Chapter II The Conquerors
I
“England is a sieve” is the cry of the astonished audience in Mr. Belloc’s brochure on the fiscal question. “Poor old England is a sieve.” They were filled with horror at the Tariff Reformer’s revelation of the surplusage of imports over exports, and his vision of the golden sovereigns being drained from this country to pay for these undesirable incursionists. They already contemplated the time when the last piece of gold would have been transported to meet the demands of the insatiable “foreigner,” and the whole country would suddenly realise that its pockets were empty—that it had spent all that it had. Undoubtedly similar if less pleasant arguments of a vigorous fiscal campaign have succeeded in shaking belief in England’s prosperity. It is still possible in train or street, or places where men assemble, to find observers, with an air of sagacity, declaiming upon England’s headlong rush towards poverty and the abyss. I remember listening for many hours, on the journey over the St. Gothard to Milan, to a fluent English traveller explaining to some astonished Italians that England was steadily growing poorer year by year; less money accumulated, less money spent. Such are the follies of untrained minds, who are unable to read experience or to interpret figures. They cannot apprehend the astonishing facts of “super-wealth” as accumulated in this country; as accumulated in the past thirty years. That rate of accumulation has never been before paralleled: just as the expenditure which accompanies accumulation—for we are not a thrifty race—offers something new in a standard of whole classes. A serious study of the superfluous wastage of the nation might bring reassurance to all who are afraid of an enforced austerity of manners; even if it provides little gratification to those who would see expenditure devoted to desirable ends. Statistics present to the reader incredible arrays of increase: so much leaping forward of income-tax returns, unchecked by wars, borrowings, or trade depressions; nearly two hundred millions of the National Income divided amongst people whose individual incomes exceed five thousand a year. Where does it go to? How is it consumed? What asset of permanent value will be left behind as evidence of the super-wealth of the twentieth century? The answers to these questions are not entirely satisfactory. “Waste” is written large over a very substantial proportion of the national expenditure, and that far more in the private than in the public consumption. A Conservative leader once informed a meeting in Scotland that if all the rich men were abolished there would be no one left to give work to the poor people. That, however, was rather a popular method of combating Socialism, than a serious contribution to political economy. “To a retailer of news,” says Mr. George Russell, “who informed him that Lord Omnium, recently deceased, had left a large sum of money to charities, Mr. Gladstone replied with characteristic emphasis, ‘Thank him for nothing. He was obliged to leave it. He couldn’t carry it with him.’” And what the rich man is to do with his money except to find employment, and how he is to escape the burden of death duties or graduated income tax in a world where every civilised nation has an eye upon his “super-wealth,” are queries whose answer is conjectural.
The most obvious increase of this waste comes from the “speeding up” of living which has taken place in all classes in so marked a fashion within a generation. The whole standard of life has been sensibly raised, not so much in comfort as in ostentation. And the result is something similar to that in the insane competition of armaments which takes place amongst the terrified nations of the world. One year ten huge ironclads confront twenty. A decade after, fifteen huge ironclads of another type have replaced the first: to be confronted again with thirty of the new floating castles. So many millions have been thrown to the scrap heap. The proportion of power has remained unaffected. It is the same in the more determined private competition for supremacy in a social standard. Where one house sufficed, now two are demanded; where a dinner of a certain quality, now a dinner of a superior quality; where clothes or dresses or flowers, now more clothes, more dresses, more flowers. It is waste, not because fine clothes and rare flowers and pleasant food are in themselves undesirable, but because by a kind of parallel of the law of diminishing returns in agriculture, additional expenditure in such directions fails to result in correspondent additions of happiness. In many respects, indeed, the effect is not only negatively worthless, but even positively harmful. Modern civilisation in its most highly organised forms has elaborated a system to which the delicate fibre of body and mind is unable to respond. And the result is the appearance (whimsical enough to Carlyle’s spectators “beyond the region of the fixed stars”) of a society expending half its income in heaping up the material of disease, to which the other half of its income is being laboriously applied for remedy.
But the general effect (to the above-mentioned dispassionate spectators) is of an extravagance of wealth and waste which is only not insolent because it is for the most part unconscious, the sport of blind forces rather than the deliberate defiance of the limits of human endeavour. It is not insolence or—as it might have appeared in the olden days—a determination to rival the fabled immortals, which has charged all our high roads with wandering machines racing with incredible velocity and no apparent aim. Many (such as W. E. Henley) demand “Speed in the face of the Lord.” Others are inflamed with the desire for “driving abroad in furious guise,” as an escape from the ennui of a life which has lost its savour; as in the tortured and bored procession in old Rome, for the “easier and quicker” passing of the “impracticable hours.” But a large proportion of those who have employed motor cars in habitual violation of the speed limit, and in destruction of the amenities of the rural life of England, have done so either because their neighbours have employed motor cars, or because their neighbours have not employed motor cars; in an effort towards equality with the one, or superiority over the other. When every man of a certain income has purchased a motor car, when life has become “speeded up” to the motor-car level, that definite increase of expenditure will be accepted as normal. But life will be no happier and no richer for such an acceptance; it will merely have become more impossible for those who (for whatever reason) are unequal to the demands of such a standard. And the same is true of the multiplication of meals; of the rise in the price of rent in certain districts of London, for example, because every one wants to live there; of numberless exactions and extortions which have grown up in a society whose members are “like wealthy men who care not how they give.”
And mournfully enough this rather dull and drab extravagance of private living is accompanied by a severe scrutiny of any kind of public expenditure, and a resentful criticism of all efforts to stamp the memory of this age upon enduring brick and stone. The London County Council, housed in a few scattered hovels and warrens, proposed a year or two back to devote a few hundred thousand pounds to an “Hôtel de Ville,” situate on the banks of the river opposite Westminster. And the opponents of the particular party in power had no difficulty in stirring up the wealthier classes into the fiercest protest against this attempt to leave the future with a permanent memorial of twentieth-century London. The one dignified and conspicuous building of the Victorian age—the Palace at Westminster—remains to-day scamped, truncated, and unfinished, because the nation, in a cold fit of retrenchment, was alarmed at the amount which it had already lavished upon it. Dr. Dill has shown in the Roman Peace, during the age of the Antonines and after, the people of the Empire turning with enthusiasm to great communal building; and every city setting itself to such achievements as remain to-day the wonder of the world. There is something of brutality, indeed, as well as something of large achievement, in the inadequacy of ends to means: as in the gigantic Pont du Gard, marching in its grandeur over a deep valley in order to conduct a tiny rivulet of water to a second-rate provincial city; or the enormous stone arenas which in every ruined Roman town mark the place of the communal games. But the brutality is charged with strength; there is purpose in it, carried through with relentless tenacity; the purpose of the bending of Nature’s stubborn resistance to the designs of man. What kind of building will represent for the astonishment of future eyes the harvest of the super-wealth of the British Peace? The signs are not propitious. A Byzantine Cathedral at Westminster, a Gothic Cathedral at Liverpool, a few town halls and libraries of sober solidity, the white buildings which to-day line Whitehall, and fill the passing stranger with bewilderment at a race “that thus could build,” will be the chief legacies of this present generation. The thirteenth century gave us the Cathedrals; the sixteenth gave us the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge and the noblest of English country houses. These tiny Englands, with populations, in the aggregate, less than that of London to-day, and wealth incomparably smaller, have left us possessions which we can admire but cannot equal. “The work which we collective children of God do,” complained Matthew Arnold, “our grand centre of life, our city for us to dwell in, is London! London, with its unutterable external hideousness, and with its internal canker of publice egestas, privatim opulentia, unequalled in the world.” It was this contrast which gave point to a question which otherwise the plain man would put by as absurd: “If England were swallowed up by the sea to-morrow, which of the two, a hundred years hence, would most excite the love, interest, and admiration of mankind, the England of the last twenty years or the England of Elizabeth?”
Public penury, private ostentation—that, perhaps, is the heart of the complaint. A nation with the wealth of England can afford to spend, and spend royally. Only the end should be itself desirable, and the choice deliberate. The spectacle of a huge urban poverty confronts all this waste energy. That spectacle should not, indeed, forbid all luxuries and splendours: but it should condemn the less rewarding of them as things tawdry and mean. “Money! money!” cries the hero—a second-grade Government clerk—of a recent novel—“the good that can be done with it in the world! Only a little more: a little more!” It is the passionate cry of unnumbered thousands. Expenditure multiplies its return in human happiness as it is scattered amongst widening areas of population. And the only justification for the present unnatural heaping up of great possessions in the control of the very few would be some return in leisure, and the cultivation of the arts, and the more reputable magnificence of the luxurious life. We have called into existence a whole new industry in motor cars and quick travelling, and established populous cities to minister to our increasing demands for speed. We have converted half the Highlands into deer forests for our sport; and the amount annually spent on shooting, racing, golf—on apparatus, and train journeys and service—exceeds the total revenue of many a European principality. We fling away in ugly white hotels, in uninspired dramatic entertainments, and in elaborate banquets of which every one is weary, the price of many poor men’s yearly income. Yet we cannot build a new Cathedral. We cannot even preserve the Cathedrals bequeathed to us, and the finest of them are tumbling to pieces for lack of response to the demands for aid. We grumble freely at halfpenny increases in the rates for baths or libraries or pleasure-grounds. We assert—there are many of us who honestly believe it—that we cannot afford to set aside the necessary millions from our amazing revenues for the decent maintenance of our worn-out “veterans of industry.”
To the poor, any increase of income may mean a day’s excursion, a summer holiday for the children; often the bare necessities of food and clothes and shelter. To the classes just above the industrial populations, who with an expanding standard of comfort are most obviously fretting against the limitations of their income, it may mean the gift of some of life’s lesser goods which is now denied; music, the theatre, books, flowers. Its absence may mean also a deprivation of life’s greater goods: scamped sick-nursing, absence of leisure, abandonment of the hope of wife or child. All these deprivations may be endured by a nation—have been endured by nations—for the sake of definite ends: in wars at which existence is at stake, under the stress of national calamity, or as in the condition universal to Europe a few hundred years ago, when wealth and security were the heritage of the very few. But to-day that wealth is piling up into ever-increasing aggregation: is being scrutinized, as never before, by those who inquire with increasing insistence, where is the justice of these monstrous inequalities of fortune? Is the super-wealth of England expended in any adequate degree upon national service? Is the return to-day or to posterity a justification for this deflection of men and women’s labour into ministering to the demands of a pleasure-loving society? Is it erecting works of permanent value, as the wealth of Florence in the fifteenth century? Is it, as in the England of Elizabeth, breeding men?
No honest inquirer could give a dogmatic reply. The present extravagance of England is associated with a strange mediocrity, a strange sterility of characters of supreme power in Church and State. It is accompanied, as all ages of security and luxury are accompanied, by a waning of the power of inspiration, a multiplying of the power of criticism. The more comfortable and opulent society becomes, the more cynicism proclaims the futility of it all, and the mind turns in despair from a vision of vanities. It gives little leadership to the classes below it: no visible and intelligent feudal concentration which, taught in the traditions of Government and inheriting strength and responsibility, can reveal an aristocratic order adequate to the immense political and economic necessities of the people. Never, especially during the reaction of the past twenty years, were fairer opportunities offered to the children of wealthy families for the elaboration of a new aristocratic Government of a new England; and never were those opportunities more completely flung away. Its chosen leaders can offer nothing but a dialectic, a perpetual criticism of other men’s schemes, clever, futile, barren as the east wind. The political creed which it embraces—the Protectionist system which is going to consolidate the Empire and make every wife’s husband richer—is almost entirely dependent for its propagation upon aliens from outside; politicians, economists, journalists, bred in an austerer life amongst the professional classes, and now employed by a society which seems without capacity to breed leaders of its own. It can compete for the pictures of great masters, but it leaves the men of genius of its own day to starve. It continues, now as always, garnishing the sepulchres of the prophets which its predecessors have stoned. It maintains large country houses which offer a lavish hospitality; but it sees rural England crumbling into ruin just outside their boundaries, and has either no power or no inclination to arrest so tragic a decay. It fills vast hotels scattered round the coasts of England and ever multiplying in the capital, which exhibit a combination of maximum expenditure and display with a minimum return in enjoyment. It has annexed whole regions abroad, Biarritz and the Riviera coast, Austrian and German watering-places, whither it journeys for the recovery of its lost health, and for distractions which will forbid the pain of thinking. It plunges into gambles for fresh wealth, finding the demands of its standards continually pressing against its resources; seeking now in South Africa, now in West Australia, now in other Imperial expansions, the reward which accompanies the conversion of the one pound into the ten. At best it is an existence with some boredom in it; even when accompanied by actual intellectual labour: the management of an estate and its agents, directorships, or the overlooking of public and private philanthropies. At worst, more perhaps in America than in England, where the standard has not so much been overthrown as never securely established, it becomes a nightmare and a delirium.
Delirium would seem to be the fate of all societies which become content in secured wealth and gradually forget the conditions of labour and service upon which alone that security can be maintained. “They describe,” says Bagehot of the French memoirs, “a life unsuitable to such a being as man in such a world as the present one: in which there are no high aims, no severe duties, where some precept of morals seems not so much to be sometimes broken as to be generally suspended and forgotten—such a life, in short, as God has never suffered men to lead on the earth long, which He has always crushed out by calamity or revolution.” Those who are familiar with the methods of dissipation of much of the new wealth of America—methods creeping across the Atlantic—are familiar also with a life “unsuitable to such a being as man.” This society is only distinguished from that which was consumed in the French Revolution, by absence of the wit and grace and polished human intercourse which in part redeemed so selfish and profitless a company. The pictures given from time to time possess a note of exaggeration. They flare a fierce white light upon a certain group of rich people, with no toleration of shadows or half tones. The thing stands ugly, in its pitiless glare, a vision not good to look upon. Yet the essential facts remain. The picture is only not a caricature, because the life it describes is itself a caricature. The forces which have moulded it have driven it inevitably along certain paths: resistance is useless. For in America enormous wealth—not only beyond “the dreams of avarice,” but in such aggregations of millions as make it inconceivable even to its possessors—has descended upon a tiny group of persons who have exploited the resources of a continent. The first generation accumulated these great possessions, in a fierce hand-to-hand conflict in which strength and cunning triumphed, and polish and pleasantness of manner and kindliness counted for nothing at all. To the second generation is given the spending of it. There are few traditions of social service. There are no feudal or communal responsibilities of social obligation. Charity is resented by the recipient and tiresome to the giver. The founding of Universities becomes too commonplace to attract. Settlements are voted drab and unsatisfying. Religion has become a plaything. All other avenues being thus closed, there remain but a self-indulgence which in itself breeds satiety, and a competition of luxurious display, which, in its more advanced stages, passes into an actual insanity. The second generation here is often weaker than its fathers. The fierce will-power which ensured financial success in the most terrific financial struggle that the world has ever seen, has exhausted the capacities of the family lineage. It has been raised on the principle of “doing as one likes.” It pursues its existence through an unreal, fantastic world, in a luxurious expenditure as fantastic as a veritable “Dance of Death.”
Mr. Upton Sinclair, Mr. Frank Norris, Mrs. Wharton, and other American novelists have presented pictures of the luxurious waste and extravagance of a plutocracy which have been scornfully repudiated by its members. Yet almost every individual incident or place in “the Metropolis”—“Castle Havens,” Newport, the queer palaces of New York, the crude scattering of fortunes easily won in scratching the earth or wrecking a railway—could be paralleled in the actual society of America. Many could even be paralleled in England, where millionaire company promoters, on their hectic path between poverty through prosperity to prison or suicide, will purchase so many miles of good English land, build round it a great wall ten feet high, construct billiard rooms under a lake, remove a hill which offends the view. “He was kind to the poor,” they wrote on the grave of one of them, who had devastated the middle classes with the promise of high interest for investment, guaranteed on his prospectuses by the names of Proconsuls and Ambassadors of world-wide fame. The disease may not have attained its full consummation in this country; that is in part because of a standard which, though crumbling, still struggles to survive; in part because the wealth accumulation is less sudden and overwhelming: in part also because we are satisfied with less bizarre manifestations of the always unsatisfied demand for pleasure. Yet we have parallels, even in this country to “Castle Havens.” “It had cost three or four millions of dollars, and within the twelve-foot wall which surrounded its grounds lived two world-weary people who dreaded nothing so much as to be left alone.” The house had many gables, in the Queen Anne style: from the midst of them shot a Norman tower decorated with Christmas tree wreaths in white stucco: overlapping this was the dome of a Turkish mosque rising out of this something like a dove-cot: out of that, the slender white steeple of a Methodist country church: on top a statue of Diana. “Has there ever been any insanity in the Havens family?” is the natural query of the visitor, as he gazed at this astonishing erection.
All round are the “second generation”: young men, of whom it was said that “if only they had had a little more brains, they would have been half-witted”: women “who boast of never appearing twice in the same gown”; one dreadful personage in Boston who wears each costume once, and then has it solemnly cremated by her butler: women who artificially make themselves barren, because of the inconvenience incidental to motherhood, and lavish their affections upon cats and dogs. “It was the instinct of decoration, perverted by the money-lust.” The men are busy making money in order that their idle women may attain supremacy in this mad race for display. The “second generation” are so bored that ever more fantastic amusements are sought to stimulate jaded interest. The one thing they all dread is “to be left alone.” “There was a woman who had her teeth filled with diamonds; and another who was driving a pair of zebras. One heard of monkey dinners and pyjama dinners at Newport, of horseback dinners and vegetable dances in New York.” “One would take to slumming and another to sniffing brandy through the nose: one had a table-cover made of woven roses, and another was wearing perfumed flannel at sixteen dollars a yard: one had inaugurated ice-skating in August, and another had started a class for the weekly study of Plato.” People’s health broke down quickly in face of this furious pursuit of pleasure; then they ate nothing but spinach, or lived on grass, or chewed a mouthful of soup thirty-two times before swallowing it. “There were ‘rest cures’ and ‘water cures,’ ‘new thought’ and ‘metaphysical healing’ and ‘Christian Science.’” The young men were filled with the same delusion as the older women. “Some were killing themselves and other people in automobile races at a hundred and twenty miles an hour.” “There was another young millionaire who sat and patiently taught Sunday School, in the presence of a host of reporters: there was another who set up a chain of newspapers all over the country, and made war against his class.” Behind this second generation there was even the vision of a third, growing up in the heart of such a nightmare: a third generation in which there would no longer remain even the memories of the early struggles of the pioneers of great fortunes to connect them with reality.
That reality it is impossible for such a society ever to apprehend. Newspaper criticisms leave them entirely unmoved. The more unblushing the record of scandals and viciousness and foolish, distorted luxury in any “fashionable” paper, the more secure its circulation amongst the very people who are assailed. They are indifferent to the onslaughts upon their lives by persons “outside.” They know that these people are not, as a matter of fact, condemning their lives. They are only expressing their discontent at not being “inside.” The pauper wants fresh meat instead of canned. The business man wants his thousand a year to become two thousand a year. The anarchist who demands revolution can be bought with a secure guarantee of a steady income. In Mr. Hueffer’s entertaining novel of New York, a rich man’s son, scandalised at the method by which his father obtained his super-wealth, attempts restitution to the victims. They one and all indignantly repudiate his “charity.” One and all they ask to “come in” on the ground floor in any future flotations and manipulations which he may be designing. They reject the return of the proceeds of piracy. All they desire is a partnership in future piratical raids against a person or persons unknown.
It is a society organised from top to bottom on a “money” basis, a business basis, with everything else as a side show. The men listen to President Roosevelt’s fierce words about the Trusts and Corporations. They have no resentment. It is “only Teddy’s way.” It cheers up the people with the hope that something will be done, while they themselves are secure in the knowledge that everything which can be done is in the control of the money power. When they find a reformer whom they can silence by force, they crush him. If they cannot crush him, they purchase him. If he can neither be crushed nor purchased, they ignore him. Religion is easily woven into the scheme of things, and pleasantly harmonised with the accepted way of living. The Bishop of London preaches in Wall Street, eloquently urging the business men to regard their wealth as a stewardship from God. Far from resentment, the business men abandon the Stock Exchange gamble for a quarter of an hour, press round the bishop to shake his hand. “Bishop,” they say, “that discourse of yours made us feel real good.” Then they return to the Stock Exchange gamble. A prominent preacher is lured over at an immense salary from England to preach to a church of the wealthy. He braces himself for a great effort, and denounces their riches, their works, and their ways. He expects an outbreak of indignation. He discovers instead a universal congratulation. The wealthy and their wives flock to his church, hoping to hear some more. The receipts of the pew rents double. They talk of raising his salary. The more he denounces, the more they applaud. The experience indeed is common to all similar societies: since the day when the prophet complained that his listeners crowded to hear him as he denounced their vices, “and so,” he reproaches himself, “thou art unto them as a very lovely song, of one that hath a pleasant voice and can play well on an instrument.”
Only some realities cannot be altogether excluded. Change and Death knock with gaunt hands, and refuse all proffered monetary bribes. Here a frantic millionaire, going blind, offers two million dollars to any one that can cure him. The high gods remain indifferent to the challenge. Teeth drop out, hair drops off; old age creeps on apace: the wealthiest are trembling at the approach of the end. The visitor to “The Metropolis” from the south beholds “a golf course, a little miniature Alps, upon which the richest man in the world pursued his lost health, with armed guards and detectives patrolling the place all day, and a tower with a search-light whereby at night he could flood the grounds with light by pressing a button.” A motor accident, an occasional sensational divorce case, the death of a child, tear down suddenly all the blinds and cushions, revealing the richest as unprotected as the poorest in a universe altogether indifferent to such slight things as man’s profit and gain. Outside, an occasional crisis, the panic fear of people to whom wealth means attainment, that their wealth is vanishing, brings the accumulation of vast fortune toppling to the ground. There follows a crop of suicides: then the machine recovers and swings forward again on its blind, staggering progress nowhither. The secret places of the world are ravaged, the wise men subpœnaed, all cunning invention subsidised, that some alchemy may be found which will resist the ravages of time, preserve a beauty that is departing, stay the inexorable chariots of the hours. There are even attempts to turn the flank of the enemy: by “Christian Science” liberally supported, to abolish, if not disease, at least its sufferings; by “Psychical Research,” to communicate with a company pursuing a similar ineffectual existence beyond the grave. “What is it all worth?” is the question which lurks in the background, refusing to be stifled; which drives occasional revolters, wearied of the repetition of these pleasures, into efforts after philanthropies, or to shoot wild beasts in remote places, or even into political and religious adventure. So they come and after a little while they go, none knowing whence or whither: a company of tired children, flushed and uncomfortable from the too violent pursuit of pleasure: who thought, in the snatching of what things seemed desirable in a life given over to enjoyment, to effect an attainment which has ever been jealously denied to the family of mankind.
But here, after all, in England or America, is only the life of the few. If their existence is conspicuous it is because in distortion and dangerous cases there can be most clearly realised the ravages of disease. In England for the most part wealth is encased and preserved in a wall of social tradition; and the majority of men, however opulent, have some interests and occupations which redeem them from the mere blind pursuit of pleasure. Yet in England it is becoming increasingly questioned how far this wealth is providing permanent benefit to the community. It is expended in the maintenance of a life—a life and a standard—bringing leisure, ease and grace, some effort towards charities and public service, an interest, real or assumed, in literature, music, art, social amenity, and a local or national welfare. But it offers little substantial advantage, in endowment, building, or even direct economic or scientific experiment. The percentages of legacy bequeathed to charity or to education are lamentably low; and of these percentages most are deflected into charity or religion in its least remunerative forms. Philanthropy is large and liberal, but the aggregate of poverty remains unaffected by it, or even, to the minds of the intimate observer, deepened. Much of it appears less as the effort of intelligence and compassion than as the random and often harmful attempt to satisfy a conscience disturbed by penury adjacent to plenty. Social experiments involving thought as well as money—a Bournville, a Toynbee Hall, a Limpsfield colony for epileptics, a hospital for the new cure of consumption—are still sufficiently rare as to attract attention. A few thousands bequeathed to miscellaneous institutions out of a fortune of many hundred thousands is still so unusual as to evoke considerable newspaper adulation. The fact is, that the necessary expenditure upon an accepted standard of living is so exacting and so continually increasing with the increase of new demands, that little superfluity remains for adventure in social or charitable effort. Some of the wealthiest landlords have been reducing their pensions on their estates, now that the State provides five shillings a week; in part, perhaps, in order that the recipients should not be demoralised by this enormous access of fortune; but in part because they can see other channels into which this expenditure may at once be deflected. Families with incomes of many thousands a year—caught in the cog-wheels of this vast machine, this swollen definition of essential things—find a real difficulty in making “both ends meet.” Most—in a calm hour—will deplore it. The old look back with regret to an austerer day, to the time when central London had no Sunday restaurant, and it was only necessary for the few to know the few. The young—or the more thoughtful of them—look forward with foreboding, wondering how long the artisan, the shop assistant, the labourer, the unemployed, will content to acquiesce in a system which expends upon a few weeks of random entertainment an amount that would support in modest comfort a decent family for a lifetime.
“The most unpremeditated, successful, aimless Plutocracy”—so it appears to one shrewd observer—“that ever encumbered the destinies of mankind.” He sees it continually being recruited from below. Companies rise like bubbles, expand, burst, carrying with them into the upper air their promoters and the parasites which follow in their train. Now it is the gold mines of South Africa which offer a particular crop of amiable, ignorant, generously spending persons to swell the general extravagance. Now from America comes the importation of millions which are scattered in the home country in various forms of elaborate expenditure. Now old-established businesses are renovated, purchased, floated on the market inordinately “boomed”; with subsequent collapse to the shareholders, with substantial margin of profit to the “undertakers.” Those who retain the wealth thus cleverly won, settle down in the English countryside to make the money circulate, and generally to have a good time. Now, again, the more feverish industry and energy of the new cities pile up a monopoly value of millions upon the land which is “owned” by private persons: who find themselves, as they rise and sleep, suddenly inundated with a steady flow of money which is exacted as tribute from the working peoples. So, in various ways, the enrichment of a new wealthy class which is compensating for its newness by liberal hospitalities, and the effort of some old-established rich families not to be pushed under in display by these alien intruders, has “set a pace” which is driving the whole of modern life into a huge apparatus of waste. Numbers go down in the competition: then the country estates are sold and pass into the hands of South African millionaires or the children of the big traders, or the vendors of patent medicines. Others find themselves continually in debt, adventuring into the City as directors of companies, or attempting to obtain unearned increase by following in the train of the great adventurers. Sometimes, as in the South African promotions of 1895, the whole of a society flings itself into a furious gambling mania, from which the few astute suck no small advantage, and ultimately attain the honour which is the reward of great possessions. There are many who endeavour to keep their heads in this confused tumultuous world, who still cherish an ideal of simplicity, and upon exiguous income will maintain a standard of manners and intelligence. More and more, it would appear, these are destined to capitulate: to be compelled to “give in” and accept the new expenditure, or to be pushed aside as outside the main current of successful life. The vision of this new “Plutocracy” appears to be drifting steadily away from the vision which, at any historic time, has been held to justify the endowment of leisure and comfort, and the control of great fortunes, as a trust for the service of mankind.
For this “Plutocracy,” though accepting distinction in art, in literature, in the governance of Empire, as a matter of evidence to-day itself contributes but little to these desirable ends. Mr. Mallock can laboriously demonstrate—in counter reply to the demands of Socialism—that the wealth of the world is in the main increased by the inventor, the individual, the ingenious multiplier of energy and discoverer of scientific appliances. Many of the richer classes accept such a demonstration as an infallible proof of the justice of present wealth distribution. Other writers can justify an opulent and leisured class above, for the provision of clever and energetic persons who will cultivate the tradition of statesmanship, or encourage disinterested experiment in advancement of knowledge or the service of humanity. But the actual rulers of Empire, the men of science, the great soldiers, the great artists and writers, as a matter of fact very rarely appear as the children of, or are rewarded by the qualifications for entrance into, the governing classes. The wills and legacies presented day by day in the newspapers are themselves a judgment and refutation of any attempt to demonstrate parallel between achievement and material acquisition. At the summit are usually names of obscure unknown persons, who bequeath, with sundry small diversions into charity or hospitals, the bulk of their hundreds of thousands to their relatives. Here a successful brewer, there a speculator in land, again a “financier” in the city, or a landlord who has not even had the enterprise to speculate, but merely placidly drawn his rents from the developing town or half a countryside; or again, the owners of large trade organisations now run by skilled and alert managers as limited liability companies: these form the staple material of the huge accumulations which make up the bulk of those hundreds of millions which regularly pass every year from some few hundred persons to some few other hundreds. Quite low down in this list of obscure wealthy, conspicuous if they attain six figures, and often falling below five, are the men who have created and have served; authors of European distinction, generals with ten campaigns to their name, politicians who have devoted their lives to public affairs, men of science who have effected discoveries for which all humanity is richer. Under no kind of analysis does examination of these names and figures provide any co-ordination of wealth and capacity, or wealth and national or imperial or humanitarian service. The observer has not only to lament the paucity of talent amongst the children of families with high past record of spacious and splendid renown. He is not compelled to turn his attention in perhaps unfair emphasis to that section of society which regards its possessions as a trinket or plaything, and, amid an atmosphere of frivolity, is engaged in squandering its brief existence through every variety of passionless pleasure. It is enough for him, in analysing the ordinary undistinguished accumulation of great wealth, to note the balance of social service on the one hand, of remuneration on the other; and to wonder how long the obscure multitudes who labour with so scanty a return, in order that these may enjoy, will continue to be satisfied with what (to them) appears so improvident a bargain. And if this detached observer, inspired neither by hate nor envy, were asked to summarise the social advantage of all this heaped-up wealth expended by the few who have attained, he would be compelled to find it in a social convenience and amenity; in the provision of opportunity, embedded in pleasant surroundings and with bodily discomforts as far as possible removed, for entertaining conversation.
So, concentrating themselves especially in London, for an annual campaign of association, there gather every year the companies of the successful. They have expended some half their days in tranquillity and quiet places—in rural England, in high Swiss mountain valleys—anywhere in which the too exasperated material of the human mind can be nursed back into some semblance of sanity. They gather, from the four winds, into the tumult of the capital, to occupy the remaining half of the year in deliberate tearing the fabric of that mind to pieces in an orgy of human intercourse. It is effort directed at the highest pressure, with no interspaces of silence in which to learn, to suffer, or to enjoy. It is the effort of those few who have attained success in a race where the majority are content with existence and endurance, to exhibit the magnitude of that success in a transitory experience of too violently accelerated life. For these months nobody is ever alone; nobody ever pauses to think; no one ever attempts to understand. All quick and novel sensations are pressed into the service of an ever more insistent demand for new things. Parliament pays its tribute, in a labyrinth of dining-rooms and a famous terrace, which is an annexe—as the Empire is an annexe—to the activities of this restless energy. What passes for British Art in a Royal Academy and other exhibitions; the Opera, dragging European singers to stimulate an audience numbed by the whirl of circumstance; any unexpected appeal, a decadent French play, actors from an earlier, simpler, passionate South, an audacious novel or two, a passing scandal, serve to infuse the concoction with some lambent vitality. But, for the most part, it is talk—talk—talk; talk at luncheon and tea and dinner; talk at huge, undignified crowded receptions, where each talker is disturbed by the consciousness that his neighbour is desirous of talking to others; talk at dances and at gatherings, far into the night; with the morning devoted to preparation for further talking in the day to come. It is talk usually commonplace, sometimes clever, occasionally sincere; of a society desirous of being interested, more often finding itself bored, filled with a resolute conviction that it must “play the game”; that this is the game to be played, that it must be played resolutely to the end. Elemental things occasionally intrude, marriages, and those unexpected deaths which refuse to postpone themselves to a more convenient out-of-season. What does it all mean? No one knows. What does it all come to? Again, no one knows. To many it stands for the inevitable, as the factory life is inevitable to some, the field drudgery to others. A few it stimulates with a consciousness of power in human intercourse and the subtle sensation of rejoicing in a crowd. To a tiny remnant alone it presents the appearance of a complicated machine, which has escaped the control of all human volition, and is progressing towards no intelligible goal; of some black windmill, with gigantic wings, rotating untended under the huge spaces of night.
It is not illuminated by high ardours. It is not disfigured by great crimes. The criticism of its “smartness,” its vulgarity, its selfishness, advanced largely by women novelists and unfamiliar critics, is based upon a biassed reading of values. There are those who are pushing to get in, as there are those who are pushing to get out. There are egoisms here as in all human energies; revolts which drive their victims outside the accepted standards; reactions which find expression in a petulance or a despair. Neither to-day nor to-morrow will this strange turmoil stand for anything conformable to the record of various pleasure-loving societies, which from time to time have lived and flourished and died. But if its viciousness be but the palest reflection of similar past efforts, its activities and devotions are also set in grey. It has none of the fury of passionate pleasure which accompanied the decline and fall of Rome; but it has little of the large utterance, and magnificence of artistic display, and consciousness of occupying a great arena in the world’s affairs, which speaks from every day’s record of that long autumn of decay. It has few of those feverish and almost unintelligible lusts and cruelties which make the story of the Early Renaissance in Italy like the memory of evil dreams. But, on the other hand, it will neither stamp upon the stone and marble of its dwelling-places, nor store up upon the walls of its cities and opulent houses, nor write in the life history of its men and women, that harvest of an artistic beginning and a rich individual experience which makes the Renaissance appear as one of the wonder-ages of the world. To-day, here, in England, it plays and trifles with large forces which, if it once understood, it might flee from in terror and dismay. Its social and philanthropic enterprises are fairly ample; it bestows considerable sums on public and private charities, shepherding its friends into drawing-room meetings to listen to some attractive speaker—an actor, a Labour Member, a professional humorist—pleading for pity to the poor. It discusses the possibility of social upheavals in that dim, silent, encompassing life in which all its activities are embedded—the incalculable populations, which set the society that matters in the midst of a rude and multitudinous society that does not count. It plays in good humour with light schemes of Social Reform; wondering, like the pleasant salons of Paris in the new age of gold before the Revolution, whither events are tending; convinced, as these salons also were convinced, that nothing can alter the effectual standards of its world. It plays with religion; listening to the agreeable discourses of one popular preacher, urging kindliness and charity and toleration to all men; amused at the violence of another, denouncing all its works and ways; a little disturbed by a third, feeling the sudden intrusion of the cold hand of a universe in which all its standards are unknown. “Sydney Smith talking,” wrote Carlyle in his diary, “other persons prating, jargoning. To me, through these thin cobwebs, Death and Eternity sat glaring.” Only in an occasional solitary hour, in that magic twilight of a London summer evening, or in the flare of a dim dawn over the sleeping city, do such disturbing visitants tear the silence as with a sudden cry.
It is an aggregation of clever, agreeable, often lovable people, whose material wants are satisfied by the labour of unknown workers in all the world, trying with a desperate seriousness to make something of a life spared the effort of wage-earning. It is built up and maintained in an artificial, and probably a transitory, security—security which has never been extended in the world’s history to more than a few generations. It will continue with each until each drops out, if uncomplaining, a little fatigued, and the fresh recruits take the place of the deserters and the dead.
No study is more disheartening, none more disturbing, than the study of those companies of human beings, which in various periods of social security have attempted in similar fashion to play with the purposes of life. “Some set their hearts on building and gardening,” wrote Tavannes of the Court of the Valois, “on painting or reading or the chase. They run after an animal all day and get their faces torn in the woods; or they trot from morning till evening after a ball of wool; or they spend the day and the night in games of hazard, from which they rise without any great reluctance; or they buy arms and horses, and never use them.” “Sadness and melancholy without a legitimate cause,” he declares, “are their own just punishment; a failure to recognise the grace of God which has made us immortal.” More than an age of Adventure, more even than an age of reckless Wickedness, does time judge and condemn an age of ineffectual Pleasure.
Where are the braveries, fresh or frayed?
The plumes, the armours—friend and foe?
The cloth of gold, the rare brocade?
The mantles glittering to and fro?
The pomp, the pride, the royal show?
The cries of war and festival?
The youth, the grace, the charm, the glow?
Into the night go one and all.
Mane floreat, et transeat: vespere decidat. Et custodia in nocte—“As a watch in the night.”
II
“Conquerors” they appear to the critic abroad: “the Island Pharisees” to the critic at home. Many attempts have been made in recent times to describe in fiction this new leisured life of England: the particular contemporary aspect of that Fair “wherein it was contrived should be sold all sorts of Vanity, and that it should last all the year long.” There is something of it in the Egoist, something also in the extraordinary analysis by Mr. Henry James of the meaning of situation in various companies of rich, idle persons whose utility or significance in any rational universe it is difficult to apprehend. Some of the younger novelists, with less detachment and with less acceptance, have attempted interpretation, not of the moods of the moment, but of the meaning of a whole society. Mr. Galsworthy, for example, in a rather fierce indictment—gazing at the struggle for continuance amongst the successful, like a spectator gazing at a struggle of ants or bees—has drawn up an impeachment of the country house and conventional life of successful England. His hero enters this society from abroad, examining it, as if for the first time, with curious eyes, without any background of the fortifying curriculum of the accepted English education. He is excited to questioning and resentment by the ironical smiles and comments of a foreigner, a chance acquaintance in a third-class carriage, who, having rejected everything, swallowed “all the formulas,” has no attitude but that of irony towards the folly of human things. He attempts to allay that resentment by personal examination of the various phases of the life of the “Conquerors.” He wanders desolately from the oppression of the club to the oppression of an artistic and literary gathering; and thence to the futility of the philanthropic attempt to elevate the lower classes by chess and coffee and bagatelle. He notes the well-fed, bullet-headed, jovial crowds in the streets, the wives and husbands who have settled down to a routine of affection, the wives and husbands who have settled down to a routine of dull hatred and acceptance. The complacency of it all, its satisfaction, its docility, its absence of high purpose and adventure, haunt him like a nightmare. He essays the countryside with no better result. He stays a night with a lonely vicar. He beholds a warder guarding the huge convict prison—symbol of the unsuitability of Christianity to practical affairs. He walks the English roads with an energetic Indian civilian, who is very content to run the machine, without caring to inquire whether the machine is worth running at all. Finally, in the atmosphere of the English country house, serene and dominant, and triumphantly content, he realises that he is not of this company. Some disturbing madness has come upon him, which compels him to inquire, where other men are content to enjoy. And that way lies madness—or the struggle up a hill path, difficult and extended, towards some new form of sanity. So he brands them with some contempt and some anger as “Pharisees”—the island Pharisees, who have mistaken the accident of their own favoured circumstances for the reward of merit, and now present an invincible complacency to all the arrows of outrageous fortune. In such a condemnation he is something less than just to a race which has been considerably misjudged and misunderstood. The men and women which fall under the lash of Mr. Galsworthy’s satire have none of the historic characteristics of the Pharisee. Their ancestors may have thanked God that they were not as other men are. These are but astonished that the distinction was noticeable or important. The “other men” have vanished from the picture. They would be acknowledged to be of common blood, common faith, common nationality. But they so readily pass unnoticed that it would seem a work of supererogation to drag them on to the stage at all. The standard of life which is only maintained by the labour of obscure persons becomes accepted as normal; to be received without questioning. It is less easy, indeed, to excite questions than to propound answers. In the study of the psychology of “Space” and “Time” the student is familiar with the difficulty, not of explanation but of inquiry: “here is space, here is time—What is all the pother about?” is the attitude of the plain man. And “here is human life, as we know it,” is the attitude of the “plain man” in the class where is accepted as fixed and unalterable, that the services of many shall minister to the comfort of the few. The “Conquerors” have got far beyond the stage of the Pharisee. They are the children’s children of those rather crude exponents of complacency and pride. They reveal no ostentatious complacency and pride. Their attitude is rather one of acceptance. It is not that they thank God that they are not as other men are. It is that they can imagine no conceivable readjustment of the universe which could make other men as themselves; or themselves different They are enterprising, but they shun adventure. They are kind, with no real possibility of sympathy. Enormous shut doors separate them from the real world: and they bend the world to their desires. “Doubts don’t help you,” says one of Mr. Galsworthy’s characters. “How can you get any good from doubts? The thing is to win victories.” “Victories?” is the reply. “I’d rather understand than conquer.” But the “Island Race” has preferred to conquer rather than to understand. And wisdom is justified of all her children.
Once or twice, indeed, the critic is willing to suggest that perhaps the choice is not so mad a one after all. The ironical foreigner who prefers to resist, beg, cringe, and criticise, presents a figure not wholly heroic. He has fallen back on facts. He has sucked the salt and rind of life. He has deliberately contracted himself out of the universe of make-believe which he sees encompassing the people amongst whom his lot is cast. He enjoys his weakness and his laughter: the machine moves on; doing the work of the world. And these people, as he sees them—with their blindness to real issues, their carefully tended gardens, and the gates so severely padlocked which guard the pathways to waste spaces outside—may perhaps after all have learned the lesson of compromise in a world of frantic possibilities. The garden must be cultivated: cultivated, even if the sun which so pleasantly encourages its flowers to pass into kindly fruit is in reality a furnace of incredible fury; and the earth, of which this garden is a tiny segment, running along an illimitable inane towards no intelligible goal. “Spirit ruins you,” declares the little foreign barber, condemned always to shave paupers in the cellars of a Rowton lodging-house. “In this world what you want is to have no spirit.” The drôle Irish actor dies drunk in squalor, all because he has something in him “which will not accept things as they are, believing always that they should be better.” “When he was no longer capable of active revolution he made it by getting drunk. At the last this was his only way of protesting against society.” And occasionally, from the heart of the mechanical routine, there comes evidence that understanding is there—that understanding is possible: that not grossness or obtuseness or selfishness, as in the first hasty verdict, but the deliberate determination not to face the realities is the real motive power which keeps the system from falling into decay. For if the realities be faced, the bottom falls out of the world; and man, naked, shivering, and alone, is suddenly left defenceless, confronting the fire and the darkness. The hero of one of Mr. Galsworthy’s novels finds his uncle, a shrewd, insensitive man of business, criticising the modern uncensored drama. “‘What’s right for the French and Russians, Dick,’ he said, ‘is wrong for us. When we begin to be real we only really begin to be false.’ ‘Isn’t life bad enough already?’ he asks. It suddenly struck Shelton that, for all his smile, his uncle’s face had a look of crucifixion. He stood there very straight, his eyes haunting his nephew’s face; there seemed to Shelton a touching muddle in his optimism—a muddle of tenderness and of intolerance, of truth and second-handedness. Like the lion above him, he seemed to be defying Life to make him look at her.”2
“Defying Life to make him look at her” has been the effort of all societies which have been removed for a time from the immediate necessities of labour, hunger, and cold. That defiance of life is not so mad a thing as it at first appears. It attempts, and to a certain extent with success, to create a possible existence for an average which can never be far removed from the conventional. It works: that is its justification; this gospel of the Second Best, which substitutes a placid friendliness for love’s high ardour, and prettiness for beauty, and a compromise of cruelty and kindliness for social justice, and a standard of convention for the demands of a compelling religion. It is assailed in scornfulness and bitterness and passion, by the advocates of these various flaming emotions; by the religious prophets who demand sincerity; by the social prophets who cry for equality and compassion; by the artists who wish to challenge the unveiled Truth; by the great lovers who are outraged by this ignoble treatment of the “Lord of Life of terrible aspect.” But the thing swings forward, indifferent or but politely tolerant of the clamour; because its inhabitants know that the secure second best is a wiser choice (for them) than the hazards of an effort towards a doubtful larger attainment. Most of those who have demanded less limited horizons, and pressed forward to sail on uncharted seas, and adventured “beyond the sunset,” have vanished and been heard of no more. There is surely justification for any who in the face of such disasters confine their voyages to the familiar creeks and havens, and never willingly forsake the shelter of the shore.
And still to other nations—less successful in the economic struggle, less immovably confident in attainment—these people appear as “the Conquerors”: dominating the world with a certain serene confidence in the justice of their supremacy which is at once enviable and exasperating to the critic from outside. The Englishman abroad is inclined to gush a little at the fascination of the foreign freedom, especially at the charm and beauty of the South. He finds here manners, and an immemorial tradition of courtesy, and a less slavish devotion to material ends. But the South itself is under no such illusion. To these it is the English who are the people that have attained. Italy, Spain, Hungary, Bulgaria, are all desirous of unravelling the secret and accepting the standard of the dominant race. Even the writers of literature, although they may mingle a delicate irony with their praise, yet are content to emphasise the deficiences of their own people; in the contrast presented to them by the immigrant English who settle in their coasts, and maintain their own life and manners unconscious of the life and manners of their neighbours.
It is as a conquering race, secure, imperturbable, profoundly careless of opinion outside, that the astonished foreigner encounters the Englishman abroad. “I see them at work,” writes M. Marcel Prévost, from Biarritz, “and never perhaps have I better known and understood their Anglo-Saxon energy than here, on the French soil, in a French hotel, kept not by Germans or Swiss, but by the French of the Midi.” He applauds even while he criticises. He mingles his irony with admiration. He sees the Conquerors, not triumphant over the conquered, not consciously brutal to the conquered, but simply brushing them aside as irrelevant; never, indeed, seeing them at all. He sees, in fact, this English colony contemplating certain cities of France, not as a land with centuries of history beaten into its soil, but as a place where the amenities of climate enable them to transplant into a Southern air a portion of England. The French—even in the towns of the stranger, where the French colony is numerous, in London or in Barcelona, for example—never give the impression of a civic garrison engaged by the Mother Country. Whilst a few hundreds of English people in a French town, “obstinately speaking nothing but English, inhabiting only English lodgings, dressing only in the English fashion, practising their religion, their sports, and their games, with an easy ostentation, end by persuading us,” he ironically complains, “that we are the strangers—or at least the conquered nation.” It is this mingling of security and indifference that fills him with despair. In Biarritz, Pau, Dinard—he might have said in the whole côte d’azur of the Riviera—“the English have conquered us,” he declares. Excellent milieu pour étudier leurs procédés de conquête.
In the attempt to analyse the secret of this supremacy, he fixes attention especially upon three points. First, the English are at home abroad. When we go to foreign lands, says M. Prévost, it is the stranger who interests us, his manners and habits, his peculiarities, the ways in which he differs from us. When the Englishman goes abroad, the customs of the country, the opinion of the people amongst whom he lives, count for nothing. He comes to Biarritz to live his life, the traditional English life, made up of bounteous feeding, of violent physical exercise, of clubs, and of bridge. He describes the types which he found at the Hotel Victoria, all entirely complacent, all self-sufficient, all just blandly tolerant of the occasional presence of the native inhabitant in this frontier post of Empire. “Yes; all those people are entirely at home there. It is I who am the stranger, the profane, since I look upon them with curiosity, since I wish to learn something from them.” This accusation is an old one: accepted since the famous definition of the Continent in the verdict of the British tourist, as “ruins, inhabited by imbeciles”: since the refusal of the English lady to speak French in Paris, because, as she protested, “it only encourages them.” Here at least, amid much that has changed, the type is unchangeable. The conquering race cannot understand the conquered. No conquering race ever has understood the conquered: except when, understanding, its Imperial rule has begun its decline. If the English in India, it has been said, commenced to understand India, the episode of English rule in India would be nearing its close. The second “instrument of invasion,” this acute observer finds in a “Discipline of Life, unanimously accepted.” Their plan of conquest is traced in advance. They stamp their life upon the life of the invaded cities: demanding, and in consequence readily obtaining, those things which they judge indispensable to the discipline of their existence. These include especially l’installation hygiénique and l’installation sportive. At Biarritz to-day, the villas which are not entirely sanitary do not let. This is a more effective pressure than any bye-law of a local authority. They create—through their demands—hot air and vapour baths, certain conditions of ventilation, electric light, le seul qui ne “mange pas d’oxygène” disent-ils. They insist also upon their sports: golf, tennis, polo, hunting, shooting. They even patronise automobilism, whilst declaring, says M. Prévost slyly, “that it is not a true sport; they accuse it of not being an English sport.” To this they join their religion, or at least the outward manifestation of their religion. (One thinks of English “chaplains abroad.”) Given also to this an imperious complacency of costume, and all the materials are offered to provide the Anglican colony abroad with the impression of un corps d’occupation ayant son uniforme, ses titres, ses chefs. Ces sont bien des conquérants.
But beyond these superficial truculencies the observer may find a deeper interpretation of the cause of these triumphs. He sees the English, in these new Englands that they have made abroad, less intelligent, less generally cultivated than the French; less cultivated, less scientific, artistic, and laborious than the Germans. Yet it is these “barbarians,” not the French or the Germans, who have attained, almost without effort, the overlordship of the world. He ascribes this attainment to the fact that to-day the English are the only people who have truly national manners and characteristics. In a different order of things, but in equal measure, they exercise upon the manners of the world the Authority which the French exercised in the eighteenth century; when even those who hated them were compelled to copy them. “Manners and Customs in France,” he asks dejectedly, “what is it that can be developed to-day under this title? We have no longer ‘Manners and Customs.’ But the English retain their manners and customs with a stubborn placidity.” “You can love—more or less—certain qualities of this conquering people,” he concludes, “but how is it possible not to admire its strong national discipline?” “That is what ought to be learnt from it,” he exhorts his fellow-countrymen, “rather than ways of smoking or rules of play.”
There is much sound common sense under this quiet irony and badinage. The qualities which have produced an English domination of Biarritz or Cannes are the qualities which have given to the race an Empire dominant over four hundred millions of variegated peoples. The qualities which have made them respected rather than loved at the continental watering-places are the qualities which would cause their subject peoples for the most part to contemplate the abandonment of their rule without regret. Strength, energy, and a certain crudity make up the blend of all Imperial races. It was so with the Romans: a conspicuous efficiency, a justice equally impartial and indifferent; aloofness with a certain disdain in it; an exercise of power almost startling in the disproportion of end to means. It is the vigour of a clumsy giant; sometimes exercising his strength in beneficent enterprise, in effecting desirable acts which no weaker agent can perform; sometimes—and generally unwittingly—crushing with heavy hoof things of whose value he has no conception. No Conquering Race can possess much power of introspection, of self-examination. “They do not fret and whine about their condition,” says Whitman of the animals. He could equally have said it about the English. No Conquering Race can possess patience: else it passes into the acquiescence of the South, whose favourite word is “to-morrow,” or the acquiescence of the East, which is content to let the thundering legions pass, and to plunge in thought again. No Conquering Race can possess irony: else it will uncomfortably suspect that its conquered peoples are secretly laughing at it, and this suspicion will excite it to resentment and reprisal. No Conquering Race can possess humour: for then one day it will find itself laughing at itself; and that day its power of conquest is gone. Those who would help mankind must not expect much from them, is the half sad, half cynical verdict of worldly wisdom. Those who would rule mankind must not expect much from themselves beyond rulership, is the lesson of history upon all Imperialisms. Above all, those who would do the work of the world must not trouble themselves very greatly with the inquiry whether the work of the world is worth the doing. If there are signs of menace in the present outlook they arise from just this fact: that a race which has conquered is now passing, it would seem, into a race that is comfortable; that the frivolous pursuit of pleasure rather than of wickedness, and the maintenance of a too exacting standard of material welfare is threatening to replace an older salutary simplicity; and that the reproach of Juvenal to Rome is not without justification in twentieth-century London, when he accused its successful peoples of having eaten of the herb of Sardinia. Moritur et ridet;—it laughs and dies.
For its efforts at conquest, however annoying to those who resent its domination, are enterprises of no mean or timid order. No nation need be ashamed of Empire on a large scale, or apologise for the overlordship of a Continent. To-day’s criticism deplores the weakening or vanishing of the qualities by which such conquest was attained: in an aristocratic caste which is merging itself in a wealthy class, and undergoing weakening in the process. It is not from the “Conquerors” but from a rather harassed and limited Middle Class that the “Empire builders” are now drawn: a Lord Macdonnell from the home of a peasant farmer in Ireland, a Cecil Rhodes from an English country parsonage. The men who are administering with varying success British East Africa and Northern Nigeria, and the huge machine of government in India, are mainly the children of the professional families, drawn abroad by love of adventure or absence of opportunity at home. There is little danger in England of any general popular uprising against aristocratic privilege, or even against a system which has concentrated in few hands so disproportionate a percentage of the national accumulation. But there may be danger of a kind of internal collapse and decay, in the deflection of vigour and intellectual energy to irrelevant standards and pleasures; in the inadequacy of that vigour and energy before nations ever becoming better equipped in the world struggle, and determined to make desperate efforts for the supreme position. The invocation to “wake up” is supposed to be addressed mainly to the working peoples, whose extravagant thirst for alcoholic refreshment, and whose Trade Unions, encouraging an enforced idleness, are creating, in this theory, a falling-off in commercial and industrial efficiency. But far more than among the “rude mechanicals,” a facing of realities is needed among the classes who have conquered and attained; who now, absorbed in the difficult art of living under elaborate standards, find little superfluous energy or wealth remaining for the setting of the house in order. A variable and random philanthropy is the substitute for Social Reform. A buying-off of the more energetic from below by honours and titles liberally bestowed, prevents the attack upon a whole class by the resentment of energy and intellect excluded from privilege. Free patronage and a liberal entertainment of authors, critics, playwrights, musicians, and ambitious politicians, removes the menace of an intellectual proletariat exciting anger and envy amongst the dim millions of the industrial populace. It has the sense also to know the limits of its interferences; to know that its power, inadequate to constructive effort, rests on inhibitions rather than activities. The rather ignoble rôle played by the House of Lords during the past decade reveals its weaknesses. It will allow changes which it profoundly dislikes, when compelled by fear. It will resist changes in action when that fear is controlled. It will altogether abandon the effort to initiate changes where change is essential. It can do little but modify, check, or destroy other men’s handiwork. It has no single constructive suggestion of its own to offer to a people confronting difficult problems, and harassed by the obligations of necessary reorganisations. It can neither breed leaders nor ideas. And because of this ultimate sterility—though it has all the cards in its hands and every material force in its favour—its power may gradually pass and be destroyed; to appear in history as one more aristocracy declining, not through the batterings of external enemies, but from the fretting and crumbling of an internal decay.
Its fear to-day is Socialism: Socialism which it does not understand, but which presents itself as an uprising of the uneducated, suddenly breaking into its houses; their clumsy feet on the mantelpiece, their clumsy hands seizing and destroying all beautiful and pleasant things. So it lies awake at night, listening fearfully to the tramp of the rising host: the revolt of the slave against his master. From Socialism—as a code of economic organisation, ordering life on a military, disciplinary, and rational basis—it has perhaps less to fear than it sometimes imagines. For this “Socialism” is farther away in time than many ardent Socialists suppose. And if “Socialism” were consummated, there might be found under its rigorous régime more tenderness to an aristocratic caste and tradition than is anticipated by those who are terrified at the promise of its advent. These people, indeed, have less to fear from a demand for equality, than from a demand for efficiency: from the enforced necessity, either in a hazardous national crisis abroad, or in some stress of economic adversity at home, for the rule of energy and intelligence. The demand of the Napoleonic system—“the declared principle,” to “seek talent wherever it may be found”—might make havoc of the supremacy of the children of the “Conquerors”; might drastically determine that some less ruinous proportion of the national wealth was expended on aimless conventions and enjoyments. It may be desirable that the land of England, for example, shall be held in the hands of private owners, instead of being owned by the whole community. It seems to be increasingly questioned whether the land of England shall continue to be held by its present private owners: whether the landed classes of this country, in any ultimate standard of profit and loss, can justify the trust and high calling which has placed the welfare of the rural population in their keeping, and now sees little return but a decaying, deserted countryside. There is much, again, to be said for a Second Chamber in Government. There is little to be said for the present Second Chamber, except that in practice it appears to have disproved all its theoretical advantages: abstaining where in theory it ought to have struck, and striking where in theory it ought to have abstained. Aristocracy in England has been kindly and generous. Even as in part transformed into a plutocracy, it provides little of that attitude of insolence to the less fortunate which is the surest provocation of revolution. The action of a section of the motoring classes, indeed, in their annexation of the highways and their indifference to the common traditions, stands almost alone as an example of wealth’s intolerable arrogances, and has certainly excited more resentment amongst the common people than any extravagance of pleasure or political reaction. It is only in such manifestations as those of enjoyment deliberately associated with careless injury to the general convenience, that there is revealed the remotest possibility of a deliberate “class war” between the rich and the poor. Feudal England is dying, and the attempt to transform a caste basis of land and breeding into a caste basis of material possession seems doomed to failure. But it will fail less from external assault than from the inability of the inheritors of great fortune to maintain the energies and devotions through which that fortune has been made. “The Conquerors” will leave little bitterness behind them. There may even remain, in the memory of a more exacting age to come, a pleasant recollection of those who upheld, in time of tranquillity, a standard of manners and a tradition of kindliness, duty, and courage before life’s lesser ills. From public schools, which profess to teach “character” rather than to stimulate intelligence, through universities encouraging large expenditure on comfort, limitless bodily exercise, and an exiguous standard of intellectual effort, they pass to the “truly national manners and characteristics” which M. Prévost so much admires. In country residence, in solid aggregation in the metropolis, in lesser imitative effort amongst the provincial cities, they have cherished a code of hospitality, courtesy, criticism, mild and generous interest in public and private affairs. If that code is in part vanishing before the influx of the new “Super-wealth,” it yet exhibits, in the present generation, a still active power of assimilation. Not for conspicuous crimes, for selfishness, for class exclusiveness, or for insolence will this society be judged and condemned by the progress of time. It will pass—if it passes—because it is mistaking abnormal and insecure experience for the normal and secure; because an unwillingness to face reality is gradually developing a confusion between reality and illusion; because in its prosperity it may be stricken with blindness to the signs of the time.