THE RATIONALE OF ENGLISH CROAKING.
Silt GARNET WOLSELEY, who has just, we see, come out as a novelist, complained on Tuesday, in a little speech delivered to the Corporation of the Trinity House, at a dinner given by the Lord Mayor, of the ancient English habit of Croaking. If one believed the croakers, he said, there was no English Army ; whereas the Army, small as it was, was, as he could testify from personal knowledge, in admirable order, ready to go anywhere and do anything. The complaint is a very old one, it is quite true, and we have never yet seen it reasonably accounted for. One of the proudest people in the world, and one of the most self-confident, which never seriously expects defeat, and which performs immense actions—such, for instance, as the conquest of Abyssinia or the annexation of the Transvaal—as if they were incidents in the day's work, loves nothing so well as depreciation of its own strength, and pessimist anticipations of future failures to be made by its agents. its ships will all go down, its soldiers will all be. left without food, its diplomatists will be beguiled by any Russian who enjoys beguiling, and its Mixisters will be caught napping when- ever they ought to have been in movement. The nation has never but once been defeated on a great battle-field, but its most popular mouthpieces always declare that it has no Army ; if has the most powerful Navy in the world, yet highly placed
officials describe its Fleet as a phantom affair ; it gains something from every struggle, yet no struggle can arise without prophecies of ruin to its material interests. So deep-rooted is this spirit, that every now and then it exercises an important effect on political affairs. No small portion of the agitation miffing from
the war in the East is caused by the croakers, who see in the transfer of some great position two thousand miles away proof positive that the "star of the Empire has set," and loudly affirm that its greatest dependency will in a few weeks be indefensible, and in a few years have passed away for ever. Men of the highest rank and the largest experience are not ashamed to indulge in the gloomiest prophecies, while careful thinkers will tell you that England has already sunk to the position of Holland. Mr. Jevons excited a sort of gloomy rapture when he predicted the extinction of our coal supply within a few hundred years, and it is necessary every now and then to answer grave and experienced doctors, who tell the most athletic of races, to its unconcealed delight, that the physique of the population is rapidly de- generating. The intellectual interest of this tone of mind, which is habitual, and profoundly affects the judgment passed on England by foreign nations, is the extreme difficulty of accounting for it. If England had had, like Spain, a history of failure, lasting through two hundred years, the expectation of failure would be natural, for it would only be an expectation of the accustomed, but the history of England has been one long career of victory and success. Our Army is worthless, but it defeats its enemies ; our Generals are Philistines, but they overthrow conquerors of genius ; our ships cannot keep afloat, but they are dreaded throughout the earth ; our Envoys are always blinded, but their confidential papers, published too late, instruct all Europe ; our Ministers are always sleepy, yet England is always extending her frontiers, increasing her wealth, and more than holding her own. There are, of course, many deductions to be made from that statement, but that is how their history is read by the very people who enjoy the pessimist prophecies, and it is their feeling rather than the fact that we are endeavouring to describe. Certainly it is not experience which teaches Englishmen to croak. If, again, the English were a people of melancholy temperament, like the Irish or the Spaniards, looking forward always to misfortune, and rather inclined to enjoy a good cry, and pity themselves in a nice eloquent way, as the typical Irish Member always does, and Castelar or Ayala frequently does, the croaking would be intelligible ; but the English temperament has very little whine in it, is too unimaginative for nervousness, and is inclined rather to grumbling, that is, to a form of rough criticism, than to serious unhappiness. So far from looking forward to misfortune, the English believe in progress, till they base all their plans upon it, and make themselves positively ridiculous to philo- sophers by assuming as a law that in earthly affairs the flow will always beat the ebb,—that the sea will not only advance, but advance on all sides together. And finally, if the English were an over-frank people, much wanting in reticence and apt to hun- ger for sympathy, we could understand their predilection for abusing their own ; but they are one of the most reticent of races, -and would consider such exposures of their private affairs, their 'pecuniary losses, and personal fears as they make about State affairs almost indelicate and entirely silly. To tell all the world, possibly on the eve of a great effort, that they were quite power- less would strike them in private life as senseless folly ; but in public life they always do it, and very often without any visible grounds.
The habit of croaking aloud proceeds of course from the habit of freedom in discussing all public matters, but the mental conflition of which it is a symptom is produced, we are sometimes tempted to think, rather by certain virtues than by certain defects -of the English character. Careless men do not croak. Sanguine men do not croak. Frivolous men do not croak, except when they are 'repeating, like parrots, ideas which somebody else has put into their minds, as medicine is put into children's throats with a spoon. It is the strenuous men who croak, who take everything that occurs an grand serieux, who realise obstacles because they want the result so greatly, and who cannot bear that anything should be omitted which, in their judgment,
will ensure success. Those who croak about British recruits are not men who see no use in armies, but men who want to see the Army stronger than it can be, and are so anxious that it should do the impossible, that they overlook its fitness to do all that those who organise it intend to ask or order it to do. It is not the holiday sailor, but the old Admiral who croaks about the Navy, not the epigrammaticflaneur, but the old Doctor who says the physical condition of the people is suffering from the modern habit of preserving the unfittest. It is not the careless man who worries about the Colorado Beetle, but the philanthropist or the politician, who cannot bear the idea of a second Irish famine, and who is so intent on pre- venting it, that he realises to himself and exaggerates to others all the potential mischiefs which an invasion of the maleficent insect might produce to the industry of these Islands. Precisely the same impulse, in fact, which makes the Englishman a success- ful manufacturer, a somewhat narrow, but intense application of mind, makes him also a croaker,—a man ready to anticipate mis- fortune, because he is so determined that it shall not arrive. Ile
wants the railway, till he either sees or imagines a Chat Moss, which, nevertheless, if it exists, he will strenuously fill up. Of course other impulses help. The Englishman is not a melancholy being, and not a querulous one, striking foreigners, in fact, and especially Germans, as at once obtuse and impassive ; but he has in him nevertheless an enormous capacity for anxiety, for thinking things will go wrong, for believing not in particular and definable dangers, so much as that there is danger somewhere to be met. He is not going to lose his Consols in particular, but he is going to die in a workhouse. The trait does not come out in him so fully as it does in the New Englander, who lives in a climate which strains the nerves, and eats food that tends to dyspepsia, and who looks, among all other white men, like Anxiety embodied, or like the slave who at Egyptian banquets warned the revellers ; but it exists, and shows itself where all English peculiarities show themselves most freely, in political dis- cussion and political life. The preoccupation and anxiety, the permanent doubt whether fate is propitious, which, as regards private affairs, the Englishman exhibits only to his intimates, as regards public affairs he acknowledges to his newspaper, or the Member for his borough, hoping that the Member may bring his fear to the " attention " of the Englishman's providence, his Par- liament, which can stop Russia, or reduce foreign competition, or legislate the beetle into the Atlantic. Granted a strenuous man, with a hidden capacity for intense anxiety, and a habit of think- ing aloud on public subjects, and we have the regular English croaker, who, sometimes to his own hurt, tells everybody where he thinks the weak place is, scolds furiously at any- body responsible for the weak place, and then goes on as if there were no weak place whatever. Sometimes, indeed, he knows that he is exaggerating the thinness of the ice, for besides his wish to be heard, he is, unconsciously to himself, the victim of a superstition. The dislike of the average Englishman to assume that things will go right proceeds, we believe, in no small part, from a fear that if he entertains that notion even in his mind, much more if he expresses it, things will go all wrong, that somehow Providence is propitiated by refrain- ing from vain confidence or certainty of success. If you call a servant a treasure, says the Englishman, the servant leaves next week ; if you say, "how well I am l" you are sure to be visited at lead by toothache. The feeling which makes so many good people put " D.V." in the the middle of any announcement of a purpose—those who do it acknowledging all the while that Deo bolo nothing could happen—is one deep down in the British character, as deep as the similar but more coarsely displayed feel- ing about the envious eye—the superstitious fear of being lucky, lest the Fates be irate—is in the Italian. It is a strenuous rate, with a deep capacity for anxiety, and a fear of the sin of presumption pushed to a superstition, which produces so many croakers.
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