Chapter LV: After a Year of Journalism: an Outbreak of Auto-Obituary 347 (4)

To write of currency is generally recognised as an objectionable, and indeed almost as an indecent, practice. Editors will implore a writer almost tearfully not to write about money. This is not because it is an uninteresting subject, but because it is, and always has been, a profoundly disturbing subject. The whole modern world has been brought up on cash and on credit reckoned in terms of money. Four or five generations of us have lived by the faith that a dollar was a dollar and a pound a pound, and that if you left them about they grew at so much per cent. per annum, and also increased in value. Most things became cheaper and cheaper throughout our young lives. That cheapening seemed in the nature of things. We worked for money; we saved the stuff, we looked forward to a comfortable old age. Now we live in a phase of fluctuating and on the whole mounting prices. Whosoever saveth his money shall lose it. Even the dollar buys two things where ten years ago it bought three. The pound sterling is in a worse case, and many of the other currencies have sunken to levels beyond the wildest fantasies of 1913.

Now this, as Mr. Keynes points out, is a breach of the understanding between society and the common individual. In this system in which we and our predecessors have lived for a century and more, the system which Socialists will call the “Capitalist” system but which Mr. Keynes much more properly calls the “Private Capitalist” system, there has always been an implicit guarantee that the money we worked for and saved up and lent and invested in various ways was _good_. It was good for our needs whenever we chose to spend it again. This was the incentive to work; this was the driving force of the whole hundred years of industrial production from Waterloo to the Marne. And to a large extent the incentive has gone. Money is no longer good; it has become treacherous. Unless it can be restored this system of ours must break down and lead either to social chaos and human decadence or to a new and different system.

Now Mr. Keynes is not a Socialist. He believes that the existing system of individual competition is “in accordance with human nature and has great advantages.” But it cannot go on unless money is made trustworthy again. And his proposals to restore our confidence in money are very bold and remarkable indeed.

The vice, the almost incurable vice, of cash and credit systems, since first the methods of money became dominant in the Roman Republic, has been its tendency to expand debt to impossible dimensions. Every country at the end of the war found itself owing preposterous sums to the creditor class or to foreign countries, and forced in various measure to tax the productive classes, to tax its creditor class either directly by income-tax and capital levy, or indirectly by currency inflation, and to bilk its foreign creditors. Every sovereign State in Europe had its own policy and set about the business on its own lines, with the result that to-day Europe is a museum of methods of economic collapse, from Britain, crushed by taxation and unemployment in an attempt to deflate back to the gold standard, to Germany, smashed into complete economic paralysis by extreme currency inflation. No country remains now with its currency based on a gold standard, not even the United States of America. True, you can exchange dollar bills for gold at Washington, but then you lose by the transaction. The United States has over-bought gold and is still accumulating and hoarding gold--at a loss. If all America’s hoarded gold were minted and circulated, the value of the dollar would fall. The American dollar is the extreme case of deflation, as the exploded German mark was the extreme case of inflation.

Now what Mr. Keynes wants the world to do is to scrap gold altogether as a monetary standard and to substitute a “managed” currency. For the present he would have two independent units in the world, the dollar and the pound, because he is sceptical of the Americans and British ever working together without friction--even in so vitally important a matter. In both the United States and Britain he would have the banks and Treasury co-operating to keep in circulation such an amount of currency as would maintain internal prices at a steady level. They would decrease currency if prices fell, and increase it if they rose. He would take the price of a “standard, composite commodity”--so much steel, so much wheat, so much rice, so much rubber, and so on--and he would make that the new standard of value. He believes that the other currencies in the world would finally steady down into fairly stable relations with the “managed” dollar and the “managed” pound. And then we would go on again with our “Private Capitalism,” buying, selling, saving, investing, competing, as we did in the happy days before the war.

But there are certain curious implications in this. Mr. Keynes seems to recognise them and yet not give them their full value. The underlying assumption of Private Capitalism is that human beings will work better for gain, will show more enterprise and industry for profit, than for any other motive. But here, at the heart of the system, Mr. Keynes proposes to establish a disinterested group of managers, bankers, and officials who are not to accumulate private fortunes, though they could do so very easily by playing with the fluctuations of prices, but with a single-hearted devotion are just to maintain them for the public good. He seems to realise the difficulty here. He insists at several points that a system of Private Capitalism cannot survive without moderation; that if private enterprise will insist upon gambling upon the exchanges and working for profits regardless of any other consideration, the whole system must collapse. But if we are to rely upon the spirit of service and not upon the incentive of gain in our banks and Treasury officials, why should we not rely upon it generally? If currency can be “managed” in the public interest by men working, not for profit, but for service, why not also the production of staples and land and sea transport? But a system of economics run on the motive of service is not individualism at all; it is Socialism.

I think that in the long run Mr. Keynes will be forced to realise this. A “managed” currency is a long step towards a deliberately organised world. The gold standard was the standard of individual enterprise and go-as-you-please. The gold standard has failed and passes. Unless human society is to fail also, the age of scientific management is close at hand.

XX

THE HUB OF EUROPE: CZECHO-SLOVAKIA AND FRANCE

26.1.24

Bohemia within its mountains is like a square citadel in the very centre of Europe. Czecho-Slovakia, the old Bohemian kingdom revived and extended, is the most orderly and successful of all the States created by the Treaty of Versailles. The republic understands the modern need of advertisement; the wandering writer finds a flattering welcome there, and what is done in Prague is heard of in the world.

The new treaty with France brings Czecho-Slovakia still more prominently forward. Poor exhausted bankrupt Poland, that sucked orange, is thrust aside, and Czecho-Slovakia becomes the keystone of France’s restless incessant rearrangement of alliances. But Czecho-Slovakia is a very different country from Poland; it is sturdier and less romantically inclined, its President and chief Minister are among the most level-headed and far-seeing of European statesmen; and it is likely to prove a sobering and restraining influence upon French activities. Bohemia is the projecting westward angle of the Slav world; its language is closely akin to Russian, Serbian, Polish and Bulgarian; within its boundaries there are more than three million Germans, and three-quarters of a million of Magyars, and its natural destiny seems to be that it should act as a region of exchange and interpretation between the Slavic world, Hungary and Turkey, and the world of Central and Western Europe. German speech encloses it upon three sides. In itself, with its thirteen million odd of heterogeneous population, largely engaged in agriculture, it cannot be a country of any great importance; its importance now, as in the past, lies in its position and its possible inter-racial functions.

To these the President and his chief Minister and pupil, Mr. Benes, are acutely alive. They see in their country a meeting-place and reconciler of European interests. They are ambitious to make it a centre of trade, of intellectual interchange, and political unification. For this end they have worked steadfastly since their country emerged into renewed political existence in 1918. Theirs is a splendid and civilised dream.

It has been stated in many quarters that this new alliance has been made hastily, and at the initiative of France, as a stepping-stone to an understanding with Russia. The possibility of a Labour Government in Great Britain, and of a complete British recognition of Russia, is supposed to have driven France into a hasty search for an intermediary who would help her to end her long feud with the Bolsheviks. But in reality the recent visit of President Masaryk to Paris and London was already arranged last summer. He was already discussing the problems of this understanding then. It is probably a Czech rather than a French initiative that has brought it about.

There is something very attractive in these steadfast schemes to make Bohemia the centre of a Europe renewed. I think everyone who hopes to see a more noble and spacious civilisation emerging from the distresses of the present time must feel warmly sympathetic with these great ambitions. But it is impossible to ignore the enormous disadvantages against which the imaginations of President Masaryk and Mr. Benes and their colleagues are pitted. They make their creative effort in a tangle of long-accumulated difficulties and with some extraordinarily intractable material.

One first difficulty lies in the fact that the European railway system was developed while Prague was merely a provincial capital. The railways of Central Europe radiate from Vienna and Berlin. The centres of banking and commercial exchange were in these cities. And the efforts of Prague to deflect the currents of trade and finance to herself have hitherto fallen far short of the political ambitions of her leaders. I remember my astonishment on my first journey from Eger to Prague in 1920 to discover that I was travelling to the capital on a single line of railway.

In Prague at that time the great Sokol festival was going on, the festival of the patriotic societies, and there was little thought of Europe apparent and much of the three united peoples of Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia. National costumes made the streets gay; national music filled the air. But there was a great welcome at that time for the foreign visitor, and the bunting of all the Allies interwove with the national flag. French horizon-blue and the Stars and Stripes came into the picture with the chain and robes of the Lord Mayor of London, who was there in full regalia. And when one was in the presence of President Masaryk, with his sweeping views and his amazing knowledge of the contemporary intellectual activities of the English and French and German and Russian speaking worlds, the nationalist enthusiasm of Prague seemed no more than a picturesque and necessary background clamour.

But I was there again this last summer, and the foreign flags and visitors had gone, and I realised more fully the sturdy and obstinate patriotism of the Bohemian people. I saw Prague not on show for the foreigner, but in its everyday clothes. And the effect was extremely provincial. My impression was that the friction between the German Bohemians--an absolutely necessary element--and the Czechs had increased. That may be the fault of the recalcitrant Germans; I will not venture to adjudicate on the rights and wrongs of that issue. The point is that that bad feeling has not been allayed. There was a more pronounced objection to the German language. Hitherto the Czechs have been a bilingual people, and it was in the double possession of a Teutonic and Slav language and culture that one of our chief hopes for their future lay. But they seem to be dropping German and learning no other language in its place. They are sinking back into a churlish monolingualism. The public notices of the town of Prague are in Czech, and in Czech only. For the westerner Czech is as difficult as Russian. Indeed, so far as he is concerned, they might as well be in Chinese. This is patriotic barbarism. How can Prague expect either pleasure visitors or business men to come to her if she will not speak to them in any intelligible tongue? How can she become a mart or meeting-place of the nations if she insists that no other speech than her own shall be used in her streets? In a little while all the currents of Central European life will be flowing back again to their former centres in polyglot Vienna and Berlin.

Now these excesses of Czech patriotism make President Masaryk, to my mind, a very tragic figure. For this amazing man, this learned professor who was a village blacksmith’s son, did more than anyone to revive the self-respect and national feeling of the Czechs. He restored the Czech nation. He believed, and still believes, that he restored a necessary and decisive councillor to the European board. It may be that he has done no more than produce a tough, rustic dwarf. The fine patriotism he evoked has been vulgarised and cheapened, and about him and behind him and Mr. Benes presses a loud and irreconcilable body of ultra-patriots. His Germans have been foolish and tiresome; egged on by the Austrian landowners, who are furious because of the Capital Levy and a liberal land policy, they will do nothing but rehearse grievances. In such German places as Marienbad you see them retaliating the insults of Prague by boycotting Czech. Yet a generous understanding between Czech and German is essential to any future beyond obscurity for Bohemia. A Czecho-Slovakia, pure Czech, with perhaps for political purposes a smattering of French, will be following in the way of Poland towards a vexed and vexatious insignificance in European affairs.

XXI

THE MANDARINS AT THE GATE: THE REVIVAL OF THE OLD LEARNING

2.2.24

It would be near the truth of things to say that the only events of permanent importance in human affairs are educational events. Except in so far as they demonstrate and teach or interrupt teaching, wars and treaties, kings and laws, and all the standard material of history are but the by-products of the educator’s work. Some day, when we have escaped from the trumpery dignity of classical history, a new Gibbon will trace for us the failure in understanding and co-operation that made the Roman Empire no more than a staggering pretension and left Europe and Western Asia a festering cluster of nationalisms to this day. No conqueror can make the multitude different from what it is, no statesman can carry the world’s affairs beyond the ideas and capacity of the generation of adults with which he deals, but the teachers--I use the word in the widest sense--can do more than either conqueror or statesman; they can create a new vision and liberate latent powers in our kind. Or, if the perversity of their possibilities hold them, they can continue to put out the eyes of the children of men and let the world go on still under blind leaders of the blind.

At no time in the world’s experience has the need for a creative education been so manifest as it is to-day. This social and political system in which we live is ailing and divided against itself, failing to reconstitute even as much economic universalism as prevailed before the great war, involving itself in a hopeless muddle of debts. It is a system plainly doomed to a further series of wider and profounder disasters, unless amidst its distresses it can evolve a clearer realisation, not only in its ruling classes but generally, of the origins of our race and our civilisation, of the conditions under which our communities have grown, of the vital inter-relationships of our social order, and of the tremendous perils and the immense possibilities before mankind. A population with such a breadth of outlook, a population disciplined to creative constructive work, is not simply desirable to-day; it is imperatively demanded if civilisation is to avert a decay and a collapse as much greater than the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as a modern liner is greater than an Alexandrian galley.

It is because of his realisation of the paramount need of a great educational effort as the first and supreme thing in human affairs to-day that every intelligent man must needs note with something between dismay and bitter derision the recent signs of a revival of “classical” teaching in the schools and colleges of the Atlantic peoples. The French, who so love the eighteenth century that in foreign and domestic policy they are always trying to get back to it, have led the way. Disturbing modern subjects which tend to betray the facts that the Mediterranean Sea is not the whole world, and that most great events of present importance to mankind occurred before or outside of or in revolt against the Latin civilisation, are to be kept out of the purview of French adolescence. More Greek will be taught, but not enough of it and not well enough for the young Frenchman to realise how feeble was the political, social, and economic reaction of Greece upon Rome. He will be trained to think that there was some sort of magnificent succession between the two, whereas Rome got little from Greece except slave pedagogues and pedants, misleading literary models which crippled her own sturdier initiative, articles de luxe, living and dead, architects, sculptors and painters, and cared so little for the clarifying Aristotle that she left his books about and lost them.

The French, so largely German in race and mental quality, must however cherish their own Latin illusion in their own fashion; it comes nearer home to an English writer when he finds President Coolidge blessing the classical side. And still more dismaying is the truculent behaviour of the British Classical Association which has recently been meeting in the congenial atmosphere of Westminster School. Mr. Costley-White, the Headmaster, boasted of the increasing number of unfortunates in his school who were taking up the classical course, and made it clear that even those who were supposed to have a modern course in his school were really not given an honest modern course at all, but wasted their time with elementary classics before they were contemptuously “specialised” in science, modern history, mathematics, or modern languages. (What a classification!) And Mr. Herbert Fisher told coyly how even in a Coalition Government fragments of the Greek Anthology were not unfrequently translated into English verse during the duller Cabinet discussions--on contemporary education, one presumes. He further pointed out the power every headmaster had to direct the studies in his school, and in plain words to steal people’s sons for the classics. It is clear that the classical headmasters of Great Britain, in a mood of self-complacent obstinacy, will spare no efforts to pith as many young intelligences as possible with their antiquated, deadening and antisocial disciplines. The classical tradition is still strongly entrenched in the educational world of the English-speaking peoples, and both in America and in the British Empire it will be over its dead body only that a modern education will be able to reach the finer minds of the new generation.

Now it is a useless and dangerous civility to write flattering things about the classical education that still cripples the selected best of our youth. It robs us of a directive class of lively intelligences; it is the root cause of the pretentious sterility of contemporary statescraft. The uncritical cant it sustains about the peerless beauty of Greek art and Greek character, and the massive wisdom and integrity of Roman law and administration, has been and still is a blight upon the creative impulses of modern life. In schools and in colleges it is, and, considering the sort of man who will generally have to impart it, it must always be, a deadening grammatical grind. It consumes the scanty time of our youth, it eats up the time-table, so that any effectual broadening study of other things cannot co-exist with it. It presents the history of mankind grotesquely out of perspective; it saturates its victims with a pro-Hellenic, pro-Latin partisanship that perverts their judgment of all historical processes. Its material being languages and--in a lesser degree--literature, dead, pickled, and without any power of growth or fresh combination, it is, before anything else, a training in stereotyped expression and stereotyped forms of thought. At the present time, in the face of the world’s present needs, it is impossible to regard a school or college presided over by a classical scholar and devoted to the classical tradition as anything but a dead and death-diffusing spot in our educational system. This new offensive against the proper education of our children, to which the British Classical Association gives such definite expression, is a thing essentially evil, a thing which any servant of creative civilisation must fight at any cost. We cannot afford to sacrifice our convictions to politeness and pretend that we think the classically trained mind anything better than a warped and restricted and mischievously infectious mind.

We need a world-wide common education of which the history of life and the sciences of life and matter are the two main divisions, in which drawing, mathematics, and living languages are studied as tools and methods of expression and not as subjects in themselves, and in which music is properly utilised in the development of æsthetic perception. In such a modern education the dead languages and literature can play only a subordinate and illustrative and properly proportioned part.

XXII

LENIN: PRIVATE CAPITALISM AGAINST COMMUNISM

9.2.24

So Lenin is dead at last. He dies on the eve of the recognition of the Soviet Government by the Western Powers. For most practical purposes the work of Lenin was over before 1920. His death now or a little later will make only the smallest difference in the destinies of Russia.

For the Communist Party which still controls Russia has this in common with the Catholic Church, that it is sustained by a system of dogmas, disciplines and, now, experiences and traditions so much stronger than any single individual, that individuals, though they may serve it more or less effectively, cannot control nor deflect it. They must move inside its limitations. Russia, under the Communist rule, is at the opposite pole to such a phase of affairs as would evoke a Cæsarism. It is over the Western Latin democracies, subjected to the adventures and ravages of uncontrolled rich men, that the dictators arise. Lenin was never in reality a dictator as Mussolini is a dictator. He impressed one as being in the grip of forces quite beyond his control, albeit they are forces he had himself helped to develop and organise. Communism is definite, directive, compelling; Fascism is dramatic and empty, a puerile, vague, violent thing, a young ass to be ridden anywhere by a bold, competent rider. A score of Lenins might die and Communism would go on as though nothing had changed. Without Mussolini the Fascisti might do anything--fall into a torrent, get lost, destroy society, vanish.

I saw Lenin in 1920 in the Kremlin. He was an extraordinarily fragile little thing, small hands clasped together upon the corner of his desk and little feet that dangled from his chair far off the ground. He was very bald. I learn now with astonishment that I was the older man. He put his amusing Mongoloid face a little on one side as we talked, with something of the wary expression of a fencer. When he found out I didn’t want to score points for or against Communism, but to learn what they proposed to do next and particularly what they proposed to do about the peasants, he dropped any appearance of controversy and laid his views and plans before me very frankly.

In return I tried to tell him things about England, but he seemed to have been stuffed up with a lot of nonsense about British conditions. He believed that a certain obscure paper called the _Dreadnought_, or the _Woman’s Dreadnought_, or some such title, edited by Miss Sylvia Pankhurst, represented millions of insurgent British proletarians, and that the violent struggle then going on in Ireland was, in some slightly obscured form, a struggle between Capitalism and Communism. It was difficult to readjust his perspectives.

His schemes for the reorganisation of Russia seemed to me to be right-minded, honestly conceived, and very, very artless. He had a scheme for the “Electrification of Russia” that struck my usually quite sufficiently imaginative mind as hopelessly impractical. It ignored distances, and Russia is a country consisting mostly of distances.

I suppose no gambler who stakes his all upon a single throw against great odds and wins was ever so astonished as the Bolsheviks when they came into power in 1917. They went into Russia like good revolutionists to make trouble and die. They found themselves presently in scarcely disputed possession of a completely exhausted country. Even in 1920 they seemed still a little incredulous to find themselves still there. Never was there such rant and nonsense as the stuff Mr. Winston Churchill, for example, talks about the Bolsheviks seizing upon and ruining Russia. So far from seizing, there was nothing to oppose them but brigands and hopelessly incapable military adventurers, and so far from ruining, the ruin was already complete. In this chaos the Bolsheviks grasped power, according to all the accepted revolutionary examples. There was not so much an organised resistance to their seizure as a lawless disregard. They had to shoot. All revolutionists have to shoot. It is their privilege and their danger. But it is usually conceded that the Bolsheviks shot too much and went on shooting too long, and acquired almost a habit of shooting.

It is not that they were bloodthirsty men, but that they were inexperienced and unprepared. They murdered in a fit of Russian nerves. And they were equally inexperienced and unprepared for the task of government, once their power was secure. They served Russia well in defending her from France, Poland, Churchill, Kolchak, Judenitch, Deniken, Wrangel, and all the evil horde that beset her from without, but they rebuilt within slowly and experimentally and wastefully. And they had the bad luck of two famine years.

Still, they are on their feet now; they are making headway, and it is from the red root of Communist theory that the new Russian order will grow. It is manifestly destined to be a very great system, a United States in the Old World, stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific.

It is very important to grasp the fact that the former Russian political and social order was bankrupt and collapsed of its own accord, because it is the lesson that the private adventurers of the West are most loath to learn. Communism is not a dragon that devours healthy States; it is rather the scavenger of the rotten and fallen. You cannot say, for example, that Communism is either very strong nor spreading very rapidly as an aggressive doctrine in Europe. And yet it may still come to prevail over great parts of Europe. Europe is sick and obstinately set against its own cure; the decay of its monetary system (without which, as Mr. Keynes has pointed out, private capitalism is a totally unworkable system) spreads, and the European community, saturated with ideas of eager private gain, destitute of a sufficiently strong sense of the collective good, and enslaved by narrow individualistic and partisan and patriotic obsessions, makes no effort sufficiently comprehensive and intelligent to arrest the decay. The European system is not being seriously attacked from without at the present time, and least of all by Communism; the whole Communist propaganda in Western Europe does not amount to much more than the advertisement organisation of a typewriter seller or a patent medicine vendor. But the European system is being attacked from within by its own speculators and profit-makers, its tariffs and its combines for the restraint and deflection of trade. It has taught all its children competitive self-seeking, and it crumbles and collapses now for the lack of creative effort.

I am not one of those who minimise and detract from the great achievements of the nineteenth century, and deep in my nature is a craving for irresponsible liberty. Temperamentally I dislike Communism. I am a collectivist but not a Communist. I have always clung and still cling to the belief that the sprawling social and economic life in which I have grown up might be progressively organised into a secure, generous, and scientific system without any abrupt and violent destructive change. But I must confess to a deepening and increasing doubt whether the present European system can right itself. The collapse continues so steadily and disconcertingly. The little nations sit within their boundaries scheming for small advantages, none heeding the general good. Germany follows Russia; her enemies without and her “big-business” fools within have prepared another great area in which the Communist may make his experiments. And the collapse shows no tendency to end at the Rhine. The Western exchanges totter.

It may be that the hopes of such as I are excessive, that tinkering cannot save the European system now, that it is destined to profounder and more drastic changes than we are willing to admit as necessary. Perhaps the root is too rotten with self-seeking. Perhaps the Communist, with all his faults, his wastefulness and ugliness of method, has something vital to teach the world, if it is no more than discipline and devoted subordination to large ideas. Perhaps the whole European system, like Russia, may after all need to be regrafted upon this new strange root of Communism before it enters upon a fresh creative phase. I do not know. But it is plain to me that the years pass and the recovery of Europe does not begin.

XXIII

THE FANTASIES OF MR. BELLOC AND THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD

16.2.24

Mr. Belloc has written a small imposing book about America and England, called _The Contrast_. Small it is in length and substance, but imposing in its English edition at least by reason of large print, vast margins, thick paper, and all that makes a book physically impressive. It is the sort of book that has the first sentence of Chapter I on page nine. To the student of current events it is a very noteworthy book indeed. It betrays the drift of a very complex group of forces at work in our educational, journalistic, and literary world, a group of forces desiring the separation of America from Europe, clamouring for the disengagement of America from participation in the development of a new phase of civilisation, and the arrest of that development.

Mr. Belloc is too often treated by American and English critics as a merely comic figure. Comic figure no doubt this bulky, gesticulating Frenchman is, with his pretensions to an enormous bibulousness, with his affectation of a fastidious but non-existent scholarship, with the immense emphasis of his wild impromptu classifications and his magnificent caricature of a victorious dialectic. His prose style becomes more and more wonderfully suggestive of the after-dinner talker at his richest and jolliest. The sudden lapses into intense whispering italics; the abrupt glorification of some phrase by the thick loud enunciation of unexpected capitals! He is quick to imitate any form of dignity, even the dignity of the scientific exponent at his solemnest. Could anything be more sublimely funny, for instance, than this pseudo-illuminating experiment to illustrate the profound truth (in italics) that “_intense individual contact and energy make for uniformity_”?

“Put a number of smooth, round balls upon a billiard table. Give them each a slow and slight movement, and you will see no general movement appearing. There will be little clatter, few and rare collisions. Impart to them each a very rapid motion, that is, an individual intensity, and while you raise very greatly the noise of the shocks (which is a superficial phenomenon), and while you increase even more the number and frequency of collisions (which is the cause of the noise), you also soon develop a resultant of all the directions. If the sharp speed of each be maintained you will soon perceive in the movement of the whole a general swing, and all that great mass of balls will be moving in a crowd. So it is with a human society.”

One likes to think of that rosy dinner party adjourned to the billiard-room and “poon thesh soshial lawsh to pra’l tes’” by imparting the motion as directed.

But apart from the almost wilfully preposterous side of Mr. Belloc there is much to interest us in him profoundly. He is vigorously expressive; he speaks for forces in our community that are more often silently active; he gives resistances animation. The least original of contemporary writers, he has retained the leading ideas of an upbringing that was essentially Catholic and Latin in a practically inflexible form. His world, after a few merely preparatory phases and with a polite gesture to the Greeks, begins and ends with Rome. His mind in this age of tumultuous growth is like a naughty and growing child refusing to be put into larger clothes. And yet he is not blind to the great volume of reality outside that narrow old-fashioned scheme of his. He is not a blind man; he has at once vision and an extreme obstinacy. He feels and denies the passing of mediaeval Europe, he struggles against his realisation of the coming of a new order in the world, which shall comprehend, for example, Siberia and China and America, and a world-wide culture into which Islam and Christendom, the wisdom of India and China and the science of Britain and Germany and America and France and North Italy and Russia and Japan shall alike fall and be fused. One probable factor in this synthesis will be the English language, the great political and scientific traditions it carries with it, and the band of English-speaking communities, still growing and still crude, which will bring those traditions into fruitful relationships with a thousand new conditions and a thousand new climatic conditions. Rome will have a scarcely more important place in an English-knitted world than Babylon.

And so Mr. Belloc beats himself against the growing strength of this great net of civilised understandings. It does not exist. The languages diverge. The Americans are more foreign to the British than any Western Europeans. The British are a slightly detached part of some general Western European culture. A Frenchman can understand Keats and an American cannot. Americans are “egalitarian” and the British profoundly aristocratic. The decay of British aristocracy is the end of Britain, but there is always France to fall back upon. The American military mind is French in spirit. A Bellocian storm of such assertions swirls through the entire book, aggressive in manner, self-protective in motive. He emerges where he began. The Americans do not belong to “our” system--“_our_” meaning the intimate close brotherhood of British and French and Italians and Spanish and so forth, the British rather marginal to the Latin Catholic world. The Americans are a “New Thing”--capitals; they are a new culture outside the Western European culture. They are a “new race.” They must follow their own destinies and “we” ours.

Mr. Belloc is writing for American as much as for English readers, and he shows a care for their susceptibilities. But one or two possibilities gleam through, possibilities of a reassuring sort for his dear old Western European world. There may be biological forces at work; “a new race, the fate of which, to survive or to die, we know not.” Or this great new world may presently fall into social disorder, division--and insignificance.

This is the essence of Mr. Belloc’s argument to estrange Americans and Europeans, and particularly the Americans and British. Is it sound? So far as the differences go one concedes the vividness of Mr. Belloc’s vision. (His opening account of the different qualities of American and European scenery, by the way, is an amazingly good piece of writing.) But do the Americans present either a new race or even a new culture? I deny both these propositions. They are racially a still largely unfused mixture of Europeans, and the novel features of their social and cultural life merely mark a new phase into which the British and the European and the Slav cultures are all following America. That is to say, I do not believe that America is diverging upon a line of her own, but is simply ahead along a path that the other great constituents of the coming world community must all presently follow.

Let us state the case briefly and simply. Nobody who knows anything of the facts of the case regards the citizen of the United States as a sort of transplanted Britisher; but with the exception of certain coloured millions and certain Red Indian survivals they are manifestly transplanted Europeans, whose political institutions were originally built up in reaction to the Hanoverian monarchy and as a development of and in close sympathy with European liberalism and British nonconformity. This community of transplanted Europeans had the good fortune to have no strong military neighbour, and it had an almost virgin continent into which to expand. This good fortune enabled the States to realise very swiftly the full social and political possibilities of steamboat, railway, and electric communication.

They have developed a great State on the modern scale, with an unprecedented unity and uniformity of general ideas. A little too favoured by their immunities, they have not perhaps made so good a pace as they might have done with their general elementary education, but altogether their progress has been marvellous. The congested and entangled States of Western Europe--I leave out the Russian and British systems, which are neither of them truly European--are destined to achieve an ultimate unity under the same irresistible forces of transport that have expanded and held together the American United States. Their unification may be complicated or arrested by the unavoidable interweaving of the Slav and British systems with their destinies, and it is surely impossible for anyone outside the Belloc type of mentality to imagine either English-speaking or Latin-speaking America having neither voice nor share in the European part of this recrystallisation of the world’s affairs.

In this new order of life into which our kind is passing, Roman Christendom will become a local tradition and a province, just as Sumeria was swallowed up in Babylonia and just as the Empires of Babylon and Egypt became memories and provinces in the Empire of Rome. We are not developing new races, but merely mingling those we have, and our cultures do not so much differentiate as fuse, so we may reasonably hope to have at last one creative culture, with many aspects, replacing the partial civilisations of the past.

Fate has imposed it upon Mr. Belloc that he should see these things and deny them. His lot, I think, might have been happier had he been born and settled in some rich little town in the South of France, and there sat in the café, drinking his good red wine and orating and denying, without the irritation of having seen and known. But it was decreed that he should go to America and come back to report a strange and terrible land where the mountains are not really mountains nor the rivers rivers, and where a strange race grows outside the pale.

And, an exile in modern England, he has been forced, too, to turn his eyes into the depths of the past and see how life arose and how it has come to be man and will pass beyond man. And that also he denies, with much banging of the little round drum of a table on the terrasse. The American is a phantom and geology a lie; the only true world is Latin-made Europe, and if Heaven had not created it specially for jolly men, Mr. Belloc would; and in the warmth and congenial friendliness of it, Mr. Belloc will sit fighting reality with voice and gesture until the good red wine runs out and the sun goes down upon him for the last time.

XXIV

A CREATIVE EDUCATIONAL SCHEME FOR BRITAIN: A TENTATIVE FORECAST

22.2.24

The Labour Government of Great Britain starts its career with a conservative discretion that should reassure even the most excitable inmates of the Rothermere journalistic institutions. For this year at any rate we shall get little that we might not have had from a rather left-handed Liberal Cabinet. The Social Revolution is in no hurry to arrive.

The recognition of Russia is all to the good; and the treatment of foreign politicians in office as though they were statesmen and the serious little visits and talks, are full of promise. If you treat a politician as a statesman sufficiently it is possible that he will become one. It is to be hoped that the economies upon military things will have a certain courage, and that we may see the last of costly Guards’ uniforms and such-like gilt on the Royal gingerbread, this year. A democratic monarchy with a Labour Prime Minister should wear plain clothes. But these are minor matters. The immediate test of the Labour Government’s quality will be its treatment of national education. There is no excuse for just carrying on. The British educational policy since the war has been mean and deadly. The children insist upon growing up, and at present most of them for all practical purposes achieve the status of unemployed adults or undertrained blacklegs at fourteen. Secondary and higher education is a dislocated muddle.

I do not want to undervalue British education. Compared with other countries the common citizen of Britain is well educated and well informed. He is--though many Americans are loath to realise this--better educated and better informed than the average American common citizen. But compared with what is needed in a great modern State he is pitifully and dangerously under-educated. It is impossible for a Labour Government to realise its ideal of a highly organised community inspired not by profit-hunting but by the spirit of co-operative service, and working and producing abundantly for the common good, with the British population at the present level of education. To raise that level is a necessary condition to the successful extension of public service into economic life and the replacement of the money scramble by economic order.

For this reason Mr. C. P. Trevelyan is for me the most interesting and hopeful of all the new Labour Ministers. With his family tradition of high scholarship and liberal innovation, and with the new ferment of modern creative ideas in his mind, we may hope for a very bold and broad handling of the problems of British education. To him is given the opportunity of welding the disconnected parts, some quite good and some extremely inadequate or defective, which make up the British educational resources of to-day, into what may be the first completely comprehensive modern educational system in the world.

The first thing needed for the achievement of such a task is a complete and final recognition of the fact that such an education must go on at least to the age of sixteen, and that it must include a general knowledge of the history of the world and mankind, the elements of political and economic science, some knowledge of the methods and scope of biological and physical science, and a reasonable acquaintance with and use of at least one foreign language. The raising of the leaving age to sixteen was promised some years ago by Mr. Fisher, probably the feeblest statesman who has ever been overruled by his political associates. That promise was made when Britain was to become a land fit for heroes under the eloquent gestures of Mr. Lloyd George. It is for Mr. Trevelyan now to make that promise a reality.

But it is not only upward that the school age should extend, but also downward. It should be possible for poor parents who cannot afford a nursery to send their children to the people’s schools at a quite tender age. The children of prosperous people have a governess, or in towns go to some properly equipped infant school, by the time they are four or five. The children of the working-class woman knock about at home with a mother too busy to give them sufficient educational attention, and their only open air is the street. They miss the beginnings of drawing and modelling and such-like play; they do not get sufficiently talked to; they get little or no music; they start with that much handicap. Vile attempts at economy in British education have meant a grave retrogression in this respect. The schools have to be reopened to infants, and the facilities for infant teaching restored and extended. The public infant school must be the day-nursery of the poor.

Both these extensions of the school age will require more teachers. And even as it is, the British schools are scandalously understaffed. Not only is that so, but many of the existing staffs are under-trained and under-educated for their work. I cannot conceive of British education as a satisfactory system with less than quadruple the number of teachers at work than are now employed.

Moreover they have to be better teachers. When British elementary education was organised in the ’seventies of the last century it was done in the shabbiest and cheapest way possible. Those were the days when Englishwomen of the prosperous classes would become half frantic with jealousy and hate and derision at the idea of a housemaid wearing a fringe or the cook going out in pretty clothes on a Sunday. That was the spirit of the time. It was intolerable to them that the poor man’s “brats” should be taught by really educated persons. The prospective teachers of the general public, therefore, were not sent through the Universities and made a part of the general comity of educated men and women. They were put apart into mean, bleak, restricted training colleges of their own, and everything was done to establish and maintain a sense of social inferiority in their minds. They were intended to feel the superiority of the parson and the lordship of the manufacturer and the squire. Never has a profession risen to self-respect against such obstacles and disadvantages as the British elementary teachers. It is for Mr. Trevelyan to complete the expansion and liberalisation of these training colleges, to see that they get at last the staffs, libraries, laboratories, and facilities of interchange necessary to incorporate them completely in the university system of the land. Or else to hand them over to the local authorities as lunatic asylums or something of that sort or to reconstruct them to meet the housing shortage, or just simply to dynamite them and send the whole of the next generation of teachers through the Universities.

Having secured an adequate supply of soundly trained and educated teachers, and with the whole youthful population--except those attending the many excellent private preparatory schools in Britain--going up to the age of sixteen, at least, to the publicly maintained schools, it will be possible for Mr. Trevelyan to give his mind to the very urgent problem of grading schools. The organisers of elementary education in Britain, like the American fathers, seem to have thought that a school was just a school. But children under the age of twelve require very different educational surroundings from those between twelve and sixteen. The Junior school may well be a mixed village school as close to mother as possible, a small school, bright and homelike. The Second school needs to be larger, and with a various staff; children are already differentiating after twelve, there must be a choice of studies, one child’s education is another child’s poison. Moreover, the equipment needed at the second stage is greater and more various. Educational centres are indicated here, and the automobile to collect the youngsters comes happily into the world at this stage to enable both Britain and America to meet the demands of an advancing civilisation upon rural youth.

Over most of Britain the market towns lie at eight or ten miles apart; the roads converge upon them, they are the natural places for the Second schools. Here is a very pretty and, I should think, a very congenial task of reorganisation for Mr. Trevelyan. Like Edward VI of England, it may be his destiny to write his name upon England with a trail of new and reconstructed schools.

But an educational system that secures merely a proper education for every British boy or girl up to the age of sixteen is only the broad foundation of a complete State education. The English “Public Schools,” which are not really public at all, and which retain their boys in a state of loutish athleticism two years or more after they should be at college; the miscellany of “upper-class” girls’ schools; the Universities, that are partly continuation colleges and partly Universities for real intellectual work and interchange, much incommoded by undergraduates’ “rags,” solemn athleticism, and a pervading adolescent clamour; the antiquated and boring legal and medical professional training; and, indeed, the whole tangle of class-conscious, middle- and upper-class educational institutions in Britain, would be enormously benefited, and I hope will be benefited, by a bold--even though it were at the time an entirely unsuccessful--attempt at reorganisation upon modern lines.

Once people have been set thinking about these things they will never stop as they are. The mischief at present is that we take the most preposterous arrangements for granted because we are used to them. It will not be necessary to stir the venerable quiet, the tradition, and ripe usages of Oxford and Cambridge very greatly. Somewhere the fine traditions of classical scholarship and stylistic mathematics should be preserved, and these seem to be their appointed refuges. But there is now a constellation of other and more conveniently situated provincial Universities which are still miserably cramped and poor. For all that, several are doing quite first-class University work. And there exists now in London, in spite of neglect and misdirection, a great group of literary, artistic, scientific, and legal institutions which cry aloud to be grouped and correlated upon broad and congenial lines as the effective intellectual nucleus of the British Empire, and even perhaps of the English-speaking world. It is to the loosely co-ordinated institutions within and without the present so-called University of London that I hope Mr. Trevelyan will chiefly direct his attention as the apex of the pyramid I hope to see arising, based on the existing preparatory school, on the re-fashioned “Public School,” relieved of its too mature seniors, and on the revised and strengthened free Junior and Second schools which should take the place of our existing elementary schools.

XXV

PORTUGAL AND PROSPERITY: THE BLESSEDNESS OF BEING A LITTLE NATION

1.3.24

For several weeks just recently I was cut off from Britain and America and most of the things that interest me in the world by a postal strike in Portugal. It was an original sort of strike. The little dears went to their offices and so forth, and just did nothing until the Government kept a promise to raise salaries. Telegrams and letters coagulated in masses that are still incompletely dissolved. Some of the more humorous of the strikers mixed up the letters, and delivered considerable numbers at the wrong addresses, where many perished miserably. Meanwhile I read the Lisbon _Diario de Noticias_, which has about as much foreign news as the _West Sussex Gazette_, and meditated on Portugal. To which country I had come, by the by, because it was within three days’ post of England and a most convenient cable centre.

Portugal has a climate that is always interesting and generally delightful. It has its wild phases of sea-wind and passionate rain, and then the only thing to do here at Estoril--except work--is to go to the western headlands and see the green Atlantic waves hit the cliffs and explode into vast mountains of sunlit foam. And to get caught and drenched by a rainstorm, and so home. Or the north wind blows, and usually it is the north wind that blows, and then the air is as keen and sweet as Alpine air and the sky is blazing blue. The flowers are astonishing. There is purple iris in all the water courses; the banks are alive with periwinkle and tall spikes of antirrhinum; in the woods are endless scillas and rock roses. The other day I walked over a shrubby moorland and there I came upon a great multitude of upstanding clumps of a sort of white heather, rather big and round with the tips and shadows just tinged with pink, and everywhere among these clumps there crept a gentian-blue flower--lithospermum I think it is. And not a soul was there to appreciate this lavish loveliness except myself and another chance wanderer from the beaten track.