Hughes Thomas
True Manliness
XCIV
The state of Europe thirty years ago was far more dead and hopeless than now. There were no wars, certainly, and no expectations of wars. But there was a dull, beaten-down, pent-up feeling abroad, as if the lid were screwed down on the nations, and the thing which had been, however cruel and heavy and mean, was that which was to remain to the end. England was better off than her neighbors, but yet in bad case. In the south and west particularly, several causes had combined to spread a very bitter feeling abroad amongst the agricultural poor. First among these stood the new poor law, the provisions of which were rigorously carried out in most districts. The poor had as yet felt the harshness only of the new system. Then the land was in many places in the hands of men on their last legs, the old sporting farmers, who had begun business as young men while the great war was going on, had made money hand over hand for a few years out of the war prices, and had tried to go on living with grayhounds and yeomanry uniforms – “horse to ride and weapon to wear” – through the hard years which had followed. These were bad masters in every way, unthrifty, profligate, needy, and narrow-minded. The younger men who were supplanting them were introducing machinery, threshing machines and winnowing machines, to take the little bread which a poor man was still able to earn out of the mouths of his wife and children – so at least the poor thought and muttered to one another; and the mutterings broke out every now and then in the long nights of the winter months in blazing ricks and broken machines. Game preserving was on the increase. Australia and America had not yet become familiar words in every English village, and the labor market was everywhere overstocked; and last, but not least, the corn laws were still in force, and the bitter and exasperating strife in which they went out was at its height. And while Swing and his myrmidons were abroad in the counties, and could scarcely be kept down by yeomanry and poor-law guardians, the great towns were in almost worse case. Here too emigration had not yet set in to thin the labor market; wages were falling, and prices rising; the corn-law struggle was better understood and far keener than in the country; and Chartism was gaining force every day, and rising into a huge threatening giant, waiting to put forth his strength, and eager for the occasion which seemed at hand.
You generation of young men, who were too young then to be troubled with such matters, and have grown into manhood since, you little know – may you never know! – what it is to be living the citizens of a divided and distracted nation. For the time that danger is past. In a happy hour, and so far as man can judge, in time, and only just in time, came the repeal of the corn laws, and the great cause of strife and the sense of injustice passed away out of men’s minds. The nation was roused by the Irish famine, and the fearful distress in other parts of the country, to begin looking steadily and seriously at some of the sores which were festering in its body, and undermining health and life. And so the tide had turned, and England had already passed the critical point, when 1848 came upon Christendom, and the whole of Europe leapt up into a wild blaze of revolution.
Is any one still inclined to make light of the danger that threatened England in that year, to sneer at the 10th of April, and the monster petition, and the monster meetings on Kennington and other commons? Well, if there be such persons amongst my readers, I can only say that they can have known nothing of what was going on around them and below them, at that time, and I earnestly hope that their vision has become clearer since then, and that they are not looking with the same eyes that see nothing, at the signs of to-day. For that there are questions still to be solved by us in England, in this current half-century, quite as likely to tear the nation in pieces as the corn laws, no man with half an eye in his head can doubt. They may seem little clouds like a man’s hand on the horizon just now, but they will darken the whole heaven before long, unless we can find wisdom enough amongst us to take the little clouds in hand in time, and make them descend in soft rain.
XCV
The years 1848-9 had been years of revolution, and, as always happens at such times, the minds of men had been greatly stirred on many questions, and especially on the problem of the social condition of the great mass of the poor in all European countries. In Paris, the revolution had been the signal for a great effort on the part of the workmen; and some remarkable experiments had been made, both by the Provisional Government of 1848 and by certain employers of labor, and bodies of skilled mechanics, with a view to place the conditions of labor upon a more equitable and satisfactory footing, or, to use the common phrase of the day, to reconcile the interests of capital and labor. The government experiment of “national workshops” had failed disastrously, but a number of the private associations were brilliantly successful. The history of some of these associations – of the sacrifices which had been joyfully made by the associates in order to collect the small funds necessary to start them – of the ability and industry with which they were conducted, and of their marvellous effect on the habits of all those engaged in the work, had deeply interested many persons in England. It was resolved to try an experiment of the same kind in England, but the conditions were very different. The seed there had already taken root amongst the industrial classes, and the movement had come from them. In England the workpeople, as a rule, had no belief in association, except for defensive purposes. It was chiefly amongst young professional men that the idea was working, and it was necessary to preach it to those whom it most concerned. Accordingly a society was formed, chiefly of young barristers, under the presidency of the late Mr. Maurice, who was then Chaplain of Lincoln’s Inn, for the purpose of establishing associations similar to those in Paris. It was called the Society for Promoting Working Men’s Associations, and I happened to be one of the original members, and on the Council. We were all full of enthusiasm and hope in our work, and of propagandist zeal: anxious to bring in all the recruits we could. I cannot even now think of my own state of mind at the time without wonder and amusement. I certainly thought (and for that matter have never altered my opinion to this day) that here we had found the solution of the great labor question; but I was also convinced that we had nothing to do but just to announce it, and found an association or two, in order to convert all England, and usher in the millennium at once, so plain did the whole thing seem to me. I will not undertake to answer for the rest of the Council, but I doubt whether I was at all more sanguine than the majority. Consequently we went at it with a will: held meetings at six o’clock in the morning (so as not to interfere with our regular work) for settling the rules of our central society, and its off-shoots, and late in the evening, for gathering tailors, shoemakers, and other handicraftsmen, whom we might set to work; started a small publishing office, presided over by a diminutive one-eyed costermonger, a rough-and-ready speaker and poet (who had been in prison as a Chartist leader), from which we issued tracts and pamphlets, and ultimately a small newspaper; and, as the essential condition of any satisfactory progress, commenced a vigorous agitation for such an amendment in the law as would enable our infant associations to carry on their business in safety, and without hindrance. We very soon had our hands full. Our denunciations of unlimited competition brought on us attacks in newspapers and magazines, which we answered, nothing loth. Our opponents called us Utopians and Socialists, and we retorted that at any rate we were Christians; that our trade principles were on all-fours with Christianity, while theirs were utterly opposed to it. So we got, or adopted, the name of Christian Socialists, and gave it to our tracts, and our paper. We were ready to fight our battle wherever we found an opening, and got support from the most unexpected quarters. I remember myself being asked to meet Archbishop Whately, and several eminent political economists, and explain what we were about. After a couple of hours of hard discussion, in which I have no doubt I talked much nonsense, I retired, beaten, but quite unconvinced. Next day, the late Lord Ashburton, who had been present, came to my chambers and gave me a cheque for £50 to help our experiment; and a few days later I found another nobleman, sitting on the counter of our shoemakers’ association, arguing with the manager, and giving an order for boots.
It was just in the midst of all this that my brother came to live with us. I had already converted him, as I thought. He was a subscribing member of our Society, and dealt with our Associations; and I had no doubt would now join the Council, and work actively in the new crusade. I knew how sound his judgment was, and that he never went back from a resolution once taken, and therefore was all the more eager to make sure of him, and, as a step in this direction, had already placed his name on committees, and promised his attendance. But I was doomed to disappointment. He attended one or two of our meetings, but I could not induce him to take any active part with us. At a distance of more than twenty years it is of course difficult to recall very accurately what passed between us, but I can remember his reasons well enough to give the substance of them. And first, as he had formerly objected to the violent language of the leaders of the Anti-Corn-Law agitation, so he now objected to what he looked upon as our extravagance.
“You don’t want to divide other people’s property?”
“No,” I answered.
“Then why call yourselves Socialists?”
“But we couldn’t help ourselves: other people called us so first.”
“Yes; but you needn’t have accepted the name. Why acknowledge that the cap fitted?”
“Well, it would have been cowardly to back out. We borrow the ideas of these Frenchmen, of association as opposed to competition as the true law of industry; and of organizing labor – of securing the laborer’s position by organizing production and consumption – and it would be cowardly to shirk the name. It is only fools who know nothing about the matter, or people interested in the competitive system of trade, who believe, or say, that a desire to divide other people’s property is of the essence of Socialism.”
“That may be very true: but nine-tenths of mankind, or at any rate, of Englishmen, come under one or the other of those categories. If you are called Socialists, you will never persuade the British public that this is not your object. There was no need to take the name. You have weight enough to carry already, without putting that on your shoulders.”
This was his first objection, and he proved to be right. At any rate, after some time we dropped the name, and the “Christian Socialist” was changed into the “Journal of Association.” English Socialists generally have instinctively avoided it ever since, and called themselves “co-operators,” thereby escaping much abuse in the intervening years. And when I look back, I confess I do not wonder that we repelled rather than attracted men who, like my brother, were inclined theoretically to agree with us. For I am bound to admit that a strong vein of fanaticism and eccentricity ran through our ranks, which the marvellous patience, gentleness, and wisdom of our beloved president were not enough to counteract or control. Several of our most active and devoted members were also strong vegetarians, and phonetists. In a generation when beards and wide-awakes were looked upon as insults to decent society, some of us wore both, with a most heroic indifference to public opinion. In the same way, there was often a trenchant, and almost truculent, tone about us, which was well calculated to keep men of my brother’s temperament at a distance. I rather enjoyed it myself, but learnt its unwisdom when I saw its effects on him, and others, who were inclined to join us, and would have proved towers of strength. It was right and necessary to denounce the evils of unlimited competition, and the falsehood of the economic doctrine of “every man for himself;” but quite unnecessary, and therefore unwise, to speak of the whole system of trade as “the disgusting vice of shop-keeping,” as was the habit of several of our foremost and ablest members.
XCVI
Hardy had a way of throwing life into what he was talking about, and, like many men with strong opinions, and passionate natures, either carried his hearers off their legs and away with him altogether, or roused every spark of combativeness in them. The latter was the effect which his lecture on the Punic Wars had on Tom. He made several protests as Hardy went on; but Grey’s anxious looks kept him from going fairly into action, till Hardy stuck the black pin, which represented Scipio, triumphantly in the middle of Carthage, and, turning round said, “And now for some tea, Grey, before you have to turn out.”
Tom opened fire while the tea was brewing.
“You couldn’t say anything bad enough about aristocracies this morning, Hardy, and now to-night you are crowing over the success of the heaviest and cruelest oligarchy that ever lived, and praising them up to the skies.”
“Hullo! here’s a breeze!” said Hardy, smiling; “but I rejoice, O Brown, in that they thrashed the Carthaginians, and not, as you seem to think, in that they, being aristocrats, thrashed the Carthaginians; for oligarchs they were not at this time.”
“At any rate they answer to the Spartans in the struggle, and the Carthaginians to the Athenians; and yet all your sympathies are with the Romans to-night in the Punic Wars, though they were with the Athenians before dinner.”
“I deny your position. The Carthaginians were nothing but a great trading aristocracy – with a glorious family or two I grant you, like that of Hannibal; but, on the whole, a dirty, bargain-driving, buy-cheap-and-sell-dear aristocracy – of whom the world was well rid. They like the Athenians indeed! Why, just look what the two people have left behind them – ”
“Yes,” interrupted Tom; “but we only know the Carthaginians through the reports of their destroyers. Your heroes trampled them out with hoofs of iron.”
“Do you think the Roman hoof could have trampled out their Homer if they ever had one?” said Hardy. “The Romans conquered Greece too, remember.”
“But Greece was never so near beating them.”
“True. But I hold to my point. Carthage was the mother of all hucksters, compassing sea and land to sell her wares.”
“And no bad line of life for a nation. At least Englishmen ought to think so.”
“No, they ought not; at least if ‘Punica fides’ is to be the rule of trade. Selling any amount of Brummagem wares never did nation or man much good, and never will. Eh, Grey?”
Grey winced at being appealed to, but remarked that he hoped the Church would yet be able to save England from the fate of Tyre and Carthage, the great trading nations of the old world: and then, swallowing his tea, and looking as if he had been caught robbing a hen-roost, he made a sudden exit, and hurried away out of college to the night-school.
“What a pity he is so odd and shy,” said Tom; “I should so like to know more of him.”
“It is a pity. He is much better when he is alone with me. I think he has heard from some of the set that you are a furious Protestant, and sees an immense amount of stiff-neckedness in you.”
“But about England and Carthage,” said Tom, shirking the subject of his own peculiarities; “you don’t really think us like them? It gave me a turn to hear you translating ‘Punica fides’ into Brummagem wares just now.”
“I think that successful trade is our rock ahead. The devil who holds new markets and twenty per cent. profits in his gift is the devil that England has most to fear from. ‘Because of unrighteous dealings, and riches gotten by deceit, the kingdom is translated from one people to another,’ said the wise man. Grey falls back on the Church, you see, to save the nation; but the Church he dreams of will never do it. Is there any that can? There must be surely, or we have believed a lie. But this work of making trade righteous, of Christianizing trade, looks like the very hardest the Gospel has ever had to take in hand – in England at any rate.”
Hardy spoke slowly and doubtfully, and paused as if asking for Tom’s opinion.
“I never heard it put in that way. I know very little of politics or the state of England. But come, now; the putting down the slave-trade and compensating our planters, that shows that we are not sold to the trade-devil yet, surely.”
“I don’t think we are. No, thank God, there are plenty of signs that we are likely to make a good fight of it yet.”
XCVII
The newest school of philosophy preaches an “organized religion,” an hierarchy of the best and ablest. In an inarticulate way the confession rises from the masses that they feel on every side of them the need of wise and strong government – of a will to which their will may loyally submit – before all other needs; have been groping blindly after it this long while; begin to know that their daily life is in daily peril for want of it, in a country of limited land, air, and water, and practically unlimited wealth. But Democracy – how about Democracy? We had thought a cry for it, and not for kings, God made or of any other kind, was the characteristic of our time. Certainly kings, such as we have seen them, have not gained or deserved much reverence of late years, are not likely to be called for with any great earnestness by those who feel most need of guidance and deliverance, in the midst of the bewildering conditions and surroundings of our time and our life.
Thirty years ago the framework of society went all to pieces over the greater part of Christendom, and the kings just ran away or abdicated, and the people, left pretty much to themselves, in some places made blind work of it. Solvent and well-regulated society caught a glimpse of that same “big black democracy,” – the monster, the Frankenstein, as they hold him, at any rate the great undeniable fact of our time – a glimpse of him moving his huge limbs about, uneasily and blindly. Then, mainly by the help of broken pledges and bayonets, the so-called kings managed to get the gyves put on him again, and to shut him down in his underground prison. That was the sum of their work in the great European crisis; not a thankworthy one from the people’s point of view. However, society was supposed to be saved, and the “party of order,” so called, breathed freely. No; for the 1848 kind of king there is surely no audible demand anywhere. In England in that year we had our 10th of April, and muster of half a million special constables of the comfortable classes, with much jubilation over such muster, and mutual congratulations that we were not as other men, or even as these Frenchmen, Germans, and the like. Taken for what it was worth, let us admit that the jubilations did not lack some sort of justification. The 10th of April muster may be perhaps accepted as a sign that the reverence for the constable’s staff has not quite died out amongst us. But let no one think that for this reason democracy is one whit less inevitable in England than on the Continent, or that its sure and steady advance, and the longing for its coming, which all thoughtful men recognize, however little they may sympathize, with them, in the least incompatible with the equally manifest longing for what our people intend by this much-worshipped and much-hated name.
For what does democracy mean to Englishmen? Simply an equal chance for all; a fair field for the best men, let them start from where they will, to get to the front; a clearance out of sham governors, and of unjust privilege, in every department of human affairs. It cannot be too often repeated, that they who suppose the bulk of our people want less government, or fear the man who “can rule and dare not lie,” know little of them. Ask any representative of a popular constituency, or other man with the means of judging, what the people are ready for in this direction. He will tell you that, in spite perhaps of all he can say or do, they will go for compulsory education, the organization of labor (including therein the sharp extinction of able-bodied pauperism), the utilization of public lands, and other reforms of an equally decided character. That for these purposes they desire more government, not less; will support with enthusiasm measures, the very thought of which takes away the breath and loosens the knees of ordinary politicians; will rally with loyalty and trustfulness to men who will undertake these things with courage and singleness of purpose.
