It has become the Englishman's habit, one might almost say the Englishman's instinct, to take himself for the head and front of the universe. The order of creation began, we are told, in protoplasm. It has achieved at length the Englishman. Herein are the culmination and ultimate glory of evolutionary processes. Nature, like the seventh-standard boy in a board school, "can get no higher." She has made the Englishman, and her work therefore is done. For the continued progress of the world and all that in it is, the Englishman will make due provision. He knows exactly what is wanted, and by himself it shall be supplied. There is little that can be considered distinguishingly English which does not reflect this point of view. As an easy-going, entirely confident, imperturbable piece of arrogance, the Englishman has certainly no mammalian compeer. Even in the blackest of his troubles he perceives that he is great. "I shall muddle through," he says. He is expected and understood to muddle through; and, muddle through or not, he invariably believes he has done it. Sheer complacency bolsters him up on every hand. At his going forth the rest of the world is fain to abase itself in the dust. He is the strong man, the white man of white men. He is the rich, clean sportsman, the incomparable, the fearless, the intolerable. And by "Englishman" the world has learned not to mean "Briton." The world has been taught to discriminate. It has regarded the Britannic brotherhood; and though it forgets that the Gael and the Celt are Britons, it takes its Englishman for a Briton, only with a difference. On the other hand, it is keenly sensible of sundry facts—as that it is the Englishman who rules the waves and the Englishman upon whose dominions the sun never sets; that the British flag is the English flag, the British army the English army, and the British navy the English navy, and that Scotland and Ireland, with Wales, are English appanages. It would be foolish to assert that the Englishman has greatly concerned himself in either the promulgation or the acceptance of these notions. But he holds them dear, and they are ineradicably planted in his subconsciousness.
One is inclined to think, however, that, while the supremacy and superiority of the Englishman have been received without traverse in his own dominions, there are those in outer darkness—on the Continent, in Ireland, and even in Scotland—who admit no such supremacy and no such superiority. Nay, there be persons breathing the breath of life who, so far from looking upon the Englishman with the eyes with which the early savage must have regarded Captain Cook, look upon him with the eyes with which Captain Cook regarded the early savage. In Ireland, particularly, hatred of the English has become a deep-grounded national characteristic. The French dislike of perfidious Albion may be reckoned to a great extent an intermittent matter. It sputters and flares when a Fashoda or a Boer War comes along, and it has a way of finding its deadliest expression in caricature. But the Irish hatred is as persistent and concrete as it is ancient. In Scotland the feeling about the English amounts in the main to good-humoured tolerance, touched with a certain amazement. The least cultivated of Scotsmen—and such a man is quite a different being from the least cultivated of Englishmen—will tell you that "thae English" are chiefly notable by reason of their profound ignorance and a ridiculous passion for the dissipation of money. The Scot of the middle class thinks his neighbour is a feckless, foolish person who would pass muster if he could be serious, and who has got what he possesses by good luck rather than by good management. Up to a point both are right, for the English in the mass are at once much more ignorant and much less thrifty than the people of Scotland, and their good-nature and happy-go-luckiness are things to set a Scot moralising.
Years ago Matthew Arnold put the right names on the two more creditable and powerful sections of English society. The aristocracy he set down for Barbarians, the middle class for Philistines. The aristocracy were inaccessible to ideas, he said; the middle class admired and loved the aristocracy. It is so to this day, and so to an extent which is in entire consonance with the circumstance that for sheer stupidity the Englishman of the upper class is without parallel, while the Englishman of the middle class cannot be paralleled for snobbishness. Arnold's complaint that neither class was a reading class or at all devoted to the higher matters still holds. The great, broad-shouldered, genial Englishman whom Tennyson sang and at whom Arnold gibed is still with us. That he is as great and as broad-shouldered and as genial as ever nobody will deny. And, broadly speaking, his outlook upon life remains exactly what it was. To be ruddy and healthy, to go out mornings with dogs, to dine hilariously and dance evenings, to be generous to the poor, and to honour oneself and the King are the rule of his life if he be a Barbarian; and to ape these things and consider them gifts of price, if he be a Philistine. Since Arnold, however, the Englishman, egregious though he undoubtedly was, has taken unto himself a new and altogether alarming demerit. Out of his love of health and ease and security and pleasure and well-ordered materialism there has sprung up a trouble which is like to cost him exceeding dear—a trouble, in fact, which, if he be not careful, will go far to emasculate him, if not wholly to destroy him. Of the higher matters, as has been said, he has taken but the smallest heed. Writer fellows, painter fellows, philosopher Johnnies, and so forth are not of his world, except in so far as they may entertain his women-folk, or deck his halls with commercial canvas, or assist him in the eking out of his small talk before dessert. It is not to be expected of him that he should take to his heart persons whom he cannot by any possibility understand. Even Arnold could forgive him that failing. It was the build of the man, the breed and constitution of him, that justified him. But since, being English, he has found his way to the unpardonable sin. It was well that he should despise persons who, however much they might think, did little and got little for doing it. It was well that brains which could not sit a horse, and preferred bed to the moors, and had no rent-roll, should be despised. It would have been well, too, if that other kind of brains, which, beginning with nothing, ends in millionairedom and flagrant barbarianism, might also have continued to be despised and to be kept at arm's-length. The great, broad-shouldered, genial Englishman, however, has succumbed. Park Lane has become a Ghetto; my lord's house parties reek of gentlemen with noses, and names ending in "baum"; and the English Houses of Parliament, the finest club in Europe, the mother of parliaments, the most dignified assemblage under the sun, is just a branch of the Stock Exchange. As the exceedingly clever young man who recently wrote a book about the Scot might say, this shows what the English really are.
It has been remarked, and possibly not without truth, that the Scot keeps the Sabbath and everything else he can lay his hands upon. He is credited with being the perfect money-grubber; his desire for competence, we have been told by the clever young man before mentioned, has blighted his soul and brought him into opprobrium among Turks and Chinamen. Well, the Scot does look after money: he desires competence, he loves independence; and, when he can get them, ease and pleasure are gratifying to him. If he comes off the rock and attains affluence, he is not averse to the goodnesses that affluence commands. He will start a castle and a carriage and a coat-of-arms with the best of them; he will lift up his family and leave his children well provided for. In these connections he is just as human as the next man; but he never has played and he never will play the English game of lavishness and wastefulness and swaggering profusion, and, least of all, will he play it on a basis of undesirable association. The Scotsman who has compassed wealth, even though he be the son of a mole-catcher or a sweetie-wife or a Glasgow beer-seller, can always remember that there is such a thing as spiritual integrity. And though he may or may not boo and boo and boo in accordance with the good old kindly English legend, he certainly will not do it in Jews' houses. This, I take it, is where he has some little advantage over Englishmen.
Perhaps no finer indication of the English spirit, and of the greed and corruption that have overtaken it, could have been offered than has been offered by the trend of recent events in South Africa. To go thoroughly over the ground in such an essay as the present is, of course, impossible; to state the arguments for both sides would be to reproduce writing of which everybody is heartily tired. The battling newspapers have said their say, and we are just beginning to feel the comfort of a more or less reasonable settlement. All that need be said here is that the Englishman has not come out of this war with anything like the honour and the glory and the éclat that he has been accustomed to expect of himself in similar undertakings. His bodily prowess, his hardihood, his Spartan capacity for withstanding the rigours of campaigning, his military abilities, and his very patriotism have all had to be called in question during the past two and a half years. When he went out to the fray, his cry was, "Ha! ha!" and the war was to be over in six weeks. He had the finest equipment, the finest munitions, the finest men, the finest system, the world had seen. He was as fit as a fiddle and as hard as nails, and his love of music prompted him to take a piano with him. Then the English and they that dwell in outer darkness saw many things. They have been learning their lesson ever since. They have learned that in a fight the great, broad-shouldered, genial Englishman, instead of being worth three Frenchmen, is worth about the fiftieth part of a Boer farmer. They have learned that the great, broad-shouldered, genial Englishman is not above selling spavined horses and stinking beef to the country that he loves. And they have learned that when a great, broad-shouldered, genial Englishman is discovered in his incompetence or his culpable negligence or his dishonour, it is the business of all the other great, broad-shouldered, genial Englishmen to get round him and screen him from the public gaze and swear that he is a maligned and misunderstood man. The incidents of the war alone, without any backing or the smallest distortion or exaggeration, have been quite sufficient to show that there is something rotten in the condition of the English. It has been a tale of shame and ignominy and disaster from beginning to end. It has resulted in a peace which practically settles very little, and an inquiry with closed doors. Verily Apollo must have a care for his reputation in the Pantheon.
The Englishman who is not a sportsman dares not mention the circumstance. In the counties he must shoot and hunt, or be for ever damned. In the towns he must have daily dealings with a starting-price bookmaker and hourly news from the race-courses and the cricket-pitches, otherwise Englishmen decline to know him. "I am a sportsman, sir," is the English shibboleth. "It is the English love of manly sports that has made the English paramount in every land and on every sea." The Lord Chief Justice of England rowed stroke for his college in Oxford v. Cambridge in 1815, otherwise he would not be Lord Chief Justice of England. At eighteen the Lord Chancellor was one of the best sprinters of his day, otherwise he would never have dandled his little legs on the Woolsack. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman is a keen shot, and was one of a party of seven who made the biggest bag on record in 1865, otherwise he would never have been Leader of the Opposition. Mr. Henry Labouchere is one of our most brilliant and daring steeple-chase riders, otherwise he would never have owned Truth. Mrs. Ormiston Chant is a cricket enthusiast; so are the Archbishop of Canterbury, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, and Mr. Tommy Bowles. Lord Roberts can take a hand at croquet with the best young woman out of Girton, and Mr. John Morley understands a race-horse almost as well as he understands the Encyclop?dists. In fact, the English eminent are either sportsmen or nothing, and all the other English follow suit.
Now and again somebody gets up and points out that betting is a great evil; whereupon the Duke of Devonshire opens one eye and says that he never had a shilling on a horse in his life. Then everybody says that horse-racing is good for the breed of horses, employing large amounts of capital and large numbers of honest persons, and on the whole a manly and profitable pastime. Incidentally, too, it transpires that fox-hunting is an equally noble and English form of sport, and that when farmers cease from puppy-walking, Britain may very well drop the epithet "Great" from her name. Or perhaps Mr. Kipling, fresh from the unpleasant truths of South Africa, conceives a distich or two as to flannelled fools and muddied oafs. In response there is an immediate and emphatic English howl. Why cannot the little man stick to his Recessionals? How dare he call sportsmen like Ranji and Trott and Bloggs and Biffkin flannelled fools, much less the Tottenham Hotspurs and Sheffield United muddied oafs! Is it not true that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton? Were not flannelled fools and muddied oafs among the first to throw up their home ties and fling themselves into the imminent breach when the war broke out? Are not cricket and football healthy and admirable old English sports, and pleasantly calculated to keep the youth of the country out of much worse mischief on Saturday afternoons? And so on right down the line. The English are sportsmen. Sport is bred in the bone of them. Less than a century ago they were cock-fighting and man-fighting in the splendid English way. They would be doing it yet, if their own stupid laws did not prevent them. Instead they race horses and pursue the fox, watch cricket and football matches, and play tennis and croquet and ping-pong. It is sport that keeps England sweet. If it were not for sport, the English would cease to have red faces and husky voices and check suits. One presumes, too, that if it were not for sport they would entirely lose their sense of fair play, their love of honest dealing, and that spirit of self-sacrifice which notoriously informs all their actions. It is sport that has made the English the justest as well as the greatest of the nations. It is sport which keeps her unspotted of the lower vices, such as drunkenness, indolence, and misspent Saturday afternoons. It is sport which gives her a standard of manliness, an all-day press, and a platform upon which prince and pauper, the highest and the lowest, meet as common men. Long live sport!
Perhaps it is pardonable in a Scot to note that the only forms of sport which can be pronounced sane and devoid of offence came out of Scotland. The grand instance in point, of course, is the ancient and royal game of golf. Without attempting to say a word that would tend to exaggerate the value of a pastime which is beloved by all Scotsmen, and not without its appreciators even in England, it seems fitting to remark that in golf you have a game which, while every whit as healthy, as manly, and as invigorating as horse-racing, cricket, football, and the rest of them, can never by any chance become the mere kill-time of the idle, unparticipating spectator or the prey of the "professional", the ready-money bookmaker, and the halfpenny journal. As to other Scottish sports, one need not here particularise; but they are all healthy and honest in the broadest sense, and with the single exception of football, which has been corrupted by the English, they have not been allowed to deteriorate into vices. The exploitation of popular pastimes by covetous and unprincipled persons is an unmistakable sign of national decadence. In England that exploitation goes on without let or hindrance and in almost every department. Protest brings merely contempt and objurgation upon the head of the protester, and the national virility continues to be slowly but surely sapped away. That the English notion of sport should permit of the orgies of bloodshed, rowdyism, and partisanship which take place in the coverts and on football-fields, race-courses, and cricket-grounds serves to indicate that, in spite of all that has been said and sung in its praises, the English notion of sport is an exceedingly sad and sorry one. It is natural that a people given over to display and the getting of money for the sake of the more unnecessary luxuries money can buy should in a great measure lose its taste for outdoor sports of the primal order. The English are losing that taste at a rate which can leave no doubt as to the ultimate upshot. In brief, the Englishman as sportsman worth the name seems to be disappearing; and in his place England will have the adipose, plethoric, mechanical slayer of birds who goes to his shoot in a bath-chair, and the cadaverous, undersized, Saturday-afternoon zealot, the chief joys of whose existence are the cracking of filberts and the kicking of umpires.
The English, all the world has heard, are a nation of shopkeepers. They are understood to keep shop and to glory in it. They have kept shop, with the other nations for customers, ever since international shopkeeping became a possibility. In the beginning, one is afraid, their notion of shopkeeping ran neither to fair trade nor honest dealing; but gradually there was built up a system of commercial equity, the main principle of which was the protection of one shopkeeper against another and the security of shopkeepers generally.
In course of time the English man of business arose. He had a silk hat and expansive manners. He lived in a suburb and read the Times on his way to business in the morning. All day at his office he would cheat no man, and his word was as good as his bond. His office day was a day of quite ten hours, and during those ten hours he sweated like the proverbial nigger. At nights he retired to his suburb, and, with the wife and children whom he kept there, ate to repletion from the joint, washed it down with sherry and port supplied to him by merchants of the type of the late Mr. Ruskin's father; and, hey, presto! by eleven of the clock he was deep among the feathers. Twice on Sundays he went to church and held the plate. To Sunday's midday dinner he invited the vicar or a curate, and there was always beef and batter-pudding and improving talk, not to mention cabbage and an extra special "glass of wine, sir." Other recreations the English man of business had none, save and except perhaps an occasional Saturday-afternoon drive in a hired chaise with Mrs. Man-of-Business and the children, and a still more occasional visit to the theatre. In the long run, by the practice of these virtues he amassed wealth. He put his money into good bottoms; he owed no man a penny; and as he never robbed anybody and always lived miles within his income, he had a conscience so easy that it seemed to sleep. Everybody respected him. He was in demand to take the chair at the meetings of young men's improvement societies, and to explain the secret of his success "free, gratis, and for nothing" to the callow young men thereat assembled. He would tell you unctuously that he attributed his success (1) to early rising, (2) to never wasting time , (3) to always saving at least one third of his income, (4) to never going bond for anybody, and (5) to marrying Mrs. Man-of-Business—this last, of course, with a chortle. So he wagged along and helped to build up the commercial greatness and probity and honour of his country. And when he died he had a magnificent and costly funeral and was attended to his last long home by his weeping relict and sorrowing sons and daughters. Next day there was an account of Mr. Man-of-Business's obsequies in the local papers, and his sons proceeded to carry on the concern.
That was forty years ago. To-day the English man of business is a bird of an entirely different and altogether more entrancing feather. Indeed, it is a question whether he has not ceased to be a man of business at all. One might perhaps sum him up best by saying that he has begun to have notions. Whereas he was once the bulwark of the Philistine class, he has now gone over, lock, stock, and barrel—particularly barrel—to the Barbarians. He lives in the manner, style, and odour of Barbarism; and the ruling ambition of his existence is to pass for a "county magnate", a man of birth and leisure, rather than for a man of business. So that he has entirely laid aside the characteristics which distinguished his early and middle Victorian prototype. Breadth, girth, weight, the substantial, the ponderous, are not for him. He does not attribute his success to early rising; he does not boast that his word is his bond; he does not slap his sides when he laughs; he never went to business on a tram-car in his life; and as for his owing all he is to Mrs. Man-of-Business, it is to his association with that charming bechiffoned, bejewelled little lady that he owes all he owes. In other words, the new English man of business has made up his mind that, if life is to be made tolerable at all, it must be made tolerable through social ways. That is to say, if one's income runs to a couple of thousand a year out of a butter business, one must live in precisely the manner of persons whose incomes run to two thousand a year out of lands and hereditaments. "The glass of fashion and the mould of form" for a person who would live is Mayfair. Lords and dukes and the landed gentry have houses in Mayfair; their wives and female relatives flutter round in flashing equipages and brilliant toilettes; there is the theatre, the opera, and other people's houses in the evening, the Park on Sundays, the river in the summer, Scotland in the autumn, and the Riviera for the winter and early spring. Lords and dukes and the landed gentry tread this pretty round, and find both pleasure and dignity in it. Why not the head of the old-established firm of Margarine, Sons, Bros. & Co.? Why not, indeed? Old Margarine, founder of the house, never missed a day at the office for forty years. Young Margarine will tell you that, "after all, you know, it is rather amusing to drop into the office sometimes and see the fellows sit up." All the same, the business is a beastly bore, and there are moments when he wishes it at the deuce.
As for Mrs. Margarine, Mrs. Man-of-Business, the erstwhile portly mother of daughters and only begetter of her spouse's success, really, if you saw her in her boudoir, in her carriage, at Princes, at the opera, at Brighton, or at Monte Carlo, you would not recognise her. She is young and slim; her hair is of flax; she has rings on her fingers, and probably bells on her toes; her diamonds are the envy of duchesses; "and as for Margarine, my dear, I never think either about it or him. My little boys are at Eton, and Dickie is going into the Guards." Sometimes even Mr. and Mrs. Man-of-Business manage to get presented. Then, as you may say, their cup runneth over; hand in hand they stand upon their Pisgah and stare at the Pacific as it were. There are no more worlds to conquer. They come down with a light upon their faces, and Margarine, Sons, Bros. & Co. can be hanged. In point of fact, Margarine, Sons, Bros. & Co. sooner or later becomes Margarine, Sons, Bros. & Co., Limited. Margarine himself drops out, taking with him all the money he can get. When he comes to die, if you said "Margarine," he would do his best to insult you.
That is all. Of course, I have taken an extreme case, but apparently the desire of the latter-day English man of business is wholly in these directions. Be he in a great or small way, he is fain to step westward; he is fain to live as the Barbarians and to be undistinguishable from them. And rather than be beaten he will enter into that kingdom piecemeal. Surpluses that would have gone to consolidation and extension in the old days now go to personal and feminine expenditure. Bond Street captures what the wise would have dumped into Threadneedle Street; and instead of resting our hope upon the business methods of Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Budgett, our heart inclines to the excellent precepts of our millionaire friend "Yeth Indeed." Which is to say that the English man of business, like the English sportsman, is dying out of the land. Whether his loss will be deplored by countless thousands is another question. Anyway, he is going.
I am dealing here with the English journalist, because in my opinion, after the English sportsman and the English man of business, there is nothing under the sun so wonderfully English and so fearfully foolish. The elegant and austere writer who gave us The Unspeakable Scot has said much which he no doubt hoped would lead people to believe that the British Press was entirely in the hands of Scotsmen, and that this accounted at once for its dulness and its continual advertisement of Scottish virtues. For my own part, I have no hesitation in asserting that Mr. Crosland's view of the situation is quite a mistaken one. In any case, it is obvious that, even if Fleet Street be, as Mr. Crosland suggests, eaten up with louts from over the Border, the English journalist is not yet wholly extinct, and somewhere in the land the remnant of him stands valiantly to its guns. It is well known, however, that, as a fact, the remnant very largely outnumbers its hated rival, the proportion of Scots to the proportion of Englishmen on the staffs of most newspapers being probably no higher than as one is to three. So that for the stodginess and flat-footedness of the English newspaper—the epithets are Mr. Crosland's own—the Englishman is at least equally to blame with the Scot. Mr. Crosland's main complaint against the newspaper press of his country is that it lacks brilliance. So far as I am aware, it has never before been asserted that the function of a newspaper is to be brilliant. News is news all over the world. To write brilliantly of a dog-fight or of the suicide of a defaulting clerk may be Mr. Crosland's ambition in life, but most persons possessing such an ambition would transfer their finical attentions from the field of journalism to that of belles-lettres. No doubt, if Mr. Crosland had his way, the morning papers, in which the soul of the average Englishman so delighteth, would be published from the Bodley Head or at the Sign of the Unicorn, or haply at Mr. Grant Richards's.
It is not my intention, however, to enter into a sort of ten nights' discussion with Mr. Crosland. He has had his say and taken the whipping he deserved. My business is with the English journalist; and while I shall not descend to personalities in dealing with him, I hope to show that his brilliance and liveliness and smartness, though much vaunted, are neither a boon nor a blessing either to journalism as a force or to society at large. I think that it may be fairly set down for a fact that the fine flower and consummate expression of English journalism is the halfpenny newspaper. At any rate, nobody would pretend to find in the halfpenny newspaper the sententious dulness and flat-footedness which are supposed to characterise the journalistic work of the Scot. The smartness of the halfpenny press is indeed not even American. There is but one epithet for it, and that is English. Broadly speaking, its appeal is directly and exclusively to the bathotic. In England the bathotic has always had the majority in its grip. The majority notoriously has no mind. It is a thing of one emotion, an instrument of one stop. On that stop—the bathotic stop—the English journalist makes a point of playing. There has been a time in his history when he believed in the educative possibilities and duties of his profession. He long held with the Scot that the Press was a power, and that it was becoming that it should glory in being a power for the betterment of the race. After many shrewd searchings and commercial gropings, the English journalist discovered that the way to fame and fortune lay in the mastery of the bathotic stop. He learned to sing songs of Araby in one squalid key every morning, and he has since been able to keep a gig and out-circulate everything that considers itself possessed of circulation. He has played, as one might say, old Harvey with the Daily Telegraph. He has put the Times to the shame of being a journal that "nobody reads." More than all, he has said flatly to the English people, "You are a rabbit-brained crowd, and here for your delectation and your coppers is the worst that can be written for you."
When England comes to her day of reckoning, in the hour when she shall see her own mischance and is fain to remember the names of her destroyers, none of them will seem to her so flagrant and so to be deprecated as the English journalist. "Behold," she will say, "the monster who convinced me that it was beautiful to split infinitives; that it was elegant to begin six paragraphs on one page with the blessed statement, 'A dramatic scene was enacted in Mr. Thingamybob's court yesterday'; that good books are to be worthily pronounced upon by sub-editors in the intervals of waiting for the three o'clock winner; and that, so far from being a reproach to one, the bathotic was the only honourable and creditable attitude of mind."
If a man wish to perceive to what degraded passes the art of writing may come and yet retain the qualities of intelligibility and apparent reasonableness, let him peruse the morning papers and die the death. The reek and offence of them smells to heaven. They are a sure indication of the decadence of the English mind and of the cupidity and unscrupulousness of the English journalist. There has been nothing like them, nothing to compare with them, for cheapness and futility and banality in the history of the world. They are more to be fearful of than the pestilence, inasmuch as they spell intellectual debasement, the corruption of the public taste, and the defilement of the public spirit. Their very literal innocuousness condemns them. It is their boast that they may be read in the family without a blush. Their assumption of morality and puritanical straitlacedness is admirable. Beneath it there lie a licentiousness of purpose, a disregard for what is just, and a contempt for what is decent and of good report which are calculated to make the angels weep. When one inquires into the personnel of the staffs by which these papers are run, one is confronted with exactly the kind of man one expects to meet. First of all, he is English, and as shallow and flippant and irresponsible as only an Englishman can be. The saving touch of seriousness does not enter into his composition. He neither reads nor thinks. Beer, billiards, and free lunches, free entry to the less edifying places of amusement, a minimum of work and a maximum of pay, constitute his ideal of the journalist's career, and he is always doing his best to live up to it. Of responsibility to anybody save his immediate chief, who, after all, is only himself at a little higher salary, he has not the smallest notion. His duty is neither by himself nor by the public. All that is expected of him is loyalty to his chief and to his paper, and it is his pride and joy that this loyalty is invariably forthcoming.
Very occasionally one hears that, in consequence of a change in the political policy of a newspaper, the editor of that paper has considered it to be his duty to resign his editorship. Probably not more than two such resignations have occurred in English journalism during the past twenty years. In both instances the self-denying editors have been held up by the English papers as sublime examples of honour and martyrdom. That there is nothing extraordinary in sticking to one's principles, even though it means loss of livelihood, does not appear to have dawned upon the lively English mind. Of course, it will be said that, if every member of the staff of a newspaper, down even to the junior reporters, were allowed to have beliefs and principles, and were not expected to write anything in antagonism to them, an exceedingly remarkable kind of newspaper would result. Compromise, at any rate on established matters, must be the rule of the journalist's life. On the other hand, I incline to the opinion that the English journalist is far too swift to acquiesce in doubtful procedure, and that where the morals, good report, and high character of a paper are concerned it is better to have a Scotch staff than an English one. Nothing is more characteristic of the English journalist of to-day than the circumstance that he is literally without opinions of his own. He takes his opinions from his chiefs, just as his chiefs take their opinions from their proprietors, or from the wire-pullers with whose party the paper happens to be associated. In a sense it is impossible that it should be otherwise. Yet you will find that in the main Scottish journalists do have opinions of their own, and that somehow they manage to be loyal to them. For weal or woe the Scot is immovable and unchangeable as the granite of his own hills. You can never get him to see that half-measures are either desirable or necessary. He will not stretch his conscience nor palter with his soul for any man or any man's money. The Englishman is all the other way—that is why he makes such a nimble and even brilliant journalist.
The English are a nation of employed persons. Wherever you go, from Berwick to Land's End, you will find that in the main the men you meet are somebody's employees. The better kind of them possibly write "manager" on their cards; some of them even are managing directors; others, again, are partners in wealthy houses or heads of such houses. Yet, as I have said, they strike you almost to a man as being in somebody's employment. Even the most prosperous of them have the strained, repressed, furtive look which comes of the long turning of other people's little wheels; while the masses, the employed English masses, give you, as regards appearance, physique, and habit of mind alike, an excellent notion of what a galley-slave must have been. The fact of being employed is indeed the only big and abiding fact in the average Englishman's life. It has its effect on the whole man from the time of his youth to the time of his death; it influences his actions and the trend of his thoughts to a far greater extent than any other force—love and religion included. In the Englishman's view, to be employed is the only road to subsistence, and, if one be ambitious, the only road to honour. He must work for somebody, otherwise he cannot be happy. The notion of working for himself appals him; and if by any chance he be persuaded to take the plunge, the consideration that he has no master weighs so heavily upon him that his end is usually speedy ruin of one sort or another. That is to say, he either takes advantage of his freedom to the extent of doing no work at all, or, in the absence of the guiding hand, he loses his judgment and throws to the winds the caution that kept him his place. It is a pity, there can be no doubt; but the thing is in the English blood. If you are an Englishman, you must be employed; if you are unemployed, you are unhappy, and worse. For a full century the rich merchants, enterprising manufacturers, colliery-owners, mill-owners, and what not, in whom the English put their trust, have been preaching and fomenting this doctrine by every means in their power. To their aid in spreading the glorious truth they have brought the moralists and the Churches: "'if a man will not work, neither shall he eat.' 'Servants, obey your masters.' Punctuality is the soul of business. Be faithful over a few things. Begin at the bottom rung of the ladder. Mr. So-and-so, the notorious billionaire, was once a poor working-boy in Manchester. Furthermore, if you don't work and at our price—well, to say the least of it, God will not love you."
And the English—poor bodies!—carry on their lives accordingly. The whole scheme of things is arranged to fit in with the ideas of employers as to what work means, under what conditions it should be performed, and what should be its rewards. To live in the manner pronounced to be respectable by the moralists and the Churches, you must take upon yourself exactly the labours, and no others, prescribed by the employers. In other words, to keep an eight-roomed house with a piano in it, a wife with blouses and four new hats a year, and a little family who can go to church on Sunday mornings dressed as well as any of them, you must keep Messrs. Reachemdown's books, and pass through your hands many thousands of Messrs. Reachemdown's moneys, for a salary of ￡150 a year. When you get old and half blind through years of poring over Reachemdown's figures, they will pension you off at a pound a week, and get a younger man to do the work for the other ￡2. You, good, easy Englishman, will, in your heart of hearts, be exceedingly grateful to Reachemdown & Reachemdown, and count it not the least of your many blessings that you have never wanted good work and kind employers. You will say to your English son, "My boy, make up your mind to serve people well, and in your old age they will never forget you. Always be industrious, obliging, and respectful. Remember that a rolling stone gathers no moss, and never forsake the substance for the shadow." And the chances are that your fine English boy will do exactly what you, his fine English father, have done. Indeed, if he be old enough at the time of your "retirement," he might very appropriately take your place at Reachemdown & Reachemdown's; then he will marry, he will live in a house with a piano in it, his wife will have four new hats a year, and his children will go to church on Sundays as well dressed as any of them.
On the whole, I should be sorry to say that this sort of thing was not desirable. If a nation is to be great, it is essential that it should contain a large body of workers, and the more industrious and dependable and trustworthy that body of workers, the better it is for the State and for the pillars and props of the State, the employers included. But the point is that the English take too much credit for it and get too much ease out of it. It has been complained by Mr. Crosland and other masters of elegant English that the Scot goes to London and the smaller industrial markets and there enters into successful competition with the English employed, and it appears to annoy Mr. Crosland that the Scot should not be content with good work, say book-keeping from nine to six, good wages, say ￡150 per annum, and kind employers, say Messrs. Reachemdown & Reachemdown, all his life. It seems to annoy him, too, that the Scot never acquires that pathetic satisfaction in being employed which permeates the beautiful spirit of his English competitor. You will meet hoary and bald-headed Englishmen who will tell you with a quaver that they have been in the employment of one and the same house, man and boy, for over half a century, sir! Somehow the Englishman tells you this with a look of pride, and rather expects you to regard him as a sort of marvel. It never occurs to him that he is really bragging of his own ineptitude,—to use Mr. Crosland's favourite abstraction,—his own lack of enterprise. The number of Scots who have been in the employment of one house for forty years, least of all the number of Scots who brag about it, is probably not a round dozen. As a general rule, when a Scot has been in a house forty years, it is his house.
Another matter in which the English employee appears to me to err mightily is his treatment of his employer. In concerns of great magnitude personal relations between employer and employed are often impossible, because the employer seldom comes near the place where his money is made for him. Quite frequently, however, he is accessible; yet the employee knows him not. He would no more think of walking up and shaking hands with him than he would think of casting himself from the top of the factory chimney-stack. It is the unwritten law of the English that the employer is a better man than the employed. For the employee to say "How do!" to the employer; for the employee to meet the employer in the street and omit to make respectful obeisances; for the employee to assert anywhere outside his favourite pot-house that Jack's as good as his master, would never do. If you are paid wages, you must be grateful and respectful; and though you know quite well that your employer is paying you just as little as ever he can, you must still respect him. Broadly speaking, we manage these things better in Scotland; and, for that matter, the Scot manages them better in England. The English employee quirks and crawls before his employer, because he knows that his employer can exercise over him powers which, if they do not mean exactly life and death, do mean a possibly long period of out-of-workness. And out-of-workness is, as a rule, the most fearful thing in life that can happen to an Englishman, for the simple reason that he never has anything behind him. If he has been earning fifty pounds a year, he has spent it all; if he has been earning a thousand a year, he has spent it all and more to it. With the Scot it is different. No matter how small his earnings, he invariably contrives to save a portion of them. When he has saved a hundred pounds, he is practically an independent man, for a Scot with a hundred pounds at his disposal can defy, and can afford to defy, any employer that ever breathed the breath of life. Besides, hundred pounds or no hundred pounds, the Scot will not grovel. He does his work and his duty, and the rest can go hang. His days are not spent in blissful contemplation of the joys of being in good work; he has no anxieties as to how long it is going to last; he admits no superiorities; he is afraid of no man. Some day, perhaps, the Englishman will learn to take a leaf out of his book. The Englishman will learn that to be employed, excepting with a view to greater things than subsistence, is to be in a condition which borders very closely on degradation. He will learn that services rendered and energies expended for long periods of years without adequate reward, and with only a pretence at advancement, are a discredit and not an honour. He will learn that a man's a man, and that it is no man's business to be so faithful to another man that he cannot be faithful to himself.
It pains me beyond measure to say it, but I think there can be no doubt that the accumulated experience and wisdom of mankind goes to show that at the bottom of most troubles there is a woman. Since Eve and the first debacle, it has been woman all along the line. I do not say that it is her fault, but the fact remains. White hands cling to the bridle-rein, and the horse proceeds accordingly. It is woman that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we will. She has a delicate finger in everybody's pie. No matter who you are, some woman has got you by a little bit of string. Occasionally you are the better for being so entangled; but nine times out of ten it is a misfortune for you. When one comes to look closely at the decadence of the English, and endeavours to account for it in a plain way and without fear or prejudice, one cannot help perceiving that here again one has a pronounced case of woman, woman, woman. Further,—and once more I pray that I may not seem impolite,—the woman with whom you have to contend in England, though her hand be full of power, is not, perhaps, a woman, after all. I sometimes think that she may be best and most properly expressed in the word "Chiffon." Whatever she may have been in the past, however sweet, however demure, however capable, however beautiful, the Englishwoman of to-day is just a foolish doll, a thing of frills and fluff and patchouli, a daughter of vanity, and a worshipper of dressmakers. Under her little foot, under her mild, blue, greedy eye, the Englishman has become a capering carpet-knight, one who dallies at high noon, a buck, a dandy, an unconvinced flippancy, the shadow of his former self. Be he father or merely husband of the fair, his case is pretty much the same. Both at home (if he can find it in his heart to call his conglomeration of cosey-corners home) and abroad it is Chiffon that runs him. Chiffon must have a house full of fal-lals: so must the Englishman. Chiffon delights in Chippendale that a sixteen-stone male person dare not sit upon: so does the Englishman. Chiffon must dine late off French kickshaws with champagne to them: so must the Englishman. Chiffon must not have more than two children, whom she must visit and kiss once a day: it is the same with the Englishman. Chiffon does not like the way in which you are running your newspaper: the Englishman forthwith runs his newspaper another way. Chiffon does not like that cross-eyed clerk of yours; she is sure there is something wrong about him; she wouldn't trust him with a hairpin, my dear! He gets fired. Chiffon is fond of motor-cars and tiaras of diamonds and eight-guinea hats and three or four new frocks a week, and she hates to be worried about money matters. "Poor little Chiffon!" says the good, kind Englishman; "she shall be happy, even though we drift sweetly toward Carey Street. We must keep it up, though the heavens fall; and when I come to think of it, I have read somewhere of a man who had only ￡500 year, and is now in receipt of ￡16,000 simply through marrying an expensive wife." Lower down the scale it is just the same: Chiffon will have this, Chiffon will have that, and so will the Englishman. It is only four-three a yard, and it will make up lovely! The Englishman never doubts that it will. Chiffon discovers that Chiffon next door has got an oak parlour-organ and a case of birds on the instalment system. "She is getting them off a Scotsman," says Chiffon; "and I want some too." "Dry those pretty eyes," says the Englishman; "I will apply at once for an extra two-bob a week, and it shall be done." The children of Chiffon next door are "taking music lessons off a lidy in reduced circumstances." Chiffon's children are as good as the children of Chiffon next door any day in the week—they, too, shall take music lessons. The Englishman concurs.
This, of course, is all when you are married to her. When you are Chiffon's fiancé (she would not have you say sweetheart or lover for worlds), you enjoy what is commonly called in England a high old time. First of all, she will flirt with you till your reason rocks upon its throne. Then, when you are about as confused as a little boy who has fallen out of a balloon, she brings you to the idiot-point, informs you that it is so sudden and that she doesn't quite know what you mean, and asks you if you do not think it would have been more manly on your part to have spoken first with her papa. Being an Englishman, and having nothing better to do, you put up with it and go guiltily off to Chiffon's delectable male parent. He inquires into your income in pretty much the manner of a person who is going to lend you ￡20 on note of hand only, grunts a bit, asks to be excused while he has a word with the missis; comes back, says, "Yes, you can have her," and next morning you find yourself on the same old stool, in front of the same old shiny desk, wondering what in the name of heaven you have done. There is a three-years' courtship, all starch and theatre-tickets and bouquets and fretfulness and anxiety; there is a wedding pageant, got up specially for the purpose of annoying the neighbours; you have a whirling twenty minutes before a company of curates, who persist in calling you by the wrong name; you go home in shivers; you drink soda-water to prevent you from getting drunk; you make a speech in the tone of a man who has just been hung; you find yourself feeling rather queer aboard the Dover packet,—and Chiffon is yours. Such an experience at a time of life when a man is callow, shy, full of nerves, and unversed in the serious matters of life is bound to leave its mark upon the character. It takes the heart out of most men, and some of them never get it back again. It is an English institution and a stupid one. Like many another English institution, it has its basis in pretentiousness and display, instead of in the vital issues of life. In Scotland we make marriages on different and more serious principles. There are no Chiffons in Scotland, whether maids or matrons. Consequently in Scotland there are precious few fools. Hard heads, sound sense, high spirits, indomitable will, inexhaustible energy, are not the offspring of mammas who know more about cosmetics than about swaddling-clothes, and who suckle their children out of patent-food tins. One of the rebukers of Mr. Crosland has pointed out with some pertinence that the Scotswoman approximates more closely to the Wise Man's view of what a good wife should be than almost any other kind of woman in the world. Here, as Mr. Crosland would say, is Solomon:
Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies.
The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil.
She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life.
She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands.
She is like the merchants' ships; she bringeth her food from afar.
She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens.
She considereth a field, and buyeth it: with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard.
She girdeth her loins with strength, and strengtheneth her arms.
She perceiveth that her merchandise is good: her candle goeth not out by night.
She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff.
She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy.
She is not afraid of the snow for her household: for all her household are clothed with scarlet.
Her husband is known in the gates, when he sitteth among the elders of the land.
She maketh fine linen, and selleth it; and delivereth girdles unto the merchant.
Strength and honour are her clothing: and she shall rejoice in time to come.
She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness.
She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.
Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her.
Yes, Mr. Crosland, it is "very, very, very Scotch." What poor little Chiffon would think of it, if it were put before her as a standard of wifely qualification and duty, nobody but the Englishman knows. Perhaps she would shrug her shoulders and say, "How absurd!" Perhaps she would not understand it at all.
The Englishwoman's love of petty display and cheap fripperies, her desire to outshine the neighbours and to put all she has on her back, and to pass everywhere for a woman of means and station, no doubt had its beginning in a laudable anxiety to make the best of things. Unfortunately, however, the tendency has been developed out of reason, to the neglect of the qualities which make a woman the inspiration and strength of a man's life. To dress, and to talking and thinking about it, the Englishwoman devotes unconscionable hours. The bare business of robing and disrobing takes up pretty well half her waking day. Her transference from the bath to the breakfast-table cannot be accomplished under fifty minutes. Before she will appear in the open she will make yet another toilet. She is a full twenty minutes tidying herself before lunch. In the afternoon there is an hour of getting into tea-gowns; and, crowning rite of all, my lady "strips" for dinner. From morn to dewy eve her little mind is busy with dress. The shopping, over which she makes such a fuss, is almost invariably a matter of new frocks, new hats, new shoes, new feathers, matching this, exchanging that, sitting on high stools before pomatumed counter-skippers, and dissipating, in the purchase of sheer superfluities, gold that men have toiled for. Her visiting is equally an unmitigatedly dressy matter; she goes to see her friends' frocks, not her friends, and it is the delight of her soul to turn up in toilettes which render her friends frankly and miserably envious. Of the real purport of clothes she knows nothing; and if you endeavour to explain it to her, she will charge you with the wish to make an old frump of her before her time. As for the expense of it all, she never bothers her pretty head about money matters; she tells you in the most childlike way that her account at the bank seems to be perpetually overdrawn, but that "Randall is a dear, kind boy, though he does swear a bit when some of the bills come in. Besides," she says, "I am sure it helps him in his profession to have a well-dressed wife."
And the pity of it is, that quite frequently the person upon which these adornments are lavished is really not worth the embellishment, and would indeed be far better served and make a far better show in the least elaborate of garments. For, notoriously, the physique of the Englishwoman of the middle and upper classes is not now what it was. In height, in figure, in suppleness and grace of build, the Scottish woman can give her English sister many points. In the matter of facial beauty, too, the Englishwoman cannot be said particularly to shine. At a Drawing-Room, at the opera, the beauty of England spreads itself for your gaze; and the amazing lack both of beauty and the promise of it appals you. If we are to believe the society papers, there is not an ugly nor a plain-featured woman of means in all broad England. Every week the English illustrated journals give you pages of photographs, beneath which you may read in entrancing capital letters, "The beautiful Miss Snooks," or "Lady Beertap's two beautiful daughters." Yet the merest glance at those photographs convinces you that Miss Snooks is about as good-looking as the average kitchen-wench, while the two beautiful daughters of Lady Beertap have faces like the backs of cabs. The fact is, that the so-called English beauty is a rare thing and a fragile thing. Fully seventy-five per cent. of Englishwomen are not beautiful to look upon. Of the other twenty-five per cent., one here and there—perhaps one in a thousand—could stand beside the Venus of Milo without blenching. For the rest, they have a girlish prettiness which accompanies them into their thirtieth year, and sickens slowly into a sourness. At forty, little Chiffon, who was so pretty at twenty, has crow's-feet and flat cheeks, and a distinct tendency to the nut-cracker type of profile.
With a tow-row-row-row-row-row for the British Grenadiers! Which, of course, means the English Grenadiers, inasmuch as there never were any Scottish Grenadiers. To-day, however, the English do not sing this song. Their grandfathers delighted in it, and the tune still survives as a soldier-man's march. But when the modern English wish to celebrate the English soldier vocally, they do it in their own decadent, bathotic way. They have an idiot-song called Tommy Atkins. The chorus of it goes somewhat in this wise:
Oh! Tommy, Tommy Atkins,
You're a good 'un, heart and hand;
You're a credit to your nation
And to your native land.
May your hand be ever ready!
May your heart be ever true!
God bless you, Tommy Atkins!
Here's your country's love to you!
And since the outbreak of the late war, at any rate, the English do not speak of soldiers, but of Tommies; and the principal English poet has gone farther, and dubbed them Absent-Minded Beggars. Since the outbreak of the war, too, it has been necessary to issue from time to time words of caution to the great English public. Lord Roberts—"Little Bobs," I suppose, I should call him, in the choice English fashion—has on two or three occasions deemed it advisable to let it be known that his desire was that the great English public should discontinue the practice of treating Cape-bound or returned Tommies to alcoholic stimulants, and substitute therefor mineral waters or cocoa. This was very wise on Little Bobs's part, and it has no doubt saved at least two Cape-bound or returned Tommies from the degradation of an almighty drunk. I mention this because it illustrates in an exceedingly quaint way the attitude of the English towards the soldier. When there is war toward, the soldier is absolutely the most popular kind of man in England. In peace-time an English soldier is commonly credited with being socially vile and unpresentable. There is a popular conundrum which runs, "What is the difference between a soldier and a meerschaum pipe?" and the answer, I regret to say, is, "One is the scum of the earth, and the other the scum of the sea." Tommy's place in the piping times of peace is just at the bottom of the social ladder; there he must stay, and drink four ale, and smoke cheap shag, and sit at the back of the gallery in places of amusement. Then war comes along, and the English bosom expands to the sound of the distant drum, and to the rumour of still more distant carnage. Who is it that's a-working this 'ere blooming war? Blest if it ain't our old friend Tommy Atkins! Fetch him out of the four-ale bar at once. The nation's heroes have no business in four-ale bars. The saloon bar is the place for them, and the barmaid shall smile upon them, and they shall have free drinks and free cigars till all's blue; for they are the nation's heroes, and they deserve well of their country. Furthermore, if they wish to visit those great and glorious centres of enlightened entertainment commonly called the Halls, they shall no longer be stuffed obscurely away in the rear portion of the gallery, but they shall come out into the light of things; they shall come blushingly and amid acclaim into the pit or the stalls, or, for that matter, into any part of the 'ouse.
Throughout the war this has been so. It was so till yesterday. But the ancient English smugness has begun to assert itself once more; and Tommy—dear Tommy, God-bless-you Tommy, in fact—finds staring him in the face, as of yore, "Soldiers in uniform not served in this compartment"; "Soldiers in uniform cannot be admitted to any part of this theatre except the gallery." The English Kipling hit the whole matter off in his vulgar way when he wrote Tommy:
I went into a theatre as sober as could be;
They gave a drunk civilian room, but 'adn't none for me;
They sent me to a gallery, or round the music-'alls;
But when it comes to fightin'—Lord! they'll shove me in the stalls!
For it's Tommy this and Tommy that, an' "Tommy, wait outside";
But it's "Special train for Atkins" when the trooper's on the tide—
The troopship's on the tide, my boys—the troopship's on the tide
Oh! it's "Special train for Atkins" when the trooper's on the tide.
We were told that this war, if it were doing England no other good, was at least bringing her to a right understanding of the soldier-man. It was teaching her to take him by the hand, to recognise in him a creditable son and an essential factor in the State. It has ended in the way in which pretty well every English revival does end—namely, in smoke. Though England has as much need of the soldier and is as much dependent upon him for peace and security as any other nation, she has never been able—excepting, as I have said, in time of war—to bring her greedy mind to the pass of doing him the smallest honour or of rendering to him that measure of social credit which is obviously his by right.
That the English Tommy is not altogether a delectable person, however, goes, I think, without saying. According to General Buller and other more or less competent authorities, the men in South Africa were splendid. I do not doubt it in the least. On the other hand, the "returns" from that country have not struck one as reaching a high standard of savouriness or manliness; and, however splendid he may have been as a campaigner, as an ex-campaigner the English Tommy has scarcely shone; so that in a sense the changed attitude of the English public mind towards him is not to be wondered at.
Elsewhere in this essay I have pointed out that the late war has not reflected any too much credit upon that chiefest of snobs—the English military officer. To go into the army has long been considered good form among the English Barbarians, and to be an officer in a swagger regiment may be reckoned one of the best passports to English society. It gives a man a tone, and puts him on a footing with the highest, because an officer is a gentleman in a very special sense. But it is well known that, during the past half-century or so, the English Barbarians have been too prone to put their sons into the army for social considerations only, and without regard to their qualification or call for the profession of arms. And in the long result it has come to pass that the English army is officered by men who know as little as possible and care a great deal less about their profession, and are compelled to leave the instruction, and as often as not the leadership, of their men to non-commissioned officers. Over and over again in the South African campaign it was the commissioned officer who blundered and brought about disaster, and the non-commissioned officers and the horse sense of the rank and file that saved whatever of the situation there might be left to save. Probably the true history of the British reverses, major and minor, in South Africa will never be made public. But I believe it can be shown that in almost every instance it was the incapacity or remissness of the English commissioned officer which lay at the root of the trouble. The fact is, that the monocled mountebank who is in the army, don't you know, seldom or never understands his job. He is too busy messing, and dancing, and flirting, and philandering, and racing, and gambling, and speeding the time merrily, ever to learn it. That the honour of Britain, and the lives of Englishmen, Scotsmen, and Irishmen, should be in his listless, damp hand for even as long as five minutes is an intolerable scandal. That he should haw and haw, and yaw and yaw, on the barrack-square, and take a salary out of the public purse for doing it, shows exactly how persistently stupid the English can be. Of course, the common reply to any attack upon these shallow-pated incompetents is that you must have gentlemen for the King's commissions, and that the pay the King's commissions carry is so inadequate that no gentleman unpossessed of private means can afford to take one. This is a very pretty argument and exceedingly English. The money will not run to capable men; therefore let us fling it away on fools. Army reform, sweeping changes at the War Office, new army regulations, an army on a business footing, and so on and so forth, are always being clamoured for by the English people, and always being promised by the English Government. But until the day when the granting of commissions and promotion are as little dependent upon social influence and the influence of money as advancement in the law or advancement in the arts, the English army will remain just where it is and just as rotten as it is.
For downright childishness the modern English soldier, whether he be officer or file-man, has perhaps no compeer. When the South African War broke out, Tommy and his officers were men of scarlet and pipe-clay and gold lace and magnificent head-dresses. Also all drill was in close order; you were to shove in your infantry first, supported by your artillery, and deliver your last brilliant stroke with your cavalry. The men should go into the fray with bands playing, flags flying, and dressed as for parade. You commenced operations with move No. 1; the enemy would assuredly reply with move No. 2; you would then rush in with move No. 3; there would be a famous victory, and the streets of London would be illuminated at great expense. In South Africa matters did not quite pan out that way; the enemy declined absolutely to play the stereotyped war-game, for the very simple reason that they did not know it, and that South Africa is not quite of the contour of a chess-board. And so the English had to change their cherished system, and to learn to ride, and to throw their pretty uniforms into the old-clothes baskets, and to get out of their old drill into a drill which was no drill at all, and to give up resting their last hope on the British square, and to get accustomed to deadly conflict with an enemy whom they never saw and who never took the trouble to inform them whether they had beaten him or not. It was all very trying and all very bewildering, and it is to the credit of the English army that in the course of a year or two it did actually manage to understand the precise nature of the work cut out for it and made some show of dealing with it in a workman-like way.
Here was a lesson for us, and we learned it. An Englishman, you know, can learn anything when he makes up his mind to it. And he has learned this South African lesson thoroughly well; so well, indeed, that it looks like being the only lesson he will be able to repeat any time in the next half-century. For what has he done? Well, to judge by appearances, we must reason this way: "I was not prepared for this South African business. It was a new thing to me. It gave me a new notion of the whole art and practice of war. The old authorities were clean out of it. Therefore I solemnly abjure the old authorities. For the future I wear slouch-hats and khaki and puttees and a jacket full of pockets, and I drill for the express notion that I may some day meet a Boer farmer. The entire sartorial and general aspect of my army shall be remodelled on lines which might induce one to think that the sole enemy of mankind was Mr. Kruger, and the great military centre of the world was Pretoria." It does not seem to occur to the poor body that his next great trial is not in the least likely to overtake him in South Africa. He has had to fight on the Continent of Europe before to-day, and I shall not be surprised if he has to do it again before many years have passed over his head. Yet, wherever his next large fighting has to be done, you will find that he will sail into it in his good old infantile, stupid English way, armed cap-a-pie for the special destruction of Boers. It is just gross want of sense, and that is all that can be said for it.
Since Trafalgar, the English navy has been the apple of the Englishman's eye. He holds that the English power is a sea-power; that these leviathans afloat, the King's ships, are his first line of defence; and that so long as he keeps the English navy up to the mark he can defy the world. His method of keeping it up to the mark is most singular. It consists of tinkering with old ships generation after generation, laying down new ones which seemingly never get finished, and of being chronically short of men. The naval critics of England may be divided sharply into two camps. In the one we have a number of gentlemen who are naval critics simply because they happen to be connected with newspapers. These young persons are naturally anxious to do the best that can be done for their papers and for themselves. They recognise that if they are to be in a position to obtain immediate and first-hand information—not to say exclusive information—as to naval doings, they must stand well with the Admiralty and the authorities. The Admiralty and the authorities are not in need of adverse critics. What they like and what they will have are smily, wily reporters, who will swear with the official word, see with the official eye, and take the rest for granted. In the other camp of naval critics you have a bright collection of book-compilers, naval architects, and patent-mongers, all of whom have some sort of fad to exploit or some private axe to grind. Hence the amiable English taxpayer knows just as much at the present moment about his navy as he knew three years ago about his army. In spite of the perfervid assurances of Mr. Kipling, and of the ill-written, anti-scare manifestoes of the morning papers, the English taxpayer knows in his heart that all is not so well as it might be with the English navy. What is wrong the English taxpayer cannot tell you; but there it is, and he has a sort of feeling that, when the big sea-tussle comes, the English navy, being tried, will be found wanting. Herein I think he shows great prescience. The superstition to the effect that the English rule the waves has of late begun to be known for what it is. There are nowadays other Richmonds in the field, all bent on doing a little wave-ruling on their own account. And after the first start of surprise and astonishment, the sleepy, slack, undiscerning Englishman has just let things go on as they were, and has just dilly-dallied what time the new wave-rulers were building and equipping the finest battle-ships that modern science can put afloat, and making arrangements for the acquisition of as much naval supremacy as they can lay their hands on. And whether the English navy be or be not as efficient as the Admiralty and the admirals would have us believe, it is quite certain that, in consequence of budding wave-rulers, the English navy is not, on the whole, so formidable a weapon or so impregnable a defence as it ought to be. The fact is, that in the matter of naval strength, offensive and defensive, the English are just a quarter of a century behind. They slept whilst their good friends the French, the Russians, and the Germans were climbing upward in the dark; and when they woke it was to perceive that another navy had sprung into existence by the side of the English navy, and that the task of catching up, of putting the old navy into a position of absolute supremacy over the new, was well-nigh an impossible one. You cannot build line-of-battle ships in an hour. Furthermore, the yards of England, though capable of extraordinary achievements, are not capable of a greater output than the yards of France, Russia, and Germany conjoined. Half a century ago the English had a distinct and preponderating start. When the other powers began to show increased activity in the matter of shipbuilding, the English said, "It is of no consequence; let 'em build." They threw their start clean away. The probabilities are that they will never be able to regain it.
Quite apart from the large general question, however, and granting that on paper England's sea-power is equal to that of any three powers combined, it cannot have escaped the attention of the interested that the foreign naval experts view our whole flotilla with a singular calm, and appear to be quite amused when we talk of naval efficiency and advancement. It is pretty certain that this calm and this amusement are not based entirely in either ignorance or arrogance. Ships built and fitted in Continental yards may lack the advantage of being English built, but they are fighting-ships nevertheless, and they have not much to lose by comparison with the best English fighting-ships, even when the comparison is made by English experts. Indeed, it is very much open to question whether some of the Continental ships are not a long way ahead of some of the best English ships in destructive power and possibilities for fight. Of course the common reply to this is, that it is no good having a fine machine unless you have the right man to handle it. And Jack, of course,—the honest English Jack,—is the only man in the world that really knows how to handle fighting-ships. Well, it may be so, or it may not be so. The Englishman will undoubtedly keep his engines going and stick to his guns till chaos engulfs him. It seems possible, too, that he has made himself thoroughly familiar with every detail of the machine he has got to work, and that he knows his business in a way which leaves precious little room for more intimate knowledge. In spite of all this, however, it cannot be denied that the Continental navy-man is slowly but surely creeping up to the English standard. That as a rule he is a man of better family than the English navy-man, that his conditions of service are more favourable, and that his food and accommodation are better, are all in his favour. He may lack the steadiness and the grit of the old original English hearts of oak. Still, he is coming on and making progress; whereas the old original English hearts of oak do not appear to be getting much "forrader." Besides, it is well known that the English do not possess anything like enough of them, and those whom they do possess have such a love for the service that they take particularly good care to warn would-be recruits off it.
From time immemorial the English have made a point of treating the saviours of their country meanly and shabbily. In the Crimea the English troops were half-starved and went about in rags, while a lot of broad-shouldered, genial Englishmen made fortunes out of army contracts. It was the same in the Transvaal, and it will be the same whenever England is at war. In peace-time she does manage to keep her soldiers and sailors decently dressed, but it is notorious that she nips them in the paunch, and that the roast beef and plum-pudding and flagons of October which are supposed to be the meat and drink of John Bull are not considered good for his brave defenders. A beef-fed army and a beef-fed navy are what Englishmen believe they get for their money. The rank and file of the army and navy are better informed. With a navy that is undersized, undermanned, underfed, and underpaid, the English chances of triumph, when her real strength is put to the test, are problematical. Meanwhile, we may comfort ourselves with Mr. Kipling and the Daily Telegraph.
The English have one sauce. But the number of their religions is as the sands of the sea. Roughly speaking, they divide themselves religiously into two classes—Anglicans and Nonconformists. The Anglicans, one may say, are reformed Catholics; the Nonconformists, reformed Anglicans. Apparently all English religions—with the exception, of course, of the Catholic religion, which is not counted—date from or since the Reformation. We know what the Reformation means in Scotland, though the English notion of it seems to be a trifle vague. We also know in Scotland what religion means. I doubt if the English have any such knowledge. One has only to visit an average Anglican or Nonconformist church on the Sabbath to perceive that in England religion is under a cloud and has almost ceased to be a spiritual matter. In the first place, you will notice that the congregation is for the most part composed of women and children. Englishmen are too busy or too bored to go to church on the Sabbath. What little faith, what little religious fervour or feeling, they ever possessed has been knocked out of them, and they no longer go to church. And this change has been accomplished, not by the failure of dogmas, not by the spread of free-thought, not by secularists, anti-clericalists, or philosophers, but simply by an indolent clergy on the one hand and cheap railway fares on the other. The mediocre preacher and the new-fangled English week-end have emptied the churches of England's manhood. The women and children are left, a puling, bemused crowd, and to these the English shepherds and pastors blate their cheap ritual and read their ill-considered sermons.
It is curious to note how easily an English parson or Nonconformist minister can make a reputation for greatness as a preacher. Let him be just a little more competent than the average, and people flock to hear him. I doubt if there is a really great preacher alive in England to-day. Yet there are three or four who pass for great, and who are supposed to be in line with St. Paul, John Knox, and Wesley. To give instances would be invidious, but I have no hesitation in asserting that the preachments offered in London at the three or four great churches which are supposed to enshrine orators are, as a rule, exceedingly feeble efforts, tricked out with gauds and mannerisms, packed with trite sentiment, and utterly devoid of doctrine, inspiration, and value. There are not three bishops on the English bench that can furnish forth a sermon worth going fifty yards to hear. There is not a Nonconformist minister who has a soul above stodginess, convention, and a convenient if threadbare Scriptural tag. The Salvation Army, perhaps, have the fervour and the courage, but they lack wisdom, and they have no art. The Congregationalists have some of the wisdom and a touch of the art, but they have no fervour. Indeed, wherever you turn you find that the recognised English religionists have given themselves up to a decadent, Hebraic emotion, and let the solid things of the spirit—the Hebraic culture, the Hebraic vision, the Hebraic passion—pass by them.
Gradually the churches of this remarkable country are ceasing to have anything to do with religion at all. "Religion be hanged!" say those that run them. "Religion no longer appeals to the wayward, stony-hearted, over-driven, half-educated English populace. What is wanted is social brightness and warmth, the religion of brotherhood and the full belly; so that we will give magic-lantern entertainments in our churches on the Lord's Day, we will go in 'bald-headed' for pleasant Sunday afternoons, hot coffee and veal-and-ham pies, and screws of tobacco given away at the doors, wrapped up in a tract, which you are at liberty either to read or to light your pipe with." As for the English priests that had the authority of God, they are no longer sure whether they have that authority or not. Of course, they believe they have it in a sacerdotal, canonical, and private way; but not one of them dare stand up and swear by his powers publicly. The bishops are all for peace and quietness. "If you please, we are your friends, and not your masters," say they to their clergy; and their clergy, to use an English vulgarism, "wink the other eye." And the clergy, too, in turn are the friends and not the masters of common men; they are so much your friends, indeed, that, providing you mount a silk hat on Sunday and put a penny on the plate, you can depend upon a friendly shake of the hand and a kindly grin of recognition six days in the week, even though you happen to be a bookmaker or the keeper of a bucket-shop. For the Nonconformist clergy, if clergy they may be called, they speak humorously at tea-parties, they enter into hat-trimming competitions at bazaars, and they play principal guest at the tables of over-fed tradesmen. There is not a man amongst them who can say boo to a goose. There is not a man amongst them who as a social unit is worth the ￡150 a year and a manse, with ￡10 per annum for each child, that a glozing, unintellectual English congregation hands over to him. Out of the ease and security and respectability and dolce far niente which the Church of England provides for a considerable proportion of her priests, she has managed to evolve a few scholars, a few men of letters, perhaps an odd saint or two, and an odd man of temperament and mark. But what have the English Nonconformists produced? Dr. Horton and Dr. Parker, and that G.R. Sims of religionists, the Rev. Hugh Price Hughes. To this distinguished triumvirate—though the English Nonconformists will hold up pious hands of horror at the notion—one may add that valiant thumper of the pulpit drum, General Booth, who is doing a work in religious decadence and bathoticism which it will take centuries to undo. Want of heart and want of mind, coupled with the blessed spirit of tolerance, have indeed played havoc with the English Churches.
The loosening of the grip of the Church on English society has, of course, not been without its results on English morals and on English society at large. There is a general feeling abroad that religion is played out, that the system of Hebrew ethics which has been drilled into the English blood by generations of the faithful was all very well for the faithful, but is altogether impracticable and out of harmony with the present intelligent times. You will find Englishmen nowadays complaining that the taint of spiritualism, asceticism, and ethical faith which they have inherited from their people is a source of hindrance to them in the matter of their commercial or social progress, and their lives are spent in an endeavour to eradicate or to triumph over that taint. The Archbishop of Canterbury could not run a tea-shop by the rules laid down in the Sermon on the Mount, they will tell you; and, what is worse, the Archbishop of Canterbury agrees with them. "Take all thou hast, and give it to the poor" is out of the question even for Dr. Horton. Since those blessed words were said, we are told, the Poor Law has sprung up; we give all that is necessary for pauperism in the poor-rate; and, thanks to the excellence of our social system, it is now impossible for man, woman, or child to die of starvation, provided only that they will work. I have heard it stated by an English Nonconformist minister that his chief complaint against the Roman Catholic community in his district was their habit of being over-liberal to the poor. "No man is refused," observed my Nonconformist friend, "no matter how dissolute or idle or irreligious he may be."
Then in the large question of the employment of human flesh and blood to make money for you, the modern Englishman finds that he must either tear the effects of his religious bringing-up out of his heart, or forego the possibility of becoming really rich, don't you know. It is all a matter of supply and demand; and if the mass of humanity live starved lives and die daily in order that I may be fat and warm and cultured and possessed of surpluses at banks, it is not my fault. You must really blame supply and demand. With this fine phrase on his lips, the English capitalist confutes all the philosophies and sets his foot on the majority of the decencies of life. Of course, I shall be told that the prince and chief of all hide-bound industrial capitalists is Mr. Andrew Carnegie, who happens to be a Scot. And I cheerfully admit that Mr. Carnegie is a very serious case in point. But for our one Mr. Carnegie, the English have fifty Mr. Carnegies. They may not be so rich or so famous; but there they are, and the blood and spirit of the English people suffer accordingly. The religion of the wealthy does not prevent them from grinding the face of the poor; and the religion of the middle classes is of pretty much the same order. It is at the hands of the English middle classes that the English poor suffer a further and a bitterer depredation. For when you have earned money hardly, you want good goods for it; and the English middle classes, who are nearly all shopkeepers, either directly or indirectly, make a point of palming off on you the very worst goods the law will allow them to sell.
And, in spite of all, the churches continue to open their doors, new churches continue to be built, million-pound funds are raised, the missionary speeds over the blue wave to the succour of the 'eathen, and English women and children have their pleasant Sunday afternoons, and bishops keep high-stepping horses; Church and State are grappled together with hooks of steel, and England is a Christian country. Till the churches get out of their slippers and their sloth and their tea-bibbing and their tolerance, matters will go on in the same old futile, scandalous way. If they are to have charge and direction of the soul of man, they must remember that the soul of man is a greater thing than ease, and a greater thing than the Church; they must not play with the immortal part of humanity, and they must not trifle with the things which they believe to be of God. In no other country save England would such churches and such priests as the English now possess be tolerated or supported; it is the English decadence which has rendered Englishmen blind to the stupidity and banality of their pastors and spiritual guides, and it is the English easy-heartedness which permits the game of cant and cadge and sham to go on unchecked.
The flower and exemplar of well-nigh everything that is choicely and brutally English may be summed up in the English politician. Such a tub-thumper, such a master of claptrap and the arts and feints and fetches of oratory, has never been known before since the world began. He is English, and therefore he knows his business. He has made a study of it as a business, and without regard to its more serious issues. His position is, that, if he would do himself well, he must tie himself hand and foot to some party, and serve that party through thick and thin. Then in the end, and with good luck, will come reward. You may be born in a chandler's shop. By birth, therefore, you belong to the very lower English middle class. Through the practice of a number of commercial virtues, and with the help of considerable speculation outside your own business, you become wealthy. Now, wealth without honour is nothing to an Englishman. He cannot brook that his wealth, his shining, glorious superfluity, should be hidden under a bushel. Therefore he seeks municipal honours; he becomes a town councillor, an alderman, a mayor even.
But these, after all, are not the summits; they lead at best only to a common knighthood, and any fool can get knighted if he wants to. So you determine to seek Parliamentary honours. You subscribe liberally to the funds of your party, and by-and-by a constituency is found for you to contest. You lose the fight and subscribe again; another constituency is found for you, and you win by the skin of your teeth or with a plumping majority, as the case may be. You are now a full-blown member of Parliament; it is worth the money and much better than being a mayor. Up to this time you have been an orator of sorts. You have held forth from schoolroom platforms and the tops of waggons what time the assembled populace shouted and threw up its sweaty nightcaps. You have been carried shoulder high behind brass bands rendering See, the Conquering Hero Comes. Now however, you are really in Parliament; and for the nonce—for several years, in fact—you must give up talking. There is plenty for you to do; you may put questions on the paper, you may get a look in at committee work, you may show electors round the Houses, and you may go on subscribing liberally to the party funds. When you have subscribed enough, it is just within the bounds of possibility that the heads of the party—the Front Bench people, as it were—will begin to discover that there is virtue in you. You will be encouraged to make a speech or two at the slackest part of debates, and some fine day you may be entrusted with the fortunes of a little Bill which your party wishes to rush through. All the while you are subscribing liberally to the party funds. After many years, when you are least expecting it, the bottom seems to fall out of the universe—that is to say, there is a General Election. You have to fight your seat; you win; you come nobly back; behold, your party is in power. Then comes the grand moment of your life. You are shovelled into the Cabinet on account of services rendered. From this point, if you possess any ability at all, you can have things pretty much your own way; and if your ambition has been to hear yourself called "My lord" before you die, and to see your wife in the Peeresses' Gallery on great occasions, and your sons swanking about town with "Hon." before their names, you can manage it. It is a slow job, and it involves many years of hard work and lavish expenditure; but it is politically possible in England for a man to be born on the flags and to die properly set forth in Burke and Debrett.
I do not say for a moment that the end and aim of every English politician is the peerage; but I do say that, as a rule, his labours are directed towards some end of honour or emolument, and seldom or never to the good of the State. It is ambition, and not patriotism, that fires his bosom; it is self-aggrandisement, and not a desire for the welfare of the English people, that keeps him going; and it is party, and not principle, that guides and rules his legislative actions. Of course, the great art of being a politician is to hide these facts from the public. If you went down to your constituency like an honest man and said, "Gentlemen, I wish you to return me to Parliament in order that I may make a high position for myself, in order that I may become a man of rank and the founder of a family," your constituency would hurl dead cats at you. Therefore you go down with an altogether different tale: "I am going to the House of Commons, gentlemen, in your interests and not in mine. It will cost me large sums of money; besides which, as your member, I shall be expected to subscribe to all the local cricket clubs. But I have the best interests of Muckington at heart; and, if you honour me by making me your representative, money is no object."
It is a wonderful business, and a great and a glorious. One stands in astonishment before the bright English intelligence which takes so much on promise and gets so little performed. An English party never goes into power with the intention of doing more than half of what it has promised to do. At election times its great business is to capture votes: these must be had at any price short of rank bribery. And, once landed with the blest, the party immediately settles down, not to the work of carrying out its promises, but to the far more serious business of keeping itself in power. From the point of view of the careless lay-observer, the House of Commons is an assemblage for the discussion of Imperial affairs, with a view to their being managed in the best possible way. To the politician it is just an arena in which two sets of greedy men meet to annoy, thwart, ridicule, and bring about the downfall of each other.
The amount of interest the Englishman is supposed to take in this amazing assemblage and its doings makes it plain that the Englishman himself is well-nigh as foolish and well-nigh as oblique as the person whom he elects to represent him. Next to royalty itself there is nobody in England who can command so much attention and such a prominent place in the picture as the politician. If he be a Cabinet Minister of any standing, it is impossible for him to walk through the streets either of London or of any of the English provincial towns without being immediately recognised and "respectfully saluted"; whereas, if he happens to have come to any metropolitan district or provincial town on political business bent, he may depend upon being received at the proper point by the local authorities, supported by a guard of honour of the local Volunteers, and he may also depend upon more or less of an ovation on his way to and from the place of meeting.
Year in and year out, too, the illustrated papers of every degree blossom with his latest photograph. Mr. So-and-so in his new motorcar; Mr. So-and-so playing golf; Mr. So-and-so and the King; Mr. So-and-so addressing the mob from the railway train,—these are pictures in which every Englishman has delighted from his youth up, and in which he will always find great artistic and moral satisfaction. As for the journals which live out of the personal paragraph, they must give—or imagine they must give—pride of place to the politician, or perish. Little anecdotes of the sayings and doings of the politically great are always marketable. It is not necessary that they should have the slightest foundation in truth; but they must be neat, reasonably amusing, and flattering to the personage involved.
It is when one turns to the English daily papers, however, that one begins to understand what an extraordinary hold the political interest has upon the English public mind. It is well known that, in the main, the debates in the House of Commons are quite dull, colourless, and somnolent functions. Half of them take place in the presence only of the Speaker and a quorum. That is to say, nine nights out of ten, members spend the greater portion of their time in the smoke-rooms, dining-rooms, and lobbies, and not in the House itself, the simple reason being that, as a rule, the debates are not interesting. When some reputable champion of either party gets on his legs, or when some wag is up, members manage to attend in force; but it is only at these moments that they do so. Yet, if you pick up an English morning newspaper, you will find six columns of that sheet devoted to a report of the proceedings in Parliament; another three columns of descriptive matter bearing on the same proceedings; and, out of four or five leaders, three at least deal with the political question of the moment. Even when Parliament is not sitting, the first leader is never by any chance other than political. From the point of view of the dull English mind, nothing more important than a political happening can happen in this world. Mr. Somebody has called Mr. Somebody else a liar across the floor of the House of Commons. It is essential for the well-being of the country at large that the episode should be reported with a separate subhead and great circumstance in the Parliamentary report; that the scene should be described by the lively and picturesque pen of the writer of the Parliamentary sketch; that the appearance of the gentleman who called the other gentleman a liar should be dwelt upon in the notes; that instances of other gentlemen having called gentlemen liars across the floor of the House should also be given in the notes; and, finally, that a rotund and windy leader should be written, wherein is discussed gravely the general advisability of gentlemen calling other gentlemen liars across the floor of the House; wherein one is assured that, in spite of occasional regrettable instances of the kind, the English Parliament is the most decorous and dignified assemblage under the sun; and wherein we cannot refrain from paying our tribute of respectful admiration to the Right Honourable the Speaker, whose tact, good sense, and gentleman-like spirit, coupled with the firmness, resolution, and knowledge of the procedure of the House becoming to his high position, invariably enable him to still the storm and to repress the angry passions of our heated legislators before any great harm has been done. So that a gentleman who calls another gentleman a liar across the floor of the House of Commons really renders a great service to Englishmen, inasmuch as he provides them with a gratuitous entertainment, about which they may read, talk, and argue for at least twenty-four hours.
Recognising their own love of politics and political strife, and knowing in their hearts that the talk in the House of Commons—not to mention the House of Lords—is, generally speaking, of the flattest and flabbiest, one would imagine that the wise English would be at some pains to take measures calculated to brighten up the Parliamentary debates and render them of real interest. But no such precautions are taken. When a would-be member of Parliament is heckled, he is never by any chance asked if he is prepared, at the psychological moment, to pull the nose of one of the right honourable gentlemen opposite. Any member of Parliament who, in the middle of a dull debate, would walk across the floor and box the ears of, say, Mr. Balfour, or Lord Hugh Cecil, would thereby earn for himself the distinction of being the best-discussed and best-described man in England for quite half a week. Considering the small amount of exertion required for such a proceeding, and the very large amount of notoriety which would accrue to the person who ventured on it, one wonders that it has never been done.
In spite of the abnormal share of publicity and applause which is extended to the English politician, however, the solemn fact remains that he is seldom a person of any real force, capacity, understanding, or character. Commonplace, mediocre, insincere, inept, are the epithets which best describe him. He passes through the legislative chamber or chambers, says his say in undistinguished speeches, casts his vote, earns his place, his pension, or his peerage, and passes beyond our echo and our hail. The daily papers manufacture for him an obituary notice varying in length from five lines to a couple of columns, and nobody wants to hear anything more about him. As a matter of fact, he has left the world neither wiser nor wittier nor happier than he found it. If he has made one phrase or uttered one sentiment that sticks in men's minds, he is fortunate. Neither history nor posterity will have anything to say about him, though in his day he kicked up some fuss and took up a lot of room. In short, politics as a career in England is not a career for solid, serious men. It merely serves the turn of the specious, the shallow, the incompetent, and the vainglorious.