THE CRIMES
OF ENGLAND
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THE CRIMES
OF ENGLAND
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G. K. CHESTERTON
Author of #eretics, ‘Orthodoxy,’
‘What's Wrong with the World,'
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LONDON
CECIL PALMER & - HAYWARD
oAKLEY House, BLOOMSBURY STREET

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Firſt Edition November 1915
Second Edition. December 1915
Printed in Great Britain .
&y Turnbull & Søears, Edinburgh

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28
CHAPTER I
SoME WoRDs To PROFEssoR WHIRLwind
The German Professor, his need of Education
for Debate—Three Mistakes of German Contro-
versialists—The Multiplicity of Excuses—False-
hood against Experience—Kultur preached by
Unkultur—The Mistake about Bernard Shaw—
German Lack of Welt-Politik—Where England
is really Wrong.
CHAPTER II
The PROTESTANT HERO
Suitable Finale for the German Emperor—
Frederick II. and the Power of Fear—German
Influence in England since Luther—Our German
Kings and Allies—Triumph of Frederick the
Great.
CHAPTER III
THE ENIGMA of WATERLoo
How we helped Napoleon—The Revolution
and the Two Germanies—Religious Resistance of
Austria and Russia — Irreligious Resistance of
Prussia and England—Negative Irreligion of
England; its Idealism in Snobbishness—Posi-
tive Irreligion of Prussia; no Idealism in Any-
thing—Allegory and the French Revolution—
PAGE
2 I
34
The Dual Personality of England; the Double
Battle—Triumph of Blucher. . . .
6 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
CHAPTER IV
THE CoMING of THE JANIssa RIES g 46
The Sad Story of Lord Salisbury—Ireland and
Heligoland—The Young Men of Ireland—The
Dirty Work—The Use of German Mercenaries
—The Unholy Alliance—Triumph of the German
Mercenaries. -
CHAPTER V
THE LosT ENGLAND . - 57
Truth about England and Ireland—Murder and
the Two Travellers—Real Defence of England
—The Lost Revolution—Story of Cobbett and
the Germans—Historical Accuracy of Cobbett–
Violence of the English Language—Exaggerated
Truths versus Exaggerated Lies—Defeat of the
People—Triumph of the German Mercenaries.
CHAPTER VI
HAMLET AND THE DANes : . * tº 69
Degeneration of Grimm’s Fairy Tales—From
Tales of Terror to Tales of Terrorism–German
Mistake of being Deep—The Germanisation of
Shakespeare—Carlyle and the Spoilt Child—The
Test of Teutonism—Hell or Hans Andersen—
Causes of English Inaction — Barbarism and
Splendid Isolation—The Peace of the Plutocrats
---Hamlet the Englishman—The Triumph of
Bismarck.
CHAPTER VII
THE MIDNIGHT of EURope . iº ** 82
The Two Napoleons—Their Ultimate Success
— The Interlude of Sedan—The Meaning of an
Emperor — The Triumph of Versailles—The
True Innocence of England—Triumph of the
Kaiser. -
CONTENTS
CHAPTER VIII
THE WRONG HoRSE
Lord Salisbury Again—The Influence of 1870
–The Fairy Tale of Teutonism—The Adoration
of the Crescent—The Reign of the Cynics—Last
Words to Professor Whirlwind.
CHAPTER IX
THE Awake NING of ENGLAND
The March of Montenegro—The Anti-Servile
State—The Prussian Preparation—The Sleep of
England—The Awakening of England.
CHAPTER X
THE BATTLE of THE MARNE .
The Hour of Peril—The Human Deluge—
The English at the Marne.
PAGE
93
Ioô
II9

CHAPTER I
SOME WORDS TO
PROFESSOR WHIRLWIND
DEAR PROFESSOR WHIRLw1ND,
Your name in the original German
is too much for me; and this is the nearest I
propose to get to it: but under the majestic image
of pure wind marching in a movement wholly
circular I seem to see, as in a vision, something
of your mind. But the grand isolation of your
thoughts leads you to express them in such words
as are gratifying to yourself, and have an in-
conspicuous or even an unfortunate effect upon
others. If anything were really to be made of
your moral campaign against the English nation,
it was clearly necessary that somebody, if it were
only an Englishman, should show you how to
leave off professing philosophy and begin to prac-
tise it. I have therefore sold myself into the
Prussian service, and in return for a cast-off suit
of the Emperor's clothes (the uniform of an Eng-
lish midshipman), a German hausfrau's recipe for
poison gas, two penny cigars, and twenty-five Iron
Crosses, I have consented to instruct you in the
rudiments of international controversy. Of this
part of my task I have here little to say that is not
covered by a general adjuration to you to observe
9
IC THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
certain elementary rules. They are, roughly speak-
ing, as follows:—
First, stick to one excuse. Thus if a tradesman,
with whom your social relations are slight, should
chance to find you toying with the coppers in his
till, you may possibly explain that you are in-
terested in Numismatics and are a Collector of
Coins; and he may possibly believe you. But if
you tell him afterwards that you pitied him for
being overloaded with unwieldy copper discs, and
were in the act of replacing them by a silver six-
pence of your own, this further explanation, so far
from increasing his confidence in your motives, will
(strangely enough) actually decrease it. And if
you are so unwise as to be struck by yet another
brilliant idea, and tell him that the pennies were all
bad pennies, which you were concealing to save
him from a police prosecution for coining, the
tradesman may even be so wayward as to institute
a police prosecution himself. Now this is not in
any way an exaggeration of the way in which you
have knocked the bottom out of any case you may
ever conceivably have had in such matters as the
sinking of the Lusitania. With my own eyes I
have seen the following explanations, apparently
proceeding from your pen, (i) that the ship was
a troop-ship carrying soldiers from Canada; (ii)
that if it wasn't, it was a merchant-ship unlawfully
carrying munitions for the soldiers in France; (iii)
that, as the passengers on the ship had been
warned in an advertisement, Germany was justified
in blowing them to the moon; (iv) that there
were guns, and the ship had to be torpedoed
SOME WORDS TO PROFESSOR WHIRLWIND 11
because the English captain was just going to
fire them off; (v) that the English or American
authorities, by throwing the Lusitania at the
heads of the German commanders, subjected them
to an insupportable temptation; which was appar-
ently somehow demonstrated or intensified by the
fact that the ship came up to schedule time, there
being some mysterious principle by which having
tea at tea-time justifies poisoning the tea; (vi)
that the ship was not sunk by the Germans at all
but by the English, the English captain having
deliberately tried to drown himself and some
thousand of his own countrymen in order to cause
an exchange of stiff notes between Mr Wilson
and the Kaiser. If this interesting story be true,
I can only say that such frantic and suicidal de-
votion to the most remote interests of his country
almost earns the captain pardon for the crime.
But do you not see, my dear Professor, that the
very richness and variety of your inventive genius
throws a doubt upon each explanation when con-
sidered in itself? We who read you in England
reach a condition of mind in which it no longer
very much matters what explanation you offer, or
whether you offer any at all. We are prepared
to hear that you sank the Lusitania because the
sea-born sons of England would live more happily
as deep-sea fishes, or that every person on board
was coming home to be hanged. You have ex-
plained yourself so completely, in this clear way,
to the Italians that they have declared war on you,
and if you go on explaining yourself so clearly to
the Americans they may quite possibly do the same.
I 2 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
Second, when telling such lies as may seem
necessary to your international standing, do not
tell the lies to the people who know the truth.
Do not tell the Eskimos that snow is bright
green; nor tell the negroes in Africa that the
sun never shines in that Dark Continent. Rather
tell the Eskimos that the sun never shines in
Africa; and then, turning to the tropical Africans,
see if they will believe that snow is green.
Similarly, the course indicated for you is to
slander the Russians to the English and the
English to the Russians; and there are hundreds
of good old reliable slanders which can still be
used against both of them. There are probably
still Russians who believe that every English
gentleman puts a rope round his wife's neck
and sells her in Smithfield. There are certainly
still Englishmen who believe that every Russian
gentleman takes a rope to his wife's back and
whips her every day. But these stories, pictur-
esque and useful as they are, have a limit to their
use like everything else; and the limit consists
in the fact that they are not true, and that there
necessarily exists a group of persons who know
they are not true. It is so with matters of fact
about which you asseverate so positively to us, as
if they were matters of opinion. Scarborough
might be a fortress; but it is not. I happen to
know it is not. Mr Morel may deserve to be
universally admired in England; but he is not
universally admired in England. Tell the Russians
that he is by all means; but do not tell us.
We have seen him; we have also seen Scar-
SOME WORDS TO PROFESSOR WHIRLWIND 13
borough. You should think of this before you
speak.
Third, don't perpetually boast that you are
cultured in language which proves that you are
not. You claim to thrust yourself upon everybody
on the ground that you are stuffed with wit and
wisdom, and have enough for the whole world.
But people who have wit enough for the whole
world, have wit enough for a whole newspaper
paragraph. And you can seldom get through
even a whole paragraph without being mono-
tonous, or irrelevant, or unintelligible, or self-
contradictory, or broken-minded generally. If
you have something to teach us, teach it to us
now. If you propose to convert us after you
have conquered us, why not convert us before
you have conquered us? As it is, we cannot
believe what you say about your superior educa-
tion because of the way in which you say it. If
an Englishman says “I don't make no mistakes in .
English, not me,” we can understand his remark;
but we cannot endorse it. To say “Je parler le
Frenche language, non demi,” is comprehensible,
but not convincing. And when you say, as you
did in a recent appeal to the Americans, that the
Germanic Powers have sacrificed a great deal of
“red fluid" in defence of their culture, we point
out to you that cultured people do not employ
such a literary style. Or when you say that the
Belgians were so ignorant as to think they were
being butchered when they weren't, we only
wonder whether you are so ignorant as to think
you are being believed when you aren't. Thus
I4. THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
for instance, when you brag about burning Venice
to express your contempt for “tourists,” we
cannot think much of the culture, as culture,
which supposes St Mark's to be a thing for
tourists instead of historians. This, however,
would be the least part of our unfavourable
judgment. That judgment is complete when we
have read such a paragraph as this, prominently
displayed in a paper in which you specially spread
yourself: “That the Italians have a perfect
knowledge of the fact that this city of antiquities
and tourists is subject, and rightly subject, to
attack and bombardment, is proved by the measures
they took at the beginning of the war to remove
some of their greatest art treasures.” Now
culture may or may not include the power to
admire antiquities, and to restrain oneself from
the pleasure of breaking them like toys. But
culture does, presumably, include the power to
think. For less laborious intellects than your
own it is generally sufficient to think once. But
if you will think twice or twenty times, it cannot
but dawn on you that there is something wrong
in the reasoning by which the placing of diamonds
in a safe proves that they are “rightly subject”
to a burglar. The incessant assertion of such
things can do little to spread your superior
culture; and if you say them too often people
may even begin to doubt whether you have any
superior culture after all. The earnest friend
now advising you cannot but grieve at such in-
cautious garrulity. If you confined yourself to
single words, uttered at intervals of about a month
SOME WORDS TO PROFESSOR WHIRLWIND 15
or so, no one could possibly raise any rational
objection, or subject them to any rational criticism.
In time you might come to use whole sentences
without revealing the real state of things.
Through neglect of these maxims, my dear
Professor, every one of your attacks upon England
has gone wide. In pure fact they have not
touched the spot, which the real critics of Eng-
land know to be a very vulnerable spot. We
have a real critic of England in Mr Bernard Shaw,
whose name you parade but apparently cannot
spell; for in the paper to which I have referred
he is called Mr Bernhard Shaw. Perhaps you
think he and Bernhardi are the same man. But
if you quoted Mr Bernard Shaw's statement in-
stead of misquoting his name, you would find that
his criticism of England is exactly the opposite of
your own; and naturally, for it is a rational
criticism. He does not blame England for being
against Germany. He does most definitely blame
England for not being sufficiently firmly and em-
phatically on the side of Russia. He is not such
a fool as to accuse Sir Edward Grey of being a
fiendish Machiavelli plotting against Germany; he
accuses him of being an amiable aristocratic stick
who failed to frighten the Junkers from their
plan of war. Now, it is not in the least a ques-
tion of whether we happen to like this quality
or that: Mr Shaw, I rather fancy, would dislike
such verbose compromise more than downright
plotting. It is simply the fact that Englishmen
like Grey are open to Mr Shaw's attack and are
not open to yours. It is not true that the English
I6 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
were sufficiently clear-headed or self-controlled to
conspire for the destruction of Germany. Any
man who knows England, any man who hates
England as one hates a living thing, will tell you
it is not true. The English may be snobs, they
may be plutocrats, they may be hypocrites, but
they are not, as a fact, plotters; and I gravely
doubt whether they could be if they wanted to.
The mass of the people are perfectly incapable
of plotting at all, and if the small ring of rich
people who finance our politics were plotting for
anything, it was for peace at almost any price.
Any Londoner who knows the London streets and
newspapers as he knows the Nelson column or the
Inner Circle, knows that there were men in the
governing class and in the Cabinet who were
literally thirsting to defend Germany until Ger-
many, by her own act, became indefensible. If
they said nothing in support of the tearing up of
the promise of peace to Belgium, it is simply
because there was nothing to be said.
You were the first people to talk about World-
Politics; and the first people to disregard them
altogether. Even your foreign policy is domestic
policy. It does not even apply to any people who
are not Germans; and of your wild guesses about
some twenty other peoples, not one has gone
right even by accident. Your two or three shots
at my own not immaculate land have been such
that you would have been much nearer the truth
if you had tried to invade England by crossing
the Caucasus, or to discover England among the
South Sea Islands. With your first delusion, that
SOME worDS TO PROFESSOR WHIRLWIND 17
our courage was calculated and malignant when in
truth our very corruption was timid and confused,
I have already dealt. The case is the same with
your second favourite phrase; that the British
army is mercenary. You learnt it in books and
not in battlefields; and I should like to be present
at a scene in which you tried to bribe the most
miserable little loafer in Hammersmith as if he
were a cynical condottiere selling his spear to
some foreign city. It is not the fact, my dear
sir. You have been misinformed. The British
Army is not at this moment a hireling army any
more than it is a conscript army. It is a volunteer
army in the strict sense of the word; nor do I
object to your calling it an amateur army. There
is no compulsion, and there is next to no pay.
It is at this moment drawn from every class of the
community, and there are very few classes which
would not earn a little more money in their
ordinary trades. It numbers very nearly as many
men as it would if it were a conscript army; that
is with the necessary margin of men unable to
serve or needed to serve otherwise. Ours is a
country in which that democratic spirit which is
common to Christendom is rather unusually sluggish
and far below the surface. And the most genuine
and purely popular movement that we have had
since the Chartists has been the enlistment for
this war. By all means say that such vague and
sentimental volunteering is valueless in war if you
think so; or even if you don't think so. By all
means say that Germany is unconquerable and
that we cannot really kill you. But if you say
B - - * ,
I 8 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
that we do not really want to kill you, you do us
an injustice. You do indeed.
I need not consider the yet crazier things that
some of you have said; as that the English intend
to keep Calais and fight France as well as Ger-
many for the privilege of purchasing a frontier
and the need to keep a conscript army. That,
also, is out of books, and pretty mouldy old books
at that. It was said, I suppose, to gain sympathy
among the French, and is therefore not my im-
mediate business, as they are eminently capable of
looking after themselves. I merely drop one word
in passing, lest you waste your powerful intellect
on such projects. The English may some day for-
give you; the French never will. You Teutons
are too light and fickle to understand the Latin
seriousness. My only concern is to point out that
about England, at least, you are invariably and
miraculously wrong.
Now speaking seriously, my dear Professor, it
will not do. It could be easy to fence with you
for ever and parry every point you attempt to
make, until English people began to think there
was nothing wrong with England at all. But I
refuse to play for safety in this way. There is a
very great deal that is really wrong with England,
and it ought not to be forgotten even in the full
blaze of your marvellous mistakes. I cannot have
my countrymen tempted to those pleasures of
intellectual pride which are the result of comparing
themselves with you. The deep collapse and
yawning chasm of your ineptitude leaves me upon
a perilous spiritual elevation. Your mistakes are
SOME WORDS TO PROFESSOR WHIRLWIND 19
matters of fact; but to enumerate them does not
exhaust the truth. For instance, the learned man
who rendered the phrase in an English advertise-
ment “cut you dead" as “hack you to death,”
was in error; but to say that many such adver-
tisements are vulgar is not an error. Again, it is
true that the English poor are harried and in-
secure, with insufficient instinct for armed revolt,
though you will be wrong if you say that they are
occupied literally in shooting the moon. It is true
that the average Englishman is too much attracted
by aristocratic society; though you will be in
error if you quote dining with Duke Humphrey
as an example of it. In more ways than one you
forget what is meant by idiom. -
I have therefore thought it advisable to provide
you with a catalogue of the real crimes of
England; and I have selected them on a prin-
ciple which cannot fail to interest and please you.
On many occasions we have been very wrong
indeed. We were very wrong indeed when we
took part in preventing Europe from putting a
term to the impious piracies of Frederick the .
Great. We were very wrong indeed when we
allowed the triumph over Napoleon to be soiled
with the mire and blood of Blucher's sullen
savages. We were very wrong indeed when we
allowed the peaceful King of Denmark to be
robbed in broad daylight by a brigand named
Bismarck; and when we allowed the Prussian
swashbucklers to enslave and silence the French
provinces which they could neither govern nor
persuade. We were very wrong indeed when we
zo THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
flung to such hungry adventurers a position so
important as Heligoland. We were very wrong
indeed when we praised the soulless Prussian
education and copied the soulless Prussian laws.
Knowing that you will mingle your tears with
mine over this record of English wrong-doing, I
dedicate it to you, and I remain,
Yours reverently,
G. K. CHESTERTON
CHAPTER II
THE PROTESTANT HERO
A question is current in our looser English
journalism touching what should be done with the
German Emperor after a victory of the Allies.
Our more feminine advisers incline to the view
that he should be shot. This is to make a mistake
about the very nature of hereditary monarchy.
Assuredly the Emperor William at his worst would
be entitled to say to his amiable Crown Prince
what Charles II. said when his brother warned
him of the plots of assassins: “They will never
kill me to make you king.” Others, of greater
monstrosity of mind, have suggested that he should
be sent to St Helena. So far as an estimate of
his historical importance goes, he might as well be
sent to Mount Calvary. What we have to deal
with is an elderly, nervous, not unintelligent person
who happens to be a Hohenzollern; and who, to
do him justice, does think more of the Hohen-
zollerns as a sacred caste than of his own particular
place in it. In such families the old boast and
motto of hereditary kingship has a horrible and
degenerate truth. The king never dies; he only
decays for ever. -
If it were a matter of the smallest importance
what happened to the Emperor William when
- - 21
2 2. THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
once his house had been disarmed, I should satisfy
my fancy with another picture of his declining
years; a conclusion that would be peaceful,
humane, harmonious, and forgiving. -
In various parts of the lanes and villages of
South England the pedestrian will come upon an
old and quiet public-house, decorated with a dark
and faded portrait in a cocked hat and the singular
inscription, “The King of Prussia.” These inn
signs probably commemorate the visit of the Allies
after 1815, though a great part of the English
middle classes may well have connected them with
the time when Frederick II. was earning his title
of the Great, along with a number of other
territorial titles to which he had considerably
less claim. Sincere and simple-hearted Dissenting
ministers would dismount before that sign (for
in those days Dissenters drank beer like Chris-
tians, and indeed manufactured most of it) and
would pledge the old valour and the old victory of
him whom they called the Protestant Hero. We
should be using every word with literal exactitude
if we said that he was really something devilish
like a hero. Whether he was a Protestant hero
or not can be decided best by those who have
read the correspondence of a writer calling himself
Voltaire, who was quite shocked at Frederick's
utter lack of religion of any kind. But the little
Dissenter drank his beer in all innocence and rode
on. And the great blasphemer of Potsdam would
have laughed had he known; it was a jest after
his own heart. Such was the jest he made when
he called upon the emperors to come to com-
THE PROTESTANT HERO 2 3
munion, and partake of the eucharistic body of
Poland. Had he been such a Bible reader as the
Dissenter doubtless thought him, he might haply
have foreseen the vengeance of humanity upon
his house. He might have known what Poland
was and was yet to be; he might have known
that he ate and drank to his damnation, discerning
not the body of God.
Whether the placing of the present German
Emperor in charge of one of these wayside public-
houses would be a jest after his own heart possibly
remains to be seen. But it would be much more
melodious and fitting an end than any of the
sublime euthanasias which his enemies provide for
him. That old sign creaking above him as he sat
on the bench outside his home of exile would be a
much more genuine memory of the real greatness
of his race than the modern and almost gimcrack
stars and garters that were pulled in Windsor
Chapel. From modern knighthood has departed
all shadow of chivalry; how far we have travelled
from it can easily be tested by the mere suggestion
that Sir Thomas Lipton, let us say, should wear
his lady's sleeve round his hat or should watch his
armour in the Chapel of St Thomas of Canterbury.
The giving and receiving of the Garter among
despots and diplomatists is now only part of that
sort of pottering mutual politeness which keeps the
peace in an insecure and insincere state of society.
But that old blackened wooden sign is at least
and after all the sign of something; the sign of
the time when one solitary Hohenzollern did not
only set fire to fields and cities, but did truly set
24 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
on fire the minds of men, even though it were fire
from hell.
Everything was young once, even Frederick th
Great. It was an appropriate preface to the
terrible epic of Prussia that it began with an un-
natural tragedy of the loss of youth. That blind
and narrow savage who was the boy's father had
just sufficient difficulty in stamping out every trace
of decency in him, to show that some such traces
must have been there. If the younger and greater
Frederick ever had a heart, it was a broken heart;
broken by the same blow that broke his flute.
When his only friend was executed before his
eyes, there were two corpses to be borne away;
and one to be borne on a high war-horse through
victory after victory: but with a small bottle of
poison in the pocket. It is not irrelevant thus to
pause upon the high and dark house of his child-
hood. For the peculiar quality which marks out
Prussian arms and ambitions from all others of the
kind consists in this wrinkled and premature
antiquity. There is something comparatively
boyish about the triumphs of all the other tyrants.
There was something better than ambition in the
beauty and ardour of the young Napoleon. He
was at least a lover; and his first campaign was
like a love-story. All that was pagan in him
worshipped the Republic as men worship a woman,
and all that was Catholic in him understood the
paradox of Our Lady of Victories. Henry VIII.,
a far less reputable person, was in his early days a
good knight of the later and more florid school of
chivalry; we might almost say that he was a fine
THE PROTESTANT HERO 25
old English gentleman so long as he was young.
Even Nero was loved in his first days: and there
must have been some cause to make that Christian
maiden cast flowers on his dishonourable grave.
But the spirit of the great Hohenzollern smelt
from the first of the charnel. He came out to his
first victory like one broken by defeats; his
strength was stripped to the bone and fearful as a
fleshless resurrection ; for the worst of what could
come had already befallen him. The very con-
struction of his kingship was built upon the
destruction of his manhood. He had known the
final shame; his soul had surrendered to force.
He could not redress that wrong; he could only
repeat it and repay it. He could make the souls
of his soldiers surrender to his gibbet and his
whipping-post; he could make the souls of the
nations surrender to his soldiers. He could only
break men in as he had been broken; while he
could break in, he could never break out. He
could not slay in anger, nor even sin with sim-
plicity. Thus he stands alone among the con-
querors of their kind ; his madness was not due
to a mere misdirection of courage. Before the
whisper of war had come to him the foundations
of his audacity had been laid in fear.
Of the work he did in this world there need be
no considerable debate. It was romantic, if it be
romantic that the dragon should swallow St
George. He turned a small country into a great
one: he made a new diplomacy by the fulness and
far-flung daring of his lies: he took away from
criminality all reproach of carelessness and incom-
26 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
pleteness. He achieved an amiable combination
of thrift and theft. He undoubtedly gave to stark
plunder something of the solidity of property.
He protected whatever he stole as simpler men
protect whatever they have earned or inherited.
He turned his hollow eyes with a sort of loath-
some affection upon the territories which had most
reluctantly become his : at the end of the Seven
Years War men knew as little how he was to be
turned out of Silesia as they knew why he had
ever been allowed in it. In Poland, like a devil
in possession, he tore asunder the body he in-
habited ; but it was long before any man dreamed
that such disjected limbs could live again. Nor
were the effects of his break from Christian
tradition confined to Christendom; Macaulay's
world-wide generalisation is very true though
very Macaulayese. But though, in a long view, he
scattered the seeds of war all over the world, his
own last days were passed in a long and compara-
tively prosperous peace; a peace which received
and perhaps deserved a certain praise: a peace
with which many European peoples were content.
For though he did not understand justice, he
could understand moderation. He was the most
genuine and the most wicked of pacifists. He did
not want any more wars. He had tortured and
beggared all his neighbours; but he bore them no
malice for it. . -
The immediate cause of that spirited disaster,
the intervention of England on behalf of the new
Hohenzollern throne, was due, of course, to the
national policy of the first William Pitt. He was
THE PROTESTANT HERO 27
the kind of man whose vanity and simplicity are
too easily overwhelmed by the obvious. He saw
nothing in a European crisis except a war with
France; and nothing in a war with France except
a repetition of the rather fruitless glories of
Agincourt and Malplaquet. He was of the
Erastian Whigs, sceptical but still healthy-minded,
and neither good enough nor bad enough to
understand that even the war of that irreligious
age was ultimately a religious war. He had not
a shade of irony in his whole being; and beside
Frederick, already as old as sin, he was like a
rather brilliant schoolboy. -
But the direct causes were not the only causes,
nor the true ones. The true causes were con-
nected with the triumph of one of the two
traditions which had long been struggling in
England. And it is pathetic to record that the
foreign tradition was then represented by two of
the ablest men of that age, Frederick of Prussia
and Pitt ; while what was really the old English
tradition was represented by two of the stupidest
men that mankind ever tolerated in any age,
George III. and Lord Bute. Bute was the figure-
head of a group of Tories who set about fulfilling
the fine if fanciful scheme for a democratic
monarchy sketched by Bolingbroke in “The
Patriot King.” It was bent in all sincerity on
bringing men's minds back to what are called
domestic affairs, affairs as domestic as George III.
It might have arrested the advancing corruption of
Parliaments and enclosure of country-sides, by
turning men's minds from the foreign glories of
28 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
the great Whigs like Churchill and Chatham;
and one of its first acts was to terminate the
alliance with Prussia. Unfortunately, whatever
was picturesque in the piracy of Potsdam was
beyond the imagination of Windsor. But what-
ever was prosaic in Potsdam was already established
at Windsor; the economy of cold mutton, the
heavy-handed taste in the arts, and the strange
northern blend of boorishness with etiquette.
If Bolingbroke's ideas had been applied by a
spirited person, by a Stuart, for example, or
even by Queen Elizabeth (who had real spirit
along with her extraordinary vulgarity), the
national soul might have broken free from its
new northern chains. But it was the irony of the
situation that the King to whom Tories appealed
as a refuge from Germanism was himself a
German. -
We have thus to refer the origins of the
German influence in England back to the begin-
ning of the Hanoverian Succession; and thence
back to the quarrel between the King and the
lawyers which had issue at Naseby; and thence
again to the angry exit of Henry VIII, from the
mediaeval council of Europe. It is easy to ex-
aggerate the part played in the matter by that
great and human, though very pagan person,
Martin Luther. Henry VIII. was sincere in his
hatred for the heresies of the German monk, for
in speculative opinions Henry was wholly Catholic;
and the two wrote against each other innumerable
pages, largely consisting of terms of abuse, which
were pretty well deserved on both sides. But
"THE PROTESTANT HERO - 29
Luther was not a Lutheran. He was a sign of
the break-up of Catholicism; but he was not a
builder of Protestantism. The countries which
became corporately and democratically Protestant,
Scotland, for instance, and Holland, followed
Calvin and not Luther. And Calvin was a
Frenchman; an unpleasant Frenchman, it is true,
but one full of that French capacity for creating
official entities which can really act, and have a
kind of impersonal personality, such as the French
Monarchy or the Terror. Luther was an anarchist,
and therefore a dreamer. He made that which
is, perhaps, in the long run, the fullest and most
shining manifestation of failure; he made a name.
Calvin made an active, governing, persecuting
thing, called the Kirk. There is something ex-
pressive of him in the fact that he called even his
work of abstract theology “The Institutes.”
In England, however, there were elements of
chaos more akin to Luther than to Calvin. And we
may thus explain many things which appear rather
puzzling in our history, notably the victory of
Cromwell not only over the English Royalists but
over the Scotch Covenanters. It was the victory
of that more happy-go-lucky sort of Protestantism,
which had in it much of aristocracy but much also
of liberty, over that logical ambition of the Kirk
which would have made Protestantism, if possible,
as constructive as Catholicism had been. It might
be called the victory of Individualist Puritanism
over Socialist Puritanism. It was what Milton
meant when he said that the new presbyter was an
exaggeration of the old priest; it was his office
3o THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
•that acted, and acted very harshly. The enemies
of the Presbyterians were not without a meaning
when they called themselves Independents. To
this day no one can understand Scotland who does
not realise that it retains much of its mediaeval
sympathy with France, the French equality, the
French pronunciation of Latin, and, strange as it
may sound, is in nothing so French as in its Pres-
byterianism.
In this loose and negative sense only it may be
said that the great modern mistakes of England
can be traced to Luther. It is true only in this,
that both in Germany and England a Protestantism
softer and less abstract than Calvinism was found
useful to the compromises of courtiers and aristo-
crats; for every abstract creed does something for
human equality. Lutheranism in Germany rapidly
became what it is to-day—a religion of court chap-
lains. The reformed church in England became
something better; it became a profession for the
younger sons of squires. But these parallel ten-
dencies, in all their strength and weakness, reached,
as it were, symbolic culmination when the mediaeval
monarchy was extinguished, and the English squires
gave to what was little more than a German squire
the damaged and diminished crown.
It must be remembered that the Germanies were
at that time used as a sort of breeding-ground for
princes. There is a strange process in history by
which things that decay turn into the very opposite
of themselves. Thus in England Puritanism began
as the hardest of creeds, but has ended as the
softest; soft-hearted and not unfrequently soft-
"THE PROTESTANT HERO 3 I
headed. Of old the Puritan in war was certainly
the Puritan at his best ; it was the Puritan in
peace whom no Christian could be expected to
stand. Yet those Englishmen to-day who claim
descent from the great militarists of 1649 express
the utmost horror of militarism. An inversion of
an opposite kind has taken place in Germany.
Out of the country that was once valued as pro-
viding a perpetual supply of kings small enough
to be stop-gaps, has come the modern menace of
the one great king who would swallow the king-
doms of the earth. But the old German kingdoms
preserved, and were encouraged to preserve, the
good things that go with small interests and strict
boundaries, music, etiquette, a dreamy philosophy,
and so on. They were small enough to be uni-
versal. Their outlook could afford to be in some
degree broad and many-sided. They had the im-
partiality of impotence. All this has been utterly
reversed, and we find ourselves at war with a
Germany whose powers are the widest and whose
outlook is the narrowest in the world.
It is true, of course, that the English squires
put themselves over the new German prince rather
than under him. They put the crown on him as
an extinguisher. It was part of the plan that the
new-comer, though royal, should be almost rustic.
Hanover must be one of England's possessions and
not England one of Hanover's. But the fact that
the court became a German court prepared the soil,
so to speak; English politics were already subcon-
sciously committed to two centuries of the belittle-
ment of France and the gross exaggeration of
32 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
Germany. The period can be symbolically marked
out by Carteret, proud of talking German at the
beginning of the period, and Lord Haldane, proud
of talking German at the end of it. Culture is
already almost beginning to be spelt with a k. But
all such pacific and only slowly growing Teutonism
was brought to a crisis and a decision when the
voice of Pitt called us, like a trumpet, to the rescue
of the Protestant Hero.
Among all the monarchs of that faithless age,
the nearest to a man was a woman. Maria Theresa
of Austria was a German of the more generous
sort, limited in a domestic rather than a national
sense, firm in the ancient faith at which all her
own courtiers were sneering, and as brave as a
young lioness. Frederick hated her as he hated
everything German and everything good. He sets
forth in his own memoirs, with that clearness
which adds something almost superhuman to the
mysterious vileness of his character, how he calcu-
lated on her youth, her inexperience and her lack
of friends as proof that she could be dispoiled
with safety. He invaded Silesia in advance of his
own declaration of war (as if he had run on ahead
to say it was coming) and this new anarchic trick,
combined with the corruptibility of nearly all the
other courts, left him after the two Silesian wars
in possession of the stolen goods. But Maria
Theresa had refused to submit to the immorality
of nine points of the law. By appeals and con-
cessions to France, Russia, and other powers, she
contrived to create something which, against the
atheist innovator even in that atheist age, stood
THE PROTESTANT HERO 33
up for an instant like a spectre of the Crusades.
Had that Crusade been universal and whole-
hearted, the great new precedent of mere force
and fraud would have been broken ; and the
whole appalling judgment which is fallen upon
Christendom would have passed us by. But the
other Crusaders were only half in earnest for
Europe; Frederick was quite in earnest for
Prussia; and he sought for allies, by whose aid
this weak revival of good might be stamped out,
and his adamantine impudence endure for ever.
The allies he found were the English. It is
not pleasant for an Englishman to have to write
the words.
This was the first act of the tragedy, and with
it we may leave Frederick, for we are done with
the fellow though not with his work. It is
enough to add that if we call all his after actions
satanic, it is not a term of abuse, but of theology.
He was a Tempter. He dragged the other kings
to “partake of the body of Poland,” and learn
the meaning of the Black Mass. Poland lay
prostrate before three giants in armour, and her
name passed into a synonym for failure. The
Prussians, with their fine magnanimity, gave
lectures on the hereditary maladies of the man
they had murdered. They could not conceive of
life in those limbs; and the time was far off when
they should be undeceived. In that day five
nations were to partake not of the body, but of
the spirit of Poland; and the trumpet of the
resurrection of the peoples should be blown from
Warsaw to the western isles. -
€
CHAPTER III
THE ENIGMA OF WATERLOO
That great Englishman Charles Fox, who was
as national as Nelson, went to his death with the
firm conviction that England had made Napoleon.
He did not mean, of course, that any other Italian
gunner would have done just as well; but he did
mean that by forcing the French back on their
guns, as it were, we had made their chief gunner
necessarily their chief citizen. Had the French
Republic been left alone, it would probably have
followed the example of most other ideal experi-
ments; and praised peace along with progress and
equality. It would almost certainly have eyed
with the coldest suspicion any adventurer who
appeared likely to substitute his personality for
the pure impersonality of the Sovereign People;
and would have considered it the very flower of
republican chastity to provide a Brutus for such a
Caesar. But if it was undesirable that equality
should be threatened by a citizen, it was intoler-
able that it should be simply forbidden by a
foreigner. If France could not put up with French
soldiers she would very soon have to put up with
Austrian soldiers; and it would be absurd if,
having decided to rely on soldiering, she had
hampered the best French soldier even on the
34 r
THE ENIGMA OF WATERLOO 35
ground that he was not French. So that whether
we regard Napoleon as a hero rushing to the
country's help, or a tyrant profiting by the
country's extremity, it is equally clear that those
who made the war made the war-lord ; and those
who tried to destroy the Republic were those who
created the Empire. So, at least, Fox argued against
that much less English prig who would have called
him unpatriotic; and he threw the blame upon
Pitt's Government for having joined the anti-French
alliance, and so tipped up the scale in favour of a
military France. But whether he was right or no,
he would have been the readiest to admit that
England was not the first to fly at the throat of
the young Republic. Something in Europe much
waster and vaguer had from the first stirred against
it. What was it then that first made war—and
made Napoleon There is only one possible
answer : the Germans.
This is the second act of our drama of the
degradation of England to the level of Germany.
And it has this very important development; that
Germany means by this time all the Germans, just
as it does to-day. The savagery of Prussia and
the stupidity of Austria are now combined.
Mercilessness and muddleheadedness are met to-
gether; unrighteousness and unreasonableness
have kissed each other; and the tempter and the
tempted are agreed. The great and good Maria
Theresa was already old. She had a son who was
a philosopher of the school of Frederick; also a
daughter who was more fortunate, for she was
guillotined. It was natural, no doubt, that her
36 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
brother and relatives should disapprove of the
incident; but it occurred long after the whole
Germanic power had been hurled against the new
Republic. Louis XVI. himself was still alive and
nominally ruling when the first pressure came
from Prussia and Austria, demanding that the
trend of the French emancipation should be re-
versed. It is impossible to deny, therefore, that
what the united Germanies were resolved to de-
stroy was the reform and not even the Revolution.
The part which Joseph of Austria played in the
matter is symbolic. For he was what is called
an enlightened despot, which is the worst kind
of despot. He was as irreligious as Frederick the
Great, but not so disgusting or amusing. The
old and kindly Austrian family, of which Maria
Theresa was the affectionate mother, and Marie
Antoinette the rather uneducated daughter, was
already superseded and summed up by a rather
dried-up young man self-schooled to a Prussian
efficiency. The needle is already veering north-
ward. Prussia is already beginning to be the
captain of the Germanies “in shining armour.”
Austria is already becoming a loyal sekundant.
But there still remains one great difference
between Austria and Prussia which developed
more and more as the energy of the young
Napoleon was driven like a wedge between them.
The difference can be most shortly stated by
saying that Austria did, in some blundering and
barbaric way, care for Europe; but Prussia cared
for nothing but Prussia, Austria is not a nation;
you cannot really find Austria on the map. But
THE ENIGMA OF WATERLOO 37
Austria is a kind of Empire; a Holy Roman
Empire that never came, an expanding and con-
tracting dream. It does feel itself, in a vague
patriarchal way, the leader, not of a nation, but
of nations. It is like some dying Emperor of
Rome in the decline; who should admit that the
legions had been withdrawn from Britain or from
Parthia, but would feel it as fundamentally natural
that they should have been there, as in Sicily or
Southern Gaul. I would not assert that the aged
Francis Joseph imagines that he is Emperor of
Scotland or of Denmark; but I should guess that
he retains some notion that if he did rule both the
Scots and the Danes, it would not be more incon-
gruous than his ruling both the Hungarians and
the Poles. This cosmopolitanism of Austria has
in it a kind of shadow of responsibility for Chris-
tendom. And it was this that made the difference
between its proceedings and those of the purely
selfish adventurer from the north, the wild dog of
Pomerania. .
It may be believed, as Fox himself came at last
to believe, that Napoleon in his latest years was
really an enemy to freedom, in the sense that he
was an enemy to that very special and occidental
form of freedom which we call Nationalism. The
resistance of the Spaniards, for instance, was cer-
tainly a popular resistance. It had that peculiar,
belated, almost secretive strength with which war
is made by the people. It was quite easy for a
conqueror to get into Spain; his great difficulty
was to get out again. It was one of the paradoxes
of history that he who had turned the mob into
38 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
an army, in defence of its rights against the princes,
should at last have his army worn down, not by
princes but by mobs. It is equally certain that at
the other end of Europe, in burning Moscow and
on the bridge of the Beresina, he had found the
common soul, even as he had found the common
sky his enemy. But all this does not affect the
first great lines of the quarrel, which had begun
before horsemen in Germanic uniform had waited
vainly upon the road to Varennes or had failed
upon the miry slope up to the windmill of Valmy.
And that duel, on which depended all that our
Europe has since become, had great Russia and
gallant Spain and our own glorious island only as
subordinates or seconds. That duel, first, last,
and for ever, was a duel between the Frenchman
and the German; that is, between the citizen and
the barbarian. -
It is not necessary nowadays to defend the
French Revolution, it is not necessary to defend
even Napoleon, its child and champion, from
criticisms in the style of Southey and Alison,
which even at the time had more of the atmo-
sphere of Bath and Cheltenham than of Turcoing
and Talavera. The French Revolution was at-
tacked because it was democratic and defended
because it was democratic; and Napoleon was
not feared as the last of the iron despots, but
as the first of the iron democrats. What France
set out to prove France has proved; not that
common men are all angels, or all diplomatists,
or all gentlemen (for these inane aristocratic
illusions were no part of the Jacobin theory), but
THE ENIGMA OF WATERLOO 39
that common men can all be citizens and can all be
soldiers; that common men can fight and can rule.
There is no need to confuse the question with any
of those escapades of a floundering modernism
which have made nonsense of this civic common-
sense. Some Free Traders have seemed to leave
a man no country to fight for; some Free Lovers
seem to leave a man no household to rule. But
these things have not established themselves
either in France or anywhere else. What has
been established is not Free Trade or Free Love,
but Freedom; and it is nowhere so patriotic or so
domestic as in the country from which it came.
The poor men of France have not loved the land
less because they have shared it. Even the
patricians are patriots ; and if some honest
Royalists or aristocrats are still saying that de-
mocracy cannot organise and cannot obey, they
are none the less organised by it and obeying it,
nobly living or splendidly dead for it, along the
line from Switzerland to the sea. -
But for Austria, and even more for Russia,
there was this to be said; that the French Re-
publican ideal was incomplete, and that they
possessed, in a corrupt but still positive and often
popular sense, what was needed to complete it.
The Czar was not democratic, but he was humani-
tarian. He was a Christian Pacifist; there is
something of the Tolstoyan in every Russian.
It is not wholly fanciful to talk of the White
Czar: for Russia even destruction has a deathly
softness as of snow. Her ideas are often innocent
and even childish ; like the idea of Peace. The
40 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
phrase Holy Alliance was a beautiful truth for
the Czar, though only a blasphemous jest for his
rascally allies, Metternich and Castlereagh. Austria,
though she had lately fallen to a somewhat treason-
able toying with heathens and heretics of Turkey
and Prussia, still retained something of the old
Catholic comfort for the soul. Priests still bore
witness to that mighty mediaeval institution
which even its enemies concede to be a noble
nightmare. All their hoary political iniquities
had not deprived them of that dignity. If they
darkened the sun in heaven, they clothed it with
the strong colours of sunrise in garment or gloriole;
if they had given men stones for bread, the stones
were carved with kindly faces and fascinating tales.
If justice counted on their shameful gibbets
hundreds of the innocent dead, they could still
say that for them death was more hopeful than
life for the heathen. If the new daylight dis-
covered their vile tortures, there had lingered in
the darkness some dim memory that they were
tortures of Purgatory and not, like those which
Parisian and Prussian diabolists showed shameless
in the sunshine, of naked hell. They claimed a
truth not yet disentangled from human nature;
for indeed earth is not even earth without heaven,
as a landscape is not a landscape without the sky.
And in a universe without God there is not room
enough for a man.
It may be held, therefore, that there must in
any case have come a conflict between the old
world and the new ; if only because the old are
often broad, while the young are always narrow.
THE ENIGMA OF WATERLOO 4 I
The Church had learnt, not at the end but at the
beginning of her centuries, that the funeral of God
is always a premature burial. If the bugles of
Bonaparte raised the living populace of the passing
hour, she could blow that yet more revolutionary
trumpet that shall raise all the democracy of the
dead. But if we concede that collision was inevit-
able between the new Republic on the one hand and
Holy Russia and the Holy Roman Empire on the
other, there remain two great European forces
which, in different attitudes and from very different
motives, determined the ultimate combination.
Neither of them had any tincture of Catholic
mysticism. Neither of them had any tincture of
Jacobin idealism. Neither of them, therefore, had
any real moral reason for being in the war at
all. The first was England, and the second was
Prussia.
It is very arguable that England must, in any
case, have fought to keep her influence on the
ports of the North Sea. It is quite equally arguable
that if she had been as heartily on the side of the
French Revolution as she was at last against it,
she could have claimed the same concessions from
the other side. It is certain that England had no
necessary communion with the arms and tortures
of the Continental tyrannies, and that she stood at
the parting of the ways. England was indeed
an aristocracy, but a liberal one; and the ideas
growing in the middle classes were those which
had already made America, and were remaking
France. The fiercest Jacobins, such as Danton,
were deep in the liberal literature of England.
42 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
The people had no religion to fight for, as in
Russia or La Vendée. The parson was no longer
a priest, and had long been a small squire. Al-
ready that one great blank in our land had made
snobbishness the only religion of South England;
and turned rich men into a mythology. The effect
can be well summed up in that decorous abbrevia-
tion by which our rustics speak of “Lady's Bed-
straw,” where they once spoke of “Our Lady's
Bedstraw.” We have dropped the comparatively
democratic adjective, and kept the aristocratic
noun. South England is still, as it was called in
the Middle Ages, a garden; but it is the kind
where grow the plants called “lords and ladies.”
We became more and more insular even about
our continental conquests; we stood upon our
island as if on an anchored ship. We never
thought of Nelson at Naples, but only eternally
at Trafalgar; and even that Spanish name we
managed to pronounce wrong. But even if we
regard the first attack upon Napoleon as a national
necessity, the general trend remains true. It only
changes the tale from a tragedy of choice to a
tragedy of chance. And the tragedy was that,
for a second time, we were at one with the
Germans.
But if England had nothing to fight for but a
compromise, Prussia had nothing to fight for but
a negation. She was and is, in the supreme sense,
the spirit that denies. It is as certain that she
was fighting against liberty in Napoleon as it is
that she was fighting against religion in Maria
Theresa. What she was fighting for she would
THE ENIGMA OF WATERLOO 43
have found it quite impossible to tell you. At the
best, it was for Prussia; if it was anything else,
it was tyranny. She cringed to Napoleon when
he beat her, and only joined in the chase when
braver people had beaten him. She professed to
restore the Bourbons, and tried to rob them while
she was restoring them. For her own hand she
would have wrecked the Restoration with the
Revolution. Alone in all that agony of peoples,
she had not the star of one solitary ideal to light
the night of her nihilism.
The French Revolution has a quality which all
men feel; and which may be called a sudden
antiquity. Its classicalism was not altogether a
cant. When it had happened it seemed to have
happened thousands of years ago. It spoke in
parables; in the hammering of spears and the
awful cap of Phrygia. To some it seemed to pass
like a vision; and yet it seemed eternal as a group
of statuary. One almost thought of its most
strenuous figures as naked. It is always with a
shock of comicality that we remember that its
date was so recent that umbrellas were fashionable
and top-hats beginning to be tried. And it is a
curious fact, giving a kind of completeness to this
sense of the thing as something that happened
outside the world, that its first great act of arms
and also its last were both primarily symbols; and
but for this visionary character, were in a manner
vain. It began with the taking of the old and
almost empty prison called the Bastille; and we
always think of it as the beginning of the Revolu-
tion, though the real Revolution did not come till
44 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
some time after. And it ended when Wellington
and Blucher met in 1815; and we always think
of it as the end of Napoleon; though Napoleon
had really fallen before. And the popular imagery
is right, as it generally is in such things: for the
mob is an artist, though not a man of science.
The riot of the 14th of July did not specially de-
liver prisoners inside the Bastille, but it did deliver
the prisoners outside. Napoleon when he returned
was indeed a revenant, that is, a ghost. But
Waterloo was all the more final in that it was a
spectral resurrection and a second death. And in
this second case there were other elements that
were yet more strangely symbolic. That doubtful
and double battle before Waterloo was like the
dual personality in a dream. It corresponded
curiously to the double mind of the Englishman.
We connect Quatre Bras with things romantically
English to the verge of sentimentalism, with
Byron and “The Black Brunswicker.” We
naturally sympathise with Wellington against Ney.
We do not sympathise, and even then we did not
really sympathise, with Blucher against Napoleon.
Germany has complained that we passed over
lightly the presence of Prussians at the decisive
action. And well we might. Even at the time
our sentiment was not solely jealousy, but very
largely shame. Wellington, the grimmest and
even the most unamiable of Tories, with no French
sympathies and not enough human ones, has
recorded his opinion of his Prussian allies in terms
of curt disgust. Peel, the primmest and most
snobbish Tory that ever praised “our gallant
THE ENIGMA OF WATERLOO 45
Allies " in a frigid official speech, could not con-
tain himself about the conduct of Blucher's men,
Our middle classes did well to adorn their parlours
with the picture of the “Meeting of Wellington
and Blucher.” They should have hung up a com-
panion piece of Pilate and Herod shaking hands.
Then, after that meeting amid the ashes of
Hougomont, where they dreamed they had
trodden out the embers of all democracy, the
Prussians rode on before, doing after their kind.
After them went that ironical aristocrat out of
embittered Ireland, with what thoughts we know;
and Blucher, with what thoughts we care not;
and his soldiers entered Paris, and stole the sword
of Joan of Arc.
CHAPTER IV
THE COMING OF THE
JANISSARIES
The late Lord Salisbury, a sad and humorous
man, made many public and serious remarks that
have been proved false and perilous, and many
private and frivolous remarks which were valuable
and ought to be immortal. He struck dead the
stiff and false psychology of “social reform,” with
its suggestion that the number of public-houses
made people drunk, by saying that there were a
number of bedrooms at Hatfield, but they never
made him sleepy. Because of this it is possible to
forgive him for having talked about “living and
dying nations”: though it is of such sayings that
living nations die. In the same spirit he included
the nation of Ireland in the “Celtic fringe” upon
the west of England. It seems sufficient to remark
that the fringe is considerably broader than the
garment. But the fearful satire of time has very
sufficiently avenged the Irish nation upon him,
largely by the instrumentality of another fragment
of the British robe which he cast away almost con-
temptuously in the North Sea. The name of it is
Heligoland; and he gave it to the Germans.
The subsequent history of the two islands on
either side of England has been sufficiently ironical.
46
THE COMING OF THE JANISSARIES 47
If Lord Salisbury had foreseen exactly what would
happen to Heligoland, as well as to Ireland, he
might well have found no sleep at Hatfield in one
bedroom or a hundred. In the eastern isle he was
strengthening a fortress that would one day be
called upon to destroy us. In the western isle he
was weakening a fortress that would one day be
called upon to save us. In that day his trusted
ally, William Hohenzollern, was to batter our ships
and boats from the Bight of Heligoland; and in
that day his old and once-imprisoned enemy, John
Redmond, was to rise in the hour of English
jeopardy, and be thanked in thunder for the free
offer of the Irish sword. All that Robert Cecil
thought valueless has been our loss, and all that
he thought feeble our stay. Among those of his
political class or creed who accepted and welcomed
the Irish leader's alliance, there were some who
knew the real past relations between England and
Ireland, and some who first felt them in that hour.
All knew that England could no longer be a mere
mistress; many knew that she was now in some
sense a suppliant. Some knew that she deserved
to be a suppliant. These were they who knew a
little of the thing called history; and if they
thought at all of such dead catchwords as the
“Celtic fringe” for a description of Ireland, it was
to doubt whether we were worthy to kiss the hem
of her garment. If there be still any Englishman
who thinks such language extravagant, this chapter
is written to enlighten him. . .
In the last two chapters I have sketched in out-
line the way in which England, partly by historical
48 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
accident, but partly also by false philosophy, was
drawn into the orbit of Germany, the centre of
whose circle was already at Berlin. I need not
recapitulate the causes at all fully here. Luther
was hardly a heresiarch for England, though a
hobby for Henry VIII. But the negative Ger-
manism of the Reformation, its drag towards the
north, its quarantine against Latin culture, was in
a sense the beginning of the business. It is well
represented in two facts; the barbaric refusal of
the new astronomical calendar merely because it
was invented by a Pope, and the singular decision
to pronounce Latin as if it were something else,
making it not a dead language but a new language.
Later, the part played by particular royalties is
complex and accidental; “the furious German "
came and passed; the much less interesting Germans
came and stayed. Their influence was negative
but not negligible; they kept England out of that
current of European life into which the Gallophil
Stuarts might have carried her. Only one of the
Hanoverians was actively German; so German
that he actually gloried in the name of Briton, and
spelt it wrong. Incidentally, he lost America. It
is notable that all those eminent among the real
Britons, who spelt it right, respected and would
parley with the American Revolution, however
iingo or legitimist they were ; the romantic con-
servative Burke, the earth-devouring Imperialist
Chatham, even, in reality, the jog-trot Tory North.
The intractability was in the Elector of Hanover
more than in the King of England; in the narrow
and petty German prince who was bored by
THE COMING OF THE JANISSARIES 49
Shakespeare and approximately inspired by Handel.
What really clinched the unluckly companionship
of England and Germany was the first and second
alliance with Prussia; the first in which we pre-
vented the hardening tradition of Frederick the
Great being broken up by the Seven Years' War;
the second in which we prevented it being broken
up by the French Revolution and Napoleon. In
the first we helped Prussia to escape like a young
brigand; in the second we helped the brigand to
adjudicate as a respectable magistrate. Having
aided his lawlessness, we defended his legitimacy.
We helped to give the Bourbon prince his crown,
though our allies the Prussians (in their cheery
way) tried to pick a few jewels out of it before
he got it. Through the whole of that period, so
important in history, it must be said that we were
to be reckoned on for the support of unreformed
laws and the rule of unwilling subjects. There is,
as it were, an ugly echo even to the name of
Nelson in the name of Naples. But whatever is
to be said of the cause, the work which we did in
it, with steel and gold, was so able and strenuous
that an Englishman can still be proud of it. We
never performed a greater task than that in which
we, in a sense, saved Germany, save that in which
a hundred years later, we have now, in a sense, to
destroy her. History tends to be a façade of faded
picturesqueness for most of those who have not
specially studied it: a more or less monochrome
background for the drama of their own day. To
these it may well seem that it matters little whether
we were on one side or the other in a fight in
D
5o THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
which all the figures are antiquated; Bonaparte
and Blucher are both in old cocked hats; French
kings and French regicides are both not only dead
men but dead foreigners; the whole is a tapestry
as decorative and as arbitrary as the Wars of the
Roses. It was not so: we fought for something
real when we fought for the old world against the
new. If we want to know painfully and precisely
what it was, we must open an old and sealed and
very awful door, on a scene which was called
Ireland, but which then might well have been
called hell.
Having chosen our part and made war upon the
new world, we were soon made to understand
what such spiritual infanticide involved ; and were
committed to a kind of Massacre of the Inno-
cents. In Ireland the young world was repre-
sented by young men, who shared the democratic
dream of the Continent, and were resolved to foil
the plot of Pitt; who was working a huge
machine of corruption to its utmost to absorb
Ireland into the Anti-Jacobin scheme of England.
There was present every coincidence that could
make the British rulers feel they were mere
abbots of misrule. The stiff and self-conscious
figure of Pitt has remained standing incongruously
purse in hand; while his manlier rivals were
stretching out their hands for the sword, the onl
possible resort of men who cannot be bought and
refuse to be sold. A rebellion broke out and was
repressed ; and the government that repressed it
was ten times more lawless than the rebellion.
Fate for once seemed to pick out a situation in
THE COMING OF THE JANISSARIES 5 i
plain black and white like an allegory; a tragedy
of appalling platitudes. The heroes were really
heroes; and the villains were nothing but villains.
The common tangle of life, in which good men do
evil by mistake and bad men do good by accident,
seemed suspended for us as for a judgment. We had
to do things that not only were vile, but felt vile. We
had to destroy men who not only were noble, but
looked noble. They were men like Wolfe Tone,
a statesmen in the grand style who was not
suffered to found a state ; and Robert Emmet,
lover of his land and of a woman, in whose very
appearance men saw something of the eagle grace
of the young Napoleon. But he was luckier than
the young Napoleon ; for he has remained young.
He was hanged; not before he had uttered one
of those phrases that are the hinges of history.
He made an epitaph of the refusal of an epitaph:
and with a gesture has hung his tomb in heaven
like Mahomet's coffin. Against such Irishmen
we could only produce Castlereagh; one of the
few men in human records who seem to have
been made famous solely that they might be
infamous. He sold his own country, he oppressed
ours; for the rest he mixed his metaphors, and
has saddled two separate and sensible nations with
the horrible mixed metaphor called the Union.
Here there is no possible see-saw of sympathies as
there can be between Brutus and Caesar or
between Cromwell and Charles I. : there is simply
nobody who supposes that Emmet was out for
worldly gain, or that Castlereagh was out for any-
thing else. Even the incidental resemblances
$2 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
between the two sides only served to sharpen the
contrast and the complete superiority of the
nationalists. Thus, Castlereagh and Lord Edward
Fitzgerald were both aristocrats. But Castle-
reagh was the corrupt gentleman at the Court,
Fitzgerald the generous gentleman upon the land;
some portion of whose blood, along with some
portion of his spirit, descended to that great
gentleman, who—in the midst of the emetic im-
moralism of our modern politics—gave back that
land to the Irish peasantry. Thus again, all
such eighteenth-century aristocrats (like aristo-
crats almost anywhere) stood apart from the
popular mysticism and the shrines of the poor;
they were theoretically Protestants, but practically
pagans. But Tone was the type of pagan who
refuses to persecute, like Gallio: Pitt was the
type of pagan who consents to persecute; and his
place is with Pilate. He was an intolerant indif.
ferentist; ready to enfranchise the Papists, but
more ready to massacre them. Thus, once more, the
two pagans, Tone and Castlereagh, found a pagan
end in suicide. But the circumstances were such
that any man, of any party, ſelt that Tone had
died like Cato and Castlereagh had died like
Judas. -
The march of Pitt's policy went on ; and the
chasm between light and darkness deepened.
Order was restored ; and wherever order spread,
there spread an anarchy more awful than the sun
has ever looked on. Torture came out of the
crypts of the Inquisition and walked in the sun-
light of the streets and fields. A village vicar was
THE COMING OF THE JANISSARIES 53
slain with inconceivable stripes, and his corpse set
on fire with frightful jests about a roasted priest.
Rape became a mode of government. The viola-
tion of virgins became a standing order of police.
Stamped still with the same terrible symbolism,
the work of the English Government and the
English settlers seemed to resolve itself into
animal atrocities against the wives and daughters
of a race distinguished for a rare and detached
purity, and of a religion which makes of innocence
the Mother of God. In its bodily aspects it
became like a war of devils upon angels; as if
England could produce nothing but torturers, and
Ireland nothing but martyrs. Such was a part of
the price paid by the Irish body and the English
soul, for the privilege of patching up a Prussian
after the sabre-stroke of Jena.
But Germany was not merely present in the
spirit: Germany was present in the flesh. Without
any desire to underrate the exploits of the English
or the Orangemen, I can safely say that the finest
touches were added by soldiers trained in a
tradition inherited from the horrors of the Thirty
Years' War, and of what the old ballad called
“the cruel wars of High Germanie.” An
Irishman I know, whose brother is a soldier, and
who has relatives in many distinguished posts of
the British army, told me that in his childhood
the legend (or rather the truth) of '98 was so
frightfully alive that his own mother would not
have the word “soldier” spoken in her house.
Wherever we thus find the tradition alive we find
that the hateful soldier means especially the German
54 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
soldier. When the Irish say, as some of them do
say, that the German mercenary was worse than
the Orangemen, they say as much as human mouth
can utter. Beyond that there is nothing but the
curse of God, which shall be uttered in an unknown
tongue. -
The practice of using German soldiers, and
even whole German regiments, in the make-up
of the British army, came in with our German
princes, and reappeared on many important occa-
sions in our eighteenth-century history. They
were probably among those who encamped tri-
umphantly upon Drumossie Moor, and also (which
is a more gratifying thought) among those who
ran away with great rapidity at Prestonpans.
When that very typical German, George III.,
narrow, serious, of a stunted culture and coarse
in his very domesticity, quarrelled with all that
was spirited, not only in the democracy of America
but in the aristocracy of England, German troops
were very fitted to be his ambassadors beyond the
Atlantic. With their well-drilled formations they
followed Burgoyne in that woodland march that
failed at Saratoga; and with their wooden faces
beheld our downfall. Their presence had long
had its effect in various ways. In one way,
curiously enough, their very militarism helped
England to be less military; and especially to be
more mercantile. It began to be felt, faintly of
course and never consciously, that fighting was a
thing that foreigners had to do. It vaguely
increased the prestige of the Germans as the
military people, to the disadvantage of the French,
THE COMING OF THE JANISSARIES 55
whom it was the interest of our vanity to under-
rate. The mere mixture of their uniforms with
ours made a background of pageantry in which it
seemed more and more natural that English and
German potentates should salute each other like
cousins, and, in a sense, live in each other's
countries. Thus in 1908 the German Emperor
was already regarded as something of a menace
by the English politicians, and as nothing but a
madman by the English people. Yet it did not
seem in any way disgusting or dangerous that
Edward VII. should appear upon occasion in a
Prussian uniform. Edward VII. was himself a
friend to France, and worked for the French
Alliance. Yet his appearance in the red trousers
of a French soldier would have struck many
people as funny; as funny as if he had dressed
up as a Chinaman.
But the German hirelings or allies had another
character which (by that same strain of evil coin-
cidence which we are tracing in this book) en-
couraged all that was worst in the English
conservatism and inequality, while discouraging all
that was best in it. It is true that the ideal
Englishman was too much of a squire; but it is
just to add that the ideal squire was a good
squire. The best squire I know in fiction is
Duke Theseus in “The Midsummer Night's
Dream,” who is kind to his people and proud of
his dogs; and would be a perfect human being if
he were not just a little bit prone to be kind to
both of them in the same way. But such natural
and even pagan good-nature is consonant with the
56 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
warm wet woods and comfortable clouds of South
England; it never had any place among the harsh
and thrifty squires in the plains of East Prussia,
the land of the East Wind. They were peevish
as well as proud, and everything they created, but
especially their army, was made coherent by sheer
brutality. Discipline was cruel enough in all the
eighteenth-century armies, created long after the
decay of any faith or hope that could hold men
together. But the state that was first in Germany
was first in ferocity. Frederick the Great had to
forbid his English admirers to follow his regiments
during the campaign, lest they should discover that
the most enlightened of kings had only excluded
torture from law to impose it without law. This
influence, as we have seen, left on Ireland a fearful
mark which will never be effaced. English rule in
Ireland had been bad before; but in the broaden-
ing light of the revolutionary century I doubt
whether it could have continued as bad, if we had
not taken a side that forced us to flatter barbarian
tyranny in Europe. We should hardly have seen
such a nightmare as the Anglicising of Ireland if
we had not already seen the Germanising of
England. But even in England it was not without
its effects; and one of its effects was to rouse a
man who is, perhaps, the best English witness to
the effect on the England of that time of the
Alliance with Germany. With that man I shall
deal in the chapter that follows. .
CHAPTER V
THE LOST ENGLAND
Telling the truth about Ireland is not very
pleasant to a patriotic Englishman; but it is very
patriotic. It is the truth and nothing but the
truth which I have but touched on in the last
chapter. Several times, and especially at the
beginning of this war, we narrowly escaped ruin
because we neglected that truth, and would insist
on treating our crimes of the '98 and after as
very distant; while in Irish feeling, and in fact,
they are very near. Repentance of this remote
sort is not at all appropriate to the case, and will
not do. It may be a good thing to forget and
forgive; but it is altogether too easy a trick to
forget and be forgiven. -.
The truth about Ireland is simply this ; that
the relations between England and Ireland are .
the relations between two men who have to travel
together, one of whom tried to stab the other at
the last stopping-place or to poison the other at
the last inn. Conversation may be courteous, but
it will be occasionally forced. The topic of
attempted murder, its examples in history and
fiction, may be tactfully avoided in the sallies;
but it will be occasionally present in the thoughts.
Silences, not devoid of strain, will fall from time
- 57
58 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
to time. The partially murdered person may even
think an assault unlikely to recur; but it is asking
too much, perhaps, to expect him to find it im-
possible to imagine. And even if, as God grant,
the predominant partner is really sorry for his
former manner of predominating, and proves it
in some unmistakable manner—as by saving the
other from robbers at great personal risk—the
victim may still be unable to repress an abstract
psychological wonder about when his companion
first began to feel like that. Now this is not in
the least an exaggerated parable of the position
of England towards Ireland, not only in '98, but
far back from the treason that broke the Treaty
of Limerick and far onwards through the Great
Famine and after. The conduct of the English
towards the Irish after the Rebellion was quite
simply the conduct of one man who traps and
binds another, and then calmly cuts him about
with a knife. The conduct during the Famine
was quite simply the conduct of the first man if
he entertained the later moments of the second
man, by remarking in a chatty manner on the
very hopeful chances of his bleeding to death.
The British Prime Minister publicly refused to
stop the Famine by the use of English ships.
The British Prime Minister positively spread the
Famine, by making the half-starved populations
of Ireland pay for the starved ones. The common
verdict of a coroner's jury upon some emaciated
wretch was “Wilful murder by Lord John Russell”:
and that verdict was not only the verdict of Irish
public opinion, but is the verdict of history. But
THE LOST ENGLAND 59
there were those in influential positions in England
who were not content with publicly approving the
act, but publicly proclaimed the motive. The
Times, which had then a national authority and
respectability which gave its words a weight un-
known in modern journalism, openly exulted in
the prospect of a Golden Age when the kind of
Irishman native to Ireland would be “as rare
on the banks of the Liffy as a red man on the
banks of the Manhattan.” It seems sufficiently
frantic that such a thing should have been said
by one European of another, or even of a Red
Indian, if Red Indians had occupied anything like
the place of the Irish then and since ; if there
were to be a Red Indian Lord Chief Justice
and a Red Indian Commander-in-Chief, if the
Red Indian Party in Congress, containing first-
rate orators and fashionable novelists, could have
turned Presidents in and out ; if half the best
troops of the country were trained with the
tomahawk and half the best journalism of the
capital written in picture-writing, if later, by
general consent, the Chief known as Pine in the
Twilight, was the best living poet, or the Chief
Thin Red Fox, the ablest living dramatist. If
that were realised, the English critic probably
would not say anything scornful of red men; or
certainly would be sorry he said it. But the
extraordinary avowal does mark what was most
peculiar in the position. This has not been the
common case of misgovernment. It is not merely
that the institutions we set up were indefensible;
though the curious mark of them is that they were
6o THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
literally indefensible; from Wood's Halfpence to
the Irish Church Establishment. There can be
no more excuse for the method used by Pitt than
for the method used by Pigott. But it differs
further from ordinary misrule in the vital matter
of its object. The coercion was not imposed that
the people might live quietly, but that the people
might die quietly. And then we sit in an owlish
innocence of our sin, and debate whether the
Irish might conceivably succeed in saving Ireland.
We, as a matter of fact, have not even failed to
save Ireland. We have simply failed to destroy
her.
It is not possible to reverse this judgment or to
take away a single count from it. Is there, then,
anything whatever to be said for the English in
the matter? There is: though the English never
by any chance say it. Nor do the Irish say it;
though it is in a sense a weakness as well as a
defence. One would think the Irish had reason
to say anything that can be said against the Eng-
lish ruling class, but they have not said, indeed
they have hardly discovered, one quite simple fact
—that it rules England. They are right in asking
that the Irish should have a say in the Irish govern-
ment, but they are quite wrong in supposing that
the English have any particular say in English
government. And I seriously believe I am not
deceived by any national bias, when I say that the
common Englishman would be quite incapable of
the cruelties that were committed in his name.
But, most important of all, it is the historical fact
that there was another England, an England con-
THE LOST ENGLAND 61
sisting of common Englishmen, which not only
certainly would have done better, but actually did
make some considerable attempt to do better. If
anyone asks for the evidence, the answer is that
the evidence has been destroyed, or at least de-
liberately boycotted: but can be found in the
unfashionable corners of literature ; and, when
found, is final. If anyone asks for the great men
of such a potential democratic England, the answer
is that the great men are labelled small men, or
not labelled at all; have been successfully belittled
as the emancipation of which they dreamed has
dwindled. The greatest of them is now little
more than a name; he is criticised to be under-
rated and not to be understood; but he presented
all that alternative and more liberal Englishry; and
was enormously popular because he presented it.
In taking him as the type of it we may tell most
shortly the whole of this forgotten tale. And,
even when I begin to tell it, I find myself in the
presence of that ubiquitous evil which is the sub-
ject of this book. It is a fact, and I think it is
not a coincidence, that in standing for a moment
where this Englishman stood, I again find myself
confronted by the German soldier.
The son of a small Surrey farmer, a respect-
able Tory and churchman, ventured to plead
against certain extraordinary cruelties being in-
flicted on Englishmen whose hands were tied, by
the whips of German superiors; who were then
parading in English fields their stiff foreign uni-
forms and their sanguinary foreign discipline.
In the countries from which they came, of course,
62 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
such torments were the one monotonous means of
driving men on to perish in the dead dynastic
quarrels of the north; but to poor Will Cobbett,
in his provincial island, knowing little but the low
hills and hedges around the little church where
he now lies buried, the incident seemed odd–nay,
unpleasing. He knew, of course, that there was
then flogging in the British army also; but the
German standard was notoriously severe in such
things, and was something of an acquired taste.
Added to which he had all sorts of old grand-
motherly prejudices about Englishmen being pun-
ished by Englishmen, and notions of that sort.
He protested, not only in speech, but actually in
print. He was soon made to learn the perils of
meddling in the high politics of the High Dutch
militarists. The fine feelings of the foreign mer-
cenaries were soothed by Cobbett being flung into
Newgate for two years and beggared by a fine of
A looo. That small incident is a small transparent
picture of the Holy Alliance; of what was really
meant by a country, once half liberalised, taking
up the cause of the foreign kings. This, and not
“The Meeting of Wellington and Blucher,” should
be engraved as the great scene of the war. From
this intemperate Fenians should learn that the
Teutonic mercenaries did not confine themselves
solely to torturing Irishmen. They were equally
ready to torture Englishmen: for mercenaries are
mostly unprejudiced. To Cobbett's eye we were
suffering from allies exactly as we should suffer
from invaders. Boney was a bogey; but the
German was a nightmare, a thing actually sitting
THE LOST ENGLAND 63
on top of us. In Ireland the Alliance meant the
ruin of anything and everything Irish, from the
creed of St Patrick to the mere colour green.
But in England also it meant the ruin of anything
and everything English, from the Habeas Corpus
Act to Cobbett.
After this affair of the scourging, he wielded his
pen like a scourge until he died. This terrible
pamphleteer was one of those men who exist to
prove the distinction between a biography and a
life. From his biographies you will learn that he
was a Radical who had once been a Tory. From
his life, if there were one, you would learn that he
was always a Radical because he was always a
Tory. Few men changed less; it was round him
that the politicians like Pitt chopped and changed,
like fakirs dancing round a sacred rock. His
secret is buried with him; it is that he really cared
about the English people. He was conservative
because he cared for their past, and liberal be-
cause he cared for their future. But he was
much more than this. He had two forms of
moral manhood very rare in our time: he was
ready to uproot ancient successes, and he was
ready to defy oncoming doom. Burke said that few
are the partisans of a tyranny that has departed:
he might have added that fewer still are the
critics of a tyranny that has remained. Burke
certainly was not one of them. While lashing
himself into a lunacy against the French Revolu-
tion, which only very incidentally destroyed the
property of the rich, he never criticised (to do
him justice, perhaps never saw) the English
64 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
Revolution, which began with the sack of con-
vents, and ended with the fencing in of enclosures;
a revolution which sweepingly and systematically
destroyed the property of the poor. While
rhetorically putting the Englishman in a castle,
politically he would not allow him on a common.
Cobbett, a much more historical thinker, saw the
beginning of Capitalism in the Tudor pillage and
deplored it; he saw the triumph of Capitalism
in the industrial cities and defied it. The
paradox he was maintaining really amounted to
the assertion that Westminster Abbey is rather
more national than Welbeck Abbey. The same
paradox would have led him to maintain that a
Warwickshire man had more reason to be proud
of Stratford-on-Avon than of Birmingham. He
would no more have thought of looking for
England in Birmingham than of looking for Ireland
in Belfast. -
The prestige of Cobbett's excellent literary
style has survived the persecution of his equally
excellent opinions. But that style also is under-
rated through the loss of the real English tradition.
More cautious schools have missed the fact that
the very genius of the English tongue tends not
only to vigour, but specially to violence. The
Englishman of the leading articles is calm,
moderate, and restrained; but then the English-
man of the leading articles is a Prussian. The
mere English consonants are full of Cobbett.
Dr Johnson was our great man of letters when
he said “stinks,” not when he said “putrefaction.”
Take some common phrase like “raining cats and
THE LOST ENGLAND 65
dogs,” and note not only the extravagance of
imagery (though that is very Shakespearean), but
a jagged energy in the very spelling. Say
“chats" and “chiens” and it is not the same.
Perhaps the old national genius has survived the
urban enslavement most spiritedly in our comic
songs, admired by all men of travel and continental
culture, by Mr George Moore as by Mr Belloc.
One (to which I am much attached) had a
chorus—
“O wind from the South
Błow mud in the mouth
Of Jane, Jane, Jane.”
Note, again, not only the tremendous vision of
clinging soils carried skywards in the tornado, but
also the suitability of the mere sounds. Say
“boue” and “bouche” for mud and mouth and
it is not the same. Cobbett was a wind from the
South ; and if he occasionally seemed to stop his
enemies' mouths with mud, it was the real soil of
South England.
And as his seemingly mad language is very
literary, so his seemingly mad meaning is very
historical. Modern people do not understand
him because they do not understand the difference
between exaggerating a truth and exaggerating
a lie. He did exaggerate, but what he knew,
not what he did not know. He only appears
paradoxical because he upheld tradition against
fashion. A paradox is a fantastic thing that is
said once: a fashion is a more fantastic thing that
is said a sufficient number of times. I could give
numberless examples in Cobbett's case, but I will
E.
66 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
give only one. Anyone who finds himself full in
the central path of Cobbett's fury sometimes has
something like a physical shock. No one who
has read “The History of the Reformation ” will
ever forget the passage (I forget the precise
words) in which he says the mere thought of
such a person as Cranmer makes the brain reel,
and, for an instant, doubt the goodness of God;
but that peace and faith flew back into the soul
when we remember that he was burned alive.
Now this is extravagant. It takes the breath
away; and it was meant to. But what I wish
to point out is that a much more extravagant
view of Cranmer was, in Cobbett's day, the ac-
cepted view of Cranmer; not as a momentary
image, but as an immovable historical monument.
Thousands of parsons and penmen dutifully set
down Cranmer among the saints and martyrs; and
there are many respectable people who would do
so still. This is not an exaggerated truth, but
an established lie. Cranmer was not such a
monstrosity of meanness as Cobbett implies; but
he was mean. But there is no question of his
being less saintly than the parsonages believed;
he was not a saint at all; and not very attractive
even as a sinner. He was no more a martyr for
being burned than Crippen for being hanged.
Cobbett was defeated because the English people
was defeated. After the frame-breaking riots,
men, as men, were beaten; and machines, as
machines, had beaten them. Peterloo was as
much the defeat of the English as Waterloo was
the defeat of the French. Ireland did not get
THE LOST ENGLAND 67
Home Rule because England did not get it.
Cobbett would not forcibly incorporate Ireland,
least of all the corpse of Ireland. But before his
defeat Cobbett had an enormous following; his
“Register” was what the serial novels of Dickens
were afterwards to be. Dickens, by the way,
inherited the same instinct for abrupt diction, and
probably enjoyed writing “gas and gaiters” more
than any two other words in his works. But
Dickens was narrower than Cobbett, not by any
fault of his own, but because in the intervening
epoch of the triumph of Scrooge and Gradgrind the
link with our Christian past had been lost, save in
the single matter of Christmas, which Dickens
rescued romantically and by a hair's - breadth
escape. Cobbett was a yeoman; that is, a man
free and farming a small estate. By Dickens's
time, yeomen seemed as antiquated as bowmen.
Cobbett was mediaeval; that is, he was in almost
every way the opposite of what that word means
to-day. He was as egalitarian as St Francis, and
as independent as Robin Hood. Like that other
yeoman in the ballad, he bore in hand a mighty
bow; what some of his enemies would have called
a long bow. But though he sometimes overshot
the mark of truth, he never shot away from
it, like Froude. His account of that sixteenth
century in which the mediaeval civilisation ended,
is not more and not less picturesque than Froude's:
the difference is in the dull detail of truth. That
crisis was not the founding of a strong Tudor
monarchy, for the monarchy almost immediately
perished; it was the founding of a strong class
68 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
holding all the capital and land, for it holds them
to this day. Cobbett would have asked nothing
better than to bend his mediaeval bow to the cry
of “St George for Merry England,” for though he
pointed to the other and uglier side of the
Waterloo medal, he was patriotic; and his pre-
monitions were rather against Blucher than Welling-
ton. But if we take that old war-cry as his final
word (and he would have accepted it) we must
note how every term in it points away from what
the modern plutocrats call either progress or
empire. It involves the invocation of saints, the
most popular and the most forbidden form of
mediaevalism. The modern Imperialist no more
thinks of St George in England than he thinks of
St John in St John's Wood. It is nationalist in
the narrowest sense; and no one knows the
beauty and simplicity of the Middle Ages who
has not seen St George's Cross separate, as it was
at Crecy or Flodden, and noticed how much finer
a flag it is than the Union Jack. And the word
“merry” bears witness to an England famous for
its music and dancing before the coming of the
Puritans, the last traces of which have been
stamped out by a social discipline utterly un-
English. Not for two years, but for ten decades
Cobbett has been in prison; and his enemy, the
“efficient” foreigner has walked about in the sun-
light, magnificent, and a model for men. I do not
think that even the Prussians ever boasted about
“Merry Prussia.”
CHAPTER VI
HAMLET AND THE DANES
In the one classic and perfect literary product
that ever came out of Germany—I do not mean
“Faust,” but Grimm's Fairy Tales—there is a
gorgeous story about a boy who went through
a number of experiences without learning how to
shudder. In one of them, I remember, he was
sitting by the fireside and a pair of live legs fell
down the chimney and walked about the room by
themselves. Afterwards the rest fell down and
joined up; but this was almost an anti-climax.
Now that is very charming, and full of the best
German domesticity. It suggests truly what wild
adventures the traveller can find by stopping at
home. But it also illustrates in various ways how
that great German influence on England, which is
the matter of these essays, began in good things
and gradually turned to bad. It began as a
literary influence, in the lurid tales of Hoffmann,
the tale of “Sintram,” and so on; the revisualising
of the dark background of forest behind our
European cities. That old German darkness was
immeasurably livelier than the new German light.
The devils of Germany were much better than
the angels. Look at the Teutonic pictures of .
“The Three Huntsmen.” and observe that while
. 69
7o THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
the wicked huntsman is effective in his own way,
the good huntsman is weak in every way, a sort
of sexless woman with a face like a teaspoon.
But there is more in these first forest tales, these
homely horrors. In the earlier stages they have
exactly this salt of salvation, that the boy does
not shudder. They are made fearful that he may
be fearless, not that he may fear. As long as
that limit is kept, the barbaric dreamland is decent;
and though individuals like Coleridge and De
Quincey mixed it with worse things (such as
opium), they kept that romantic rudiment upon
the whole. But the one disadvantage of a forest
is that one may lose one's way in it. And the
one danger is not that we may meet devils, but
that we may worship them. In other words, the
danger is one always associated, by the instinct
of folk-lore, with forests; it is enchantment, or
the fixed loss of oneself in some unnatural captivity
or spiritual servitude. And in the evolution of
Germanism, from Hoffmann to Hauptmann, we do
see this growing tendency to take horror seriously,
which is diabolism. The German begins to have
an eerie abstract sympathy with the force and
fear he describes, as distinct from their objective.
The German is no longer sympathising with the
boy against the goblin, but rather with the goblin
against the boy. There goes with it, as always
goes with idolatry, a dehumanised seriousness;
the men of the forest are already building upon
a mountain the empty throne of the Superman.
Now it is just at this point that I for one, and
most men who love truth as well as tales, begin
HAMLET AND THE DANES 71
to lose interest. I am all for “going out into the
world to seek my fortune,” but I do not want to
find it—and find it is only being chained for ever
among the frozen figures of the Sieges Allees.
I do not want to be an idolator, still less an idol.
I am all for going to fairyland, but I am also all
for coming back. That is, I will admire, but I
will not be magnetised, either by mysticism or
militarism. I am all for German fantasy, but I
will resist German earnestness till I die, I am all
for Grimm's Fairy Tales; but if there is such a
thing as Grimm's Law, I would break it, if I knew
what it was. I like the Prussian's legs (in their
beautiful boots) to fall down the chimney and
walk about my room. But when he procures a
head and begins to talk, I feel a little bored.
The Germans cannot really be deep because
they will not consent to be superficial. They are
bewitched by art, and stare at it, and cannot see
round it. They will not believe that art is a light
and slight thing—a feather, even if it be from an
angelic wing. Only the slime is at the bottom of
a pool; the sky is on the surface. We see this
in that very typical process, the Germanising of
Shakespeare. I do not complain of the Germans
forgetting that Shakespeare was an Englishman.
I complain of their forgetting that Shakespeare
was a man; that he had moods, that he made
mistakes, and, above all, that he knew his art was
an art and not an attribute of deity. That is what
is the matter with the Germans; they cannot
“ring fancy's knell”; their knells have no gaiety.
The phrase of Hamlet about “holding the mirror
72 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
up to nature” is always quoted by such earnest
critics as meaning that art is nothing if not realistic.
But it really means (or at least its author really
thought) that art is nothing if not artificial.
Realists, like other barbarians, really believe the
mirror; and therefore break the mirror. Also
they leave out the phrase “as 'twere,” which must
be read into every remark of Shakespeare, and
especially every remark of Hamlet. What I mean
by believing the mirror, and breaking it, can be
recorded in one case I remember; in which a
realistic critic quoted German authorities to prove
that Hamlet had a particular psycho-pathological
abnormality, which is admittedly nowhere men-
tioned in the play. The critic was bewitched;
he was thinking of Hamlet as a real man, with a
background behind him three dimensions deep—
which does not exist in a looking-glass. “The
best in this kind are but shadows.” No German
commentator has ever made an adequate note on
that. Nevertheless, Shakespeare was an English-
man; he was nowhere more English than in his
blunders; but he was nowhere more successful
than in the description of very English types of
character. And if anything is to be said about
Hamlet, beyond what Shakespeare has said about
him, I should say that Hamlet was an Englishman
too. He was as much an Englishman as he was a
gentleman, and he had the very grave weaknesses
of both characters. The chief English fault,
especially in the nineteenth century, has been lack
of decision, not only lack of decision in action, but
lack of the equally essential decision in thought—
HAMLET AND THE DANES 73
which some call dogma. And in the politics of the
last century, this English Hamlet, as we shall see,
played a great part, or rather refused to play it.
There were, then, two elements in the German
influence; a sort of pretty playing with terror and
a solemn recognition of terrorism. The first
pointed to elfland, and the second to-shall we
say, Prussia. And by that unconscious symbolism
with which all this story develops, it was soon to
be dramatically tested, by a definite political query,
whether what we really respected was the Teutonic
fantasy or the Teutonic fear.
The Germanisation of England, its transition and
turning-point, was well typified by the genius of
Carlyle. The original charm of Germany had
been the charm of the child. The Teutons were
never so great as when they were childish; in
their religious art and popular imagery the Christ-
Child is really a child, though the Christ is hardly
a man. The self-conscious fuss of their pedagogy
is half-redeemed by the unconscious grace which
called a school not a seed-plot of citizens, but
merely a garden of children. All the first and
best forest-spirit is infancy, its wonder, its wilful-
ness, even its still innocent fear. Carlyle marks
exactly the moment when the German child
becomes the spoilt child. The wonder turns to
mere mysticism; and mere mysticism always turns
to mere immoralism. The wilfulness is no longer
liked, but is actually obeyed. The fear becomes
a philosophy. Panic hardens into pessimism; or
else, what is often equally depressing, optimism.
Carlyle, the most influential English writer of
74. THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
that time, marks all this by the mental interval
between his “French Revolution ” and his
“Frederick the Great.” In both he was
Germanic. Carlyle was really as sentimental as
Goethe; and Goethe was really as sentimental
as Werther. Carlyle understood everything about
the French Revolution, except that it was a
French revolution. He could not conceive that
cold anger that comes from a love of insulted
truth. It seemed to him absurd that a man
should die, or do murder, for the First Proposition
of Euclid; should relish an egalitarian state like
an equilateral triangle; or should defend the Pons
Asinorum as Cocles defended the Tiber bridge.
But anyone who does not understand that does
not understand the French Revolution—nor, for
that matter, the American Revolution. “We
hold these truths to be self-evident": it was the
fanaticism of truism. But though Carlyle had
no real respect for liberty, he had a real reverence
for anarchy. He admired elemental energy. The
violence which repelled most men from the Re-
volution was the one thing that attracted him to
it. While a Whig like Macaulay respected the
Girondists but deplored the Mountain, a Tory like
Carlyle rather liked the Mountain and quite unduly
despised the Girondists. This appetite for form-
less force belongs, of course, to the forests, to
Germany. But when Carlyle got there, there
fell upon him a sort of spell which is his tragedy
and the English tragedy, and, in no small degree,
the German tragedy too. The real romance of
the Teutons was largely a romance of the Southern
HAMLET AND THE DANES 75
Teutons, with their castles, which are almost
literally castles in the air, and their river which is
walled with vineyards and rhymes so naturally to
wine. But as Carlyle's was rootedly a romance of
conquest, he had to prove that the thing which
conquered in Germany was really more poetical
than anything else in Germany. Now the thing
that conquered in Germany was about the most
prosaic thing of which the world ever grew weary.
There is a great deal more poetry in Brixton than
in Berlin. Stella said that Swift could write
charmingly about a broom-stick; and poor Carlyle
had to write romantically about a ramrod. Com-
pare him with Heine, who had also a detached
taste in the mystical grotesques of Germany, but
who saw what was their enemy: and offered to
nail up the Prussian eagle like an old crow as a
target for the archers of the Rhine. Its prosaic
essence is not proved by the fact that it did not
produce poets: it is proved by the more deadly
fact that it did. The actual written poetry of
Frederick the Great, for instance, was not even
German or barbaric, but simply feeble — and
French. Thus Carlyle became continually gloomier
as his fit of the blues deepened into Prussian
blues; nor can there be any wonder. His philo-
sophy had brought out the result that the
Prussian was the first of Germans, and, therefore,
the first of men. No wonder he looked at the
rest of us with little hope. -
But a stronger test was coming both for Car-
lyle and England. Prussia, plodding, policing, as
materialist as mud, went on solidifying and
76 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
strengthening after unconquered Russia and un-
conquered England had rescued her where she
lay prostrate under Napoleon. In this interval
the two most important events were the Polish
national revival, with which Russia was half in-
clined to be sympathetic, but Prussia was implac-
ably coercionist; and the positive refusal of the
crown of a united Germany by the King of Prussia,
simply because it was constitutionally offered by a
free German Convention. Prussia did not want
to lead the Germans: she wanted to conquer the
Germans. And she wanted to conquer other
people first. She had already found her brutal, if
humorous, embodiment in Bismarck; and he began
with a scheme full of brutality and not without
humour. He took up, or rather pretended to take
up, the claim of the Prince of Augustenberg to
duchies which were a quite lawful part of the land
of Denmark. In support of this small pretender
he enlisted two large things, the Germanic body
called the Bund and the Austrian Empire. It is
possibly needless to say that after he had seized
the disputed provinces by pure Prussian violence,
he kicked out the Prince of Augustenberg, kicked
out the German Bund, and finally kicked out the
Austrian Empire too, in the sudden campaign of
Sadowa. He was a good husband and a good
father; he did not paint in water colours; and of
such is the Kingdom of Heaven.
But the symbolic intensity of the incident was
this. The Danes expected protection from Eng-
land; and if there had been any sincerity in the
ideal side of our Teutonism they ought to have
HAMLET AND THE DANES 77
had it. They ought to have had it even by the
pedantries of the time, which already talked of
Latin inferiority: and were never weary of explain-
ing that the country of Richelieu could not rule
and the country of Napoleon could not fight.
But if it was necessary for whosoever would be
saved to be a Teuton, the Danes were more
Teuton than the Prussians. If it be a matter of
vital importance to be descended from Vikings,
the Danes really were descended from Vikings,
while the Prussians were descended from mongrel
Slavonic savages. If Protestantism be progress,
the Danes were Protestant; while they had at-
tained quite peculiar success and wealth in that
small ownership and intensive cultivation which is
very commonly a boast of Catholic lands. They
had in a quite arresting degree what was claimed
for the Germanies as against Latin revolutionism :
quiet freedom, quiet prosperity, a simple love of
fields and of the sea. But, moreover, by that co-
incidence which dogs this drama, the English of
that Victorian epoch had found their freshest
impression of the northern spirit of infancy and
wonder in the works of a Danish man of genius,
whose stories and sketches were so popular in
England as almost to have become English. Good
as Grimm's Fairy Tales were, they had been col-
lected and not created by the modern German;
they were a museum of things older than any
nation, of the dateless age of once-upon-a-time.
When the English romantics wanted to find the
folk-tale spirit still alive, they found it in the small
country of one of those small kings, with whom
78 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
the folk-tales are almost comically crowded. There
they found what we call an original writer, who
was nevertheless the image of the origins. They
found a whole fairyland in one head and under one
nineteenth-century top hat. Those of the English
who were then children owe to Hans Andersen
more than to any of their own writers, that essential
educational emotion which feels that domesticity is
not dull but rather fantastic; that sense of the fairy-
land of furniture, and the travel and adventure of
the farmyard. His treatment of inanimate things as
animate was not a cold and awkward allegory: it
was a true sense of a dumb divinity in things that
are. Through him a child did feel that the chair
he sat on was something like a wooden horse.
Through him children and the happier kind of
men did feel themselves covered by a roof as by
the folded wings of some vast domestic fowl; and
feel common doors like great mouths that opened
to utter welcome. In the story of “The Fir
Tree” he transplanted to England a living bush
that can still blossom into candles. And in his
tale of “The Tin Soldier” he uttered the true
defence of romantic militarism against the prigs
who would forbid it even as a toy for the nursery.
He suggested, in the true tradition of the folk-
tales, that the dignity of the fighter is not in his
largeness but rather in his smallness, in his stiff
loyalty and heroic helplessness in the hands of
larger and lower things. These things, alas, were
an allegory. When Prussia, finding her crimes
unpunished, afterwards carried them into France
as well as Denmark, Carlyle and his school made
HAMLET AND THE DANES 79
some effort to justify their Germanism, by pitting
what they called the piety and simplicity of Ger-
many against what they called the cynicism and
ribaldry of France. But nobody could possibly
pretend that Bismarck was more pious and simple
than Hans Andersen; yet the Carlyleans looked
on with silence or approval while the innocent
toy kingdom was broken like a toy. Here again,
it is enormously probable that England would
have struck upon the right side, if the English
people had been the English Government.
Among other coincidences, the Danish princess
who had married the English heir was something
very like a fairy princess to the English crowd.
The national poet had hailed her as a daughter
of the sea-kings; and she was, and indeed still is,
the most popular royal figure in England. But
whatever our people may have been like, our
politicians were on the very tamest level of
timidity and the fear of force to which they have
ever sunk. The Tin Soldier of the Danish army
and the paper boat of the Danish navy, as in the
story, were swept away down the great gutter,
down that colossal cloaca that leads to the vast
cesspool of Berlin.
Why, as a fact, did not England interpose :
There were a great many reasons given, but I
think they were all various inferences from one
reason; indirect results and sometimes quite
illogical results, of what we have called the Ger-
manisation of England. First, the very insularity
on which we insisted was barbaric, in its refusal of
a seat in the central senate of the nations. What
8o THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
we called our splendid isolation became a rather
ignominious sleeping-partnership with Prussia.
Next, we were largely trained in irresponsibility by
our contemporary historians, Freeman and Green,
teaching us to be proud of a possible descent
from King Arthur's nameless enemies and not
from King Arthur. King Arthur might not be
historical, but at least he was legendary. Hengist
and Horsa were not even legendary, for they left
no legend. Anybody could see what was obliga-
tory on the representative of Arthur; he was
bound to be chivalrous, that is, to be European.
But nobody could imagine what was obligatory
on the representative of Horsa, unless it were to
be horsy. That was perhaps the only part of
the Anglo-Saxon programme that the contem-
porary English really carried out. Then, in the
very real decline from Cobbett to Cobden (that
is, from a broad to a narrow manliness and good
sense) there had grown up the cult of a very
curious kind of peace, to be spread all over the
world not by pilgrims, but by pedlars. Mystics
from the beginning had made vows of peace—
but they added to them vows of poverty. Vows
of poverty were not in the Cobdenite's line.
Then, again, there was the positive praise of
Prussia, to which steadily worsening case the
Carlyleans were already committed. But beyond
these, there was something else, a spirit which
had more infected us as a whole. That spirit
was the spirit of Hamlet. We gave the grand
name of “evolution ” to a notion that things do
themselves. Our wealth, our insularity, our
HAMLET AND THE DANES 8 I
gradual loss of faith had so dazed us that the
old Christian England haunted us like a ghost
in whom we could not quite believe. An aristo-
crat like Palmerston, loving freedom and hating
the upstart despotism, must have looked on at its
cold brutality not without that ugly question
which Hamlet asked himself—am I a coward :
It cannot be
But I am pigeon-livered and lack gall
To make oppression bitter; or 'ere this
I should have fatted all the region kites
With this slave’s offal.
We made dumb our anger and our honour; but
it has not brought us peace.
CHAPTER VII
THE MIDNIGHT OF EUROPE
Among the minor crimes of England may be
classed the shallow criticism and easy abandon-
ment of Napoleon III. The Victorian English
had a very bad habit of being influenced by words
and at the same time pretending to despise them.
They would build their whole historical philosophy
upon two or three titles, and then refuse to get
even the titles right. The solid Victorian Eng-
lishman, with his whiskers and his Parliamentary
vote, was quite content to say that Louis Napoleon
and William of Prussia both became Emperors—
by which he meant autocrats. His whiskers would
have bristled with rage and he would have stormed
at you for hair-splitting and “lingo,” if you had
answered that William was German Emperor,
while Napoleon was not French Emperor, but
only Emperor of the French. What could such
mere order of the words matter? Yet the same
Victorian would have been even more indignant if
he had been asked to be satisfied with an Art
Master, when he had advertised for a Master of
Arts. His irritation would have increased if the
Art Master had promised him a sea-piece and had
brought him a piece of the sea; or if, during the
decoration of his house, the same aesthetic
82
THE MIDNIGHT OF EUROPE 83
humourist had undertaken to procure some Indian
Red and had produced a Red Indian.
The Englishman would not see that if there
was only a verbal difference between the French
Emperor and the Emperor of the French, so, if it
came to that, it was a verbal difference between
the Emperor and the Republic, or even between
a Parliament and no Parliament. For him an
Emperor meant merely despotism; he had not
yet learned that a Parliament may mean merely
oligarchy. He did not know that the English
people would soon be made impotent, not by the
disfranchising of their constituents, but simply by
the silencing of their members; and that the
governing class of England did not now depend
upon rotten boroughs, but upon rotten repre-
sentatives. Therefore he did not understand
Bonapartism. He did not understand that French
democracy became more democratic, not less, when
it turned all France into one constituency which
elected one member. He did not understand that
many dragged down the Republic because it was
not republican, but purely senatorial. He was
yet to learn how quite corruptly senatorial a great
representative assembly can become. Yet in
England to-day we hear “the decline of Parlia-
ment” talked about and taken for granted by the
best Parliamentarians—Mr Balfour, for instance–
and we hear the one partly French and wholly
Jacobin historian of the French Revolution recom-
mending for the English evil a revival of the
power of the Crown. It seems that so far from
having left Louis Napoleon far behind in the grey
84 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
dust of the dead despotisms, it is not at all improb-
able that our most extreme revolutionary develop-
ments may end where Louis Napoleon began.
In other words, the Victorian Englishman did
not understand the words “Emperor of the
French.” The type of title was deliberately
chosen to express the idea of an elective and
popular origin; as against such a phrase as “the
German Emperor,” which expresses an almost
transcendental tribal patriarchate, or such a phrase
as “King of Prussia,” which suggests personal
ownership of a whole territory. To treat
the Coup d'état as unpardonable is to justify
riot against despotism, but forbid any riot
against aristocracy. Yet the idea expressed
in “The Emperor of the French " is not dead,
but rather risen from the dead. It is the
idea that while a government may pretend to
be a popular government, only a person can be
really popular. Indeed, the idea is still the crown
of American democracy, as it was for a time the
crown of French democracy. The very powerful
official who makes the choice of that great people
for peace or war, might very well be called, not
the President of the United States, but the
President of the Americans. In Italy we have
seen the King and the mob prevail over the con-
servatism of the Parliament, and in Russia the
new popular policy sacramentally symbolised by
the Czar riding at the head of the new armies.
But in one place, at least, the actual form of
words exists; and the actual form of words
has been splendidly justified. One man among
THE MIDNIGHT OF EUROPE 85
the sons of men has been permitted to ful-
fil a courtly formula with awful and disastrous
fidelity. Political and geographical ruin have
written one last royal title across the sky; the
loss of palace and capital and territory have but
isolated and made evident the people that has not
been lost; not laws but the love of exiles, not
soil but the souls of men, still make certain that
five true words shall yet be written in the corrupt
and fanciful chronicles of mankind: “The King of
the Belgians.” -
It is a common phrase, recurring constantly in
the real if rabid eloquence of Victor Hugo, that
Napoleon III. was a mere ape of Napoleon I.
That is, that he had, as the politician says, in
“L’Aiglon,” “le petit chapeau, mais pas la tête";
that he was merely a bad imitation. This is
extravagantly exaggerative; and those who say it,
moreover, often miss the two or three points of
resemblance which really exist in the exaggera-
tion. One resemblance there certainly was. In
both Napoleons it has been suggested that the
glory was not so great as it seemed; but in both
it can be emphatically added that the eclipse was
not so great as it seemed either. Both succeeded
at first and failed at last. But both succeeded at
last, even after the failure. If at this moment we
owe thanks to Napoleon Bonaparte for the armies
of united France, we also owe some thanks to
Louis Bonaparte for the armies of united Italy.
That great movement to a freer and more chival-
rous Europe which we call to-day the Cause of
the Allies, had its forerunners and first victories
86 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
before our time; and it not only won at Arcola,
but also at Solferino. Men who remembered
Louis Napoleon when he mooned about the Bles-
sington salon, and was supposed to be almost
mentally deficient, used to say he deceived Europe
twice ; once when he made men think him an
imbecile, and once when he made them think him
a statesman. But he deceived them a third time;
when he made them think he was dead; and had
done nothing.
In spite of the unbridled verse of Hugo and
the even more unbridled prose of Kinglake,
Napoleon III. is really and solely discredited in
history because of the catastrophe of 1870,
Hugo hurled any amount of lightning on Louis
Napoleon; but he threw very little light on him.
Some passages in the “Châtiments" are really
caricatures carved in eternal marble. They will
always be valuable in reminding generations too
vague and soft, as were the Victorians, of the
great truth that hatred is beautiful, when it is
hatred of the ugliness of the soul. But most of
them could have been written about Haman, or
Heliogabalus, or King John, or Queen Elizabeth,
as much as about poor Louis Napoleon; they bear
no trace of any comprehension of his quite interest-
ing aims, and his quite comprehensible contempt
for the fat-souled senatorial politicians. And if
a real revolutionist like Hugo did not do justice to
the revolutionary element in Caesarism, it need
hardly be said that a rather Primrose League
Tory like Tennyson did not. Kinglake's curi-
ously acrid insistence upon the Coup d'état is, I
THE MIDNIGHT OF EUROPE 87
fear, only an indulgence in one of the least pleas-
ing pleasures of our national pen and press, and
one which afterwards altogether ran away with us
over the Dreyfus case. It is an unfortunate habit
of publicly repenting for other people's sins. If
this came easy to an Englishman like Kinglake, it
came, of course, still easier to a German like
Queen Victoria's husband and even to Queen
Victoria herself, who was naturally influenced by
him. But in so far as the sensible masses of the
English nation took any interest in the matter, it
is probable that they sympathised with Palmer-
ston, who was as popular as the Prince Consort
was unpopular. The black mark against Louis
Napoleon's name until now, has simply been
Sedan; and it is our whole purpose to-day to
turn Sedan into an interlude. If it is not an
interlude, it will be the end of the world. But
we have sworn to make an end of that ending:
warring on until, if only by a purgatory of the
nations and the mountainous annihilation of men,
the story of the world ends well. -
There are, as it were, valleys of history quite
close to us, but hidden by the closer hills. One,
as we have seen, is that fold in the soft Surrey
hills where Cobbett sleeps with his still-born
English Revolution. Another is under that height
called The Spy of Italy, where a new Napoleon
brought back the golden eagles against the black
eagles of Austria. Yet that French adventure in
support of the Italian insurrection was very im-
portant; we are only beginning to understand its
importance. It was a defiance to the German
88 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
Reaction and 1870 was a sort of revenge for it,
just as the Balkan victory was a defiance to the
German Reaction and 1914 was the attempted
revenge for it. It is true that the French libera-
tion of Italy was incomplete, the problem of the
Papal States, for instance, being untouched by the
Peace of Villafranca. The volcanic but fruitful
spirit of Italy had already produced that wonder-
ful, wandering, and almost omnipresent person-
ality whose red shirt was to be a walking flag:
Garibaldi. And many English Liberals sym-
pathised with him and his extremists as against
the peace. Palmerston called it “the peace that
passeth all understanding ”; but the profanity of
that hilarious old heathen was nearer the mark than
he knew : there were really present some of those
deep things which he did not understand. To
quarrel with the Pope, but to compromise with
him, was an instinct with the Bonapartes; an
instinct no Anglo-Saxon could be expected to
understand. They knew the truth; that Anti-
Clericalism is not a Protestant movement, but a
Catholic mood. And after all the English Liberals
could not get their own Government to risk what
the French Government had risked; and Napo-
leon III. might well have retorted on Palmerston,
his rival in international Liberalism, that half a war
was better than no fighting. Swinburne called
Villafranca “The Halt before Rome,” and ex-
pressed a rhythmic impatience for the time when
the world - -
“Shall ring to the roar of the lion
Proclaiming Republican Rome,”
THE MIDNIGHT OF EUROPE 89
But he might have remembered, after all, that it
was not the British lion, that a British poet should
have the right to say so imperiously, “Let him
roar again. Let him roar again.”
It is true that there was no clear call to
England from Italy, as there certainly was from
Denmark. The great powers were not bound to
help Italy to become a nation, as they were bound
to support the unquestioned fact that Denmark
was one. Indeed the great Italian patriot was to
experience both extremes of the English paradox,
and, curiously enough, in connection with both the
two national and anti-German causes. For Italy
he gained the support of the English, but not the
support of England. Not a few of our country-
men followed the red shirt; but not in the red
coat. And when he came to England, not to
plead the cause of Italy but the cause of Denmark,
the Italian found he was more popular with the
English than any Englishman. He made his way
through a forest of salutations, which would will-
ingly have turned itself into a forest of swords.
But those who kept the sword kept it sheathed.
For the ruling class the valour of the Italian hero,
like the beauty of the Danish Princess, was a
thing to be admired, that is enjoyed, like a novel
—or a newspaper. Palmerston was the very type
of Pacifism, because he was the very type of
Jingoism. In spirit as restless as Garibaldi, he
was in practice as cautious as Cobden, England
had the most prudent aristocracy, but the most
reckless democracy in the world. It was, and is,
the English contradiction; which has so much
90 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
misrepresented us, especially to the Irish. Our
national captains were carpet knights; our knights
errant were among the dismounted rabble. When
an Austrian general who had flogged women in
the conquered provinces appeared in the London
streets, some common draymen off a cart behaved
with the direct quixotry of Sir Lancelot or Sir
Galahad. He had beaten women and they beat
him. They regarded themselves simply as avengers
of ladies in distress, breaking the bloody whip of
a German bully; just as Cobbett had sought to
break it when it was wielded over the men of
England. The boorishness was in the Germanic
or half-Germanic rulers who wore crosses and
spurs: the gallantry was in the gutter. English
draymen had more chivalry than Teuton aristocrats
—or English ones.
I have dwelt a little on this Italian experiment
because it lights up Louis Napoleon as what he
really was before the eclipse, a politician—perhaps
an unscrupulous politician —but certainly a demo-
cratic politician. A power seldom falls being
wholly faultless; and it is true that the Second
Empire became contaminated with cosmopolitan
spies and swindlers, justly reviled by such democrats
as Rochefort as well as Hugo. But there was no
French inefficiency that weighed a hair in the
balance compared with the huge and hostile effici-
ency of Prussia; the tall machine that had struck
down Denmark and Austria, and now stood ready
to strike again, extinguishing the lamp of the world.
There was a hitch before the hammer stroke, and
Bismarck adjusted it, as with his finger, by a
THE MIDNIGHT OF EUROPE 9 I
forgery—for he had many minor accomplishments.
France fell: and what fell with her was freedom,
and what reigned in her stead only tyrants and
the ancient terror. The crowning of the first
modern Kaiser in the very palace of the old
French kings was an allegory; like an allegory on
those Versailles walls. For it was at once the
lifting of the old despotic diadem and its descent
on the low brow of a barbarian. Louis XI. had
returned, and not Louis IX. ; and Europe was to
know that sceptre on which there is no dove.
The instant evidence that Europe was in the
grip of the savage was as simple as it was sinister.
The invaders behaved with an innocent impiety
and bestiality that had never been known in those
lands since Clovis was signed with the cross. To
the naked pride of the new men nations simply
were not. The struggling populations of two vast
provinces were simply carried away like slaves into
captivity, as after the sacking of some prehistoric
town. France was fined for having pretended to
be a nation; and the fine was planned to ruin her
for ever. Under the pressure of such impossible
injustice France cried out to the Christian nations,
one after another, and by name. Her last cry
ended in a stillness like that which had encircled
Denmark. -
One man answered ; one who had quarrelled
with the French and their Emperor; but who
knew it was not an emperor that had fallen.
Garibaldi, not always wise but to his end a hero,
took his station, sword in hand, under the darken-
ing sky of Christendom, and shared the last fate
92 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
of France. A curious record remains, in which a
German commander testifies to the energy and
effect of the last strokes of the wounded lion of
Aspromonte. But England went away sorrowful,
for she had great possessions.
CHAPTER VIII
THE WRONG. HORSE
In another chapter I mentioned some of the late
Lord Salisbury's remarks with regret, but I trust
with respect; for in certain matters he deserved
all the respect that can be given to him. His
critics said that he “thought aloud "; which is
perhaps the noblest thing that can be said of a
man. He was jeered at for it by journalists and
politicians who had not the capacity to think or
the courage to tell their thoughts. And he had
one yet finer quality which redeems a hundred
lapses of anarchic cynicism. He could change his
mind upon the platform: he could repent in public.
He could not only think aloud; he could “think
better’’ aloud. And one of the turning-points of
Europe had come in the hour when he avowed his
conversion from the un-Christian and un-European
policy into which his dexterous Oriental master,
Disraeli, had dragged him ; and declared that
England had “put her money on the wrong horse.”
When he said it, he referred to the backing we
gave to the Turk under a fallacious fear of Russia.
But I cannot but think that if he had lived much
longer, he would have come to feel the same
disgust for his long diplomatic support of the
Turk's great ally in the North. He did not live,
- 93 …
94 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
as we have lived, to feel that horse run away with
us, and rush on through wilder and wilder places,
until we knew that we were riding on the night-
Iſlalºe.
What was this thing to which we trusted?
And how may we most quickly explain its develop-
ment from a dream to a nightmare, and the hair's-
breadth escape by which it did not hurl us to
destruction, as it seems to be hurling the Turk?
It is a certain spirit; and we must not ask for too
logical a definition of it, for the people whom it
possesses disown logic; and the whole thing is not
so much a theory as a confusion of thought. Its
widest and most elementary character is adum-
brated in the word Teutonism or Pan-Germanism;
and with this (which was what appeared to win in
1870) we had better begin. The nature of Pan-
Germanism may be allegorised and abbreviated
somewhat thus:
The horse asserts that all other creatures are
morally bound to sacrifice their interests to his, on
the specific ground that he possesses all noble and
necessary qualities, and is an end in himself. It is
pointed out in answer that when climbing a tree
the horse is less graceful than the cat; that lovers
and poets seldom urge the horse to make a noise
all night like the nightingale; that when sub-
merged for some long time under water, he is less
happy than the haddock; and that when he is cut
open pearls are less often found in him than in an
oyster. He is not content to answer (though, being
a muddle-headed horse, he does use this answer
also) that having an undivided hoof is more than
THE WRONG HORSE 95
pearls or oceans or all ascension or song. He
reflects for a few years on the subject of cats;
and at last discovers in the cat “the characteristic
equine quality of caudality, or a tail”; so that cats
are horses, and wave on every tree-top the tail
which is the equine banner. Nightingales are
found to have legs, which explains their power of
song. Haddocks are vertebrates; and therefore
are sea-horses. And though the oyster out-
wardly presents dissimilarities which seem to
divide him from the horse, he is by the all-filling
nature-might of the same horse-moving energy
sustained.
Now this horse is intellectually the wrong horse.
It is not perhaps going too far to say that this
horse is a donkey. For it is obviously within even
the intellectual resources of a haddock to answer,
“But if a haddock is a horse, why should I yield
to you any more than you to me? Why should
that singing horse commonly called the nightingale,
or that climbing horse hitherto known as the cat,
fall down and worship you because of your horse-
hood : If all our native faculties are the accom-
plishments of a horse—why then you are only
another horse without any accomplishments.”
When thus gently reasoned with, the horse flings
up his heels, kicks the cat, crushes the oyster,
eats the haddock and pursues the nightingale, and
that is how the war began.
This apologue is not in the least more fantastic
than the facts of the Teutonic claim. The Germans
do really say that Englishmen are only Sea-
Germans, as our haddocks were only sea-horses.
96 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
They do really say that the nightingales of Tus-
cany or the pearls of Hellas must somehow be
German birds or German jewels. They do main-
tain that the Italian Renaissance was really the
German Renaissance, pure Germans having Italian
names when they were painters, as cockneys some-
times have when they are hair-dressers. They
suggest that Jesus and the great Jews were
Teutonic. One Teutonist I read actually explained
the fresh energy of the French Revolution and
the stale privileges of its German enemies by say-
ing that the Germanic soul awoke in France and
attacked the Latin influence in Germany. On the
advantages of this method I need not dwell: if
you are annoyed at Jack Johnson knocking out an
English prize-fighter, you have only to say that it
was the whiteness of the black man that won and
the blackness of the white man that was beaten.
But about the Italian Renaissance they are less
general and will go into detail. They will discover
(in their researches into 'istry, as Mr Gandish said)
that Michael Angelo's surname was Buonarotti;
and they will point out that the word “roth" is
very like the word “rot.” Which, in one sense,
is true enough. Most Englishmen will be content
to say it is all rot and pass on. It is all of a
piece with the preposterous Prussian history, which
talks, for instance, about the “perfect religious
tolerance of the Goths”; which is like talking
about the legal impartiality of chicken-pox.
He will decline to believe that the Jews were
Germans; though he may perhaps have met some
Germans who were Jews. But deeper than any
THE WRONG. HORSE 97
such practical reply, lies the deep inconsistency of
the parable. It is simply this; that if Teutonism
be used for comprehension it cannot be used for
conquest. If all intelligent peoples are Germans,
then Prussians are only the least intelligent Ger-
mans. If the men of Flanders are as German as
the men of Frankfort, we can only say that in
saving Belgium we are helping the Germans who
are in the right against the Germans who are in
the wrong. Thus in Alsace the conquerors are
forced into the comic posture of annexing the
people for being German and then persecuting
them for being French. The French Teutons
who built Rheims must surrender it to the South
German Teutons who have partly built Cologne;
and these in turn surrender Cologne to the North
German Teutons, who never built anything, except
the wooden Aunt Sally of old Hindenburg. Every
Teuton must fall on his face before an inferior
Teuton; until they all find, in the foul marshes
towards the Baltic, the very lowest of all possible
Teutons, and worship him—and find he is a Slav.
So much for Pan-Germanism. -
But though Teutonism is indefinable, or at least
is by the Teutons undefined, it is not unreal. A
vague but genuine soul does possess all peoples
who boast of Teutonism; and has possessed our-
selves, in so far as we have been touched by that
folly. Not a race, but rather a religion, the
thing exists; and in 1870 its sun was at noon.
We can most briefly describe it under three
heads. -
The victory of the German arms meant before
G
98 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
Leipzic, and means now, the overthrow of a certain
idea. That idea is the idea of the Citizen. This
is true in a quite abstract and courteous sense;
and is not meant as a loose charge of oppression.
Its truth is quite compatible with a view that the
Germans are better governed than the French.
In many ways the Germans are very well governed.
But they might be governed ten thousand times
better than they are, or than anybody ever can be,
and still be as far as ever from governing. The
idea of the Citizen is that his individual human
nature shall be constantly and creatively active in
altering the State. The Germans are right in re-
garding the idea as dangerously revolutionary.
Every Citizen is a revolution. That is, he destroys,
devours and adapts his environment to the extent
of his own thought and conscience. This is what
separates the human social effort from the non-
human; the bee creates the honey-comb, but he does
not criticise it. The German ruler really does feed
and train the German as carefully as a gardener
waters a flower. But if the flower suddenly began
to water the gardener, he would be much sur-
prised. So in Germany the people really are
educated; but in France the people educates.
The French not only make up the State, but make
the State; not only make it, but remake it. In
Germany the ruler is the artist, always painting
the happy German like a portrait; in France the
Frenchman is the artist, always painting and re-
painting France like a house. No state of social
good that does not mean the Citizen choosing good,
as well as getting it, has the idea of the Citizen at
THE WRONG. HORSE 99
all. To say the Germanies are naturally at war
with this idea is merely to respect them and take
them seriously: otherwise their war on the French
Revolution would be only an ignorant feud. It is
this, to them, risky and fanciful notion of the
critical and creative Citizen, which in 1870 lay
prostrate under United Germany—under the un-
divided hoof.
Nevertheless, when the German says he has or
loves freedom, what he says is not false. He means
something; and what he means is the second
principle, which I may summarise as the Irresponsi-
bility of Thought. Within the iron framework of .
the fixed State, the German has not only liberty
but anarchy. Anything can be said although, or
rather because, nothing can be done. Philosophy
is really free. But this practically means only that
the prisoner's cell has become the madman's cell:
that it is scrawled all over inside with stars and
systems, so that it looks like eternity. This is
the contradiction remarked by Dr Sarolea, in his
brilliant book, between the wildness of German
theory and the tameness of German practice. The
Germans sterilise thought, making it active with a
wild virginity; which can bear no fruit.
But though there are so many mad theories,
most of them have one root; and depend upon
one assumption. It matters little whether we call
it, with the German Socialists, “the Materialist
Theory of History”; or, with Bismarck, “blood
and iron.” It can be put most fairly thus: that
all important events of history are biological, like
a change of pasture or the communism of a pack
1oo THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
of wolves. Professors are still tearing their hair
in the effort to prove somehow that the Crusaders
were migrating for food like swallows; or that
the French Revolutionists were somehow only
swarming like bees. This works in two ways
often accounted opposite; and explains both the
German Socialist and the Junker. For, first, it
fits in with Teutonic Imperialism; making the
“blonde beasts" of Germania into lions whose
nature it is to eat such lambs as the French. The
highest success of this notion in Europe is marked
by praise given to a race famous for its physical
firmness and fighting breed, but which has frankly
pillaged and scarcely pretended to rule; the Turk,
whom some Tories called “the gentleman of
Europe.” The Kaiser paused to adore the Cres-
cent on his way to patronise the Cross. It was
corporately embodied when Greece attempted a
solitary adventure against Turkey and was quickly
crushed. That English guns helped to impose the
mainly Germanic policy of the Concert upon Crete,
cannot be left out of mind while we are making
appeals to Greece—or considering the crimes of
England. -
But the same principle serves to keep the internal
politics of the Germans quiet, and prevent Socialism
being the practical hope or peril it has been in
so many other countries. It operates in two
ways; first, by a curious fallacy about “the time
not being ripe”—as if time could ever be ripe.
The same savage superstition from the forests had
infected Matthew Arnold pretty badly when he
made a personality out of the Zeitgeist—perhaps
THE WRONG. HORSE I O Í
the only ghost that was ever entirely fabulous. It
is tricked by a biological parallel, by which the
chicken always comes out of the egg “at the right
time.” He does not; he comes out when he
comes out. The Marxian Socialist will not strike
till the clock strikes ; and the clock is made in
Germany, and never strikes. Moreover, the
theory of all history as a search for food makes
the masses content with having food and physic,
but not freedom. The best working model in the
matter is the system of Compulsory Insurance;
which was a total failure and dead letter in France
but has been, in the German sense, a great success
in Germany. It treats employed persons as a
fixed, separate, and lower caste, who must not
themselves dispose of the margin of their small
wages. In 1911 it was introduced into England
by Mr Lloyd George, who had studied its opera-
tions in Germany, and, by the Prussian prestige in
“social reform,” was passed.
These three tendencies cohere, or are cohering,
in an institution which is not without a great his-
torical basis and not without great modern conven-
iences. And as France was the standard-bearer of
citizenship in 1798, Germany is the standard-bearer
of this alternative solution in 1915. The institution
which our fathers called Slavery fits in with, or
rather logically flows from, all the three spirits of
which I have spoken, and promises great advan-
tages to each of them. It can give the individual
worker everything except the power to alter the
State—that is, his own status. Finality (or what
certain eleutheromaniacs would call hopelessness)
102 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
of status is the soul of Slavery—and of Compulsory
Insurance. Then again, Germany gives the in-
dividual exactly the liberty that has always been
given to a slave—the liberty to think, the liberty
to dream, the liberty to rage; the liberty to in-
dulge in any intellectual hypotheses about the
unalterable world and state—such as have always
been free to slaves, from the stoical maxims of
Epictetus to the skylarking fairy tales of Uncle
Remus. And it has been truly urged by all
defenders of slavery that, if history has merely a
material test, the material condition of the sub-
ordinate under slavery tends to be good rather
than bad. When I once pointed out how precisely
the “model village’ of a great employer repro-
duces the safety and seclusion of an old slave
estate, the employer thought it quite enough to
answer indignantly that he had provided baths,
playing-grounds, a theatre, etc., for his workers.
He would probably have thought it odd to hear a
planter in South Carolina boast that he had pro-
vided banjos, hymn-books, and places suitable for
the cake-walk. Yet the planter must have pro-
vided the banjos, for a slave cannot own property.
And if this Germanic sociology is indeed to pre-
vail among us, I think some of the broad-minded
thinkers who concur in its prevalence owe some-
thing like an apology to many gallant gentlemen
whose graves lie where the last battle was fought
in the Wilderness; men who had the courage to
fight for it, the courage to die for it and, above
all, the courage to call it by its name.
With the acceptance by England of the German
THE WRONG. HORSE Io 3
Insurance Act, I bring this sketch of the past
relations of the two countries to an end. I have
written this book because I wish, once and for all,
to be done with my friend Professor Whirlwind
of Prussia, who has long despaired of really de-
fending his own country, and has fallen back upon
abusing mine. He has dropped, amid general
derision, his attempt to call a thing right when
even the Chancellor who did it called it wrong.
But he has an idea that if he can show that
somebody from England somewhere did another
wrong, the two wrongs may make a right.
Against the cry of the Roman Catholic Poles
the Prussian has never done, or even pretended
to do, anything but harden his heart; but he
has (such are the lovable inconsistencies of human
nature) a warm corner in his heart for the Roman
Catholic Irish. He has not a word to say for
himself about the campaign in Belgium, but he
still has many wise, reproachful words to utter
about the campaign in South Africa. I propose
to take those words out of his mouth. I will
have nothing to do with the fatuous front-bench
pretensions that our governors always govern well,
that our statesmen are never whitewashed and
never in need of whitewash. The only moral
superiority I claim is that of not defending the
indefensible. I most earnestly urge my country-
men not to hide behind thin official excuses, which
the sister kingdoms and the subject races can
easily see through. We can confess that our
crimes have been as mountains, and still not be
afraid of the present comparison. There may be,
Io.4. THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
in the eyes of some, a risk in dwelling in this
dark hour on our failures in the past: I believe
profoundly that the risk is all the other way. I
believe that the most deadly danger to our arms
to-day lies in any whiff of that self-praise, any
flavour of that moral cowardice, any glimpse of
that impudent and ultimate impenitence, that may
make one Boer or Scot or Welshman or Irishman
or Indian feel that he is only smoothing the path
for a second Prussia. I have passed the great
part of my life in criticising and condemning the
existing rulers and institutions of my country: I
think it is infinitely the most patriotic thing that
a man can do. I have no illusions either about
our past or our present. I think our whole
history in Ireland has been a vulgar and ignorant
hatred of the crucifix, expressed by a crucifixion.
I think the South African War was a dirty work
which we did under the whips of money-lenders.
I think Mitchelstown was a disgrace; I think
Denshawi was a devilry.
Yet there is one part of life and history in
which I would assert the absolute spotlessness of
England. In one department we wear a robe
of white and a halo of innocence. Long and
weary as may be the records of our wickedness,
in one direction we have done nothing but good.
Whoever we may have wronged, we have never
wronged Germany. Again and again we have
dragged her from under the just vengeance of her
enemies, from the holy anger of Maria Teresa,
from the impatient and contemptuous common
sense of Napoleon. We have kept a ring fence
THE WRONG. HORSE IO 5
around the Germans while they sacked Denmark
and dismembered France. And if we had served
our God as we have served their kings, there
would not be to-day one remnant of them in
our path, either to slander or to slay us.
CHAPTER IX
THE AWAKENING OF
ENGLAND
In October 1912 silent and seemingly un-
inhabited crags and chasms in the high western
region of the Balkans echoed and re-echoed with
a single shot. It was fired by the hand of a king
—a real king, who sat listening to his people in
front of his own house (for it was hardly a
palace), and who, in consequence of his listening
to the people, not unfrequently imprisoned the
politicians. It is said of him that his great respect
for Gladstone as the western advocate of Balkan
freedom was slightly shadowed by the fact that
Gladstone did not succeed in effecting the bodily
capture of Jack the Ripper. This simple monarch
knew that if a malefactor were the terror of the
mountain hamlets, his subjects would expect him
personally to take arms and pursue the ruffian;
and if he refused to do so, would very probably
experiment with another king. And the same
primitive conception of a king being kept for
some kind of purpose, led them also to expect
him to lead in a foreign campaign, and it was with
his own hand that he fired the first shot of the
war which brought down into the dust the ancient
empire of the Grand Turk.
106
THE AWAKENING OF ENGLAND 107
His kingdom was little more than the black
mountain after which it was named : we commonly
refer to it under its Italian translation of Mon-
tenegro. It is worth while to pause for a moment
upon his picturesque and peculiar community, be-
cause it is perhaps the simplest working model
of all that stood in the path of the great Germanic
social machine I have described in the last chapter—
stood in its path and was soon to be very nearly
destroyed by its onset. It was a branch of the
Serbian stock which had climbed into this almost
inaccessible eyrie, and thence, for many hundred
years, had mocked at the predatory empire of the
Turks. The Serbians in their turn were but one
branch of the peasant Slavs, millions of whom are
spread over Russia and subject on many sides to
empires with which they have less sympathy;
and the Slavs again, in the broad features which
are important here, are not merely Slavonic but
simply European. But a particular picture is
generally more pointed and intelligible than
tendencies which elsewhere are mingled with
subtler tendencies; and of this unmixed Euro-
pean simplicity Montenegro is an excellent
model.
Moreover, the instance of one small Christian
State will serve to emphasise that this is not a
quarrel between England and Germany, but be-
tween Europe and Germany. It is my whole
purpose in these pages not to spare my own
country where it is open to criticism; and I freely
admit that Montenegro, morally and politically
speaking, is almost as much in advance of England
108 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
as it is of Germany. In Montenegro there are no
millionaires—and therefore next to no Socialists.
As to why there are no millionaires, it is a
mystery, and best studied among the mysteries
of the Middle Ages. By some of the dark in-
genuities of that age of priestcraft a curious thing
was discovered—that if you kill every usurer,
every forestaller, every adulterater, every user
of false weights, every fixer of false boundaries,
every land-thief, every water-thief, you afterwards
discover by a strange indirect miracle, or discon-
nected truth from heaven, that you have no
millionaires. Without dwelling further on this
dark matter, we may say that this great gap in
the Montenegrin experience explains the other
great gap—the lack of Socialists. The Class-
conscious Proletarian of All Lands is curiously
absent from this land. The reason (I have some-
times fancied) is that the Proletarian is class-
conscious, not because he is a Proletarian of All
Lands, but because he is a Proletarian with no
lands. The poor people in Montenegro have
lands—not landlords. They have roots; for the
peasant is the root of the priest, the poet, and
the warrior. And this, and not a mere recrimina-
tion about acts of violence, is the ground of the
age-long Balkan bitterness against the Turkish
conqueror. Montenegrins are patriotic for Mon-
tenegro; but Turks are not patriotic for Turkey.
They never heard of it, in fact. They are
Bedouins, as homeless as the desert. The “wrong
horse" of Lord Salisbury was an Arab steed,
only stabled in Byzantium. It is hard enough
THE AWAKENING OF ENGLAND Io9
to rule vagabond people, like the gypsies. To
be ruled by them is impossible.
Nevertheless what was called the nineteenth
century, and named with a sort of transcendental
faith (as in a Pythagorean worship of number),
was wearing to its close with reaction everywhere,
and the Turk, the great type of reaction, stronger
than ever in the saddle. The most civilised of
the Christian nations overshadowed by the Crescent
dared to attack it and was overwhelmed in a
catastrophe that seemed as unanswerable as Hittin.
In England Gladstone and Gladstonism were dead;
and Mr Kipling, a less mystical Carlyle, was ex-
pending a type of praise upon the British Army
which would have been even more appropriate
to the Prussian Army. The Prussian Army ruled
Prussia; Prussia ruled Germany; Germany ruled
the Concert of Europe. She was planting every-
where the appliances of that new servile machinery
which was her secret; the absolute identification
of national subordination with business employ-
ment; so that Krupp could count on Kaiser and
Kaiser on Krupp. Every other commercial traveller
was pathetically proud of being both a slave and
a spy. The old and the new tyrants had taken
hands. The “sack” of the boss was as silent
and fatal as the sack of the Bosphorus. And the
dream of the citizen was at an end. -
It was under a sky so leaden and on a road so
strewn with bones that the little mountain de-
mocracy with its patriarchal prince went out, first
and before all its friends, on the last and seemingly
the most hopeless of the rebellions against the
I IO THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
Ottoman Empire. Only one of the omens seemed
other than disastrous; and even that was doubtful.
For the successful Mediterranean attack on Tripoli
while proving the gallantry of the Italians (if that
ever needed proving) could be taken in two ways,
and was seen by many, and probably most, sincere
liberals as a mere extension of the Imperialist re-
action of Bosnia and Paardeberg, and not as the
promise of newer things. Italy, it must be re-
membered, was still supposed to be the partner
of Prussia and the Hapsburgs. For days that
seemed like months the microscopic state seemed
to be attempting alone what the Crusades had
failed to accomplish. And for days Europe and
the great powers were thunderstruck, again and
yet again, by the news of Turkish forts falling,
Turkish cohorts collapsing, the unconquerable
Crescent going down in blood. The Serbians,
the Bulgarians, the Greeks had gathered and
risen from their lairs; and men knew that these
peasants had done what all the politicians had long
despaired of doing, and that the spirit of the first
Christian Emperor was already standing over the
city that is named after his name.
For Germany this quite unexpected rush was a
reversal of the whole tide of the world. It was
as if the Rhine itself had returned from the ocean
and retired into the Alps. For a long time past
every important political process in Europe had
been produced or permitted by Prussia. She had
pulled down ministers in France and arrested
reforms in Russia. Her ruler was acclaimed by
Englishmen like Rhodes, and Americans like
THE AWAKENING OF ENGLAND I I I
Roosevelt, as the great prince of the age. One of
the most famous and brilliant of our journalists
called him “the Lord Chief Justice of Europe.”
He was the strongest man in Christendom ; and he
had confirmed and consecrated the Crescent. And
when he had consecrated it a few hill tribes had
risen and trampled it like mire. One or two other
things about the same time, less important in
themselves, struck in the Prussian's ear the same
new note of warning and doubt. He sought to
obtain a small advantage on the north-west coast
of Africa; and England seemed to show a certain
strange stiffness in insisting on its abandonment.
In the councils over Morocco, England agreed
with France with what did not seem altogether an
accidental agreement. But we shall not be wrong
if we put the crucial point of the German surprise
and anger at the attack from the Balkans and the
fall of Adrianople. Not only did it menace the
key of Asia and the whole Eastern dream of
German commerce; not only did it offer the
picture of one army trained by France and victori-
ous, and another army trained by Germany and
beaten. There was more than the material vic-
tory of the Creusot over the Krupp gun. It was
also the victory of the peasant's field over the
Krupp factory. By this time there was in the
North German brain an awful inversion of all the
legends and heroic lives that the human race has
loved. Prussia hated romance. Chivalry was not
a thing she neglected; it was a thing that tor-
mented her as any bully is tormented by an un-
answered challenge. That weird process was
I I 2. THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
completed of which I have spoken on an earlier
page, whereby the soul of this strange people
was everywhere on the side of the dragon against
the knight, of the giant against the hero. Any-
thing unexpected—the forlorn hopes, the eleventh-
hour inspirations, by which the weak can elude
the strong, and which take the hearts of happier
men like trumpets—filled the Prussian with a cold
fury, as of a frustrated fate. The Prussian felt
as a Chicago pork butcher would feel if the pigs
not only refused to pass through his machine, but
turned into romantic wild boars, raging and rend-
ing, calling for the old hunting of princes and fit
to be the crests of kings.
The Prussian saw these things and his mind was
made up. He was silent ; but he laboured:
laboured for three long years without intermission
at the making of a military machine that should
cut out of the world for ever such romantic
accident or random adventure; a machine that
should cure the human pigs for ever of any illusion
that they had wings. That he did so plot and
prepare for an attack that should come from him,
anticipating and overwhelming any resistance, is
now, even in the documents he has himself pub-
lished, a fact of common sense. Suppose a man
sells all his lands except a small yard containing a
well; suppose in the division of the effects of an
old friend he particularly asks for his razors;
suppose when a corded trunk is sent him he sends
back the trunk, but keeps the cord. And then
suppose we hear that a rival of his has been
lassoed with a rope, his throat then cut, apparently
THE AWAKENING OF ENGLAND I 13
with a razor, and his body hidden in a well, we
do not call in Sherlock Holmes to project a pre-
liminary suspicion about the guilty party. In the
discussions held by the Prussian Government with
Lord Haldane and Sir Edward Grey we can now
see quite as plainly the meaning of the things that
were granted and the things that were withheld,
the things that would have satisfied the Prussian
plotter and the things that did not satisfy him.
The German Chancellor refused an English promise
not to be aggressive and asked instead for an Eng-
lish promise to be neutral. There is no meaning
in the distinction, except in the mind of an ag-
ressor. Germany proposed a pacific arrangement
which forbade England to form a fighting alliance
with France, but permitted Germany to retain her
old fighting alliance with Austria. When the hour
of war came she used Austria, used the old fight-
ing alliance and tried to use the new idea of Eng-
lish neutrality. That is to say, she used the rope,
the razor, and the well.
But it was either by accident or by individual
diplomatic skill that England at the end of the
three years even had her own hands free to help
in frustrating the German plot. The mass of the
English people had no notion of such a plot; and
indeed regarded the occasional suggestion of it as
absurd. Nor did even the people who knew best
know very much better. Thanks and even apolo-
gies are doubtless due to those who in the deepest
lull of our sleeping partnership with Prussia saw
her not as a partner but a potential enemy; such
men as Mr Blatchford, Mr Bart Kennedy, or the
H
II.4. "THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
late Emil Reich. But there is a distinction to be
made. Few even of these, with the admirable and
indeed almost magical exception of Dr Sarolea,
saw Germany as she was ; occupied mainly with
Europe and only incidentally with England; indeed,
in the first stages, not occupied with England at
all. Even the Anti-Germans were too insular.
Even those who saw most of Germany's plan saw
too much of England's part in it. They saw it
almost wholly as a commercial and colonial quarrel;
and saw its issue under the image of an invasion
of England, which is even now not very probable.
This fear of Germany was indeed a very German
fear of Germany. This also conceived the Eng-
lish as Sea-Germans. It conceived Germany as at
war with something like itself—practical, prosaic,
capitalist, competitive Germany, prepared to cut us
up in battle as she cut us out in business. The
time of our larger vision was not yet, when we
should realise that Germany was more deeply at
war with things quite unlike herself, things from
which we also had sadly strayed. Then we should
remember what we were and see whence we also
had come; and far and high upon that mountain
from which the Crescent was cast down, behold
what was everywhere the real enemy of the Iron
Cross—the peasant’s cross, which is of wood.
Even our very slight ripples of panic, therefore,
were provincial, and even shallow; and for the
most part we were possessed and convinced of
peace. That peace was not a noble one. We
had indeed reached one of the lowest and flattest
levels of all our undulating history; and it must
THE AWAKENING OF ENGLAND I i 5
be admitted that the contemptuous calculation
with which Germany counted on our submission
and abstention was not altogether unfounded,
though it was, thank God, unfulfilled. The full
fruition of our alliances against freedom had come.
The meek acceptance of Kultur in our books and
schools had stiffened what was once a free country
with a German formalism and a German fear. By
a queer irony, even the same popular writer who
had already warned us against the Prussians, had
sought to preach among the populace a very
Prussian fatalism, pivoted upon the importance of
the charlatan Haeckel. The wrestle of the two
great parties had long slackened into an embrace.
The fact was faintly denied, and a pretence was
still made that no pact existed beyond a common
patriotism. But the pretence failed altogether;
for it was evident that the leaders on either side,
so far from leading in divergent directions, were
much closer to each other than to their own
followers. The power of these leaders had enor-
mously increased; but the distance between them
had diminished, or, rather, disappeared. It was
said about 1800, in derision of the Foxite rump,
that the Whig Party came down to Parliament in
a four-wheeler. It might literally be said in 1900
that the Whig Party and the Tory Party came to
Parliament in a hansom cab. It was not a case of
two towers rising into different roofs or spires,
but founded in the same soil. It was rather the
case of an arch, of which the foundation-stones on
either side might fancy they were two buildings;
but the stones nearest the keystone would know
I 16 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
there was only one. This “two-handed engine"
still stood ready to strike, not, indeed, the other
part of itself, but anyone who ventured to deny
that it was doing so. We were ruled, as it were,
by a Wonderland king and queen, who cut off our
heads, not for saying they quarrelled but for say-
ing they didn't. The libel law was now used,
not to crush lies about private life, but to crush
truths about public life. Representation had be-
come mere misrepresentation; a maze of loop-
holes. This was mainly due to the monstrous
presence of certain secret moneys, on which alone
many men could win the ruinous elections of the
age, and which were contributed and distributed
with less check or record than is tolerated in the
lowest trade or club. Only one or two people
attacked these funds; nobody defended them.
Through them the great capitalists had the handle
of politics, as of everything else. The poor were
struggling hopelessly against rising prices; and
their attempts at collective bargaining, by the
collective refusal of badly-paid work, were dis-
cussed in the press, Liberal and Tory, as attacks
upon the State. And so they were; upon the
Servile State.
Such was the condition of England in 1914,
when Prussia, now at last armed to the teeth and
secure of triumph, stood up before the world, and
solemnly, like one taking a sacrament, consecrated
her campaign with a crime. She entered by a
forbidden door, one which she had herself for-
bidden—marching upon France through neutralised
Belgium, where every step was on her broken
THE AWAKENING OF ENGLAND I 17
word. Her neutralised neighbours resisted, as
indeed they, like ourselves, were pledged to do.
Instantly the whole invasion was lit up with a
flame of moral lunacy, that turned the watching
nations white who had never known the Prussian.
The statistics of non-combatants killed and
tortured by this time only stun the imagination.
But two friends of my own have been in villages
sacked by the Prussian march. One saw a taber-
nacle containing the Sacrament patiently picked
out in a pattern by shot after shot. The other
saw a rocking-horse and the wooden toys in a
nursery laboriously hacked to pieces. Those two
facts together will be enough to satisfy some of
us of the name of the Spirit that had passed.
And then a strange thing happened. England,
that had not in the modern sense any army at all,
was justified of all her children. Respected in-
stitutions and reputations did indeed waver and
collapse on many sides : though the chief of the
state replied worthily to a bribe from the foreign
bully, many other politicians were sufficiently wild
and weak, though doubtless patriotic in intention.
One was set to restrain the journalists, and had to
be restrained himself, for being more sensational
than any of them. Another scolded the working-
classes in the style of an intoxicated temperance
lecturer. But England was saved by a forgotten
thing—the English. Simple men with simple
motives, the chief one a hate of injustice which
grows simpler the longer we stare at it, came out
of their dreary tenements and their tidy shops,
their fields and their suburbs and their factories
II 8 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
and their rookeries, and asked for the arms of
men. In a throng that was at last three million
men, the islanders went forth from their island,
as simply as the mountaineers had gone forth from
their mountain, with their faces to the dawn.
CHAPTER X.
THE BATTLE OF THE MARNE
The impression produced by the first week of
war was that the British contingent had come
just in time for the end of the world. Or
rather, for any sensitive and civilised man, touched
by the modern doubt but by the equally modern
mysticism, that old theocratic vision fell far short
of the sickening terror of the time. For it was a
day of judgment in which upon the throne in
heaven and above the cherubim, sat not God, but
another.
The British had been posted at the extreme
western end of the allied line in the north.
The other end rested on the secure city and
fortress of Namur; their end rested upon nothing.
It is not wholly a sentimental fancy to say that
there was something forlorn in the position of that
loose end in a strange land, with only the sad
fields of Northern France between them and the
sea. For it was really round that loose end that
the foe would probably fling the lasso of his
charge; it was here that death might soon be
present upon every side. It must be remembered
that many critics, including many Englishmen,
doubted whether a rust had not eaten into this
as into other parts of the national life, feared
119
I 2 O THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
that England had too long neglected both the
ethic and the technique of war, and would prove
a weak link in the chain. The enemy was
absolutely certain that it was so. To these men,
standing disconsolately amid the hedgeless plains
and poplars, came the news that Namur was gone,
which was to their captains one of the four corners
of the earth. The two armies had touched; and
instantly the weaker took an electric shock which
told of electric energy, deep into deep Germany,
battery behind battery of abysmal force. In the
instant it was discovered that the enemy was
more numerous than they had dreamed. He
was actually more numerous even than they
discovered. Every oncoming horseman doubled
as in a drunkard's vision; and they were soon
striving without speech in a nightmare of num-
bers. Then all the allied forces at the front
were overthrown in the tragic battle of Mons;
and began that black retreat, in which so many
of our young men knew war first and at its
worst in this terrible world; and so many never
returned. .
In that blackness began to grow strange emotions,
long unfamiliar to our blood. Those six dark days
are as full of legends as the six centuries of the
Dark Ages. Many of these may be exaggerated
fancies, one was certainly an avowed fiction, others
are quite different from it and more difficult to
dissipate into the daylight. But one curious fact
remains about them if they were all lies, or even
if they were all deliberate works of art. Not one
of them referred to those close, crowded, and
"THE BATTLE OF THE MARNE I 2 I
stirring three centuries which are nearest to us,
and which alone are covered in this sketch, the
centuries during which the Teutonic influence had
expanded itself over our islands. Ghosts were
there perhaps, but they were the ghosts of for-
gotten ancestors. Nobody saw Cromwell or even
Wellington; nobody so much as thought about
Cecil Rhodes. Things were either seen or said
among the British which linked them up, in
matters deeper than any alliance, with the French,
who spoke of Joan of Arc in heaven above the
fated city; or the Russians who dreamed of the
Mother of God with her hand pointing to the
west. They were the visions or the inventions of
a mediaeval army; and a prose poet was in line
with many popular rumours when he told of
ghostly archers crying “Array, Array,” as in
that long-disbanded yeomanry in which I have
fancied Cobbett as carrying a bow. Other tales,
true or only symptomatic, told of one on a great
white horse who was not the victor of Blenheim
or even the Black Prince, but a faint figure out of
far-off martyrologies–St George. One soldier is
asserted to have claimed to identify the saint
because he was “on every quid.” On the coins,
St George is a Roman soldier, - -
But these fancies, if they were fancies, might
well seem the last sickly flickerings of an old-
world order now finally wounded to the death.
That which was coming on, with the whole weight
of a new world, was something that had never
been numbered among the Seven Champions of
Christendom. Now, in more doubtful and more
I 2.2 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
hopeful days, it is almost impossible to repicture
what was, for those who understood, the gigantic
finality of the first German strides. It seemed as
if the forces of the ancient valour fell away to
right and left; and there opened a grand, smooth
granite road right to the gate of Paris, down which
the great Germania moved like a tall, unanswerable
sphinx, whose pride could destroy all things and
survive them. In her train moved, like moving
mountains, cyclopean guns that had never been
seen among men, before which walled cities melted
like wax, their mouths set insolently upwards as if
threatening to besiege the sun. Nor is it fantastic
to speak so of the new and abnormal armaments;
for the soul of Germany was really expressed in
colossal wheels and cylinders; and her guns were
more symbolic than her flags. Then and now, and
in every place and time, it is to be noted that the
German superiority has been in a certain thing
and of a certain kind. It is not unity; it is
not, in the moral sense, discipline. Nothing can
be more united in a moral sense than a French,
British, or Russian regiment. Nothing, for that
matter, could be more united than a Highland clan
at Killiecrankie or a rush of religious fanatics in
the Soudan. What such engines, in such size and
multiplicity, really meant was this : they meant a
type of life naturally intolerable to happier and
more healthy-minded men, conducted on a larger
scale and consuming larger populations than had
ever been known before. They meant cities grow-
ing larger than provinces, factories growing larger
than cities; they meant the empire of the slum.
THE BATTLE OF THE MARNE 123
They meant a degree of detailed repetition and
dehumanised division of labour, to which no man
born would surrender his brief span in the sun-
shine, if he could hope to beat his ploughshare
into a sword. The nations of the earth were not
to surrender to the Kaiser; they were to surrender
to Krupp, his master and theirs; the French, the
British, the Russians were to surrender to Krupp
as the Germans themselves, after a few swiftly
broken strikes, had already surrendered to Krupp.
Through every cogwheel in that incomparable
machinery, through every link in that iron and
unending chain, ran the mastery and the skill of a
certain kind of artist; an artist whose hands are
never idle through dreaming or drawn back in
disgust or lifted in wonder or in wrath; but sure
and tireless in their touch upon the thousand little
things that make the invisible machinery of life.
That artist was there in triumph; but he had no
name. The ancient world called him the Slave.
From this advancing machine of millions, the
slighter array of the Allies, and especially the British
at their ultimate outpost, saved themselves by a
succession of hair's-breadth escapes and what
must have seemed to the soldiers the heartrending
luck of a mouse before a cat. Again and again
Von Kluck's cavalry, supported by artillery and
infantry, clawed round the end of the British
force, which eluded it as by leaping back again
and again. Sometimes the pursuer was, so to
speak, so much on top of his prey that it could
not even give way to him; but had to hit such
blows as it could in the hope of checking him for
I 24 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
the instant needed for escape. Sometimes the on-
coming wave was so close that a small individual
accident, the capture of one man, would mean the
washing out of a whole battalion. For day after
day this living death endured. And day after day
a certain dark truth began to be revealed, bit by
bit, certainly to the incredulous wonder of the
Prussians, quite possibly to the surprise of the
French, and quite as possibly to the surprise of
themselves; that there was something singular
about the British soldiers. That singular thing
may be expressed in a variety of ways; but it
would be almost certainly expressed insufficiently
by anyone who had not had the moral courage to
face the facts about his country in the last decades
before the war. It may perhaps be best expressed
by saying that some thousands of Englishmen were
dead: and that England was not. -
The fortress of Maubeuge had gaped, so to
speak, offering a refuge for the unresting and
tormented retreat; the British Generals had
refused it and continued to fight a losing fight in
the open for the sake of the common plan. At
night an enormous multitude of Germans had
come unexpectedly through the forest and caught
a smaller body of the British in Landrecies; failed
to dislodge them and lost a whole battalion in
that battle of the darkness. At the extreme
end of the line Smith-Dorrien's division, who
seemed to be nearly caught or cut off, had fought
with one gun against four, and so hammered the
Germans that they were forced to let go their
hold; and the British were again free. When
THE BATTLE OF THE MARNE I 25
the blowing up of a bridge announced that they
had crossed the last river, something other than
that battered remnant was saved; it was the
honour of the thing by which we live.
The driven and defeated line stood at last
almost under the walls of Paris; and the world
waited for the doom of the city. The gates
seemed to stand open; and the Prussian was to
ride into it for the third and the last time : for the
end of its long epic of liberty and equality was
come. And still the very able and very French
individual on whom rested the last hope of the
seemingly hopeless Alliance stood unruffled as a
rock, in every angle of his sky-blue jacket and his
bulldog figure. He had called his bewildered
soldiers back when they had broken the invasion
at Guise; he had silently digested the responsi-
bility of dragging on the retreat, as in despair, to
the last desperate leagues before the capital; and
he stood and watched. And even as he watched
the whole huge invasion swerved.
Out through Paris and out and round beyond
Paris, other men in dim blue coats swung out in
long lines upon the plain, slowly folding upon
Von Kluck like blue wings. Von Kluck stood an
instant; and then, flinging a few secondary forces
to delay the wing that was swinging round on
him, dashed across the Allies' line at a desperate
angle, to smash it in the centre as with a hammer.
It was less desperate than it seemed ; for he
counted, and might well count, on the moral and
physical bankruptcy of the British line and the
end of the French line immediately in front of
126 THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
him, which for six days and nights he had chased
before him like autumn leaves before a whirlwind.
Not unlike autumn leaves, red-stained, dust-hued,
and tattered, they lay there as if swept into a
corner. But even as their conquerors wheeled
eastwards, their bugles blew the charge; and the
English went forward through the wood that is
called Crecy, and stamped it with their seal for the
second time, in the highest moment of all the
secular history of man.
But it was not now the Crecy in which English
and French knights had met in a more coloured
age, in a battle that was rather a tournament. It
was a league of all knights for the remains of
all knighthood, of all brotherhood in arms or in
arts, against that which is and has been radically
unknightly and radically unbrotherly from the
beginning. Much was to happen after—munder
and flaming folly and madness in earth and sea and
sky; but all men knew in their hearts that the
third Prussian thrust had failed, and Christendom
was delivered once more. The empire of blood
and iron rolled slowly back towards the darkness
of the northern forests; and the great nations of
the West went forward; where side by side as
after a long lover's quarrel, went the ensigns of
St Denys and St George.
NOTE ON THE WORD & ENGLISH '”
The word: “England” and “English ’’ as uſed here require a
word of explanation, if only to anticipate the ire of the inevitable
Scot. To begin with, the word “ British ’’ involves a similar
awkwardness. I have tried to use it in the one or two carer
that referred to such thingſ as military glory and unity ; though I
am sure I have failed of full consistency in to complex a matter.
The difficulty is that this ſense of glory and unity, which should
certainly cover the Scotch, should also cover the Irish. And while
it is fairly ſafe to call a Scotsman a North Briton (despite the just
protest of Stevenson), it is very unsafe indeed to call an Irishman
a West Briton. But there is a deeper difficulty. I can assure
the Scot that I say “England,” not because I deny Scottish
nationality, but because I affirm it. And I can say, further, that
I could not here include Scots in the thesis, ſimply because I could
not include them in the condemnation. This book is a study, not of
a disease but rather of a weakness, which has only been pre-
dominant in the predominant partner. It would not be true, for
instance, to say either of Ireland or Scotland that the populace
lacked a religion ; but I do think that British policy as a whole
has suffered from the English lack of one, with its inevitable result
of plutocracy and class contempt.
A LIBRARY EDITION OF
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CECIL, PAL MER & HAYWARD
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