MARGINAL COMMENTS
By ROSE MACAULAY
WITH our passion for dividing history into arbitrary periods, such as centuries and reigns, we are already speculating on what the reign of Edward VIII will be like. For that matter, what was the reign of George V like ? Looked at from this end, it wears 'an unclassifiable air. It may go down to history (one hopes) as the last English reign in which war was allowed to break loose; in which that primitive and barbaric method of settling disputes was adopted, and mass murder regarded as a possible resource for disputants. One hopes so ; but in view of the present state of Europe and the world it can be but a pious hope.
But this reign should also appear to posterity (that foolish, unborn herd, who will probably be as wrong about past reigns as we are ourselves) as an era in which social conscience stirred more restlessly and with more effect than ever before ; a reign in which the crying of the poor (which became very loud and well organised) was heard with more generosity and more intelligence, though even this is not saying much. A reign of greater humanity, of diminishing cruelty, of (in this country) increased tolerance, of the spread of education, of the lowering (on the whole) of newspaper intelligence to suit a growing flood of semi-literate readers, of a swirling spate of bad, ,mediocre and good books, of national health insurance, of the intensified and partly victorious struggles of women for citizenship and good jobs, of relaxed taboos and altered codes, of higher living for all, of university education for thousands of the classes who had not dreamed of it since the seventeenth century, of the weakening of institutional religion in all classes. A reign of contradictions, in which the barbarism of war was followed by a league for peace, in which great estates went under and great fortunes were amassed, in which the whole kaleidoscope of the social system was shaken and upset. A reign when Labour took its place as a political and constitutional force. But above all, one supposes, a reign of invention, of mechanical transformation, of the storming of the roads and the skies by the internal combustion machine, so that life was lived, increasingly, to the accompani- ment of the harsh and whirring rumour of rotating engines. A reign when men and women leaped into the skies and rushed across them to the other ends of the earth ; when strange voices came to us out of boxes, and music and news suddenly became available to all who would pay ten shillings a year and turn a switch.
Yes : on the whole, and despite a dreadful four years, an exciting, an amusing, a stirring reign. At its outset, Mr. Max Beerbohm illustrated it with a great question- mark looming through a mist. The same question-mark, the same mist (or a denser one) looms now before the threshold of this new reign. What in the world will it be like ? What will it bring us ? We can all guess. and, since none can answer, we arc left guessing.
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