WHAT IS WRONG WITH ENGLAND ?
BY STEPHEN GWYNN.
AN Irishman's opinion about England is formed ' with some detachment, and I suppose that is why I am allowed to state mine. The trouble seems mostly moral. Success breeds self-confidence—that is why nothing succeeds like success—and England had for all living memory been conspicuously successful. Five years ago England was convinced that if international trade revived, England would somehow get the lion's share of it, the possibility of being undersold by corm.: tries with a lower exchange was an academic consider.; ation, ignored by a race who had always succeeded in placing their goods. Now, there is uneasiness where there was 'self-confidence, and that to some extent cramps the ' Englishman's form. He even begins to doubt whether his ' traditional contempt for' education has been justified : whether victory in the struggle will always go to the self-reliant' character and the practical instinct. Once Englishmen cease to assume' as an axiom their own inherent superiority, wholly absurd considerations begin to have weight. What is the world coming to when' 'Frenchmen beat Englishmen at games '? One has to remember that at the beginning of the War' 'the- average Englishman 'considered 'the French inferior to the English in a military sense. I can witness that the average Irishman shared this illusion, and, indeed, was apt to speak of French soldiering with a kind of tolerant contempt. This superstition, of course, went by the board :, nor did it go alone : and in one way and another Englishmen have been stripped of the advantages attaching to self-confidence, even when it did- not rest on facts. They are left with nothing but what is real ; and even that has been considerably impaired. The qualities on which England's success very greatly depended are less widespread than they were —and no wonder.
Consider what the War . meant to England. There was never anything in the world finer than the general leap to arms. It was magnificent—but it was not war. Men offered themselves, and they did not know what they were offering for. In France and Germany the whole population knew more or less clearly what European war meant : England had always refused to know. We believed—at this point I identify myself with the English people—that military service could be left as a voluntary obligation. We all know better now. But in the attempt to run a huge war by force of emotion, England lost touch with facts. Promises were made that could never be kept—" habitations fit for heroes," and the rest. They survive only in memory, as fuel for the grievances of those whom civil life has failed to reabsorb : and men beset by grievances—which heaven knows are anything but imaginary—lose that good humour and that sense of fair play which were the chief causes of English success. A five years war was found demoralizing in countries whose existence had been one long preparation for it : what did it mean to England, wholly unprepared to meet the ordeal ?
One effect is that, high and low alike, Englishmen have somewhat lost faith in their own traditions. They are no longer certain that the English way is the best way. They do not even know when they have done right. The most characteristic action of England since the War was the settlement with America. Logically, there is a tremendous case to be made against it : friends of England in France say that it has greatly increased the difficulties in Anglo-French relations. But it was the English thing to do. England has not yet learnt to be proud of it—because England has lost her self- reliance.
What is wrong with England is, morally speaking, a tendency to overrate her own disorder and underrate her actual power of resistence. There are revolutionary symptoms, no doubt. But I see no reason to doubt that once more the traditional genius of England will assert itself. A wave of emotion or resentment may carry her people to the brink of a precipice : but when other herds go over the steep place, the English at the last moment always dig their feet in.
It is clear, however, that there has to be drastic recon- struction in the British polity, and because the English are not a clear minded people it will come dangerously slow. - The Spectator justly puts it that England has definitely broken with the Manchester school and its eode of ethics, which were really an English religion of the nineteenth century, reinforced by odd snippets from the Bible, such as " The poor ye have always with you." But is it certain that the Manchester economic ethics and doctrine of Free Trade were not mutually self-supporting, and, conversely, does not the collapse of the one bring down the other ? Once you admit the obligation to make honourable provision for the workless it becomes a paramount necessity to see that there shall be work available': and I think that in this- matter England has characteristically accepted the first step without seeing and providing for its logical cone.
quences... . .
These consequences are the graver because of England's attitude to the vital matter of land. In effect the nineteenth century produced a nation divided into wage- payers and wage-earners. In this lies your real danger of a class war. You have abolished the working man who is his own master—the peasant ; and the village craftsman has almost disappeared with him.
I contrast England with my own country, and with • France, which •I know superficially. We in Ireland, like you, buy all manner of things which we could produce ourselves : we have not as creditable a reason as you, because we have virtually no alternative employment for labour. But at least, this is true : with us, a man who has a farm is considered to have a living : with you, he is considered to have a means of losing money. Further, with us, the farmer is almost invariably the owner of what is regarded as a hereditary possession,. and he works on it without considering his wage. The' wage is not his object in life : he has a more dignified way of living. He works for the farm. He can never be in the modern phrase " class-conscious."
In France, of course, you have the peasant as with us : but France, unlike these islands, is a country of the home-made. Every tree in France is grown for use. In Ireland, that is very rare; in England, it is exceptional. We in these islands live wastefully : the Continental peoples note this with wonder and without admiration. The peasant's home is the cradle of thrift ; Irish pro- fessional men, Irish business men, Irish cattle speculators are extravagant and improvident ; but the small farmer, even with us, is penurious. You have no penurious class in England ; and as compared with France, you have no thrift.
Moreover, when you have a peasantry, as in France,' in touch with education, you have a reservoir of strength from which the finest types are drawn. The ablest couple, man and wife, that I have ever known, with the most varied capacity and culture, were the children, one of a village clock maker, the other of a man who began as a shepherd. I doubt if England could produce a parallel to them.
What is wrong with England is largely the disappearance of the peasant and the neglect of the land as a means of living. But can so old a disease be remedied ? It was always there, and has only been sharply revealed by a crisis in the constitution. In this, then, lies a hope— the need for a fresh direction of policy being admitted.' You scrap the Manchester theory ? What then ? Is there an alternative to Socialism ?
Any Irishman, knowing the result of substituting occupying ownership for the landlord system, will agree with Mr. Lloyd George. This is no question of nation- alism. Protestant Ulster believes in State-aided land purchase as firmly as Cork or Tipperary. But then, in Ireland we had people in profusion ready by tradition to take up the task of owning and working land. Can you get them in England ? Has the disease of regarding land as a luxury gone too deep ?
I watch Mr. Lloyd George with extraordinary interest, because coming from that class of small artisans inti- mately allied with the peasantry and in fact peasants, he is by temperament opposed to every form of collecti- vism ; and in my view the English are temperamentally individualist, just as are the French—though with a difference. But even more by temperament and tradition is he opposed to what one may call the patrician, and the patrician has made the English land system. The peasant has gone under. Can Mr. George fight the patrician alliance with collectivist Labour ? Is it possible for him --and if not for him, then for whom ? —to establish in England an individualist democracy such as exists in France and Switzerland—such as is struggling to find its feet in Ireland ? One of the symptoms of what is wrong with England, it -seems to me, is that the ablest man in it—the man with most vision, and most courage—has all parties hostile to him, especially his own. The patrician and the Free Trade capitalist pulled together in the past, lessor more. But, can either of them pull with the collectivist ? Can either pull with the man who wants—not being English—to re-create a peasantry in England ? An Irishman does not see .how ; yet even an Irishman recognizes England's talent for making a compromise between the apparently irreconcilable, and avoiding what on paper seems in- evitable. I find myself less pessimistic about England's recovery than most Englishmen because I believe in the Englishman's permanent good humour—rising at the best to generosity—which prompts him to see the other side of a case, to give generously, to take with good humour, and to make the best of what he gets.
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