England, My England!

I

AFTER four years of absence, one comes back to England much as a lover might approach the bower of his mistress. One is in a romantic mood; one even expects to be received romantically. But one’s best friend is inditing a letter to his landlord —a very important letter; the lady to whom one hastens has an appointment with her dressmaker; and only the very young or the very old seem to have the leisure and the enthusiasm that one had imagined would attend the wayfarer returned. And then there are those ever-ready shopkeepers — tailors, hatters, hosiers, and bootmakers. They have the time for one. Supple as serpents, false as foxes, and ravenous as the vulture, they lie in wait.

I dare say it was the same everywhere throughout the Western world — in Paris as in London, in New York as in Berlin. The years 1919 and 1920 will be remembered as the years of greed, of everyone for himself and the devil take the hindmost. So it was most emphatically in London, materially, and even in the subtler realms of the intangible; for those who had nothing to buy or sell were equally insistent and equally mendacious with their isms; with their political, moral, and spiritual nostrums: Communism, Activism, Spookism — the list is as chaotic as it is interminable. ‘Try and keep sane, I said to myself, ‘and you will be one man in a thousand.’

There was nothing much that was new in all this. Wordsworth has recorded a parallel chapter of decay, induced by similar causes — by wars, by discontents, by revolution. One turns to the great sonnets. Ridiculously apt they seem; and reading them in this new light, one is inclined to put away pen and paper, knowing that all has been said, and better said than we can say it, better felt than we can feel it. And as we turn to Wordsworth, so, exactly, did Wordsworth turn to Milton, who doubtless turned to some old Prophet of the Hebrews, with whose library I am unfamiliar, and so must halt at that.

I cannot, however, resist the luxury of quotation. All is so pat, so ‘modern.’ If you cut his lines, they bleed.

Inevitably one feels that Wordsworth was acquainted with the Northcliffe newspapers. Or, rereading the sonnet that opens, —

When I have borne in memory what has tamed Great Nations, how ennobling thoughts depart When men change Swords for Ledgers, and desert The Student’s bower for gold, —

one feels that the poet has witnessed the processes of demobilization, and has watched a favorite disciple accept a lucrative engagement with a popular journal.

Finally, it is difficult to resist the hackneyed Milton! Thou shouldst be living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen . . . Have forfeited their ancient English dower Of inward happiness. We are selfish men —

How well you know us, Wordsworth — how more than well! And how you manage the magnificent baldness of those great lines! But still, we did, somehow, get over those old troubles, and reach, if not the Golden, at least the Victorian Age. We did jingle sovereigns in our pockets again, and read our Dickens, and cheer our Palmerston or our Peel or our ‘Dizzy’ or our Gladstone; we did follow Darwin and Huxley to their last conclusions, or Newman, Manning, and Pusey to theirs. We did actually revive and play our part in the world — a not ignoble part, and, in fact, on the whole and all things considered, a pretty decent part, as national parts are cast. So, by the same token, though the individual may suffer, — and the individual is often suffering cruelly just at present, — I see no reason for ultimate despair. England and the British Empire are not yet off the map, or gone to the bottom like some old ship dry-rotten.

In London, as in all big cities, one loses faith. I go away from London and regain it. The train stops; and as I leave my bag with the porter at the little wayside station, and sniff the keen night air, I am taken out of myself and become renewed. One loves this place; gladly one would live for it, and, as gladly, die for it. There must be millions of us who feel a like impalpable devotion. The other places we have known were inns and taverns; but this is home.

The moon lighting me, I walk over the stubble where the partridges are sleeping: I pass the burrows under the hedge; I look up to the familiar patterns of the trees. The heavens above and the earth below whisper of something intimate and near; the very smell of the place, even were I blind, or deaf, or ailing, would make me welcome. One seems to belong here as one belongs nowhere else. I dare say the Frenchman feels the same about his France, the German about his Germany — and so throughout the world. I know for certain that, as much as the blackbird in the hedge, the rabbit in the burrow, the partridge in the stubble, I am at home here; am made of the English soil I tread, the English air I breathe; and that no other soil or air could ever be quite the same to me. There are millions of others who feel as I feel — whose love is beyond reason, beyond will, or strength, or counting up of cost.

The city robs us of this heritage. More and more it seems to have no nationality; more and more it seems to produce a creature of a different species — a restless, unhappy kind of being, who dares not think, who flees from his own thoughts as if they were a poison. It has fashions instead of values; most of its art is a drug that will help it to forget; and all the isms it has concocted are but the symptoms of its malady, the outcry of its effort to escape. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that Socialism, Communism, and all the rest of them, were discussed in Palestine two thousand years ago, and that wherever man has been unhappy and oppressed, he has rediscovered the ancient formulæ, only to make wreckage of their hopes and all their promise.

II

The England to which I am returned seems to be composed of three kinds of people. There are those who, directly or indirectly, fought the war; there are those who did not, either directly or indirectly, fight the war; and there are the robbers of the widow and the orphan. Of the first class, it may be said with some certainty that they will not easily fight another war; of the second, one can only report what one knows; and the third is better left to the Almighty. But among these three one seems to move uneasily. It is a pity that the government allowed such distinctions. And with that, one comes immediately to politics, which, nowadays, seems to be the main obsession of every social gathering. The pent-up bitterness of all that we suffer in silence finds a relief in these discussions, where every public man in turn is held responsible for our misfortunes. The newspapers seem to batten on these hatreds; never, in recent years, have they been so mendacious, so personal, so filled with spite and venom. And the politicians themselves, largely a gang of nonentities, hungry for office and nursing their fly-blown reputations, speechify and go through the old wearisome performance of abuse and self-justification, until, occasionally, one feels that the best thing that could happen to this old country of ours would be a complete clearance of all these comedians and strayed play-actors, and the election of a new Parliament to which nobody would be admitted who had approached politics before.

According to one’s temperament, one laughs or weeps over this dubious conflict between the Outs and Ins. One reads the press, and even the political speeches of the Coalition, Liberal, and Labor leaders; and in every instance their insincerity appalls one. On any subject of which one has special knowledge one ‘finds them out’; they teem with ‘ bluff,’ misstatement, suppression, and every artifice of the special pleader; until at last one realizes that the whole thing is a game, and that each is trying to mesmerize the unhappy voter, who asks for nothing better, so it appears, than to be promised everything and to be given nothing. A friend of mine had invested a good deal of his savings in a company that failed. ‘They promised you enormous dividends?’ I asked, when he told me of his loss. He admitted as much. The ordinary voter of our free and enlightened democracies resembles my friend, in that, the more he is promised, the more he is magnetized and inclined to part with his vote. A fair and reasonable return would fail to attract him.

Beneath all this comedy, ‘eye-wash,’ and pretence, there is, however, a fund of seriousness. One talks to a responsible member of the responsible government and finds that he is not entirely mad. Quite the reverse, occasionally, and just as wearied of the theatrical element in his trade as you are. One learns, for instance, that the muchabused continuance of the excess-profits duty was a deliberate measure imposed by a cabinet which had foreseen the trade-boom that would follow on the cessation of hostilities, and had resolved that the country should profit by it as well as the trader. This aspect of the case has never been presented by what is called the ‘Capitalist Press,’ which, rather, has encouraged the notion that this special tax was a blow aimed at the expansion of trade.

Or, again, one learns that the devolutionary processes, which are giving new legislative bodies to Ireland, and to Egypt and India, are part of a considered programme, which must ultimately lead to the establishment of similar bodies in England, Wales, and Scotland. So that, before I die, I may see an Imperial Assembly devoted to a consideration of the general questions that affect the British Empire, while each nation, from New Zealand to Ireland, is left to work out its own personal problems, undisturbed and self-contained. For England itself this would be a notable advance; as we here need Home Rule more urgently than Ireland, and a government which, instead of being preoccupied with the affairs of half the world, could concentrate on those internal problems which so bitterly divide us.

I find myself, willing or unwilling, an apologist for our present Coalition Government; but when one reflects that to it attaches the responsibility for a peculiarly dangerous crossing, and to its opponents the joy, by fair means or by foul, of dragging it down, it is difficult for the spectator to hold to any other course. I am told that Mr. Lloyd George is a rascal; indeed, the moral obliquity of Mr. Lloyd George has become an obsession with his opponents, who seem to look for a white dove in a position that nothing white or dovelike could maintain for half an hour. More than by Mr. Lloyd George’s alleged rascality, am I affrighted by the unreality of Liberal eloquence and the pathetic fallacies of Labor. Both of these parties, at the moment, remind one of a lover, anxious to get married, and possessed of no other assets than good-will and the intensity of his emotions.

Turning from all these voices and the distraction and the discord of them, it is a curiosity of the times that the most democratic age England has ever known should listen with confidence and respect to but a couple of its prominent personages, and these both royal. An unfailing instinct has led the common Englishman —or the Canadian or Australian, for that matter — to discern that neither the King nor the Prince of Wales is open to the charge of mendacity or double-dealing. It may be that this immunity appertains to their high positions; but, on reflection, one is convinced that, apart from opportunity, the matter is one of character and a loyal sense of duty. And for this the average man is grateful.

Trusted widely in a lesser degree, but nevertheless trusted, are the three or four political personalities who are obviously free from the taint of selfinterest. Among the Labor members, there is Mr. Clynes; among the Tories, Lord Robert Cecil; among the Liberals, Lord Grey of Fallodon. Pondering over the transparent honesty and the devotion of such men, whom the hardened Parliamentarian might describe as ‘unemployable,’ I occasionally wonder whether the future may not belong to such a Central Party, composed of the Conservative Left in union with the Labor Right; for in England there is far more sympathy and understanding between the upper and lower classes than between either class and the Liberal partisan who stands midway, with his hands in the pockets of both.

Beyond these more artificial than real political divisions, one is conscious of a difficulty far more vital. The three kinds of people whom I instanced in the opening paragraph of this section must have time for fusion and forgetfulness. Through 1919 and 1920 one could not but feel that the bitterest struggle of all was that being waged between the returned soldier and the man who had taken his job. The civilian too often regarded the soldier as his natural enemy; the soldier felt himself dispossessed and disliked by the civilian. There was jealousy in this conflict, and a world of disillusion. For the soldier had been promised so much and had been so much in the limelight; and the civilian, who for several years had suffered in nerve, in vanity, in his own as well as in the popular estimation, was now afraid of losing the little or the much that he had gained by staying at home. Time is smoothing these distinctions — they will pass, and are, indeed, already passing. And even the third class, that of the profiteer, is now losing in the slump a large part of what he made in the years of unlimited demand and short supply.

III

I look round upon this altered world, and, apart from the divisions I have instanced, find myself moving amid three generations — the old, the middling, and the young. The old has had its day and is done for; it lives by its prejudices, its pride, its fears, and its slender hold upon the past. Of us all, perhaps, it has suffered most cruelly by the war — in pocket, and by the loss of those young lives to which it looked for warmth.

Toward my own generation I am still feeling rather fierce. Throughout Europe it seems to have had the means of saving us from disaster. But it muddled along, short-sighted, selfish, bent only on immediate gain, immediate purposes. After it might come the Deluge; but it seems that the Deluge was less backward and not so easily appeased. The present dog-fight between Capital and Labor is largely of its creation: the indifferent schools, the squalor of our towns, the ‘interests’ that block our way at every turning. It sees the whole duty of man as business organization and money-making, sustained by golf, by auction bridge, by overfeeding and long cigars. Such, more or less, are our masters; and to-day we are paying for their folly — and, incidentally, for our own.

The third and youngest generation, so it seems to me, is made of finer metal. A hard-bitten lot, perhaps; but what would you of young people who have been up against the nudities of war? They took the brunt of it, — young men and young women, — felt all its terrific sanity as well as its Satanic madness. For war is a paradox, an art and a sacrament as well as an inferno of evil passions and cruel deeds. This younger generation is made of a tougher material than its fathers; fundamentally it is more open, more clearly allied with those who toil. It does not regard the wage-earner as a unit to be exploited; it has known him as a man and a brother, as well as a number on a pay-sheet. One feels that this younger generation will make hay when it gets the opportunity; that it will lead where its fathers trod over-cautiously; and that it has it in its power to be trusted and followed with a confidence that is to seek to-day.

I am well alive to all the qualifying circumstances: that in my own generation there are numerous brilliant exceptions, and that in the younger generation there exists a pretty good sprinkling of shirkers and of ‘rotters.’ But it seems to me that the above generalizations will hold good. It is only our older men who talk lightly of future wars; who, incurably pugnacious at their juniors’ expense, still cling to the old conceptions of international rivalries and international hates. It is only the older men who regard Labor as the ordained antagonist, with the inevitable result, and Capital as something sacrosanct, which must be fed with countless lives. The younger generation is more human, more rational. It has suffered; it too has known fatigue, discomfort, and the darkest hours; it is without sentimentality, perhaps, and without cant; and, maybe, it is most abominably disillusioned. But not unlike it are the men and women it will some day be called upon to lead, or among whose numbers it will find its partners and associates.

Any impression of the England of to-day must be incomplete unless one takes account of the children, in whom so large a hope is centred. Just now there is a set-back, a disconcerting wave of unemployment and privation; but they have had five good years, and, where the parents are employed in any of our vital industries, they are still prosperous — well clothed, well nourished, and content. The change that has been wrought is something of a miracle. I spent a fortnight going through our Cornish fishing districts, and it seemed as if the lower strata that one knew before the war had been completely washed away. Poverty was unknown there. And it was the same in the agricultural counties; while railway men and miners were never so affluent. All were investing their increased earnings in the children.

Throughout England one marks the change occasioned by the five good years — good, in so far as the wageearner’s children are concerned. And it is not only the body that has been touched; for this latest generation, poetizing the war, as children will, has had its share of high emotions, altogether a more heightened life than the generations that grew up in times of peace. One feels inevitably that, given favorable conditions, a host of gifted men and women will spring from it; that it is, perhaps, the most precious asset that England now holds. And speaking of these children, I cannot refrain from outlining an unforgettable picture, one that must fill anyone who cares for the future of this country with hope, and even with optimism.

At the end of last summer schoolterm, I went to Victoria Station, my mission being to gather up and carry home two youngsters whose parents were abroad. Every train that drew in to the particular platform where I waited discharged its load of healthy boys and girls. Wonderful kids, fit as prize-fighters, and all delighted to be free of the restraints of school! Train after train, loaded and packed with them and their belongings, rolled into the terminus; and it would be exactly the same in all our large cities. True, they belonged, or seemed to belong, to our more fortunate classes; but behind this gathering, as well as luxury and easy money easily spent, one divined a vaster fund of sacrifice, unselfishness, and love. One knew, among one’s own acquaintance, parents who stinted themselves, who gave up much, so that Jack and Jill should have their chance — an outdoor life, good teachers, and plenty of simple food and exercise, in preparation for the difficult years that lie ahead.

IV

Your ordinary Englishman expresses himself in action; the passive, the critical, the reflective ways of life are foreign to his genius. When there is a thing to be done, he does it; and when it is done, it is over, and he sees no reason why anybody should ‘make a song about it.’ And he usually does the right thing, relying in the main on common sense. There are other and more brilliant kinds of sense, which are approached through the mind; but common sense is instinctive and requires no intellectual elaboration. Hence, the ordinary Englishman is often voted ‘stupid’ by his more gifted neighbors, or ‘dull,’ or a ‘barbarian,’ or anything you please. But give him a job to do, something concrete that he can take hold of, and the probability is that it will be done before his more scintillating friends have finished arguing about it. This native and rather inarticulate capacity may account for his survival. For you cannot destroy a people that simply will not grow up and get old. When matters get too hot for him at home, he goes off and founds the American Colonies, or New Zealand, or Australia, and carries on, not very much changed, except as a tree is changed if you give it elbow-room and light and air. In England we are grown too close together.

It is, of course, a rash undertaking to generalize about any nation, and more especially a nation so cut across with foreign blood and influences; but leaving one’s own opinions aside and relying on an observer of another race, one at least arrives at an interesting comparison; for all such estimates must be comparative, and I invariably find that the Englishman who takes pleasure in vilifying his own people — no uncommon object, nowadays — is one of those perverted idealists who have never mixed with the peoples of other lands.

At Salonica, in the late war, we were an army of six nations — French, Italian, Russian, British, Serb, and Greek. Of these the British were the least well known to the local population — not known at all, in fact, till the city was burned and 77,000 of its people rendered homeless. Mr. H. Collinson Owen, in his admirable description of these events, in Salonica and After, writes: —

‘There were many warm tributes, individual and otherwise, made to the work of the British during and after the fire. Of these, we will take one from the Greek journal Phos: —

‘The refugees were led on the night of frightfulness and destruction, with indescribable affection, far from the flames, and found themselves under the protection of an elect race whose name is spoken with gratitude by those who have been so greatly tried. . . . The life of these ardent apostles of humanity and goodness amongst us has been unstained and clean, and the Greek appreciation of it has been sincere and warm.

. . . Although there has been but little time in which so difficult an installation could be effected, nevertheless, British energy, which is the marvelous and amazing quality of this great race, was able to gather humanely, shelter, and feed a great number of refugees. The houses in which the refugees are sheltered are well-roofed, and the tents placed in perfect line, with English exactitude. There lives an entire population, which yesterday was happy, but to-day is ruined and living on the charity of powerful friends.

‘Or, again, I will cite the words of Mr. Repoules, a former Greek Minister of Finance, uttered on a different occasion: — ‘ The British are practically worshiped throughout the whole of Macedonia. . . . What is the power behind the goodness of character? And how is it gained? By nature? No! By bearing, education, and will. Their intentions are always straight, their thoughts innocent, and they never misuse their power. . . . Not even the most illeducated Englishman, even when intoxicated, molests anyone, hurts anyone, hurts an animal, touches a fruit tree, or displays any vicious tendency. Heredity has not left in the British character a trace of brutality or barbarism.’

All this is more than a little flowery; but, as Mr. Owen remarks, ‘we must remember that this comes natural to the Greek who is writing with a pen dipped in enthusiasm ’; and I may add that these tributes, far from turning the heads of their recipients, led to skits and parodies innumerable, making fun of a situation that was quite outside the range of our self-consciousness. We could not see ourselves that way, at all. Here, for instance, were 77,000 poor wretches homeless, and one helped them as a matter of course; though some of the more logical of our allies considered this the right occasion to relieve them of their valuables. It was a good opportunity; so much must be admitted; and many of these refugees had not been over-nice with us.

I dwell on these two unsolicited testimonials, not because I am proud of them, but because, in spite of their romanticism, they actually do offer a pretty good key to the leading characteristics of the common English man or woman; to that fundamental decency upon which our statesmen might count with confidence, and even with assurance. Instead of lying to such a people; instead of fearing them as an unknowm quantity, or regarding them as so many cattle that must be kept in subjection at any cost, it might pay to be open, to come out with the truth, and with many things that are neither smooth things, nor things of pleasant hearing. The common Englishman can stand the worst of them; and, in any case, he invariably ends by finding them out for himself and footing the bill for them, in blood, in treasure, heaped with compound interest.

All this — which ultimately amounts to the condemnation of a party system that virtually puts the country up for auction and sells it to the highest bidder— was more penetratingly stated, a good many years ago, by that great patriot and teacher, Professor Spenser Wilkinson. To those who wish to follow this line of thought to its conclusions, I recommend his ‘plea for a national policy,’ entitled The Great Alternative. The whole Irish question, thrown to the wolves of party when it might have been settled by agreement a generation since, is but a tithe of the price we pay for an idiosyncrasy which, framed for compromise, in this and in many other instances becomes a crime.

V

The quarrel of Indian, Irish, and Egyptian Separatists is not so much a quarrel with England as with Western civilization. Emerging from dreams that unveil only the alleged Beauty of the Past and almost totally ignore its shadows, they are confronted by a Present and a Future of disconcerting wakefulness and actuality. But Western civilization has come to stay; or, failing it, the populations of the world must fall to a good many millions below their present figure. When I was a boy at school, in the eighties, I learned that the population of India was some hundred and fifty millions. It is now well over three hundred millions. And the population of India is but one of many populations which have doubled or trebled within living memory. Without what we call Western civilization, this would have been impossible; and without what we call Western civilization, the support of any such rapidly increasing multitude will be equally impossible in the future. It is the merit, or the fault, of England that in this expansion she has played a leading part; has done so much to evolve a civilization which, whatever its failings, has enabled two human beings to grow in the place of one.

I look at what, for want of a better term, I will call Eastern civilization, but which might equally well be described as the Western civilization of the past. In the main, and apart from its alleged beauty, it is an interminable record of famine, pestilence, enslaved populations, and of perpetual warfare waged at the behest of great or little tyrants; of rapine, slaughter, and the sacking and firing of inoffensive homes. Its vaunted empires as well as its petty kingdoms were based on a servitude that left the ruling minorities defenseless in a time of crisis. Little by little emerged the free peoples who are the dominant factors of to-day. It is these who, even in despite of such difficult passages as those we have recently crossed and are still crossing, have made it possible for the earth to support its doubled and redoubled populations. The Bolshevist experiment, if it has proved nothing else, has at least proved this. It has demonstrated that Capital is even more a servant than it is a master, and that, if you lop off the head, there is not much life left in the body.

It is at once the glory and the misfortune of the English-speaking peoples that in this intensification of life and human industry, they have played a more important part than all others; and if, in so doing, we have created cities that are an offense, and a social and material organization stained with individual cruelties and injustices, there is ample evidence to prove that we are alive to most of our shortcomings and are making an honest effort to correct them. We have not accepted this Western civilization of ours as final. It dates barely from the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars, which, historically speaking, means that it is in its infancy. It is most firmly rooted among the peoples who have accepted Democracy and the implications of Democracy, which means that it cannot stand still. So that, if it possesses no immediate beauty, — which is arguable, — it does possess the beauty of growth; it does possess the beauty immanent in any force that is able to look ahead, to peer into the future; that aims at distant goals, which, being perfect, and human nature being imperfect, in all probability it can never reach.

The claim that the Englishman is dead to beauty, a congenital materialist with a passion for the ugly, is as absurd an inference as has ever been put forward. At Penzance in November I met an Englishman who had walked all the way from London, with no other object than to feast his eyes upon our autumnal foliage. He had walked for three weeks. One could go through all India, Egypt, and Ireland without coming across such gardens, small and large, as may be met with in a single English county. The Englishman is wise enough to discern that beauty is not of the past, but of all time, and that Mr. Yeats’s ‘stars grown old with dancing silver-sandalled on the sea’ — a singularly lovely image — are not ‘old ’ at all, because for them is neither present, past, nor future, but only a Oneness in which our human reckonings do not exist.

A material test is not always a vital test, but very often it answers; and looking round for a touchstone by which to measure whether our Western civilization has stood still or whether it has advanced, I can think of no better way than to compare the earnings and comfort enjoyed by the workingman of to-day with those tolerated by his parents and his grandparents. In farm, mine, or factory, whether it be number of hours worked or purchasing power of wages, there is simply no comparison: in every direction there has been an immense stride forward, heavily accentuated by the bloodless revolution that has accompanied these later years of readjustment. And turning with a similar curiosity to my own hazardous profession, I recall how the youthful Emerson, visiting England, ‘paid his respects’ to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle. One can imagine a similar pilgrim presenting himself to Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, and John Masefield. He would find these writers settled in easy homes, their works assured of an immense public, themselves free of every rank and condition of society. I reread Emerson and find that their precursors were little removed from pensioners or paupers.

VI

In a civilized country it is the mass of the people that counts, rather than any efflorescence which may adorn or vulgarize its upper and more evident manifestations. It is in the mass that one looks for the heart and inmost nature of a people; and from the mass itself rise and flower those representative and abiding exemplars by which the main body is judged — is extolled, or, perchance, condemned. Among all the European peoples — and I have come into pretty close contact with most of them — I know none more sound than the English; nor one more capable of assimilating and using those parasitic and often orchidaceous growths that are inevitable in any country so open to the world, so little burdened with intolerance.

In the scramble and general hurry of the last two years it has been hardly fair to judge us — to judge any nation, for that matter: when industry has been a gamble and politics a dilemma; when trade has degenerated into speculation, and mankind has lived from day to day, from hand to mouth, in a condition not far removed from inebriety. Out of these artificial conditions, imposed by an economic situation entirely without precedent in human experience, mankind is slowly emerging. The bubbles have burst — real values are replacing artificial, and the days of reckoning are upon us. We must hang together or disintegrate; we must face the facts of life, or, clinging to a Fool’s Paradise, must dissolve with it. The years of carnival are over.

One reaches the heart of England, and can form some estimate of its real quality, more by a study of the provincial press than by that of London. The London press, with but two or three honorable exceptions, — of which the Daily Telegraph, perhaps, is the leading instance, — is a neurotic press; more international than national, opportunist, unbalanced, and barely concerned with the city from which it is addressed. Against this it may be urged that London has no common life, no centre, no circumference; that its citizens have no knowledge of one another, and are so many units, drawn together, recruited, and dispersed by the hazards of existence. In the provincial world all this is changed. The provincial city is manageable. One is aware of an identity of interest, a local as well as a national patriotism; one feels that these towns make men rather than devour them. Here the citizens are known to their neighbors. Instead of being monstrous and imagined, they are familiar figures, who come and go openly; so that even the most famous have faces that have been seen, voices that have been heard, and strength and weaknesses that are in common knowledge.

The Londoner has no such personal evaluations. It is a curious instance of this segregation, that there are millions of Londoners who, consciously, have never spoken to a peer or even seen one, or to the proprietor of one or another of our world-famous business houses, or to any figure more conspicuous than the ordinary policeman. In a provincial town, on the contrary, including the largest, every class has its contacts, and there is nothing very legendary about the existence of a duke, a captain of industry, a celebrated scientist, or, it may be, a cabinet minister. Everyone knows him by sight, and has heard him speak, or, perhaps, has exchanged a word with him, and has come to the conclusion that he is much as other mortals.

In this English England resides the essence of our nation: its soundness, its toughness, its national consciousness and strength. And though you may see these scattered over county after county, you will find them gathered together and beating as one heart before any such collective symbol as the Whitehall Cenotaph, or the tomb of the Unknown Warrior laid to rest in Westminister Abbey. Here London may achieve its purpose as the centre of our circle. Yet the spirit behind those monuments, and the tears and homage which encompass them, are not predominantly of that city, but rather of those plainer aggregations, within sight of sea or moorland or of open country, where memories are long and fidelity is more enduring.

The main issue between man and man in this age is that which divides Capital and Labor. The struggle between an aspiring middle class, describing itself as Liberal, and a privileged class, describing itself as Conservative, is ended. Each has swallowed what it could digest of the other, and to-day only the echoes of that old warfare remain with us. But the newer conflict has in it a something of reality. In each country of the West, and even in the East, it is being fought out with the weapons that come handiest, and in accord with the national temperament. Traveling through Europe and mingling with divers peoples, one finds it of interest to observe how these particular forces vary: how what is regarded as advanced or radical in one country is denounced as slow and reactionary in its neighbor — and the less advanced the neighbor, the more slow and reactionary! An English Radical, for instance, looked upon as red hot in his own country, becomes merely tepid in Italy and stone cold in Russia. Perhaps this was what a leading Continental statesman meant when, discussing the English character and his own difficulties, he observed that, ‘The British people is in its civilization two hundred years in advance of any nation in Europe.’

This struggle has been accelerated and intensified by the fantastic earnings of certain industries favored by the war. One can understand the revolt occasioned in the mind of the wage-earner who discovers that the colliery or the shipping company that employs him has paid its shareholders a dividend of three hundred per cent, as in more than one case has actually happened. One can understand that, after fifty years of compulsory education, voices should arise, which question the legitimacy of even a far smaller return. One can understand that, in these days of discussion and inquiry, the whole system may be questioned and condemned. One can understand that Organized Labor, taking a lesson from its opponent, should regard their joint venture as a struggle wherein the spoils go to the stronger party. The fight has proceeded with enormous spirit these two years past; until circumstances, more powerful than self-interest, have brought both parties to a halt. The industrial world, after an unprecedented and fortuitous innings, is faced with readjustments that go deeper than a division of the spoils. The righting of this new situation — and it must be righted if the country is to survive — will take years, not of conflict, but of statesmanship.

In times of crisis the best men come to the top; such times grant them their opportunity. Given the worst of stable governments, this law holds good; and even Russia had her Witte in the days before Kerensky. England has never lacked men possessed of the glorified common sense that meets a difficult occasion; nor does she lack them at this moment. Temporarily they may have been obscured, intrigued against, and shouted down; but signs are not wanting that the shouters are beginning to lose their nerve, that the Utopians are seeing reason, and that the intriguers have become discredited. In the Labor Party there are still leaders who have the good sense to see that Capital, whatever its other qualities, is often a synonym for self-denial, courage, and imagination; and in the opposing camp the strongest heads are working for ways and means of reconcilement.

It is not the purpose of this paper to dwell on schemes of reconstruction, or to do more than record the impressions of a vastly interested contemporary. In England just now one endures and suffers; yet if one has any hold upon life, or any knowledge of one’s fellow creatures, one cannot but be aware that the mechanism by which we live is still in motion; is, indeed, moving with a certain precision toward definite aims and purposes. The patient is recovering and approaching convalescence.

There are many signs of returning health, and more of returning sanity. It is, for instance, admitted now that Unemployment, the spectre which, for a hundred years, has embittered the life of the wage-earner, is not a necessary and inevitable evil, to which we must submit or offer palliatives. Both parties to this vital and predominant question are working toward a considered solution.

My friend Basil Worsfold, who is regarded as an authority, assures me that agriculture can now offer inducements equal to those offered by the industries that have seduced so much capital and so much labor from the land; and that a free use of machinery and more scientific methods of cropping are tending to reverse this process, thereby restoring a balance more than a little dislocated by the collapse of Russia and of Central Europe. And again, a system of selective and state-aided emigration is being planned by our Dominions overseas, working in conjunction with those in authority at home.

All these are vital issues, and many might be added to them. Politicians will discuss them, and claim what credit they may for their inception; but the real initiative has sprung from the Nation — from those deep reservoirs of common sense and practical ability by which, in the end, every matter that affects the welfare of this country is resolved. These activities and these capacities are still as strong with us as in our heyday; and so long as we possess them, are loyal to them, and will submit to them, one feels that there is no need to despair of the England that was, that is, or that is yet to come.