Part 2

At a very typical and honoured old Public School, he to whom you are listening passed on the whole a happy time; but what an odd life educationally speaking! We lived rather like young Spartans; and were not encouraged to think, imagine, or see anything we learned, in relation to life at large. It’s very difficult to teach boys, because their chief object is not to be taught anything; but I should say we were crammed, not taught. Living as we did the herd-life of boys with little or no intrusion from our elders, and they men who had been brought up in the same way as ourselves, we were debarred from any real interest in philosophy, history, art, literature, and music, or any advancing notions in social life or politics. We were reactionaries almost to a boy. I remember one summer term Gladstone came down to speak to us, and we repaired to the Speech Room with white collars and dark hearts, muttering what we would do to that Grand Old Man if we could have our way. But, after all, he contrived to charm us. Boys are not difficult to charm. In that queer life we had all sorts of unwritten rules of suppression. You must turn up your trousers; must not go out with your umbrella rolled. Your hat must be worn tilted forward; you must not walk more than two abreast till you reached a certain form; nor be enthusiastic about anything, except such a supreme matter as a drive over the pavilion at cricket, or a run the whole length of the ground at football. You must not talk about yourself or your home people; and for any punishment you must assume complete indifference.

I dwell on these trivialities, because every year thousands of British boys enter these mills which grind exceeding small; and because these boys constitute in after life the great majority of the official, military, academic, professional, and a considerable proportion of the business classes of Great Britain. They become the Englishmen who say: “Really!” and they are for the most part the Englishmen who travel and reach America. The great defence I have always heard put up for our Public Schools is that they form character. As oatmeal is supposed to form bone in the bodies of Scotsmen, so our Public Schools are supposed to form good sound moral fibre in British boys. And there is much in this plea. The life does make boys enduring, self-reliant, good-tempered, and honourable, but it most carefully endeavours to destroy all original sin of individuality, spontaneity, and engaging freakishness. It implants, moreover, in the great majority of those who have lived it the mental attitude of that swell, who when asked where he went for his hats, replied: “Blank’s; is there another fellow’s?”

To know all is to excuse all――to know all about the bringing-up of English Public School boys makes one excuse much. The atmosphere and tradition of those places is extraordinarily strong, and persists through all modern changes. Thirty-eight years have gone since I was a new boy, but cross-examining a young nephew who left not long ago, I found almost precisely the same features and conditions. The War, which has changed so much of our social life, will have some, but no very great, effect on this particular institution. The boys still go there from the same kind of homes and preparatory schools and come under the same kind of masters. And the traditional unemotionalism, the cult of a dry and narrow stoicism, is rather fortified than diminished by the times we live in.

Our Universities, on the other hand, have lately been but the ghosts of their old selves. At my old College in Oxford last year they had only two English students. In the Chapel under the Joshua Reynolds window, through which the sun was shining, hung a long “roll of honour,” a hundred names and more. In the College garden an open-air hospital was ranged under the old City wall, where we used to climb and go wandering in the early summer mornings after some all-night spree. Down on the river the empty College barges lay stripped and stark. From the top of one of them an aged custodian broke into words: “Ah! Oxford’ll never be the same again in my time. Why, who’s to teach ’em rowin’? When we do get undergrads again, who’s to teach ’em? All the old ones gone, killed, wounded and that. No! Rowin’ll never be the same again――not in my time.” That was _the_ tragedy of the War for him. Our Universities will recover faster than he thinks, and resume the care of our particular ‘Kultur,’ and cap the products of our public schools with the Oxford accent and the Oxford manner.

An acute critic tells me that Americans hearing such deprecatory words as these from an Englishman about his country’s institutions would say that this is precisely an instance of what an American means by the Oxford manner. Americans whose attitude towards their own country seems to be that of a lover to his lady or a child to its mother, cannot――he says――understand how Englishmen can be critical of their own country, and yet love her. Well, the Englishman’s attitude to his country is that of a man to himself; and the way he runs her down is rather a part of that special English bone-deep self-consciousness of which I have been speaking. Englishmen (the speaker amongst them) love their Country as much as the French love France, and the Americans America; but she is so much a part of us that to speak well of her is like speaking well of ourselves, which we have been brought up to regard as impossible. When Americans hear Englishmen speaking critically of their own country I think they should note it for a sign of complete identification with their country rather than of detachment from it. But to return to English Universities: They have, on the whole, a broadening influence on the material which comes to them so set and narrow. They do a little to discover for their children that there are many points of view, and much which needs an open mind in this world. They have not precisely a democratic influence, but taken by themselves they would not be inimical to democracy. And when the War is over they will surely be still broader in philosophy and teaching. Heaven forefend that we should see vanish all that is old, all that has as it were the virginia-creeper, the wistaria bloom of age upon it; there is a beauty in age and a health in tradition, ill dispensed with. But what is hateful in age is its lack of understanding and of sympathy; in a word――its intolerance. Let us hope this wind of change may sweep out and sweeten the old places of my country, sweep away the cobwebs and the dust, our narrow ways of thought, our mannikinisms. But those who hate intolerance dare not be intolerant with the foibles of age; they should rather see them as comic, and gently laugh them out.

The educated Briton may be self-sufficient, but he has grit; and at bottom grit is, I fancy, what Americans at any rate appreciate more than anything. If the motto of my old Oxford College: “Manners makyth man,” were true, I should often be sorry for the Briton. But his manners don’t make him, they mar him. His goods are all absent from the shop window; he is not a man of the world in the wider meaning of that expression. And there is, of course, a particularly noxious type of travelling Briton, who does his best, unconsciously, to take the bloom off his country wherever he goes. Selfish, coarse-fibred, loud-voiced――the sort which thanks God he is a Briton――I suppose because nobody else will do it for him!

We live in times when patriotism is exalted above all other virtues, because there have happened to lie before the patriotic tremendous chances for the display of courage and self-sacrifice. Patriotism ever has that advantage as the world is now constituted; but patriotism and provincialism of course are pretty close relations, and they who can only see beauty in the plumage of their own kind, who prefer the bad points of their countrymen to the good points of foreigners, merely write themselves down blind of an eye, and panderers to herd feeling. America is advantaged in this matter. She lives so far away from other nations that she might well be excused for thinking herself the only country in the world; but in the many strains of blood which go to make up America, there is as yet a natural corrective to the narrower kind of patriotism. America has vast spaces and many varieties of type and climate, and life to her is still a great adventure.

I pretend to no proper knowledge of the American people. It takes more than two visits of two months each to know the American people; there is just one thing, however, I can tell you: You seem easy, but are difficult to know. Americans have their own form of self-absorption; but they appear to be free as yet from the special competitive self-centrement which has been forced on Britons through long centuries by countless continental rivalries and wars. Insularity was driven into the very bones of our people by the generation-long wars of Napoleon. A Frenchman, André Chevrillon, whose book: “England and the War” I commend to anyone who wishes to understand British peculiarities, justly, subtly studied by a Frenchman, used these words in a recent letter to me: “You English are so strange to us French; you are so utterly different from any other people in the world.” It is true; we are a lonely race. Deep in our hearts, I think, we feel that only the American people could ever really understand us. And being extraordinarily self-conscious, perverse, and proud, we do our best to hide from Americans that we have any such feeling. It would distress the average Briton to confess that he wanted to be understood, had anything so natural as a craving for fellowship or for being liked. We are a weird people, though we look so commonplace. In looking at photographs of British types among photographs of other European nationalities, one is struck at once by something which is in no other of those races――exactly as if we had an extra skin; as if the British animal had been tamed longer than the rest. And so he has. His political, social, legal life was fixed long before that of any other Western country. He was old before the _Mayflower_ touched American shores and brought there avatars, grave and civilised as ever founded nation. There is something touching and terrifying about our character, about the depth at which it keeps its real yearnings, about the perversity with which it disguises them, and its inability to show its feelings. We are, deep down, under all our lazy mentality, the most combative and competitive race in the world, with the exception perhaps of the American. This is at once a spiritual link with America, and yet one of the great barriers to friendship between the two peoples. Whether we are better than Frenchmen, Germans, Russians, Italians, Chinese, or any other race, is of course more than a question; but those peoples are all so different from us that we are bound, I suppose, secretly to consider ourselves superior. But between Americans and ourselves under all differences there is some mysterious deep kinship which causes us to doubt, and makes us irritable, as if we were continually being tickled by that question: Now am I really a better man than he? Exactly what proportion of American blood at this time of day is British, I know not; but enough to make us definitely cousins――always an awkward relationship. We see in Americans a sort of image of ourselves; feel near enough, yet far enough, to criticise and carp at the points of difference. It is as though a man went out and encountered, in the street, what he thought for the moment was himself; and, decidedly disturbed in his self-love, instantly began to disparage the appearance of that fellow. Probably community of language rather than of blood accounts for our sense of kinship, for a common means of expression cannot but mould thought and feeling into some kind of unity. Certainly one can hardly overrate the intimacy which a common literature brings. The lives of great Americans, Washington and Franklin, Lincoln and Lee and Grant are unsealed for us, just as to Americans are the lives of Marlborough and Nelson, Pitt and Gladstone, and Gordon. Longfellow and Whittier and Whitman can be read by the British child as simply as Burns and Shelley and Keats. Emerson and William James are no more difficult to us than Darwin and Spencer to Americans. Without an effort we rejoice in Hawthorne and Mark Twain, Henry James and Howells, as Americans can in Dickens and Thackeray, Meredith and Thomas Hardy. And, more than all, Americans own with ourselves all literature in the English tongue before the _Mayflower_ sailed; Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare, Raleigh, Ben Jonson, and the authors of the English Bible Version are their spiritual ancestors as much as ever they are ours. The tie of language is all-powerful――for language is the food formative of minds. Why! a volume could be written on the formation of character by literary humour alone. It has, I am sure, had a say in planting in American and Briton, especially the British townsman, a kind of bone-deep defiance of Fate, a readiness for anything which may turn up, a dry, wry smile under the blackest sky, an individual way of looking at things, which nothing can shake. Americans and Britons both, we must and will think for ourselves, and know why we do a thing before we do it. We have that ingrained respect for the individual conscience, which is at the bottom of all free institutions. Some years before the War, an intelligent and cultivated Austrian who had lived long in England, was asked for his opinion of the British. “In many ways,” he said, “I think you are inferior to us; but one great thing I have noticed about you which we have not. You think and act and speak for yourselves.” If he had passed those years in America instead of in England he must needs have pronounced the very same judgment of Americans. Free speech, of course, like every form of freedom, goes in danger of its life in war time. In 1917 an Englishman in Russia came on a street meeting shortly after the first revolution had begun. An Extremist was addressing the gathering and telling them that they were fools to go on fighting, that they ought to refuse and go home, and so forth. The crowd grew angry, and some soldiers were for making a rush at him; but the Chairman, a big burly peasant, stopped them with these words: “Brothers, you know that our country is now a country of free speech. We must listen to this man, we must let him say anything he will. But, brothers, when he’s finished, we’ll bash his head in!”

I cannot assert that either Britons or Americans are incapable in times like these of a similar interpretation of “free speech.” Things have been done in my country, and perhaps in America, which should make us blush. But so strong is the free instinct in both countries, that it will survive even this War. Democracy, in fact, is a sham unless it means the preservation and development of this instinct of thinking for oneself throughout a people. “Government of the people by the people for the people” means nothing unless the individuals of a people keep their consciences unfettered, and think freely. Accustom the individual to be nose-led and spoon-fed, and democracy is a mere pretence. The measure of democracy is the measure of the freedom and sense of individual responsibility in its humblest citizens. And democracy is still in the evolutionary stage.

An English scientist, Dr. Spurrell, in a recent book, “Man and his Forerunners,” thus diagnoses the growth of civilisations: A civilisation begins with the enslavement by some hardy race of a tame race living a tame life in more congenial natural surroundings. It is built up on slavery, and attains its maximum vitality in conditions little removed therefrom. Then, _as individual freedom gradually grows_, disorganisation sets in and the civilisation slowly dissolves away in anarchy. Dr. Spurrell does not dogmatise about our present civilisation, but suggests that it will probably follow the civilisations of the past into dissolution. I am not convinced of that, because of certain factors new to the history of man. Recent discoveries have so unified the world, that such old isolated successful swoops of race on race are not now possible. In our great Industrial States, it is true, a new form of slavery has arisen (the enslavement of men by their machines), but it is hardly of the nature on which the civilisations of the past were reared. Moreover, all past civilisations have been more or less Southern, and subject to the sapping influence of the sun. Modern civilisation is essentially Northern. The individualism, however, which according to Dr. Spurrell, dissolved the Empires of the past, exists already, in a marked degree, in every modern State; and the problem before us is to discover how democracy and liberty of the subject can be made into enduring props rather than dissolvents. It is, in fact, the problem of making democracy genuine. If that cannot be achieved and perpetuated, then I agree there is nothing to prevent democracy drifting into an anarchism which will dissolve modern States, till they are the prey of pouncing Dictators, or of other States not so far gone in dissolution――the same process in kind though different in degree from the old descents of savage races on their tamer neighbours.

Ever since the substantial introduction of democracy, nearly a century and a half ago with the American War of Independence, I would point out that Western Civilisation has been living on two planes or levels――the autocratic plane with which is bound up the idea of nationalism, and the democratic, to which has become conjoined in some sort the idea of internationalism. Not only little wars, but great wars such as this, come because of inequality in growth, dissimilarity of political institutions between States; because this State or that is basing its life on different principles from its neighbours.

We fall into glib usage of words like democracy, and make fetiches of them without due understanding. Democracy is certainly inferior to autocracy from the aggressively national point of view; it is not necessarily superior to autocracy as a guarantee of general well-being; it might even turn out to be inferior unless we can improve it. But democracy is the rising tide; it may be dammed or delayed but cannot be stopped. It seems to be a law in human nature that where, in any corporate society, the idea of self-government sets foot it refuses ever to take that foot up again. State after State, copying the American example, has adopted the democratic principle; and the world’s face is that way set. Autocracy has, practically speaking, vanished from the western world. It is my belief that only in a world thus uniform in its principles of government, and freed from the danger of pounce by autocracies, have States any chance to develop the individual conscience to a point which shall make democracy proof against anarchy, and themselves proof against dissolution; and only in such a world can a League of Nations to enforce peace succeed.

But though we have now secured a single plane for Western civilisation and ultimately, I hope, for the world, there will be but slow and difficult progress in the lot of mankind. And for this progress the solidarity of the English-speaking races is vital; for without that there is but sand on which to build.

The ancestors of the American people sought a new country, because they had in them a reverence for the individual conscience; they came from Britain, the first large State in the Christian era to build up the idea of political freedom. The instincts and ideals of our two races have ever been the same. That great and lovable people the French, with their clear thought and expression, and their quick blood, have expressed those ideals more vividly than either of us. But the phlegmatic tenacity of the English and the dry tenacity of the American temperament have ever made our countries the most settled and safe homes of the individual conscience. And we must look to our two countries to guarantee its strength and activity. If we English-speaking races quarrel and become disunited, civilisation will split up again and go its way to ruin. The individual conscience is the heart of democracy. Democracy is the new order; of the new order the English-speaking nations are the ballast.

I don’t believe in formal alliances, or in grouping nations to exclude and keep down other nations. Friendships between countries should have the only true reality of common sentiment, _and be animated by desire for the general welfare of mankind_. We need no formal bonds, but we have a sacred charge in common, to let no petty matters, differences of manner, divergencies of material interest, destroy our spiritual agreement. Our pasts, our geographical positions, our temperaments make us beyond all other races, the hope and trustees of mankind’s advance along the only line now open――democratic internationalism. It is childish to claim for Americans or Britons virtues beyond those of other nations, or to believe in the superiority of one national culture to another; they are different, that is all. It is by accident that we find ourselves in this position of guardianship to the main line of human development; no need to pat ourselves on the back about it. But we are at a great and critical moment in the world’s history――how critical, none of us alive will ever realise to the full. The civilisation slowly built since the fall of Rome has either to break up and dissolve into jagged and isolated fragments through a century of revolutions and wars; or, unified and reanimated by a single idea, to move forward on one plane and attain greater height and breadth.

Under the pressure of this War there has often been, beneath the lip-service we pay to democracy, a disposition to lose faith in it, because of its undoubted weakness and inconvenience in a struggle with States autocratically governed; there has even been a sort of secret reaction towards autocracy. On those lines there is no way out of a future of bitter rivalries, chicanery, and wars, and the probable total failure of our civilisation. The only cure which I can see, lies in democratising the whole world, and removing the present weaknesses and shams of democracy by education of the individual conscience in every country. Goodbye to that chance, if Americans and Britons fall foul of each other, refuse to make common cause of their thoughts and hopes, and to keep the general welfare of mankind in view. They have got to stand together, not in aggressive and jealous policies, but in defence and championship of the self-helpful, self-governing, ‘live and let live’ philosophy of life.

Who would not desire, rushing through the thick dark of the future, to stand on the cliffs of vision――two hundred years, say――hence――and view this world?

Will there then be this League for War, this caldron where, beneath the thin crust, a boiling lava bubbles, and at any minute may break through and leap up, as of late, jet high? Will there still be reek and desolation, and man at the mercy of the machines he has made; still be narrow national policies and rancours, and such mutual fear, that no country dare be generous? Or will there be over the whole world something of the glamour that each one of us now sees hovering over his own country; and men and women――all――feel they are natives of one land? Who dare say?

The guns have ceased fire and all is still; from the woods and fields and seas, from the skeleton towns of ravaged countries the wistful dead rise, and with their eyes question us. In this hour we have for answer only this: We fought for a better Future for Mankind!