WHAT IS WRONG WITH ENGLAND?
BY BISIIOP WELLDON; DEAN OF DURHAM.
THE question raised in the Spectator a September 19th ---What is wrong with England ?—is a question of profound and vital interest at the present time. It is more easily asked than answered, as your article shows. That something is wrong no thoughtful person doubts ; but what it is that is wrong, and how it can be set right, are topics which excite grave differences of opinion.
May I begin by saying that I agree with you in recog- nizing what may not unfitly be called the short-sighted- ness of the British people ? It is perhaps their lack of imagination which prevents them from foreseeing dangers until the dangers lie at their very doors. How many Englishmen anticipated thirty years ago the approaching political transformation of India ? How many anticipated fifteen years ago that events were tending to the greatest War in human history, and that a War which would be waged by the Germans in utter disregard of the slowly established conventions of civilized humanity in regard to warfare on land and by sea ? To-day there is in most British minds a tacit assumption that, whatever may be wrong in the political or social state of the British people, Great Britain will somehow "muddle through" its difficulties, in national as well as in international affairs, and that no serious or permanent injury will be done to the British Constitution.
Yet it is wellnigh impossible to mistake, among " the signs of the times," not a few of the phenomena which portend, or may not unjustly be held to portend, revolu- tion. They have always occurred in revolutionary eras, not less in the age of the French Revolution than in that of the Russian Revolution which has issued in the Bol- shevist or Soviet Government of Russia. They are, e.g., a hatred of free speech, a repudiation of the Christian moral law, an antipathy to democratic principles, and a fanatical crusade against religion. How widely and how violently these symptoms of the revolutionary spirit are operative in Great Britain to-day it is no easy matter to diagnose ; but they cannot be denied or ignored. In Russia there is only too conspicuous evidence that the revolutionary party, which has seized the reins of power, declines to tolerate writers or speakers who try, however pacifically, to controvert its views, that it exhibits an ever-growing impatience of the restraints imposed upon human nature by the validity of contracts, especially of marriage, and by the sanctity of life ; that it approves spoliation and licentiousness on a large scale ; that it asserts and maintains its title to power as resting upon sheer arbitrary force, and not in any sense upon the will of the people; and above all that it fiercely persecutes, and would if it could entirely extirpate, Christianity, because the Church, despite her many faults and failings, lifts, as she must ever lift, her voice in an abiding protest against unrighteousness. All these symptoms are flagrant in Russia to-day. They are less far menacing as yet in Great Britain, but beyond all dispute they exist.
The Government has accepted, the great responsibility of buying off, as it were, revolution during nine months by the subsidy which has been granted to the mining popula- tion. That subsidy was, I think, justified in the circum- stances in which it was granted ; but the circumstances themselves indicated that the Government had not pre- pared itself for the emergency of a strike so widely extended that it might and would have paralysed for a time all British industry. It remains now to be seen whether the Government will be ready and able at the beginning of May in next year to oppose successfully, if need be, an industrial dislocation of even greater magni- tude. Some at least among the miners and the railway men and other manual workers, and I am afraid among their leaders, are men who do not desire or intend to promote a peaceable solution of the industrial problem. They are anarchists, bent upon revolution, and upon civil war as leading to revolution, without any definite idea of reconstructing the social edifice which has been slowly but surely raised during long centuries of Christian history.
Apart from the shortsightedness to which I have already referred, the root of the evil which threatens the civilized world to-day may, I think, be defined generally as selfishness. It is the selfishness of class or party rather than personal selfishness ; and just because it is not or is not in any high degree personal selfishness, it fails at times to be recognized as selfishness at all. Yet if the employers of labour in the Victorian era had taken a more en- lightened view of their obligations to their fellow-citizens who were employed in their industries, if they had re- nounced the prevalent doctrine of the Manchester School in favour of a sympathetic spirit resting upon the common humanity which bound or ought to have bound all classes together, the antagonism which creates and fosters industrial disputes would not have been so strongly pro- nounced as it is to-day.
Nobody who lives among the miners, as I do,.can enter- tain towards them any other feeling than admiration of the heroism which they display on every occasion of disaster in the collieries. Nobody can grudge them the full amount of such living wage as it is possible under present conditions to pay them. I agree with you. in the statement that "to talk about a wholesale reduction of Wages as a cure for our distress is tantamount to accepting class warfare as inevitable."
But the authors of strikes and lock-outs have not adequately realized that the battle between Capital and Labour is not limited in its effects to the classes of the employers and the employed. If they declare battle, it touches the life of the whole community ; it inflicts untold hardships upon thousands of men and women who are not in any sense concerned with the origin of industrial disputes,. and are sometimes more straitened in their pecuniary circumstances than the majority of the toilers in mines, in workshops and upon the railways. They are thinking of their own class and not of the nation, still less are they thinking of the Empire. If they had travelled over the world they would, probably have come to see that no human institution affords such an assurance of justice, freedom and progress among all its various races as the British Empire.
Short-sightedness, then, and selfishness are in my judg- ment the two corroding evils of life in modern England. If I were to seek a remedy of them, I should look for it in the teaching of patriotism and religion, even more in the homes than in the schools. The great exhibition at Wembley, so far as it has familiarized the people of Great Britain with the magnificence of the British Empire, will have lifted them, as it were, out of themselves and have taught them that they are parts of a great whole ; and it will or it may prompt the feeling that they will not by any selfish action of their own, however justifiable in their eyes it may seem to be, imperil the safety and the dignity of the supreme charge which is committed to them now, as it will hereafter be committed to future genera- tions of the British people. But it is only by spiritual power that the materialism which is the fountain-head of selfishness in the world to-day can be cured. The nation has suffered from the decadence of the religious sentiment. It is morally enfeebled not by hostility alone, but by indifference to religion. The spirit of antichrist is abroad. It asserts itself in a blind enthusiasm for the doctrines and practices of Bolshevism. But against it stands the Spirit of Him whose golden rule is the only .principle by which peace in industrial as in international - relations can be restored and maintained. The Church of Christ in Great Britain will deserve the condemnation of posterity if she does not now rise to her high opportunity of spiritualiing the national life anew. - • -
Previous page
