Part 10
"The hall was curiously unfit for the business of a national Assembly. It is neither large, nor light enough. The acoustics are fair, but superfluous. For, who cares very much what any member other than himself is saying? In the midst there is a porter's lodge, in which sits a gentleman in the attire of the eighteenth century. This, as behoves a conservative Roman, did not meet with my disapproval. The only objection I made was that in my opinion he ought to have been clothed in all the various costumes in use since Magna Charta. The English, and the rest of the little ones, in utter contrast to ourselves, constantly vary their dress. We preferred to vary our inner selves.
"The subject of discussion, or rather of a score or so of monologues, was one of which in my time I have had the amplest experience. They proposed to give weekly a certain sum of money to anyone of their citizens who on reaching his seventieth year had arrived at the end of his financial tether. In my day I had given away millions to the populace, and my imperial successors had gone even very much further. The common people was thereby demoralised as is everybody, even parents, who accepts, year in year out, free gifts from a third person or his children. Being demoralised, such a recipient of donations becomes inevitably the most cruel enemy of his donor. Nothing contributed more to the downfall of Rome. A nation must consist of free and financially independent citizens, or it loses its most precious asset. How frequently, O Pericles, have you said to me, how much you regretted having introduced the same injurious donations into Athens. But this is the melancholy truth of all history: one learns from history one thing only, to wit, that no statesman has ever learned anything from history.
"In the midst of my sad reflections I could yet not help being amused by the speech of one member of the governing party, who belonged to that formidable mixture of faddists, formalists, cocksure-ists, and moral precisians who have in this country an influence that we should not have given to the members of the most exalted among the Roman patricians. Much as they are laughed at, they yet have the power of striking dread into the public and instilling hesitation into the feeble nerves of statesmen. The name of the orator in question was, if I am right, Harold Gox. He said:
"'Mr Speaker, it is with a satisfaction and self-complacency new even to me that I beg to submit my remarks on a subject than which there is no greater one; a subject, sir, that has no predicate except that of immensity; an immensity, sir, that exceeds infinitude itself; and last not least, an infinitude vaster than all other infinitudes: a moral infinity. This country, sir, was built up by morals and righteousness. Righteousness, I say, sir; and I will repeat it: righteousness. How did we come by our Empire? By righteousness. How did our colonists occupy vast continents? By righteousness. What was the guiding principle even of our national debt? Righteousness, in that we contracted it mainly by paying the foreigner to help us in beating our immoral enemies. Righteousness is the A and the Z of our glorious polity.
"'We cannot help being righteous; it is in us, over us, beside, beneath, and all through us. We have sometimes tried to be unrighteous; but, sir, we could not. It is not given to us, and we have only what is given to us.
"'Well then, sir, if that be so, as it undoubtedly is, beyond the shadow of a doubt; then I venture to say that any person that opposes the present bill of Old Age Pensions cannot but be an enemy of England, in that he is an enemy of righteousness.
"'What indeed, sir, can be fairer, juster, and more equitable than that they who have laboriously saved up a few sovereigns, should share them with those that have done everything in their power to have none?
"'Where there is nothing, there is death. Can a country introduce death as a regular constituent organ of its life? What in that case would righteousness do? She would blush green with shame, sir. Nothing would remain for her but to leave this country and to go to Germany or Turkey. Could we allow such a disaster? Would it not be necessary to hold or haul her back by ropes, strings, or any other instrument of our party machinery?
"'Just, pray, represent to yourself, sir, or to any other person, the actualities of the case. Here is a man of seventy. It is a noble feat of honourable perseverance to reach that age. It is, I make bold to submit, an evident proof of the favour and countenance of The Principle of All RIGHTEOUSNESS that the man was allowed to proceed so far.
"'He has worked all such days of his long life as he did not spend in reverential contemplation of the works of the Almighty. Who can blame him for that?
"'I go much further: who can possibly blame him for having focussed his attention rather on the liquid than on the solid bodies of Creation?
"'Each man has his own way of saying prayers.
"'Now, after having thus spent a long life in what has at all times been considered the essence of life; or as the ancient Romans used to formulate it, after having acted upon the noble doctrine of _ora et labora_ (pray and work), he finds himself landed, or rather stranded in the wilderness of penury. Sir, such a state of things is untenable, unbearable, and unrighteous.
"'I know full well that people who have never given righteousness the slightest chance persist in repeating the old fallacy, that a labourer ought to save up for a rainy day. But, pray, sir, is it not perfectly clear that this principle is of Egyptian origin, and comes therefore from a country where there is no rain?
"'In England, sir, there are 362 rainy days a year; therefore 3620 rainy days in ten years, 18,100 rainy days in fifty years. How shall, I ask you, that unfortunate labourer, or grocer, or author, save up for 18,100 days? That takes a capital of at least £25,000. Well, who has that capital? No one. The nation alone has it. Ergo, the nation must pay for the rain.
"'I have, sir, in my locker a great many shots like the preceding, but I will, out of modesty, not use them all. I will only dwell on one point. Sir, our opponents contend that the money needed for Old Age Pensions is not available unless it be taken from funds much more necessary for the public welfare. Now I ask, which are those funds? The answer I receive is that the nation needs more defensive measures against possible invasions on the part of a Continental power.
"'Sir, on hearing such nonsense one is painfully reminded of what Lord Bacon used to say: "_Difficile est satiram non scribere_."' (A voice from the Irish bench: 'Juvenal, and not Lord Bacon!') 'Well, Lord Percival, and not Lord Bacon, it amounts to the same.
"'An invasion? Sir, an invasion? How, for goodness' sake, do our opponents imagine such a thing to be possible? I know they say that Lord Roberts has declared an invasion of England a feasible thing. But has Lord Roberts ever invaded England? How can he know? How can anyone know?
"'They refer me to William the Conqueror. But, sir, is it not evident that William could not have done it had he not been the Conqueror? Being the Conqueror, he was bound to do it. Is there any such William amongst the Williams of the day? I looked them all up in the latest _Who's Who_--but not one of them came up to the requisite conditions.' (A voice: 'William Whiteley!') 'I hear, sir, the name of William Whiteley; and I reply that he is now too "Ltd." to undertake such a grand enterprise.
"'And more than anything else militating in my favour is the fact that the Germans do not so much as dream of doing this country the slightest harm. Look at the relationship between the Kaiser and the King; nephew and uncle. Who has ever heard that a nephew made war on an uncle? Take into consideration how the Kaiser behaved when lately visiting England. Did he not leave huge tips at Windsor? Did he not stroke children's cheeks? Did he not admire our houses? Who else has ever done that? He talked English all day long, and during part of the night. He read the _Daily Telegraph_ and took his tub every morning. Can there be stronger symptoms of his Anglophile soul?
"'A few weeks after he left England he went so far in his predilection of everything English that he even curtailed his moustaches.
"'His moustaches, sir, these the beacons of the German Empire, the hirsute hymn of Teutonia, her anchor, her lightning rod, her salvation!
"'To talk of such a man's hostile intentions against England is to accuse Dover Cliff, High Cliffe, or Northcliffe, or any other Cliff of base treachery. No, sir, there is no need of new expenses for defence on land; and as to the sea, we have only to follow the Chief Admiral's advice and go to sleep. Our principal force consists of our power to sleep on land as well as on sea. Once asleep, we can spend nothing. In that way there remains plenty of money for the Old Age Pensions, that glorious corrective of misery, that ventilator of property, and distillator of other men's pockets. I have not a word to add; the subject itself talks to every person of sense in a thousand tongues.'
"When the man had ended," Cæsar continued, "I asked one of the officials whether the orator was the clown of the house. The official looked daggers at me. He explained in a solemn voice that the orator was a staunch Liberal and Cobraite. The latter name was, I learnt, a little mistake in pronunciation; it ought to have been Cobdenite. Cobden, I was told, was a very great man. He succeeded in passing a measure which under the circumstances of his time was not altogether bad, although it drove the people away from the plough to the factories.
"However, he, like our Gracchi, imagined that what was good for his time must necessarily be good for all times. On the basis of a complete ignorance of the Continent, that is, of the Power that has always been and always will be the real regulator of the fundamental policy of England, Cobden thought he had got hold of an absolute truth, instead of a merely passing and temporary measure. Like all nations that have never gone through social and political cataclysms and are necessarily highly conservative, the English are totally lacking in historic perspective. Men of the class of Cobden, or such as the orator I had heard, are like their most renowned thinker, Herbert Spencer, absolutely devoid of historic thinking. They think in categories of quantity and matter; never in quality made by history.
"Columbus, who was with me, said:
"'You need not be unusually excited over what you see. Each nation cuts a different caper to the riddles and problems of life. The French, who used to be _des hommes_, while at present alas! they are only _des omelettes_, were in their prime of an aggressive attitude to all that touched them; the Germans were of an idealising temper, while their present mood is rather a tampering ideal; the Americans are full of the exploiting fever; and the English invariably take up a posture of expectativeness.
"'They pretend to believe what the Spartan King Archidamus always said: "One cannot by reasoning disentangle the future." This attitude pays the English best. First they let it be proved by the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and more particularly by the French that India can be conquered, and then--they take it. Even so with Egypt, Canada, the West Indies, and South Africa. Expectativeness is their motto.
"'When I came to England trying to persuade them to help me in the discovery of America, they acted the wise Archidamus, and would not give me linen for one sail. When I had discovered it, then they took as much of it, and more than they could swallow. This method of expectativeness has had much historic quality, to use your words, O Cæsar, for a time. But I am afraid it is beginning to be worn out.
"'I for one know (and have you, and Pericles, and Joan of Arc, and Napoleon, and so many others not told me the same thing when we used to meet, at the wish of Joan, at Rheims Cathedral?), I for one know what these little ones do not even dream of, so infatuated are they with the power of Reason and Science and similar machinery, namely, that our force to forefeel things of the future is far greater, at least in some of us, than our capacity to analyse or comprehend things of the present or the past. Our whole being is not so much an upshot of the past as a projection of the future. Hence the astounding assurance with which all of us now assembled in Olympus felt in advance what later on we actually did carry out. I should have discovered America had it never existed; as I actually discovered it thinking that I discovered the eastern side of Asia.'
"I very well see," said Cæsar, "what you mean. The English have no forefeeling of things to come. They do not note that their whole situation in historic space has in the last generation completely changed, and that therefore their old method of expectativeness, which lived mainly on the blunders of other nations, has become quite obsolete. They are where we were after Zama, after the end of the Second Punic War, or the end of the third century B.C., as they say. So they are at the end of their second Hundred Years' War with France. But while we distinctly felt that after the Carthaginians, whom we had defeated, we were inevitably compelled to reduce the Macedonians, and not shrinking from our heavy task we did defeat them, though with tremendous effort; the English do shrink from doing what the uncommon sense of the future as well as the common sense of the present but too clearly tell them to do.
"The blunder of France and Spain which was the chief ally of England in former times, I mean, the blunder of these great nations in making war on England only at times when they had four to ten other wars on hand; that capital blunder the dominating Power of this moment will never commit.
"Germany will not embroil herself in any Continental war while fighting England. This is indisputable.
"For the first time in modern times England will be at grips with a first-class Continental Power which is in a position to concentrate all her strength on England. This completely novel situation requires completely novel methods of meeting it. Yet, the average Englishman is quite unaware of all that. What ruined mighty Macedon? Not the lack of a powerful army, since our oldest generals, such as Æmilius Paulus, trembled at the thunderlike onslaught of the famous Macedonian _phalanx_, or infantry. But instead of joining the Carthaginians full-heartedly while we smarted under the scourge of Hannibal, they misread the whole situation and waited, and waited, until--we were able to concentrate upon them, even to incorporate the best Greek forces in our armies, and the end was disaster for Macedon.
"Just listen to the speech now going on. The Leader of the Opposition is speaking.
* * * * *
"'Mr Speaker, I am broadly astonished at the statements of the hon. member for Alarmville, who has just painted the international horizon in tints of Indian ink. I cannot imagine where he takes his tints from. Does he want to pose as a political Tintoretto?'
"(Much applause--most members send for the _Encyclopædia Imperialis_ to find out what _Tintoretto_ means.)
"'The horizon, as everybody knows, is only an imaginary line, and each man has his own horizon. If therefore the horizon of the hon. member be as black as jet, I have not much to say against it, and will send him my condolences. But why should he obtrude his horizon on that of all the rest of peace-loving humanity? I also have my horizon.'
"(The hon. member: 'Horizons, if you please.')
"'Horizons? More than one horizon? Perhaps; it probably needs more than one to descend to that of the hon. member.'
"(Opposition members: 'Deucedly clever, by Jove!')
"'On my horizon I see no cloud, no vapours, no foundations of any belief in storms or tempests of any kind. What conceivable reason should the Germans have for attacking us? I fail, I utterly fail to see it. I know that my adversaries say that whatever reasons Germany may or may not have to attack us, we, these people say, we have a plethora of motives to attack them. This point, this argument is so devoid of point or argument, that I cannot waste the time of the House in refuting it. It refutes itself. Why should we attack the Germans? Because we have no reasons to do so. That is all that one can advance. Do we want their colonies? Why, we are eternally obliged to them for having taken them and so rid us of a sterile investment. Do we want part of Germany? Neither parts nor the whole of it. Have we not ceded to them Heligoland? Sir, it is, as I said, impossible to detect a single argument in favour of our attacking Germany. The minds that counsel such a violent measure are influenced by apprehensions arising out of future developments. They are anticipative souls to whom the secrets of the future have been revealed by the timorousness of the present. I respect souls; I respect timorousness; but I refuse to attribute to it any oracular wisdom. The future is dark, three shades darker than the present, which is impenetrable enough as it is.
"'There remains, then, only the other alternative: Germany seriously means to attack us. Well, sir, let us analyse this statement. What earthly good would such an attack do to the Germans? I hear they covet Denmark and Holland, as the natural outlets of their Empire which at present is like a muffled head; and since England cannot permit their taking possession of Denmark and Holland, the Germans must fight England. This argument, sir, lacks all the elements of truth. It lacks geographical force, historical momentum, political sense. Denmark, we all know, is quite in the east of Germany between the Elbe river and the Lake of Baikal.'
"(Uproarious hilarity in parts of the House. A voice: 'Lake Baikal is in Siberia!')
"'I hear, sir, Lake Baikal is in Siberia. As if I had not known it, sir! I say Baikal as the scientific term of Baltic, which is in reality Bi-Kalic, or rapidly speaking: Baikal.'
"(Opposition members: 'Deucedly clever--he got out of _that_ scrape!')
"'Denmark which, as I said, is in the east of Germany does not muffle her at all. It is a highly artistic country and in the Bay of Catgut are fished the best strings for violins.'
"(A voice: 'Sound of Kattegat!')
"'I hear, sir, that it is the Sound of Kattegat, but I think every patriotic Englishman says Catgut. But to return to my argument: the Germans being very musical, love violins, and consequently love the Kattegat, as the hon. voice says, and love the Danes. As long as the Danes give their fine catguts, the Germans will certainly not think of doing them any harm.'
"(An angry voice: 'But Denmark is in the north of Germany!')
"'I hear, sir, that Denmark has moved from her ancient moorings. If that be so, then I can only conclude that Germany has still less reason to covet the possession of Denmark. For, is it not clear, or _luce clarius_, that Denmark is a sort of nightcap to Germany? The Germans themselves typify their nation as a _Deutscher Michel_ (Teuton Michael) with a nightcap on his head. Why, this nightcap is Denmark. The Teuton likes a nightcap.'
"(General laughter.)
"'All Teutons do.'
"(Renewed laughter.)
"'Need I say more?
"'And as to Holland, I am bound to say that it passes my comprehension how anyone can seriously maintain that Germany covets Holland. I hear that she covets Holland because it is exasperating to a great Power like Germany that the entire delta of her greatest river, the Rhine, belongs to a small and hostile Power. It is asked of me, how I, or for the matter of that any Englishman, would like to see the mouth of the Thames in the power of the Belgians? Sir, I should not like to see that, to be sure. But the case is quite different. We English have no river like the Rhine, which in its upper course gives the most generous wine, and in its lower course is nothing but a vile combination of hydrogen and oxygen, commonly called water. If, for better illustration, the Thames in her upper course gave the finest whisky----'
"(Great uproar among two-thirds of the members, all teetotallers.)
"'Or, I beg your pardon, ginger beer or cyder, we should not greatly mind to whom the lower course belonged. But, sir, it is a well-known and a most patriotic fact that the Thames river contains nothing else than water. Water, sir, is the panacea of this nation!'
"(Violent applause from two-thirds of the House.)
"'Yes, the panacea, the salvation, the resurrection, and the rehabilitation of this country.'
"(Cries: 'Righteousness!--Righteousness!')
"'We cannot get enough of it. Water in our throats--in our papers, books, and speeches. Water in our dramas, novels, drugs; water, water--three kingdoms for water!'
"(Wild and frantic applause of the whole House.)
"'Now, sir, I maintain all this does not hold good with our friends the Germans. They do drink wine and beer and schnapps. They cannot be without them. Their Rhine gives them wine in plenty in that part of its course which belongs to them. What does it, what can it matter to them to whom the lower part of the Rhine, full of mere water, does or does not belong?'
"('Hear! Hear!')
"'The Germans are a practical nation. Does any person; I say more than that, _can_ any person say that the Germans will wage a great war in order to possess themselves of water, when all that time they already have excellent wine? I could understand, sir, that if the Germans occupied the watery mouth of the Rhine only, and not its middle and upper course full of noble wine----'
"(Several voices: 'Order! Order! Retract noble.')
"'Well, well, the House will allow me to say "noble" wine, inasmuch as wine has not only four or fourteen quarters, but innumerable ones.'
"(Opposition cries: 'Excellent! deucedly clever!')
"'To return to my argument: I could understand that the Germans, if they had only the lower course of the Rhine, would forthwith wage war to acquire the middle and upper course of the river. We learn from Tacitus that they are a very thirsty nation, and this authentic news is, as readers of more modern authors tell me, not given the lie by the contemporary Germans either. But under the existing circumstances the Rhine--or Hock--argument, meant to prove German hostility, falls into the water near the Dutch border, wherever that may be.
"'There is finally, sir, another so-called argument _re_ Holland and Germany. It is stated that the Germans covet Holland on account of the Dutch colonies in Asia and South America. These colonies, as everybody knows, are exiguous.'
"(An angry voice: 'About 800,000 English square miles.')
"'I hear, sir, the Dutch colonies are about 800,000 English square miles. Of course, my information is taken from Tacitus; and no doubt since his time some additions have been made to the colonial microcosm of the Dutch. But even if that were so, and if the Dutch actually possessed 800,000 square miles of colonies, it is quite patent that these colonies, if not exiguous in extent, are exiguous in value: otherwise they would long ago have been governed from Downing Street.'
"(Approving laughter--half of the members smile knowingly, while the other half pat themselves on the backs of their neighbours.)
"'Do you mean to tell me that the Germans will wage an immense war for the sake of what we have not deigned to pick up? They are, I know, past masters in the use of offals for purposes of food and drink. But surely in matters of politics they want more than offals.