Part 2

_Silence_ is the note struck by the Great Pyramids of Geza. A national religion, profoundly spiritual, which in the service it demanded from Art and Craftsmanship must BE PERFECT. Their art and craftsmanship tell us this. They were content to give the best only. They worshipped the Great Spirit by matter. They made their arts to sing of the noble elevation of the soul from sphere to sphere till it became perfected. Therein is the _soul_ of the ancient Egyptians, which they imparted to the Greeks, and which Moses learned and tried to hand on to the Hebrews. We modern workmen will do well to ponder on these things awhile, and to take many a lesson from “the poor pagans.” Poor pagans? Rather were they a most enlightened people, with whom, by comparison, we moderns are barbarians. They may have had all, or at least the greater part of what science has given to us. It is an ignorant cry that calls them Poor Pagans. There was more soul in ancient Egypt than in Europe to-day! We worship matter, very often very nasty matter, so long as it provides wealth which we are not yet civilised enough to know how to use. What England needs is a little _more_ soul, not less! A great deal more faith, a great deal more belief in the dignity of labour, a great deal more will to choose the best and discard the worst, a higher Ideal of honour, and a deeper sense of responsibility to after-coming generations. Much more widespread and intensified determination to leave behind us things so noble that they may bear some comparison with the labour of the poor Pagan! The spirit of which I write was _here_ once. We need not cross the Channel to find it. Wiltshire contains it. The soul of our ancestors is in the very stones of the great monoliths of Stonehenge, the primitive British temple to the sun, which, alas, we do not worship but wipe out in material progress of crude industrialism.

§ 4

Our primitive ancestors were driven by an ardent worship of the Power within the Sun. Like the Greeks they must set up a great temple to the Giver of Life, who made their crops ripen, who was to them an ocular vision of an unravelled mystery, the Prime Author of All! of Him who holds our destinies, our life and death in the palm of His hand! That is what urged them. No commercial spirit came between them and a great Ideal for which to labour and make manifest.

They fetched huge monoliths from Normandy. Frail crafts bore them over the rough sea to the shore of England, whence they were dragged to their destination. Do we think that such a tremendous, so dangerous an enterprise as this, was carried out under no higher motive than an industrial company?

There probably was some Oriental blood in this ancient folk of England. All Art, indeed all Science, had its birth place in the land of the “Rising Sun.” Like the Chaldeans, the race that made Stonehenge were astronomers. Upon a certain morning and at a certain hour of the year they knew the rising sun would hit a certain spot. They knew the exact direction of the ray that would do so. There they placed their altar to the God of Light, the All Beneficent One! We know now that some centuries before the Roman conquest of England the south of the island was highly civilised, but who by is not clear. They must have been a highly artistic people, possibly Kelts, possibly a race which had been or was in touch with Mykene, because the metal work that has survived time partakes of the character of both Keltic and Mycenian craftsmanship. Whoever they were, they brought art to savage islanders; hence they sowed the seeds of their ideals and of perfect craftsmanship, to fructify in those days of England’s greatness before the weed of Industrialism and the darkness it shed over the country had become a poisonous fetish. Of that grim subject more presently. The Mithra myth came here from the East and nearly won as a religion of blood sacrifice. But a stronger prevailed--the first created thing, Love. The Jews and Romans crucified Jesus Christ. They thought thus to obliterate His teaching, to wipe out the Ideal He taught, the Utopia He would erect--a kingdom of the soul that He would revive in the materialistic Roman decay. They did kill His body, but His immortal soul survives. They killed Him as King of the Jews, but left Him living as Monarch of the human race. The eggshell may be broken without killing the embryo within it. Love, pure love, so sought for in religions, so nobly conceived by the “poor pagan” Socrates, took hold of the hearts of primitive Christians, as the Delphic myth of Apollo of the primitive Greeks, and God’s forgiveness of man’s rashness and brutality when He set the bow in the sky as a sign of mercy, not only to Hebrews but the whole world. Salvation by blood sacrifice is a crude idea; Salvation through Love is a noble one.

§ 5

The Germans in the late war thought to destroy the soul of France by battering down the precious casket whose every stone was a living symbol of her chivalrous, kingly history. Brute force, employing every engine of industrialism, every energy of materialistic science, was to prevail. The noblest craftsmanship employed in the flowering time of French history and for generations, being the expression of a sensitive people deeply attached to Beauty, was shivered to atoms recklessly and triumphantly by the cannon of a hypocrite nation which claimed the first place in the history of the modern world. If Matter could ever overcome Soul, Germany would have succeeded; Germany would have broken the pride of Flemish commerce and her traditions as an organiser of it by the destruction of Ypres. The priceless books in Louvain, written and illuminated by pious scholars and patient craftsmen, the brutes burnt or stole with as ignorant a rapacity as a herd of monkeys. Again, they sought to destroy the soul of France by turning thousands of acres of productive country and fruit gardens so essentially a vital part of the commerce of France, making a fruitful land a desert. They tried (but in vain) to kill the soul of France by subjecting villagers, men, women and children to torture; like wild beasts to smash the modesty of pure women, even those dedicated to spiritual lives; then, the lust satisfied, they slaughtered them.

The clumsy minded Teuton misjudged its prey. They judge according to their own low standard of honour; force, brute force, as against strength of character, chivalry and patriotism: a standard fit only to be carried in the ranks of savages, but this time carried under the disguise of “Kultur,” a word which now is a stigma, one which includes all that is most vile and reprehensible in a people who employed fine natural faculties to invent every possible device for the destruction of life. Not a stone did Germany’s scientific men leave unturned to discover the earth’s hidden sources of destructive elements. They abused their fine faculties, they perverted their invention, Industrialism ran riot. Scientific force was used in full measure by the Germans for annihilation. The Emperor--the worst of the horde of savages--gave his encouragement to every bestial act committed by his depraved people. If such depravity was to succeed or could succeed, Germany would have done so. First in science, first in organisation, she seemed invincible. Her Industrialism was perfected, her system organised with the precision of clockwork. If _materialism_ at the expense of every other consideration can succeed, Germany would have done so. But no! A nation may kill its own soul, but God will not permit it to kill another. It is indeed a lesson. Germany had killed its soul. It had set up Moloch where God had been. Iron, steel, explosives, every poison upon the Pharmacy List, every evil pulsation of the heart were German weapons. The countries she laid waste will revive, their soul has been strengthened by tribulation, and the would-be conqueror will lick the dust for a century. France will grow strong again, she will recultivate her fields and orchards, and rebuild her villages, towns and churches.

§ 6

In their vulgar vanity the Germans said: “What would matter the destruction of Rheims Cathedral, of Ypres Town Hall, of Laon, indeed, of all that the world esteems as Art in France? We, the only nation of Kultur, can build better. What does the destruction of the library of Louvain matter? We can create a fresh one; anyhow, we can steal all the best books therefrom.” Poor deluded people! A people without taste, possessed of no artistic genius, devoid of the sense of beauty! All the cathedrals in Germany put together are not worth one bay of Chartres, one tower of Rheims, or one arcade of Ypres Town Hall. German architecture is as hard as steel, as unemotional as iron, and, like her people, dull and soulless. Art is the mirror of a nation. German Art at its best is brutal as her people have been. The nineteenth century Minotaurs are in a direct line from the hordes of barbarians who laid Italy waste, who burned Rome, and spread horrors wherever their footsteps trod. William II. hates England more than France. As long as England holds the sea Germany cannot master the world. After France, England’s turn would have come had German materialism succeeded.

§ 7

Think of it, craftsmen and builders, and all of us who value the soul of England! Think of it, farmers, agricultural labourers, and all who live on and by the land! Your cities would be desolate wastes, your land poisoned, your women ravished, your children spiked by bayonet thrusts, your old men and women shot or tortured. That is what would have happened had Germany’s materialism prevailed! Having done this, would the soul of England been slain. No!! No conqueror ever killed the soul of a country conquered. A country commits suicide, that’s the way its soul is killed, and that is the way Germany destroyed herself.

A country may poison itself, degrade itself by self-indulgence and greed to the lowest level; it may kill in itself every good for which it has been favoured, and so kill its soul; but slain by a foreign power--never! The thought of what might have happened to us, and which was nearer happening than many of us will allow, should set us thinking of England’s mighty past. Setting the success of her commerce aside, do we quite value at their true value the legacy of riches which our ancestors have bequeathed? Do we esteem as we should the builders of our cathedrals, the _unrivalled_ beauty of the English parish and village church? Do we esteem at their due English craftsmen (the first in the world) and what noble work they left us? Do we value the great creative minds of our predecessors? I sometimes wonder if we are forgetting the very things which illustrate the beauty of the English soul in a rush after materialism, which seems to pay a momentary interest. Are we travelling, or have we been travelling along a road which has proved the road to ruin of Germany? I think sometimes we have been. Are we permitting Industrialism to kill our souls? I am not sure we are not! But more of that presently. What saved England in the four years of her great danger and trial? Her Government did not. It was not officialdom that prevented our ruin, it was that the heart of England was still sound, notwithstanding grievous temptations to break it. Notwithstanding false doctrines of Equality taught by ignorant extremists, our workmen still saw straight according to their ancient traditions as yet unbroken, as yet deaf to “catch words” from noisy rhetoric out of the mouths of ignorant and mischievous leaders inflated by vanity and rendered blind by egotism and desire for power over a more ignorant but clear-thinking workman.

§ 8

The English workman is still “_au cœur_” _honest_; he cannot help it; tradition of honesty flows in his veins still. If he _is_ ignorant, the direction of his instincts is honest. He was the best and most highly respected workman in Europe; other nations envied him. An English cabinet, an English knife, English cloth, English needlework were the envy of every foreigner. Why was the praise of English workmanship so highly praised and prized by other nations? Because her workmen were the most honest and skilled in Europe. I say “were.” Are they so still? No! But they may again become so if they are true to their noble tradition and to themselves, and no longer permit evil counsel to draw them away by specious and plausible promises.

The noble instincts of the English craftsman I am old enough to remember. Once, and not so long ago, his work was his conscience, he believed in it and did it with all his might. It was a habit of mind which ruled him and made him _free_. Why do I write “free”? Because being an honest workman, he did not fear competition. He had an ideal, which was to give the best labour for a good wage. He was simple, he took pride in his work. He had his Utopia, which was to labour to the enth of his power to do honour to himself, his family and country. Good work was encouraged then and commanded the market of the world! Economically, irrespective of honour, the workman was right. The best work will always command the best market in the long run. Honesty was the motto on the standard of the Englishman. He had an image in his mind and up to it he strove to arrive. He liked perfection and strove to reach it. In that sense he was an artist plus craftsman, an imaginative worker distinct from a machine. To have told a bricklayer he must only lay a given number of bricks a day, or that doing bad work was good for all-round trade, would have been to insult him. So his work had a soul in it; the pleasure he took in its doing was reflected. It was a pleasure to regard it. I remember hundreds of workmen like that when I was a boy, men with whom one could make friends, in whom there was good fellowship and no mistrust. There was a bond of union. We were workmen; he and I were only differentiated by the nature of Trade; he of the plough, the shovel, the saw or what not, I of the pencil, brush or scalpel, that was all.

We had the same soul and sense of honour, he to drive a straight furrow, dig a good trench, I to do a good drawing or picture. My fellow-workmen, if they think for themselves, and they are quite capable to do that, will recognise that to preach “equality” is one thing; it sounds attractive; it is, in fact, a mare’s nest, a will-o’-the-wisp; it is unreachable, in the first place; in the second, if it were reached, to-morrow would provide _inequality_. Were the scales of Fate adjusted every morning, in the evening they would be unbalanced. If it were possible to attain equality it would ruin the world; it would paralyse effort; it would reduce mankind to a system of self-indulgence, lassitude, and, finally, to imbecility. Giving up that word as hopeless, we will retain one of the popular triad--“Liberty,” as including “Fraternity.” Yet while we urge “liberty” we must beware of its caricature, “licence,” the arch-enemy of Fraternity and Liberty. Licence is, in fact, the grossest form of tyranny. We might, indeed, exclude the term “liberty,” which includes Fraternity, which excludes Licence.

§ 9

And now we come to an important point of our argument. Labour has permitted itself to become a slave. Individual workers are not FREE. They have given their souls, or shall we say their freedom, to men of their own class, who, having a smattering of education, assume power as their leaders. Anyway, so they began, but time has shown them more _drivers_ than leaders. Trade union leaders make a show of fraternity. One asks, for information: Is coercion a sign of it any more than a sign of liberty? Obedience to national law is one thing, to class law is another. Having gone far, class leaders assume the right to absorb capital, _i.e._, to hand it over to Labour. Were that to arrive would the nation as a whole be in a better way? Surely the same difficulty would occur which distresses advanced democrats. Capital would be still a bugbear to extremists, but in the hands of a class that has had no experience of its use, that has no traditions of expenditure. In the period of exercise to gain some experience capital would be wasted; it might be gambled away or spent in hours of idle self-indulgence. Where, then, would Labour be? Doubtless starving. Ignorant but ambitious leaders, to please their followers whom they have coerced, would advocate a purely class and selfish policy which might lead to civil war, of all wars the one which is certainly soul-killing. When brothers fall out and set to kill each other, where is Fraternity, where is the human family, private as well as public, concentrated or extended? It is lost! A nation is but a family on an enlarged scale.

In the concluding years of the 18th century France groaned under civil war, and came very near ruin. What followed upon the French Revolution? Autocratic government under Napoleon! It was the only way out of a grievous mess of anarchy, rapine and chaos. Most of the authors of the Revolution sooner or later suffered as they had made others suffer, under the guillotine. The most prominent agitators fell as victims to their cruelties and misdeeds. The people sacrificed those who were once their adored leaders. They suffered the death penalty from the very people that had inflamed the party of disorder. Anarchy never succeeds. Its leaders always suffer in the end, and by the hands of their dupes whom they pretended to benefit; justice invariably follows injustice; that is a law as certain as that to-morrow succeeds to-day.

§ 10

If the French Revolution does not teach us the inevitable punishment for anarchy, Russia’s _débâcle_ surely should. Militarism has only changed places there. Having been in the hands of one party, it is now in another. Tyranny has changed places, that is all! Educated men, that is to say, men who have studied cause and effect through the teaching of past history, know that certain results follow action. That is to say, situations change places. The student of history, like a chess player, is aware that the move of a pawn may be the turning-point in a game. Anarchy is a monster that breeds quickly; her whelps carry the poison of rabies which, after infecting a small circle, increases by leaps and bounds. When it has become unmanageable, when men’s passions have led them out of the bounds of reason, militarism must be resorted to. When reason and peaceful persuasion cease to avail, powder and shot have to be used, and sometimes unmercifully! Uneducated men are led by passion, educated by reason. Are we sure that anarchy is not being bred here? If so, has it shown itself? Trades unions were useful in times past, they sought for justice, they achieved something, and up to a point it was good. Like many movements beginning well and founded upon justice, it has overstepped the mark. That which began justly is ending unjustly. Peaceful order has grown to tyranny. Is it consonant with the English character to be told how much or how little our workman may labour? The workmen of England who have given themselves over to the tyranny of trades unions are rendered slaves to them.

Leaders of trade unions encourage dishonesty, but that is not all, they encourage a small output when a large one is an absolute necessity if England is to retain her place as a leading country in Europe. An “output” scrapped will mean treasure to Germany. If English labour declines, German labour will gain ascendancy here; that is certain. After the financial strain to which England has been subjected by the war, increased production is imperative. Strikes arrest production, and thus are harmful to the whole community. If they are permitted _ad lib._, what will be the result? Each strike costs millions to trade. What must the end be? Bankruptcy of the nation! Who will suffer? Labour will suffer first, because if capital is unobtainable labour cannot be paid for.

§ 11

If wages reach an extravagant sum, capital will not find the money to pay them. Again, who then will suffer? Labour, of course. These are truisms, but, being so, have they reached the ears and minds of Labour? Trades union leaders keep from the sheep they drive the knowledge of the butcher’s knife; they only tell their dupes what they (ignorant of the first laws of political economy) wish to hear. They flatter them with the hope that capital will finally be in their hands, that they are to govern the country, which is only to move while it drags the chariot of Labour. Our workmen are not prepared to rule, they are not mentally equipped to do so; their outlook, at present, is far too narrow. They see in government good only when it legislates for the advantage of their class, forgetting that there are other and equally important classes to be considered. And when speaking of Labour there is only one which appears to dominate in their minds, Industrialism as separate from Agriculture. The spread of Industrialism has pushed Agriculture aside; it has done even more, it has destroyed it in many parts of England. Agriculture must take precedence of Industrialism if we are to live on our own produce. The war ought to have taught us that, but has it? I have lived long enough to have seen the agriculture of our dear country productive and the people, relatively to now, content; when squalor was a far rarer spectacle than now. In great cities, alas, it must always be, for cities are artificial monstrosities where both wealth and poverty thrive in extremes, where idlers congregate and vice expands. But in country towns of reasonable dimensions and villages squalor had no abiding place when agriculture was the employment of the majority before the Juggernaut of Industrialism had begun its disastrous progress. There was work for all on the land.

§ 12

I remember the arrival of a threshing machine into “the street” of one of the most attractive villages in Kent, Otford. It was greeted with stones; the people did not want the noisy, smoking monster which was to take pleasant and healthy labour from so many. And they were right! The flail no longer threshes, reapers no longer reap, the sickle and scythe are rarely seen in the fields now, the plough is rarely drawn by oxen and horses. Machinery does it all now, and hundreds of thousands of agricultural labourers have had their work grabbed from them. Who can wonder, then, that Agriculture is understocked while Industrialism is overstocked? Hundreds of miles of corn-growing land are in disuse, waste land, once glowing with golden corn; a land of ashes and unproductive has taken its place. Where orchards stretched for miles once, flowering and fruiting abundantly, hideous factories have risen, belching out foul smoke destructive to man, beasts and vegetation. Where once copses, even small forests were, now a few skeletons, black and blasted, remind us of the beauty that _was_ and the devastation that _is_. Rivers and lakes which once sparkled with clean water under a bright sun, whose pools were filled with salmon and trout, have become little better than sewers. A greasy scum thickens the once glittering surface, and not a fish can live in its natural element, and, moreover, the water is poisoned, so we may not drink it. The spread of Industrialism means the spread of poison--poisoned land, water, and air, which, if not checked now, will cause serious deterioration of the health of England. When England was mainly agricultural, rosy-cheeked maidens and well-bronzed youths attested a healthy, vigorous life. Now, under Industrialism, the girls and youths are pale, sad-looking, and unhealthy. Why? Agricultural life is _natural_, industrial life is _artificial_! Of what use is money to a nation deprived of vigour and health? Rather is it an incubus than an incentive to real progress. Ill-health means idleness, slackness and inefficiency. Nothing can compensate for its departure.