The English were not wrong in loving liberty. They were only wrong in losing it.
G.K.'s Weekly, June 1, 1933.
ONE MAIN DIFFICULTY in writing biography lies in the various strands that run through every human life. It is as I have already said impossible to keep a perfect chronological order with anyone whose occupations and interests were so multifarious. In the present chapter and the two that follow we shall consider the movement of Chesterton's mind upon politics and sociology. This will involve going back to the general election of 1906 and forward to the Marconi Trial of 1913. For those who are interested in his poetry or his humour or his philosophy or his theology but not at all in his sociological and political outlook, I fear that these three chapters may loom a little uninvitingly. If they are tempted to skip them altogether, I shall not blame them; yet they will miss a great deal that is vital to the understanding of his whole mind and the course his life was to take. These are not the most entertaining chapters in the book, but if we are really to know Chesterton the events they cover must be considered most carefully.
As a boy Gilbert Chesterton spoke of politics as absorbing "for every ardent intellect"; and during these years he was himself deeply concerned with the politics of England. The ideal Liberalism sketched in his letter to Hammond during the Boer War [Chapter X] had appeared to him, if not perfectly realised, at least capable of realisation, in the existing Liberal Party. The Tory Party was in power and all its acts, to say nothing of its general ineptitude, appeared to Liberals as positive arguments for their own party. At this date so convinced a Tory as Lord Hugh Cecil could describe his own party as "to mix metaphors, an eviscerated ruin."* Several letters and postcards from Mr. Belloc announcing his own election as Liberal member for South Salford show the high hope with which young Liberalism was viewing the world in 1906:
[* In a letter to Wilfrid Ward.]
(undated)
I have, as you will have seen, pulled it off by 852. It is huge fun. I am now out against all Vermin: Notably South African Jews. The Devil is let loose: let all men beware. H. B.
(Written across top of letter)
Tomorrow Monday Meet the Manchester train arriving Euston 6.10 and oblige your little friend HB St. Hilary's Day.
Don't fail to meet that train. Stamps are cheap! HB
I beg you. I implore you. Meet that 6.10 train.
HB
Stamps are a drug in the market. 852 Meet that train! Stamps are given away now in Salford.
From 1902, when the general election left the Conservatives still in power, until 1906 the Liberal party had been, as Chesterton described it, "in the desert." And the younger members of the party were deeply concerned with hammering out a positive philosophy which might inspire a true programme for their own party. A group of them wrote a book called England A Nation with the sub-title Papers of A Patriot's Club. The Patriot's Club had no real existence, but I imagine that Lucian Oldershaw who edited the book believed that its publication might create the club. Belloc was not one of the contributors, but Hugh Law wrote ably on Ireland, J. L. Hammond on South Africa, and Conrad Noel, Henry Nevinson and C. F. G. Masterman on other aspects of the political scene.
The whole book is on a fairly high level but Chesterton's essay was the only one much noticed by reviewers. It was the introductory chapter, far longer than any of the others, and gave the key to the whole book. Entitled "The idea of Patriotism" it was, like The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which it does much to illumine, a plea for patriotism that was really for England and not for the British Empire. Such a patriotism recognizes the limitations proper to nationality and admits, nay admires, other patriotisms for other nations. Thus, in Chesterton's eyes a true English patriot should also be an ardent home ruler for Ireland since Ireland too was a nation.
He stressed the danger that the nationhood of England should be absorbed and lost in the Imperial idea. The claim that in an empire the various races could learn much from one another he considered a bit of special pleading on the part of Imperialists. England had learned much from France and Germany but, although Ireland had much to teach, we had not learned from Ireland. The real patriotism of the Englishman had been dimmed both by the emphasis on the Imperial idea and by the absence of roots in his own land. The governing classes had destroyed those roots and had almost forgotten the existence of the people. From the dregs and off-scourings of the population a vast empire had been created, but the people of England were not allowed to colonize England.
The Education Bill of 1902, brought in by the Conservatives and giving financial support to Church schools, saw Gilbert in general agreement with the Liberal attacks. He did not yet appreciate the Catholic idea that education must be of one piece and he did not think it fair that the country should support specifically Catholic schools. Parents could give at home the religious instruction they wanted their children to have. But with that fairness of mind which made it so hard for him to be a party man he saw why the Liberal "compromise" of simple Bible teaching for all in the State schools could not be expected to satisfy Catholics. He wrote to the Daily News:
The Bible compromise is certainly in favour of the Protestant view of the Bible. The thing, properly stated, is as plain as the nose on your face. Protestant Christianity believes that there is a Divine record in a book; that everyone ought to have free access to that book; that everyone who gets hold of it can save his soul by it, whether he finds it in a library or picks it off a dustcart. Catholic Christianity believes that there is a Divine army or league upon earth called the Church; that all men should be induced to join it; that any man who joins it can save his soul by it without ever opening any of the old books of the Church at all. The Bible is only one of the institutions of Catholicism, like its rites or its priesthood; it thinks the Bible only efficient when taken as part of the Church. . . . This being so, a child could see that if you have the Bible taught alone, anyhow, by anybody, you do definitely decide in favour of the first view of the Bible and against the second.
Discussing a few years later whether it was possible or satisfactory to teach the Bible simply as Literature he put his finger on the Catholic objection. "I should not mind," he said, "children being told about Mohammed because I am not a Mohammedan. If I were a Mohammedan I should very much want to know what they were told about him."
While as for the unfortunate teacher: in case a child should ask if the things in the Bible happened, "Either the teacher must answer him insincerely and that is immorality, or he must answer him sincerely, and that is sectarian education, or he must refuse to answer him at all, and that is first of all bad manners and a sort of timid tyranny . . ."
Chesterton's Liberalism received a further shock from the fact that Liberals, in attacking the Bill, were attacking also the Catholic faith and raising the cry of No Popery. In a correspondence with Dr. Clifford he reminded him of how they had stood together against popular fanaticism during the Boer War.
There are two cries always capable of raising the English in their madness—one that the Union Jack is being pulled down, and one that the Pope is being set up. And upon the man who raises one of them responsibility will lie heavy till the last day. For when they are raised, the best are mixed with the worst, every rational compromise is dashed to pieces, every opponent is given credit for the worst that the worst of his allies has by his worst enemy been said to have said. That horror of darkness swept across us when the war began. . . .
Beyond all question this is true—that if we choose to fight on the "No Popery" cry, we may win. But I can imagine something of which I should be prouder than of any victory—the memory that we had shown our difference from Mr. Chamberlain simply and finally in this—that to our hand had lain (as it once laid to his) an old, an effectual, an infallible, and a filthy weapon, and that we let it lie.*
[* Letter to the Daily News, October 1902.]
Yet it was fairly easy to be a Liberal in opposition. At the elections of 1902 (which the Liberals lost) and 1906 (which they won) Chesterton canvassed for the Liberal party. Charles Masterman used to tell a story of canvassing a street in his company. Both started at the same end on opposite sides of the road. Masterman completed his side and came back on the other to find Chesterton still earnestly arguing at the first house. For he was passionately serious in his belief that the Liberal Party stood for a real renewal, even revolution, in the life of England. "At the present moment of victory," says the report of a speech by Gilbert following the great swing of the Liberal party into power in 1906, he called for "that magnanimity towards the defeated that characterized all great conquerors. It was important that all should develop—even the Tory." It needed the experience of seeing the Liberal party in power to shake his faith.
In the new House of Commons the Conservatives were in a minority: against them were the two old parties—the Liberals and the Irish members who were in general allied to them, and a small group forming a new party known as Labour. The Labour Members who got into Parliament in 1906 and 1909 were regarded by Conservatives as being a kind of left-wing extension of the Liberal Party. Such a Liberal as Chesterton saw them there with delight, and, although he would still have called himself a Liberal, he at first hoped in the Labour men as something more truly expressive of the people's wishes.
In an introduction to From Workhouse to Westminster, a life of Will Crooks, Gilbert expressed a good deal of his own political philosophy. As a democrat he believed in the ideal of direct government by the people. But obviously this was only possible in a world that was also his ideal—a world consisting of small and even of very small states. The democrat's usual alternative, representative government, was, Gilbert said, symbolic in character. Just as religious symbolism "may for a time represent a real emotion and then for a time cease to represent anything, so representative government may for a time represent the people, and for a time cease to represent anything."
Further, the very idea of representation itself involved two perfectly distinct notions: a man throws a shadow or he throws a stone. "In the first sense, it is supposed that the representative is like the thing he represents. In the second case, it is only supposed that the representative is useful to the thing he represents." Workmen, like Conservatives, sent men to Parliament not to show what they themselves were like, but to attack the other party in their name. "The Labour Members as a class are not representatives but missiles. . . . Working men are not at all like Mr. Keir Hardie. If it comes to likeness, working men are more like the Duke of Devonshire. But they throw Mr. Keir Hardie at the Duke of Devonshire, knowing that he is so curiously shaped as to hurt anything at which he is thrown."* In the same way Mr. Balfour was entirely unlike the Tory squires who used him as a weapon. To this rule, that men do not choose to be represented by their like, Chesterton took Will Crooks as the one exception:
[* Introduction to From Workhouse to Westminster, p. XV.]
You have not yet seen the English people in politics. It has not yet entered politics. Liberals do not represent it; Tories do not represent it; Labour Members, on the whole, represent it rather less than Tories or Liberals. When it enters politics it will bring with it a trail of all the things that politicians detest; prejudices (as against hospitals), superstitions (as about funerals), a thirst for respectability passing that of the middle classes, a faith in the family which will knock to pieces half the Socialism of Europe. If ever that people enters politics it will sweep away most of our revolutionists as mere pedants. It will be able to point only to one figure, powerful, pathetic, humorous and very humble, who bore in any way upon his face the sign and star of its authority.*
[* Ibid., p. XX.]
It was sad enough after this to see Will Crooks fathering one of those very Bills for the interference with family life which Chesterton most hated. But, indeed, the years that followed the 1906 election are a story of a steadily growing disillusionment with the realities of representative government in England.
Chesterton wrote regularly for the Daily News and was regarded as one of their most valuable contributors. But when, following an attack in the House of Commons on the Liberal leader Campbell-Bannerman over the sale of peerages, he sent in an article on the subject, the Editor A. G. Gardiner wrote (July 12, 1907):
I have left your article out tonight not because I do not entirely agree with its point of view but because just at this moment it would look like backing Lea's unmannerly attack on C. B. I am keeping the article in type for a later occasion when the general question is not complicated with a particularly offensive incident.
It was a test case, and it seemed to Chesterton not a question of good manners, but of something far more fundamental. The assertion had been made in the House of Commons that peerages were being sold, and that the price of such sales was the chief support of the secret party funds. But the Daily News was a Liberal paper and this was an attack on the Liberal party. Chesterton replied (July 11, 1907):
I am sure you know by this time that I never resent the exclusion of my articles as such. I should always trust your literary judgment, if it were a matter of literature only: and I daresay you have often saved me from an indiscretion and your readers from a bore. Unfortunately this matter of the party funds is not one of that sort. My conscience does not often bother you, but just now the animal is awake and roaring. Your paper has always championed the rights of conscience, so mine naturally goes to you. If you disagreed with me, it would be another matter. But since you agree with me (as I was sure you would) it becomes simply a question of which is the more important, politeness or political morality. I agree that Lea did go to the point of being unmannerly. So did Plimsoll, so did Bradlaugh: so did the Irish members. But surely it would be a very terrible thing if anyone could say "The Daily News suppressed all demand for the Plimsoll line," or "The Daily News did not join in asking for Bradlaugh's political rights." I am sure that this is not your idea. You think that this matter can be better raised later on. I am convinced of its urgency. I am so passionately convinced of its urgency that if you will not help me to raise it now, I must try some other channel. They are going on Monday to raise a "breach of privilege" (which is simply an aristocratic censorship of the Press) in order to crush this question through the man who raised it: and to crush it forever. I have said that I think Lea's questions violent and needless. But they are not attacking his questions. They are attacking his letter, which contains nothing that I do not think, probably nothing that you do not think. Lea is to be humiliated and broken because he said that titles are bought; as they are: because he said that poor members are reminded of their dependence on the party funds; as they are: because he said that all this was hypocrisy of public life; as it is. . . .
One thing is quite certain. Unless some Liberal journalists speak on Monday or Tuesday, the secret funds and the secret powers are safe. These Parliamentary votes mark eras: they are meant to. And that vote will not mark a defence of C. B. The letter had nothing to do with C. B. It will mark the final decision that any repetition of what Lea said in his letter is an insult to the House. That is, any protest against bought titles will be an insult to the House. Any protest against secret funds will be an insult to the House.
I would willingly burn my article if I were only sure you would publish one yourself tomorrow on the same lines. But if not, here is at least one thing you can do. An article, even signed, may perhaps commit the paper too much. But your paper cannot be committed by publishing a letter from me stating my opinions. It might publish a letter from Joe Chamberlain, stating his opinions. I therefore send you a short letter, pointing out the evil, and disassociating it as far as possible from the indiscretions of Lea. I am sure you will publish this, for it is the mere statement of a private opinion and as I am not an M. P. I can say what I like about Parliament. You will not mind my confessing to you my conviction and determination in this matter. I do not think we could quarrel, even if we had to separate.
The letter was published, and was quoted in the House of Commons by Lord Robert Cecil amid general applause. But it was twenty years before a Bill was passed that forbade this particular unpleasantness.
While political corruption stirred Chesterton deeply, I think his outlook was even more affected by the progressive Socialism of Liberal legislation. He had honestly believed that the Liberal Party stood, on the whole, for liberty. He found that it stood increasingly for daily and hourly interference with the lives of the people. He found too that the Liberal papers, which he held should have been foremost in criticism of these measures, were as determined to uphold measures brought in by a Liberal Government as they had been to attack anything that the Tories brought forward.
It has been well said by Mr. Belloc that Chesterton could never write as a party man. But to the ordinary party newspaper such an attitude was utterly incomprehensible. I think that we can also see at this point how alien his fundamental outlook was from that even of the best members of his own Party. A great admirer said to me the other day that it had taken her a long time to appreciate Chesterton's sociology. "You see, I was brought up to think that it was quite right for the poor to have their teeth brushed by officials." This is undoubtedly the normal Socialistic outlook and the outlook most abhorrent to Chesterton. "The philanthropist," he once said, "is not a brother; he is a supercilious aunt."
The five years of Liberal Government had been disillusioning to many others besides Belloc and the Chesterton brothers. Probably many men in newspaper offices and elsewhere continued vaguely to support the party to which their own paper belonged. But there were others who were in those days going through a struggle between principles and Party which became increasingly acute. Gilbert has described his own feelings in a review of Galsworthy's play Loyalties, written several years later during the first World War.
. . . The author of Loyalty suffers one simple and amazing delusion. He imagines that in those pre-war politics Liberalism was on the side of Labour. On this point at least I can correct him from the most concrete experience. In the newspaper office where his hero lingered, wondering how much longer he could stand its Pacifism, I was lingering and wondering how much longer I could stand its complete and fundamental Capitalism, its invariable alliance with the employer, its invariable hostility to the striker. No such scene as that in which the Liberal editor paced the room raving about his hopes of a revolution ever occurred in the Liberal newspaper office that I knew; the least hint of a revolution would have caused quite as much horror there as in the offices of the Morning Post. On nothing was the Pacifist more pacifist than upon that point. No workman so genuine as the workman who figures in Loyalty ever figured among such Liberals. The fact is that such Liberalism was in no way whatever on the side of Labour; on the contrary, it was on the side of the Labour Party. . . .
Both Chesterton and Belloc had begun to point out that a Free Press had almost disappeared from England. The revenue of most of the newspapers depended not on subscriptions but on advertisement. Therefore nothing could be said in them which was displeasing to their wealthy advertisers. Nor was this the worst of it. Very rich men were often owners of half a dozen papers or more and dictated their policy. An outstanding example was Alfred Harmsworth—Lord Northcliffe—whose newspapers ranged from the Times through the Daily Mail to Answers. Thus to every section of the English people, Harmsworth was able to convey day by day such news as he thought best together with his own outlook and philosophy of life such as it was. Still worse, the Times had not lost in the eyes of Europe, to say nothing of America, that reputation it had held so long of being the official expression of English opinion. It was still the Jupiter of Trollope's day, the maker of ministries or their undoing. In the days of a Free Press a paper held such a position in virtue of the talents of its staff. Editors were then powerful individuals and would brook little interference. But today the editor was commonly only the mouthpiece of the owner.
It is surprising that Gilbert and the official Liberal Press so long tolerated one another. The Daily News and other papers owned by Mr. Cadbury (of Cadbury's Cocoa) were often referred to as "the Cocoa Press" and it happened that it was not in the end political disagreement alone that brought the Chesterton-Cadbury alliance to an end. In one of Gilbert's poems in praise of wine are the lines:
Cocoa is a cad and coward, Cocoa is a vulgar beast.
In the Autobiography he tells us that after he had published the poem he felt he could write no longer for the Daily News. He went from the Daily News to the Daily Herald, to the Editor of which he wrote that the News "had come to stand for almost everything I disagree with; and I thought I had better resign before the next great measure of social reform made it illegal to go on strike." G.K. was a considerable asset to any paper and had recently been referred to by Shaw (in a debate with Belloc) as "a flourishing property of Mr. Cadbury's."
Politically the break was bound to come, for even when Dickens was published Gilbert Chesterton had reached the stage of saying "as much as ever I did, more than ever I did, I believe in Liberalism. But there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in Liberals." At this time too he infuriated an orthodox Liberal journalist by saying of the party leaders "some of them are very nice old gentlemen, some of them are very nasty old gentlemen, and some of them are old without being gentlemen at all." An orthodox church journalist in a periodical charmingly entitled Church Bells got angrier yet. "A certain Mr. G. K. Chesterton," he wrote, had, when speaking for the C.S.U. in St. Paul's Chapter House, remarked "the best of his Majesty's Ministers are agnostics, and the worst devil worshippers." Church Bells cries out: "We only mention this vulgar falsehood because we regret that an association, with which the names of many of our respected ecclesiastics are connected, should have allowed the bad taste and want of all gentlemanly feeling displayed by the words quoted, to have passed unchallenged." "Vulgar falsehood" is surely charming.
But perhaps even deeper than his disillusionment with any Party was his growing sense of the unreality of the political scene. He has described it in the Autobiography:
I was finding it difficult to believe in politics; because the reality seemed almost unreal, as compared with the reputation or the report. I could give twenty instances to indicate what I mean, but they would be no more than indications, because the doubt itself was doubtful. I remember going to a great Liberal club, and walking about in a large crowded room, somewhere at the end of which a bald gentleman with a beard was reading something from a manuscript in a low voice. It was hardly unreasonable that we did not listen to him, because we could not in any case have heard; but I think a very large number of us did not even see him . . . it is possible, though not certain, that one or other of us asked carelessly what was supposed to be happening in the other corner of the large hall. . . . Next morning I saw across the front of my Liberal paper in gigantic headlines the phrase: "Lord Spencer Unfurls the Banner." Under this were other remarks, also in large letters, about how he had blown the trumpet for Free Trade and how the blast would ring through England and rally all the Free-Traders. It did appear, on careful examination, that the inaudible remarks which the old gentleman had read from the manuscript were concerned with economic arguments for Free Trade; and very excellent arguments too, for all I know. But the contrast between what that orator was to the people who heard him, and what he was to the thousands of newspaper-readers who did not hear him, was so huge a hiatus and disproportion that I do not think I ever quite got over it. I knew henceforward what was meant, or what might be meant, by a Scene in the House, or a Challenge from the Platform, or any of those sensational events which take place in the newspapers and nowhere else.*
[* Pp. 201-2.]
As in Orthodoxy Chesterton had formulated his religious beliefs, so in What's Wrong with the World he laid the foundations of his sociology. It will be remembered that, giving evidence before the Commission on the Censorship, Chesterton declared himself to be concerned only with the good and happiness of the English people. Where he differed from nearly every other social reformer was that he believed that they should themselves decide what was for their own good and happiness.
"The body of ideas," says Monsignor Knox of Gilbert's sociology, "which he labelled, rather carelessly, 'distributism' is a body of ideas which still lasts, and I think will last, but it is not exactly a doctrine, or a philosophy; it is simply Chesterton's reaction to life."*
[* The Listener, June 19, 1941.]
It may be said that a man's philosophy is in the main a formulation of his reaction to life. Anyhow life seems to be the operative word—for it is the word that best conveys the richness of this first book of Chesterton's sociology. All the wealth of life's joys, life's experiences, is poured into his view of man and man's destiny. Already developing manhood to its fullest potential he found in this book a new form of expression. To quote Monsignor Knox again, "I call that man intellectually great who is an artist in thought . . . I call that man intellectually great who can work equally well in any medium." The poet-philosopher worked surprisingly well in the medium of sociology.
He had intended to call the book, "What's Wrong?" and it begins on this note of interrogation. The chapter called "The Medical Mistake" is a brilliant attack on the idea that we must begin social reform by diagnosing the disease. "It is the whole definition and dignity of man that in social matters we must actually find the cure before we find the disease." The thing that is most terribly wrong with our modern civilisation is that it has lost not only health but the clear picture of health. The doctor called in to diagnose a bodily illness does not say: we have had too much scarlet fever, let us try a little measles for a change. But the sociological doctor does offer to the dispossessed proletarian a cure which, says Chesterton, is only another kind of disease. We cannot work towards a social ideal until we are certain what that ideal should be. We must, therefore, begin with principles and we are to find those principles in the nature of man, largely through a study of his history. Man has had historically—and man needs for his fulfilment—the family, the home and the possession of property. The notion of property has, for the modern age, been defiled by the corruptions of Capitalism; but modern Capitalism is really a negation of property because it is a denial of its limitations. He summarises this idea with one of his most brilliant illustrations: "It is the negation of property that the Duke of Sutherland should have all the farms in one estate; just as it would be the negation of marriage if he had all our wives in one harem."
But property in its real meaning is almost the condition for the survival of the family. It is its protection, it is the opportunity of its development. God has the joy of unlimited creation—He can make something out of nothing; but He has given to Man the joy of limited creation—Man can make something out of anything. "Fruitful strife with limitations," self-expression "with limits that are strict and even small,"—all this belongs to the artist, but also to the average man. "Property is merely the art of the democracy."
The family, protected by the possession of some degree of property, will grow by its own laws. What are these laws? Clearly there are two sets of problems, one concerned with life within the family, the other with the relation of the family to the state. These two sets of problems provide the subject-matter of the book. On both Chesterton felt that there had been insufficient thinking. Thus he says of the first: "There is no brain-work in the thing at all; no root query of what sex is, of whether it alters this or that." And of the second: "It is quite unfair to say that Socialists believe in the State but do not believe in the Family. But it is true to say that Socialists are especially engaged in strengthening and renewing the State; and they are not especially engaged in strengthening and renewing the Family. They are not doing anything to define the functions of father, mother and child, as such—they have no firm instinctive sense of one thing being in its nature private and another public."
It is precisely this kind of root-thinking that the book does. In the free family there will be a division of the two sides of life, between the man and the woman. The man must be, to a certain extent, a specialist; he must do one thing well enough to earn the daily bread. The woman is the universalist; she must do a hundred things for the safeguarding and development of the home. The modern fad of talking of the narrowness of domesticity especially provoked Chesterton. "I cannot," he said
with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colourless and of small import to the soul, then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labours and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.*
[* What's Wrong With the World, chapter 3, "The Emancipation of Domesticity."]
While he was writing these pages and after their appearance in print, G.K. was constantly asked to debate the question of Women's Suffrage. He was an anti-suffragist, partly because he was a democrat. The suffrage agitation in England was conducted by a handful of women, mainly of the upper classes; and it gave Cecil Chesterton immense pleasure to head articles on the movement with the words, "Votes for Ladies." G.K. too felt that the suffrage agitation was really doing harm by dragging a red herring across the path of necessary social reform. If the vast majority of women did not want votes it was undemocratic to force votes upon them. Also, if rich men had oppressed poor men all through the course of history, it was exceedingly probable that rich women would also oppress poor women. Both in What's Wrong With the World and in debating on the subject, Chesterton brushed aside as absurd and irrelevant the suggestion that women were inferior to men and what was called the physical force argument. But he did maintain that if the vote meant anything at all (which it probably did not in the England he was living in), it meant that side of life which belongs to masculinity and which the normal woman dislikes and rather despises.
All we men had grown used to our wives and mothers, and grandmothers, and great aunts all pouring a chorus of contempt upon our hobbies of sport, drink and party politics. And now comes Miss Pankhurst with tears in her eyes, owning that all the women were wrong and all the men were right. . . . We told our wives that Parliament had sat late on most essential business; but it never crossed our minds that our wives would believe it. We said that everyone must have a vote in the country; similarly our wives said that no one must have a pipe in the drawing-room. In both cases the idea was the same. "It does not matter much, but if you let those things slide there is chaos." We said that Lord Huggins or Mr. Buggins was absolutely necessary to the country. We knew quite well that nothing is necessary to the country except that the men should be men and the women women. We knew this; we thought the women knew it even more clearly; and we thought the women would say it. Suddenly, without warning, the women have begun to say all the nonsense that we ourselves hardly believed when we said it. . . .*
[* From chapter VII, The Modern Surrender.]
All the agitated reformers who were running about and offering their various nostrums were prepared to confess that something had gone very wrong with modern civilisation. But they suggested that what was wrong with the present generation of adults could be set right for the coming generation by means of education. In the last part of the book, "Education or the Mistake about the Child," he put the unanswerable question: How are we to give what we have not got? "To hear people talk one would think [education] was some sort of magic chemistry, by which, out of a laborious hotch-potch of hygienic meals, baths, breathing-exercises, fresh-air and freehand drawing, we can produce something splendid by accident; we can create what we cannot conceive." The social reformers who were talking about education seem not to have seen very clearly what they meant by the word. They argued about whether it meant putting ideas into the child or drawing ideas out of the child. In any case, as Chesterton pointed out, you must choose which kind of ideas you are going to put in or even which kind you are going to draw out. "There is indeed in each living creature a collection of forces and functions; but education means producing these in particular shapes and training them for particular purposes, or it means nothing at all."
But to decide what they were trying to produce was altogether too much for the men who were directing education in our Board Schools. The Public Schools of England were often the target of Chesterton's attacks; but they had, he declared, one immense superiority over the Board Schools. The men who directed them knew exactly what they wanted and were on the whole successful in producing it. Those responsible for the Board Schools seemed to have no idea excepting that of feebly imitating the Public Schools. One disadvantage of this was that, at its worst and at its best, the Public School idea could only be applicable to a small governing class. The other disadvantage was that whereas in the Public Schools the masters were working with the parents and trying to give the boys the same general shape as their homes would give them, the Board Schools were doing nothing of the kind. The schoolmaster of the poor never worked with the parents; often he ignored them; sometimes he positively worked against them. Such education was, Chesterton held, the very reverse of that which would prevail in a true democracy. "We have had enough education for the people; we want education by the people."
Chesterton felt keenly that while the faddists were perfectly prepared to take the children out of the hands of any parents who happened to be poor, they had not really the courage of their own convictions. They would expatiate upon methods; they could not define their aims; they would take refuge in such meaningless terms as progress or efficiency or success. They were not prepared to say what they wanted to succeed in producing, towards what goal they were progressing or what was the test of efficiency. And part of this inability arose from their curious fear of the past. Most movements of reform have looked to the past for great part of their inspiration. To reform means to shape anew, and he pointed out that every revolution involves the idea of a return. On this point, G.K. attacked two popular sayings. One was "You can't put the clock back"; but, he said, you can and you do constantly. The clock is a piece of mechanism which can be adjusted by the human finger. "There is another proverb: 'As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it'; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God, I will make it again."
It is easy to understand that this sort of philosophy should be out of tune with the Socialist who looked with contempt on the wisdom of his forefathers. It is less easy to understand why it was unacceptable also to most of the Tories. One reviewer asked whether Mr. Chesterton was the hoariest of Conservatives or the wildest of Radicals. And with none of his books are the reviews so bewildered as they are with this one. "The universe is ill-regulated," said the Liverpool Daily Post, "according to the fancy of Mr. Chesterton; but we are inclined to think that if the deity were to talk over matters with him, he would soon come to see that a Chestertonian cosmos would be no improvement on things as they are." On the other hand, the Toronto Globe remarks, "His boisterous optimism will not admit that there is anything to sorrow over in this best of all possible worlds." The Observer suggested that Chesterton would find no disciples because "his converts would never know from one week to another what they had been converted to"; while the Yorkshire Post felt that the chief disadvantage of the book was that "a shrewd reader can pretty accurately anticipate Mr. Chesterton's point of view on any subject whatsoever."
It seems almost incredible that so definite a line of thought, so abundantly illustrated, should not have been clear to all his readers. Some reviewers, one supposes, had not read the book; but surely the Daily Telegraph was deliberately refusing to face a challenge when it wrote: "His whole book is an absurdity, but to be absurd for three hundred pages on end is itself a work of genius." That particular reviewer was shirking a serious issue. He was the official Tory. But those whom I might call the unofficial Tories, such men for instance as my own father, received much of this book with delight and yet declined to take Chesterton's sociology seriously. And I think it is worth trying to see why this was the case.
In a letter to the Clarion, G.K. outlines his own position: "If you want praise or blame for Socialists I have enormous quantities of both. Roughly speaking (1) I praise them to infinity because they want to smash modern society. (2) I blame them to infinity because of what they want to put in its place. As the smashing must, I suppose, come first, my practical sympathies are mainly with them."*
[* Letter to the Clarion, February 8, 1910.]
Such a confession of faith seemed shocking to the honest old-fashioned Tory. And because it shocked him, he made the mistake of calling it irresponsible. Chesterton frequently urged revolution as the only possible means of changing an intolerable state of things. But the word "revolution" suggested streets running with blood. And, on the other hand, they had not the very faintest conception of how intolerable the state of things was against which Chesterton proposed to revolt. I think it must be said too that he was a little hazy as to the exact nature of the revolution he proposed. He certainly hoped to avoid the guillotine! And even when urging the restoration of the common lands to the people of England, he appended a note in which he talked of a land purchase scheme similar to that which George Wyndham had introduced in Ireland. But besides this tinge of vagueness in what he proposed, there was another weakness in his presentment of his sociology which I think was his chief weakness as a writer.
It would be hard to find anyone who got so much out of words, proverbs, popular sayings. He wrung every ounce of meaning out of them; he stood them on their heads; he turned them inside out. And everything he said he illustrated with an extraordinary wealth of fancy; but when you come to illustration by way of concrete facts there is a curious change. In his sociology, he did the same thing that his best critics blamed in his literary biographies. He would take some one fact and appear to build upon it an enormous superstructure and then, very often, it would turn out that the fact itself was inaccurately set down; and the average reader, discovering the inaccuracy, felt that the entire superstructure was on a rotten foundation and had fallen with it to the ground. Yet the ordinary reader was wrong. The "fact" had not been the foundation of his thought, but only the thing that had started him thinking. If the "fact" had not been there at all, his thinking would have been neither more nor less valid. But most readers could not see the distinction.
It is a little difficult to make the point clear; but anyone who has read the Browning and the Dickens and then read the reviews of them will recognise what I mean. It was universally acknowledged that Chesterton might commit a hundred inaccuracies and yet get at the heart of his subject in a way that the most painstaking biographer and critic could not emulate. The more deeply one reads Dickens or Browning, the more even one studies their lives, the more one is confirmed as to the profound truth of the Chesterton estimate and the genius of his insight. A superficial glance sees only the errors; a deeper gaze discovers the truth. It is exactly the same with his sociology. But here we are in a field where there is far more prejudice. When Chesterton talked of State interference and used again and again the same illustration—that of children whose hair was forcibly cut short in a Board School—two questions were asked by Socialists: Was this a solitary incident? Was it accurately reported? When a pained doctor wrote to the papers saying the incident had been merely one of a request to parents who had gladly complied for fear their children should catch things from other and dirtier children, it appeared as though G.K. had built far too much on this one point. It was not the case. He was not building on the incident, he was illustrating by the incident. But it must be admitted that he was incredibly careless in investigating such incidents; and quite indifferent as to his own accuracy. And this was foolish, for he could have found in Police Court records, in the pages of John Bull and later of the Eye Witness itself, abundance of well verified illustrations of his thesis.
In the same way, when he talked of the robbery of the people of England by the great landlords, he did not take the slightest trouble to prove his case to the many who knew nothing of the matter. It must be remembered that the sociological side of English history was only just beginning to be explored to any serious extent. In the Village Labourer, Mr. and Mrs. Hammond point out to what an extent they had had to depend on the Home Office papers and contemporary documents for the mass of facts which this book and the Town Labourer brought for the first time to the knowledge of the general public. Chesterton had worked with Hammond on the Speaker for some years. Just as with his book about Shaw so too with the background of his sociology he could have gone round the corner and got the required information. He knew the thing in general terms; he would not be bothered to make that knowledge convincing to his readers. If to his genius for expounding ideas had been added an awareness of the necessity of marshalling and presenting facts, he must surely have convinced all men of goodwill.
For in this matter the facts were there to marshal. It was less than a hundred years since the last struggle of the English yeomen against a wholesale robbery and confiscation that catastrophically altered the whole shape of our country. And it seems to have left no trace in the memory of the English poor. In Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen describes Catherine Morland finding the traces of an imaginary crime. But Chesterton comments that the crime she failed to discover was the very real one that the owner of Northanger Abbey was not an Abbot. The ordinary Englishman, however, thinks little of a crime that consisted in robbing "a lot of lazy monks." That they had possessed so much of the land of England merely seemed to make the act a more desirable one: yet it was a confiscation, not so much of monks' land as of the people's land administered by the monasteries.
What is even less realised is how much of the structure of the mediaeval village remained after the Reformation and how widespread was small ownership nearly to the end of the eighteenth century, when Enclosures began estimated by the Hammonds at five million acres. This land ceased in effect to be the common property of the poor and became the private property of the rich. This business of the Enclosures must be treated at some little length because it had the same key position in Chesterton's sociological thinking as the Marconi Case (shortly to be discussed) had in his political.
In every village of England had been small freeholders, copyholders and cottagers, all of whom had varying degrees of possession in the common lands which were administered by a manorial court of the village. These common lands were not mere stretches of heath and gorse but consisted partly of arable cultivated in strips with strict rules of rotation, partly of grazing land and partly of wood and heath. Most people in the village had a right to a strip of arable, to cut firing of brushwood and turf, and rushes for thatch, and to pasture one or more cows, their pigs and their geese. A village cowherd looked after all the animals and brought them back at night. Cobbett in his Cottage Economy (to a new edition of which Chesterton wrote a preface) reckoned that a cottager with a quarter-acre of garden could well keep a cow on his own cabbages plus commonland grazing, could fatten his own pig and have to buy very little food for his family except grain and hops for home-baking and brewing. He puts a cottager's earnings, working part-time for a farmer, at about 10 sh. a week. This figure would vary, but the possession of property in stock and common rights would tide over bad times. A man with fire and food could be quasi-independent; and indeed some of the larger farmers, witnessing before Enclosure Enquiry Committees, complained of this very spirit of independence as producing idleness and "sauciness."
The case for the Enclosures was that improved agricultural methods could not be used in the open fields: more food was grown for increasing town populations: much waste land ploughed: livestock immeasurably improved. Only later was the cost counted when cheap imported food for these same towns had slain English agriculture. The "compensation" in small plots or sums of money could not for the smaller commoners replace what they had lost—even when they succeeded in getting it. Claims had to be made in writing—and few cottagers could write. How difficult too to reduce to its money value a claim for cutting turf or pasturing pigs and geese. A commissioner, who had administered twenty Enclosure Acts, lamented to Arthur Young that he had been the means of ruining two thousand poor people. But the gulf was so great between rich and poor that all that the commons had meant to the poor was not glimpsed by the rich. Arthur Young had thought the benefits of common "perfectly contemptible," but by 1801 he was deeply repentant and trying in vain to arrest the movement he had helped to start.
Before enclosure, the English cottager had had milk, butter and cheese in plenty, home-grown pork and bacon, home-brewed beer and home-baked bread, his own vegetables (although Cobbett scorned green rubbish for human food and advised it to be fed to cattle only), his own eggs and poultry. After enclosure, he could get no milk, for the farmers would not sell it; no meat, for his wages could not buy it; and he no longer had a pig to provide the fat bacon commended by Cobbett. Working long hours he lived on bread, potatoes and tea, and insufficient even of these. Lord Winchelsea, one of the very few landowners who resisted the trend of the time, mentioned in the House of Lords the discovery of four labourers, starved to death under a hedge, and said this was a typical occurrence.
At the beginning of the Enclosure period the Industrial Revolution was barely in its infancy. A large part of the spinning, weaving and other manufactures was carried on in the cottages of men who had gardens they could dig in and cows and pigs of their own. The invention of power machines, the discovery of coal wherewith those machines could be worked, led to the concentration of factories in the huge cities. But it was the drift from the villages of dispossessed men, together with the cheap child labour provided by Poor Law Guardians, that made possible the starvation wages and the tyranny of the factory system. And here the tyrants were largely of a different class. There were some landowners who also had factories, and more who possessed coal-mines, but many of the manufacturers had themselves come from the class of the dispossessed.
Successful manufacturers made money—a great deal of money. Many of the men's appeals gave the figures at which the goods were sold in contrast with their rate of wages, and the contrast is startling. So, as the towns grew, the masters left the smoke they were creating and bought country places and became country gentlemen, preserved their own game and judged their own tenants. And thus disappeared yet another section of the ancient country folk. For the large landowners would seldom sell and the land bought by the new men was mostly the land of small farmers and yeomen. This was the age of new country houses with a hundred rooms and vast offices that housed an army of servants. "Labour was cheap," the descendants of those who built just then will tell you, as they gaze disconsolate at their unwieldy heritage. Old and new families alike built or rebuilt, added and improved.
Cobbett rode rurally and angrily through the ruins of a better England (described a century earlier by another horseman, Daniel Defoe). Goldsmith mourned an early example in his "Deserted Village," but they are the only voices in an abundant literature. Jane Austen is, indeed, the perfect example of what Chesterton always realised—the ignorance that was almost innocence with which the wealthy had done their work of destruction. He did not account them as evil as they would seem by a mere summary of events. And what he saw at the root of those events was in his eyes still present: England was still possessed and still governed by a minority. The Conservatives were "a minority that was rich," the liberals "a minority that was mad." And those two minorities tended to join together and rob and oppress the ordinary man, in the name of some theory of progress and perfection.
Thus the Protestant Reformation had closed the monasteries, which were the poor man's inns, in the name of a purer religion; the economists had taken away his land and driven him into the factories with a promise of future wealth and prosperity. These had been the experts of their day. Now the new experts were telling him with equal eagerness that hygienic flats and communal kitchens would bring about for him the new Jerusalem. But never did the expert think of asking Jones, the ordinary man, what he himself wanted. Jones just wanted the "divinely ordinary things"—a house of his own and a family life. And that was still denied him as is related in the chapter called "The Homelessness of Jones."
In a debate in the Oxford Union, G.K. maintained that the House of Lords was a menace to the State, because it failed precisely in what was supposed to be its main function, that of conservation. It had not saved, it had destroyed the Church lands and the common lands; it was ready to pass any Bill that affected only the lower classes. "We are all Socialists now," Sir William Harcourt had lately said, and Chesterton saw that Socialism would mean merely further restriction of liberty and continued coercion of the poor by the experts and the rich. So, looking at the past, Chesterton desired a restoration which he often called a Revolution. There were two forms of government that might succeed—a real Monarchy, in which one ordinary man governed many ordinary men—or a real democracy, in which many ordinary men governed themselves. Aristocracy may have begun well in England when it was an army protecting England: when the Duke was a Dux. Now it was merely plutocracy and it had become "an army without an enemy billeted on the people."
All this and more formed the background of Chesterton's mind. But what he wrote was a comment on the scene, not a picture of it. He wrote of the terrible irony whereby "the Commons were enclosing the commons." He spoke of the English revolution of the eighteenth century, "a revolution of the rich against the poor." He mourned with Goldsmith the destruction of England's peasantry. He cried aloud like Cobbett, for he too had discovered the murder of England his mother. But his cry was unintelligible and his hopes of a resurrection unmeaning to those who knew not what had been done to death.
