the process, the Insurance Act.
The latter in particular and the whole plan of the
social reform in general, were modeled upon Germany. Indeed, the
(17:48):
whole English life of this period was overshadowed by Germany.
We had now reached, for good or evil, the final
fulfillment of that gathering influence which began to grow on
us in the seventeenth century, which was solidified by the
military alliances of the eighteenth century, and which in the
nineteenth century had been turned into a philosophy, not to
(18:10):
say a mythology. German metaphysics had thinned our theology, so
that many a man's most solemn conviction about Good Friday
was that Friday was named after Freya. German history had
simply annexed English history, so that it was almost counted
the duty of any patriotic Englishman to be proud of
(18:32):
being a German. The genius of Carlisle the culture preached
by Matthew Arnold would not persuasive as they were, have
alone produced this effect, but for an external phenomena of
great force our internal policy was transformed by our foreign policy,
and foreign policy was dominated by the more and more
(18:54):
drastic steps which the Prussian, now clearly the prince of
all the German tribes, was taking to extend the German
influence in the world. Denmark was robbed of two provinces,
France was robbed of two provinces. And though the fall
of Paris was felt almost everywhere as the fall of
(19:18):
the capital of civilization, a thing like the sacking of
Rome by the Goths, many of the most influential people
in England still saw nothing in it but the solid
success of our kinsman and old allies of Waterlooth, the
moral methods which achieved it, the juggling with the Augustinburg claim,
(19:39):
the forgery of the MS telegram were either successfully concealed
or were but cloudily appreciated. The higher criticism had entered
into our ethics as well as our theology. Our view
of Europe was also distorted and made disproportionate by the
accident of a natural can concerned for Constantinople and our
(20:02):
route to India, which led Palmerston and later premiers to
support the Turk and see Russia as the only enemy
This somewhat cynical reaction was summed up in the strange
figure of Disraeli, who made a pro Turkish settlement, full
of his native indifference to the Christian subjects of Turkey,
(20:24):
and sealed it at Berlin in the presence of Bismarck.
Disraeli was not without insight into the inconsistencies and illusions
of the English. He said many sagacious things about them,
and one especially when he told the Manchester School that
their motto was peace and plenty amid a starving people
(20:45):
and with the world in arms. But what he said
about peace and plenty might well be parodied as a
comment on what he himself said about peace with honor.
Returning from that Berlin conference. He should have said, I
bring you peace with honor, Peace with the seeds of
the most horrible war of history, and honor as the
(21:07):
dupes and victims of the old Bully in Berlin. But
it was, as we have seen, especially in social reform,
that Germany was believed to be leading the way and
to have found the secret of dealing with the economic evil.
In the case of insurance, which was a test case,
she was applauded for obliging all her workmen to set
(21:28):
apart a portion of their wages for any time of sickness,
and numerous other provisions both in Germany and England pursued
the same ideal, which was that of protecting the poor
against themselves. It everywhere involved an external power having a
finger in the family pie, but little attention was paid
(21:49):
to any friction thus caused. For all prejudices against the
process were supposed to be the growth of ignorance, and
that ignorance was already being attacked by what was called education,
an enterprise also inspired largely by the example and partly
by the commercial competition of Germany. It was pointed out
(22:12):
that in Germany governments and great employers thought it well
worth their while to apply the grandest scale of organization
and the minutest inquisition of detail to the instruction of
the whole German race. The government was the stronger for
training its scholars as it trained its soldiers. The big
businesses were the stronger for manufacturing mind as they manufactured material.
(22:36):
English education was made compulsory, it was made free. Many good,
earnest and enthusiastic men labored to create a ladder of
standards and examinations which would connect the cleverest to the
poor with the culture of the English universities and the
current teaching in history or philosophy. But it cannot be
(22:57):
said that the connection is very complete, or the itch
even so thorough as the German achievement. For whatever reason,
the poor Englishman remained in many things much as his
fathers had been, and seemed to think the higher criticism
too high for him even to criticize. And then a
(23:17):
day came, and if we were wise, we thanked God
that we had failed. Education, if it had ever really
been in question, would doubtless have been a noble gift,
education in the sense of the central tradition of history,
with its freedom, its family honor, its chivalry, which is
the flower of Christendom. But what would our populace in
(23:40):
our epic have actually learned if they had learned all
that our schools and universities had to teach. That England
was but a little branch on a large Teutonic tree,
That an unfathomable spiritual sympathy, all encircling like the sea,
had always made us the natural allies of the great
folk by the the flowing rind, that all light came
(24:02):
from luther and Lutheran Germany, whose science was still purging
Christianity of its Greek and Roman accretions, that Germany was
a forest faded to grow, that France was a dung
heap faded to decay, a dung heap with a crowing
cock on it. What would the latter of education have
(24:23):
led to except a platform on which a posturing professor
proved that a cousin German was the same as a
German cousin. What would the goutters Knife have learned as
a graduate except to embrace a Saxon because he was
the other half of an Anglo saxon. The day came
(24:43):
and the ignorant fellow found he had other things to learn,
and he was quicker than his educated countrymen, for he
had nothing to unlearn. He in whose honor all had
been said and sung, stirred, and stepped across the border
of Belgium, then were spread out before men's eyes all
(25:04):
the beauties of his culture and all the benefits of
his organization. Then we beheld under a lifting daybreak what
light we had followed, and after what image we had
labored to refashion ourselves, Nor in any story of mankind.
Has the irony of God chosen the foolish things so
(25:26):
catastrophically to confound the wise. For the common crowd of
poor and ignorant Englishmen, because they only knew that they
were Englishmen, burst through the filthy cobwebs of four hundred
years and stood where their fathers stood when they knew
that they were Christian men. The English poor, broken in
(25:51):
every revolt, bullied by every fashion, long despoiled of property,
and now being despoiled of liberty, entered history with a
noise of trumpets, and turned themselves in two years into
one of the iron armies of the world. And when
the critic of politics and literature, feeling that this war
(26:14):
is after all heroic, looks around him to find the hero,
he can point to nothing but a mob. End of
Chapter seventeen.
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