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Page 20
Men, having learned to get what they lust after by strife, do not
easily forget the lesson. Sporadic war, like a heath fire, breaks out
daily in some part of the world; and society is as easily kindled,
and as irrationally as nations. A Jew is put out of Hungary and an
Archduke takes his place. The working men of Britain, having chosen a
Parliament which they don't believe in, and didn't want, set to work,
not to get rid of it, but to make any future Parliament impossible.
The police do their best for the shoplifters; the engine-drivers,
to help the police, prevent them from going home to bed. Sir Edward
Carson, a staunch Unionist, makes union out of the question. The
bakers, to improve the prospects of their trade, teach people to make
their own bread. The colliers--well, the colliers do not yet seem to
have found out that unless they provide people with coal, people won't
provide them with many things they are in need of.
This doesn't look much like solidarity, it must be owned; and yet I
make bold to say that the one abiding good we have got out of the war
is the discovery of the solidarity of man. Nationality (mother of war)
has been killed since we have learned from the Germans how much
alike we are at our worst, and best. Caste is mortally wounded. The
land-girl and her ladyship admit their sisterhood; the staff officer
and the batman understand each other in the light of common needs and
their satisfaction. There's the seed; water it with the dew of common
poverty and you may have one Britain instead of a round dozen, and a
League of Men to succeed a stillborn League of Nations. Courage, then;
_Eppur si muove!_
Poverty is certainly coming, for Europe is on the edge of bankruptcy.
With poverty will come freedom, and it can come in no other way.
Nobody is free while he is serf to his own necessities, and the
necessities of such a man as I am (to take the first instance that
comes to hand) have grown to such a pitch that I am as rogue and
peasant slave to them as ever Hamlet was to his. Gentleman born,
quotha! Caste and self-indulgence go hand in hand. I must be a great
man in the village, therefore live in the great house. Men must touch
their hat-brims to me, therefore my hat (not I) must be worth their
respect. A village girl must wait upon me, therefore (for my life)
I must not wait upon her. That is where I have been ever since I was
born, but now I am going to be poor and free. The time is at hand when
I must give up my roomy old house in its seven-acre garden and live in
the five-roomed cottage now occupied by my gardener. My hat must be
as it may, since I shan't buy a new one. If a maid comes to work in my
house she can only come in one capacity, which will equally involve
my working in hers. She in the kitchen, I in the coalhole or potato
patch, 'twill be all one. If she works it will be in our common
interest; and for that I too shall work.
If I, still harping on myself, go that way to freedom, shredding off
what is tiresome, cumbrous and a hindrance, one is tempted to think we
shall all--so life is in a concatenation--lose what is really vicious
in our social coil; and if in our social then in our political coil.
For if the essence of a sound private life is that a man should be
himself, so a public life for its smooth working depends upon the same
sincerity. Read my parable of the particular into society at large.
If I am to live so, and gain, are not nations? Are we to hire a great
navy, a great army, to secure us in things which we have seen to be
tiresome, cumbrous and a hindrance? Are we to exact flag-dippings
from nations to our flag? Are we to make washpots of the Maltese,
Cypriotes, Hindoos, Egyptians, Hottentots, and who not? If we go
bankrupt we shall not be able to do it, and if we are not able to do
it we shall stand among people as Britons, not as a British Empire,
over against French, Germans, Maltese, Cypriotes, standing as their
needs involve, and for what worth their virtue can ensure. So men,
being men, nations of men will become families of men:
_Magnus ab integro s�clorum nascitur ordo._
Two things therefore are clear: men are a family, and the family is to
be poor. Almost as clear to me is the coming of the day when we shall
slough the ragged skin of empire and become again a small, hardy,
fishing and pastoral people. The profiteers will leave us, like
rats and their parasites. We shall be able to feed ourselves by our
industry. We shall be contented, and as happy as men with inordinate
desires and subordinate capacities can ever hope to be. There is no
reason to suppose that we need cease to be a nursery of heroes,
that our old men will not see visions or our young men dream dreams.
Neither vision nor dream will be the worse for having its bottom in
truth.
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