The War and the Mind Oe Great Britain

I

IT is not difficult to trace the reactions of the great wars of principle in the past on the imagination of the combatants. By a war of principle is meant a war in which peoples are consciously defending some political idea, in contrast to wars that are solely concerned with the ambitions of rulers, the machinations and intrigues of commercial enterprise, or the restless movements of a growing race pushing here and there for more elbow-room in the world. In certain struggles some great issue st ands out amid all these motives and causes of conflict. A great many questions were thrown into t he melting-pot when France faced Europe in 1793: all the world is interested in the problems that were raised when Western Europe faced Germany in 1914. But in both cases there was one great overruling crisis of principle. France was fighting in 1793, even as the Allies were fighting in 1914, to give democracy its opportunity in Europe.

This was clearly recognized in Germany, where a distinguished German professor declared four years ago that Germany was making war on the ideas of 1789. The organization of the German State has been based on the belief that Europe made a false step with the ideas of the French Revolution, and that what the world needed was a return to the ideas of Frederick the Great. The war was to vindicate and establish this theory. The same view of the meaning of the German challenge in 1914 was taken by the eminent French historian M. Aulard:—

‘ The present, war, the war we are waging against Prussian militarism, against Prussianized Germany, is but the continuation of the French Revolution. We are fighting for the same cause for which our ancestors fought in 1793 and in the year II.’

This was the dominating issue. It is true that, as the war developed, the ideals for which the Allies were fighting have sometimes been obscured, the temptations of the old diplomatic world distracting men’s minds from the true purport of the struggle. Fortunately, the entry of America into the war restored the full sense of its meaning, and whatever the designs and expectations of this or that group, this or that interest, the normal Englishman hopes about this war, not that it will make his country richer or more powerful, but that it will create a world more favorable to the aims of democracy and the spirit of freedom.

A century ago England was profoundly influenced by the circumstances of her quarrel with France. England and France had often been at war. In the war that began in 1793 and ended in 1815 both nations behaved outwardly very much as they had behaved in former wars. This was Burke’s grand complaint against Pitt. There was the same filching of territory: ambition and intrigue took the same forms, if they found a larger theatre for their operations. But the war of 1793 affected the imagination of England in a direct and lasting manner. We were fighting against France; it was more important that we were fighting against French principles. Pitt’s phrase, ‘ the liquid fire of Jacobinism,’ described the real object of our terror and our hatred. French doctrines frightened our rulers much more than French power. We derided French governments, not without reason, for their inconsistency in talking about popular choice while they were seizing cities here and states there on the good oldfashioned plan of tradition. But our ancestors would not have liked them any the better if they had kept their principles with the most scrupulous fidelity. For by the stability of Europe Pitt understood the maintenance of an equilibrium between a few great powers, without any kind of reference to the wishes and feelings of the people they governed.

The ideals that France preached were more dangerous and disturbing than the cynicism she practised. This explains why the feeling between the aristocracy and the few distinguished aristocrats, led by Fox, who welcomed French principles while they criticized French policy, was so bitter and irreconcilable. So long as England was fighting against Louis XIV, it was a contest of military powers; the war with Jacobin France was a spiritual conflict , and there was danger that French ideas might invade our society, even if French soldiers were unable to set foot on our shores.

To-day again we have been fighting, not merely against a formidable enemy, but against a theory of life and politics; only in this case we were fighting on the side of the principles that we opposed in 1793. The contrast is seen in the difference in the domestic history of England during the two wars. In the earlier war Parliament passed acts to suppress trade-unions, and the agitation for Parliamentary Reform was resisted as Jacobinical and seditious. ‘Would you choose the occasion of a hurricane for repainting your house?’ asked Windham, who was Burke’s chief disciple. Burke himself denied that there was any particular in which the British constitution could be improved. Prejudice against democratic notions led statesmen to use language about the mass of the nation which at other times would have been judged dangerously provocative. Pitt talked of the artisans of the new industrial north as ‘idle and profligate,’and Burke used an expression that was not easily forgotten by the reformers— ‘the swinish multitude.’

Turn to the present war, and we find that the trade-unions have been scarcely less important, scarcely less integral a part of the administration of the country than the House of Commons itself. Voluntary recruiting, exemptions from military service on the ground of industrial need, the rationing of the textile industries, the control and organization of trade — all these administrative measures have been conducted with the responsible coöperation of the trade-unions. And Parliament, so far from recognizing the national emergency as a reason for resisting or postponing electoral reform, has enfranchised six million women and has more than doubled the electorate.

This association in the British mind of all democratic principles with a dangerous and bitter enemy had ominous consequences in the history of the nineteenth century. It brought ruin on all the liberal ideas, preached by Fox and his followers, which would have saved England from a disgraceful and a fatal chapter in the history of her relations with the Irish people: she might otherwise have escaped that distressing legacy which still embarrasses our good name in the sight of the world. But it had consequences not less important on the development of our own life and our own institutions. For it helped to determine the form of our Industrial Revolution and to inspire the gospel that contemporary economists and politicians preached with such mischievous success to their own and to succeeding generations. And as the most important question we can ask about the effect of the present war is the question whether or not we are going to release the life and the prospects of our society from the tyranny of these ideas, it is worth while to examine their character and their origin.

II

If we turn to the writings and speeches of economists and politicians of a century ago, we are struck by their confident tone. Brougham and Macaulay believed emphatically that the miracles of invention and adaptation that make up the story of our mechanical triumphs during the early phases of the Revolution promised mankind complete power over its surroundings. A few eccentric persons like Thomas Love Peacock questioned this optimism: readers of Gryll Grange and Crotchet Castle will remember the fun he pokes at the ‘Steam Intellect Society’ and the march of mind. But it was the general view that the discovery of the uses of steam had provided the key to most of the problems of life, and that Great Britain, in full possession of these secrets, was stepping out on a course of triumph and wealth.

Now, it would seem reasonable to suppose that a great increase in the power of man over his surroundings (‘Nowhere,’ said Macaulay, ‘does man exercise such a dominion over matter’) would lead to a general improvement in the whole standard of life. A group of settlers living on an island on terms of equal comradeship would find life easier and simpler for each and for all, as new devices wore invented to save labor and economic effort. But when we look at the history of the mass of the people living in the districts that were the centres of the new industry, — in Lancashire, for instance, and the West Riding of Yorkshire,— we find that just the opposite has happened. The majority of people in the districts were better off, freer, and living with a wider range of initiative and enterprise in 1750 than in 1830. This is the great standing sorrow of the Industrial Revolution. Something of this atmosphere of tragedy clings to the villages and the hills of the West Riding. The bleak and sombre landscape that gives such a setting to Charlotte Brontë’s works seems to speak of the sad destinies of the hardy men and women, spinners, weavers, combers, croppers, who worked in the old days in their homes and rode across the hills with packs on their horses’ backs. On this world the Industrial Revolution fell like a plague, or a war. It is not altogether surprising that the deterioration of their standard of life escaped the notice of the optimists of the day, for this whole world was more or less strange to them. But it is surprising that Brougham and Macaulay were not more impressed by the material aspect of the new civilization: by the hideous, squalid towns that grew up round the new factories, by the character which the look and the arrangements of these towns gave to the population that was to benefit by the great discoveries of science.

This seems strange to the modern mind, and it is intelligible only if we think ourselves back into the moral atmosphere of the time. This is easier to do because that atmosphere has hung about our thinking down to the present day. Roughly speaking, we may say that the men who welcomed the Industrial Revolution as the dawn of a great age of discovery and human power believed that the law of progress demanded that the mass of men and women should live in poverty, and with no control over their own lives. It has been the custom sometimes during the war to talk of Marshal Foch’s two armies: one an army of sacrifice, the other an army of victory. The first army was to resist, suffering tremendous losses, hoping only by its hardihood to create the opportunity for the ultimate triumph of the army of victory. In the same way our ancestors thought of the mass of men and women engaged in the new industry. They were an army of sacrifice. True, it was a dreadful spectacle that they presented. The records of the Committee of the House of Commons over which Michael Sadler presided tell a story of the sufferings and degradation of the children of the Lancashire and Yorkshire factory population that nobody can read to-day without emotion. The early pictures of the state of the Lancashire towns, revealed in the reports of Chadwick to the first Board of Health, make one wonder how any race could have survived such conditions of living. But most of the ruling class believed that this was inevitable, and that the ignorance and servitude of the many were as necessary to the development of the great Industrial Revolution to which England looked forward as the enlightenment and the riches of the few.

Why was this?

The answer is that the Industrial Revolution broke upon a society accustomed to certain fixed ideas of inequality and subordination. Those ideas had been encouraged by the course of English history from the break-up of the monasteries, the inclosure of the common lands, and the establishment of a social oligarchy as the ruling power, absorbing all the functions of government and all the opportunities of development and education. To these ideas the war with France gave a tremendous stimulus. The first impressions of the French Revolution in England were favorable; but when the reaction came, it was overwhelming. It was not merely in the world of landlords and rich merchants that the ideas of equality and freedom were abhorrent. Bamford, a Lancashire weaver, has left an account of the early efforts of the English reformers, and he shows that a workman who talked about democracy ran a good risk of being put in the nearest horse-pond by his fellows. Equality was a French idea, and the Frenchman was the enemy. The Industrial Revolution took a form that was fatal to the ideas of equality.

Mr. Belloc goes too far in suggesting in his book, The Servile State, that the capital for the new industries came exclusively from the rich, for a great many of the new employers were poor men who scraped together a little money and started a small factory. Robert Owen was one of many who started from small beginnings. Gaskell, a contemporary writer, says that the men who succeeded in the industry ‘were raised by their own efforts, commencing in a very humble way, and pushing their advance by a series of unceasing exertions, having a very limited capital to begin with, or even none at all save their own labor.’ It is, therefore, a mistake to argue that the new industry was capitalized entirely by rich men. In truth, one of the strange features of t he Industrial Revolution is the fact that the big merchants who had provided the capital for the earlier forms in which industry was capitalized did not become the pioneers of the new processes. The new capital was provided largely by small men.

But Mr. Belloc is perfectly right in his conclusion that the disastrous form that the new society took was determined by the moral atmosphere of the time. Two forces might have checked the new tyranny, the tyranny that swallowed up the whole life of society in this new industrial system. One was a sense of equality — a feeling for human dignity and freedom. The other was the corporate spirit that would have enabled bodies of men and women to resist by means of some kind of social organization the sweeping claims of the new power. Neither of these forces had any place in English society. A corporate sentiment had been fostered and maintained by constitutions of the past: the universities, the guilds, the Church. But the universities had become the private belongings of the aristocracy; the guilds had disappeared; the Church had become only one aspect of the governing class. Puritanism again had been an intensely individualistic influence on business and commerce. It was only in the trade-unions that this spirit was effectively maintained, and they were not strong enough to hold their own against the ruling powers. For the ruling class, which might in some circumstances have restrained the new power of capital, as a danger to society, threw the reins to it, believing that the more complete that power, the greater would be the prosperity of the State. The new masters of industry had only to declare their wishes and the government made haste to obey them.

There was then no corporate unit that could give conscious expression and vigor to any body of opinion or interest t hat was threatened by the new development. The inclosure of the commons, which had destroyed the old peasantry with all the bonds which brought its members together, had been the signal for the Agrarian Revolution which created the agrarian proletariat. The Industrial Revolution found certain obstacles in its way in the organized combinations of particular classes of workers. Charlotte Brontë’s novel Shirley gives a vivid account of one such struggle. But it was an unequal conflict. On the one side were the ruling powers and the vigorous capitalists of the new industry, preaching a simple doctrine that the mass of men and women were to be the instruments of the new system; that education, decent living, leisure, and any encouragement to the use of their minds would make them discontented with their inevitable lot, and thereby make them less efficient instruments. Mrs. Trimmer, one of the leading educationalists of the day, explained that, though she wanted some instruction for the poor, it was only such instruction as would make the poor ‘less disgusting to their superiors.’ On the other side were groups of workers able to organize themselves in defiance of the law, with great difficulty, sometimes in isolated unions, sometimes in larger combinations, in order to dispute the power of their masters at this or that point. There could be no question of the issue of such a conflict. The industrial system, with its concentration of power in the hands of the few and the regimentation of the mass of workers as irresponsible wage-earners, became a means, not for making a people more free, but for making authority stronger.

This theory, a kind of complacent Calvinism, was challenged by Shaftesbury and those who struggled with him for factory acts and mines acts. Shaftesbury accepted the general doctrine of subordination, and he had no sympathy with trade-unions or the workers’ demands for political rights. But he would not accept the sacrifice of human life and human happiness which the industrial system seemed to his contemporaries to demand. A more direct and passionate challenge came from the Chartists, who disputed not merely the claim of the industrial system to dictate the general conditions of life, but also the whole doctrine of inequality. But the Chartist movement failed, and the reaction of that failure on the working-class mind was seen in the temper of politics for the rest of the century. The note of revolution disappeared. The industrial system was accepted. And the conventional respect for the claims of that system limited all our ambitions and our ideas.

For the last few years before the war there was a new ferment. Mr. Wells has given a picture of this social unrest in Joan and Peter. In the strikes that were frequent, in the talk of the more thoughtful labor leaders, in discussions and policy, a new spirit was beginning to appear. It was significant that the most important piece of constructive thinking was contributed, not by any of the old intellectual leaders, but by a young man who, after a brilliant career at Oxford, had settled down to devote to the cause of industrial reform talents that most men in his position would have employed in the service of the Treasury or in making a career at the bar. This was Mr. G. D. H. Cole, author of The World of Labour. Mr. Cole was given an appointment on the staff of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers — a remarkable event to those who know the trade-unions’ suspicion of middle-class advisers; and in that position he has shown that he has great gifts as an administrator. Already, then, before the war there was the beginning of a new spirit, an impatience, not merely of the injustices of the industrial system, but of what appeared to be its whole character. Freedom and democracy were casting ambitious glances in new directions.

III

What effect will the war have on that system?

The two most important facts about our society before the war were that it accepted more or less consciously the argument that, in considering the reform of its life or institutions, we had to think first of the needs of the industrial system, and that it acquiesced in all the gross inequalities of life which resulted from this belief. Consider our towns. Could anyone imagine that those who designed them had any idea that they were to be the homes of men and women with minds to develop, with imaginations to nourish, with leisure to use for the recreation and the health of their bodies? They served none of these purposes, for they were not meant to serve any of them. They were simply an aspect of an industrial system which refused to recognize that the mass of men and women had any business with education, recreation, or the wider and spiritual purposes of life. The age which thought of men, women, and children as ‘hands’ for feeding the machines of industries had no use for libraries, galleries, playgrounds, or any of the forms in which beauty and space could bring comfort and nourishment to the human mind. As Morris said in the ‘March Wind,’ —

Consider again our education system. It is quite untrue in one sense to say that England before the war despised education. Parents of the professional classes have been ready to make great sacrifices to send their boys to a public school. What most of them valued in the public school was its atmosphere of comradeship, its tone and standards of mutual honor and loyalty, its opportunities for healthy and developing games. How far the English public school is successful as an educational force; how far its aims, methods, spirit, equipment, are adequate or well-conceived; how far, in other words, England has understood education — these are questions on which there is active and endless controversy. For the purposes of this argument it is more important to point out that, whereas a very expensive education was judged to be necessary for the children of a small class, the nation was quite prepared to let the children of the working class go into the mill at twelve, and that the children of the poor living in large towns and even in villages had to find their playgrounds in the streets.

In the middle of the nineteenth century our educational resources were scandalously deficient. Everybody remembers how they were described by Matthew Arnold and Carlyle. What was the nation’s answer? There was a burst of public-school expansion, and nine of our chief public schools were founded in twenty years. But for the working classes scarcely anything was done. It was not till 1870 that there was a universal system, and the standard of efficiency was deplorably low. And down to the war itself the nation showed singularly little sense of responsibility for its children. We washed our hands of all responsibility for the boys and girls who left school at thirteen or fourteen. What became of them? In a great number of cases they became riveters’ boys or errand-boys or vanboys; they dropped into some occupation which gave no training and left them stranded a few years later.

The Consultative Committee of the Board of Education issued a report in 1909 which pointed out a terrible truth, on which Mr. R. H. Tawney, one of the brilliant pioneers of the Workers’ Educational Association, had long insisted: —

‘There are signs that the factory system (where its operations are not held in check by the conscience of the employer or by the regulations of the State) is beginning to seize upon the improved human material turned out by the elementary schools at the close of the day-school course. Certain branches of machine production are being so organized as to make profitable the employment of boy and girl adolescent labor in businesses which, while demanding some intelligence and previous training, are in themselves deadening to the mind.’

Persons who talk of reconstruction mean different things by the term.

Some mean merely a more efficient nation on the old lines, greater output, energy better organized, mechanical improvements, industrial expansion. Others think of a nation on new lines, and they believe that the nation will emerge from the war prepared for a moral revolution. And the greatest revolution of all would be the emancipation of our minds from the bondage of this tradition.

Let us imagine what a difference it would make if we started boldly by asking what are the conditions that are essential to the good life and the free development, not of a class or a favored few, but of the community as a whole; if we put the industrial system out of our minds until we have decided what kind of a life a society ought to build for itself.

This is what the war has done for a great number of people. In one sense war must inevitably breed inequality and injustice. But it is true also that it is the nursery of a new spirit of justice. This war has been the opportunity of the common man. No higher service can be rendered to the nation than the service of the simple soldier, yesterday, perhaps, a dock laborer uncertain about the morrow, or an errand-boy with the most precarious footing in our social system, who stands in the trench waiting for the cold dawn and an expected attack. What more can a nation ask of a man than she has asked of four or five millions during these suffering years? And the man who has made these sacrifices will not accept the values of the old system. War makes life cheap, but it does not make a man’s life cheap in his own eyes. The more ready he is to risk it for an idea, the greater the value he puts upon it. The soldier who returns has broken through the strongest force in our nature, the customary standard, the habit of accepting the world as he finds it. In the old world he was the instrument of a system; in the new world he means to be in some sense the master of his life. The industrial system is challenged no longer by the reasoned discontent of a few, or the slowly spreading impatience of the many: it is challenged directly by the most powerful sentiments in a great body of the men who serve its needs.

This is a new moral force in our society: the presence of a great mass of men, conscious of sacrifices and services, who look at the world with new eyes. In the old days it seemed natural that a few people should have a life of spacious comfort and leisure, and that the great mass of the nation should live under conditions which gave no opportunity for a free and full life. The ‘comfortable classes’ had two or three holidays abroad every year; carters were on strike in London the year before the war, because they were not allowed a single day’s holiday until they had had ten years’ service. It seemed natural — this is the important truth about it — to poor as well as to rich. The war has made it seem grossly contrary to nature: the common sufferings of the trenches have taught a new philosophy to the soldiers: the experience of rationing has taught a new sense of equality in the most docile of our villages.

Our bonds have been broken in another way. In one sense war exhibits more than anything else the impotence of man. Here are twenty millions suffering every kind of horror because a few people, by willing certain ends, have brought the whole world into this enveloping net. On the other hand, the war has revealed the wonderful resourcefulness of man. Take Great Britain alone, with her millions drafted into the army, and millions drafted into munition works. She could yet maintain her economic life, and feed, clothe, and arm other nations as well. The word impossible has dropped out of our language. It is seen that the human will and human energy have an infinitely greater power over the circumstances of life than anybody had supposed. New methods of organization, new forms of social effort, have been discovered.

Thus, at the very time when men are demanding a new kind of society, able to live its own life and pursue its own spiritual ends, freed at last from the lingering shadow of the Industrial Revolution, a new experience opens up new avenues for our ambition. The war has brought at the same time a new faith in human power and a new sense of the freedom and the range of the human will. The next few years will show whether our statesmanship can satisfy the spirit created by the war among the millions of men and women who have learned to ask of their common life that it should satisfy the spiritual needs of men and women, or whether it will break down under the influence of the forces which still judge a society by its industrial power. On the answer to that question depends the future of our civilization.