THE STABILITY OF ENGLAND
By the VERY REV. W. R. INCE
time is long past when Englishmen could be justly reproached for arrogance and self-com- placency. It is an old charge against us. Goldsmith's lines, " Pride in their port,' defiance in their eye, we see the lords of human kind pass- by," have been supposed to describe our manners towards foreigners. The Englishman of Lord Palmerston's day was no doubt capable of behaving intolerably. Even the cartoons of Punch in the 'sixties sometimes make us blush. A little later, when we ceased to boast, the Americans thought that our silence only showed our proud indifference to the opinions of others. " The English are mentioned in the Bible," said Mark Twain. " Blessed are the meek,- for they shall inherit the earth."
But in truth the Boer War saw the end of our self- satisfaction. From that time we have been anxious and uneasy, with fits of pessimism. This, no doubt, is the British lion's way of shaking himself ; he lashes himself vigorously with his tail. But there has been an uncom- fortable suspicion that our prosperity culminated at the end of the last century, and that we are really On the down-grade, Foreigners thought so too, until the Great War. Now they think so no longer. And yet the Con- tinental nations, in my opinion, have not done justice to our extraordinary achievement in improvising a mag- nificent army, which in 1918 was as good as the French or the German. " You are better off than we are," said a French admiral to Napoleon. " You can make an army in six months ; but it takes years to make a sailor." " Taisez-vous," replied the Emperor indignantly ; " that is the way empires are lost. It takes 8:x years to make an army." The French, who are not a generous nation, have never acknowledged what we did to win the War.
But our recuperation after that terrible calamity, without bankruptcy and without -revolution, • has filled our neighbours with astonishment and envy. A very intelligent German lately visited this country after travelling over Europe. He expected, from -what he had heard from Englishmen, to find us in dire straits. What • he did find was a country far more flourishing than any • other that he had seen. " What humbugs you English arc ! " was his comment.
Let us try to sum up our condition impartially. We -have not repudiated our internal debt, but our taxation is on an unprecedented scale. The rich have had to alter their standard of living completely. Large houses are unsaleable ; the aristocracy have been driven from the homes which they occupied for centuries. There seems to be no remedy for unemployment. Every improvement in the economic position of the worker makes it less worth while or less possible to employ him. " It is," says Sir Alfred Ewing, " a cancer which no palliative medicine can cure. It springs essentially from the inevitable advance of applied science, which year by- year increases the efficacy of the automaton, enlarges the range of its activity and improves its quasi-skill, so that more and more it supersedes the craftsmanship and even the un- skilled labour of man." Temporary circumstances in the last century made us the workshop of the world, and permitted our population to increase to a point far beyond any possibility of feeding them by our own products. That position of privilege is no longer ours, and is very unlikely to return. We can only . feed our population by exporting commodities which other nations now prefer to make for themselves. Our empire is still called the British Commonwealth of Nations, but it is falling to pieces. Our naval supremacy is threatened by America; our homeland is exposed to invasion by hostile aircraft. In all these ways our position is definitely and probably irre- trievably inferior to what it was before the War, and, as Bishop Creighton said, there is no nation whose security is so precarious as ours. A single defeat in a great war would destroy us.
But in spite of all this, our prestige was never higher. We have faced enormous difficulties, and have so far emerged from them more successfully than any of our neighbours. The explanation is that we, alone among the nations of Europe, are politically mature. We have an intuitive sense of what is possible. We know when to give way, and how far a deal is possible. Those who have studied the " condition of England " question a hundred years ago must be astonished _that such evils could be cured without violence. And the last election proved that even under universal suffrage the electors could successfully call a halt when the Government had brought the country to the brink of ruin.
The mother of parliaments still adheres to the institu- tions which it evolved for itself, and which in the .nine- teenth century were copied all over the world. Now, however, these institutions seem to. be discredited. almost everywhere. Liberty has been suppressed in one country after another with an ease which seems astounding to those who were taught to believe in freedom and demo- cracy. The little finger of the new dictators is thicker than the loins of any hereditary monarch. No Tsar was ever so despotic as Stalin, no Sultan as Mustapha Kemal ; no Kaiser as Hitler. How are we to account for this unexpected result of a war which, as we were told, was to make the world safe for democracy ? Do our neighbours really set no store by their liberty ?
Most nations will tolerate an oppressive government if it is efficient, and an inefficient government if it leaves them free. But they will not tolerate an incompetent despotism, and if their free institutions are too weak to protect them from anarchy and disruption, they will prefer to look for a strong man to keep order. They will prefer a dictator to a constitutional sovereign, for their sovereigns have got them into trouble, and in modern times delirant flchivi, plectuntur reges. Besides. democracy is possible only when civil strife is not pushed a outrance. Unless there is an underlying loyalty and patriotism, popular government cannot be maintained. Hitherto, this condition has been observed in our own country, and hardly anywhere else. There is no magic about parliamentary democracy ; it will work only if a nation is not too much divided, and is politically mature. What is the real condition of the nations which are under dictatorships ? Visitors to Germany report that the people seem contented and even enthusiastic. Italy too seems to realize that it is better governed than ever before. Both countries were in danger of being torn to pieces by revolutionary movements. Now the appeal is to put an end to all class wars and sectional treasons, and to enlist the whole nation in self-sacrificing • work for the gUod of the country. The appeal has - not been issued in vain. - It is not a reactionary move—, meat. The dictators promise muchthat the Socialists desire. But the Marxian programme of bitter class .
warfare is .pronounced to be obsolete and detestable.. Let the German be a German first and foremost, and the Italian an Italian.
The " totalitarian State " seems to me a real alternative to parliamentary 'democracy. If I am not mistaken, Russia is already approximating to the Fascist system,. and will move further in this direction. The whole. creed of Karl Marx will be quietly discarded: Instead of communism there will be a State-directed capitalism.: Ability, including intellectual ability, will be rewarded, in moderation ; equality of payment has been already abandoned. Patriotism will take the place of revolu- tionary propaganda ; the Government will come to terms with the Church. Everything in Russia, so far as my information goes, points in this direction.
Shall we ever be converted to this new type of State ? I think not. I cannot believe that my countrymen will ever acquiesce in a regime under which it is a crime to speak evil of the government. I cannot believe that an English dictator would be able to command the services of the army of spies and informers, without. which this kind of government cannot .exist.. We are not and never have been a docile people ; we can be led, but not driven. Besides, the disadvantages of a dictatorship are very serious. We may, as Lucan says in a brilliant line, preserve the shadow of liberty, if we will to do whatever we are told. (Libertas, euius sen'areris umbram, si quidquid jubeare yetis.) But it is only the shadow, not the real thing. The dictator is sitting on the safety-valve ; he cannot hear the reasonable complaints of those who dare not. utter them. Again, the tendency is for a dictatorship to become more and more " a one man's show." We have seen how Stalin has pushed out one of his colleagues after another. And even if the dictator has a genius for rule, how long will he retain his Wisdom ? Most dictators soon become arrogant, megalomaniacal, or cruel and suspicious. And then they drag.their country down with them.
I am no prophet, and I am sometimes half, inclined to agree with Montesquieu that there are only two kinds of government, a good and a bad, and :that the good does- not exist. But at present I do not think an Englishman would gain by. changing his nationality.
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