The Future of England/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III
THE PRINCIPLES OF ENGLAND
Meanwhile, a light haze had gathered over the towers and turrets and temples of London, that a while ago had stood out so clear-cut in the afternoon. Next, thought itself, by sympathy or by reaction, became clouded too, as if a breath of scepticism had mounted up from the vapours yonder to confuse the worth of freedom and of industrialism, the past work of England.
In fact, was it true that this was indeed the achievement which had constituted our greatness? And, if so, was it not now insufficient to meet the future?
To look for a moment at history, assuredly England has not been the prima donna of freedom. For there have been three great stages in the history of liberty, and she has taken a leading part only at the last stage of the three.
The first of these epochs coincided with antiquity, and was initiated by Athens.
In antiquity the commonwealth was Church and State in one. Montesquieu said, inaccurately, that antiquity subordinated religion to the State. More correctly, religion was identified with the State. There were no conflicts between the State and religion, for these were indivisible. But evidently this condition of affairs imposed the most serious restrictions on the individual, who had thus no foothold from which to oppose the will of his fellows. He had no religion to support him against State tyranny, for religion and the State were amalgamated, the State being the Church.
It was Athens, then, who set out to break this bond. Her thinkers were the first to argue that man is a citizen not of a city state but of the universe, and is bound ultimately by the laws of reason alone. They told the world, in the words of Epictetus, to look to the laws of the living godhead, not to the laws of dead men. These new ideas transferred freedom from the forum of the city to the forum of the conscience, and the Roman disciples of the Stoics dispersed their principles throughout the world.
Nevertheless, this first epoch of freedom ended, after all, in failure. The barriers, raised by metaphysics before authority, were not strong enough to resist the impact of absolutism. Reason could not found a Church, to make head against the Cæsars.
The second stage of liberty arose in the Middle Ages, in protest against the undue assumptions of the Church over the State. Whereas antiquity had identified Church and State, mediævalism separated them, but gave precedence to the Church. When Gregory VII. said that the papacy was the master of emperors, when Innocent III. said that Christ had given to the Church the government of the whole world, when Boniface VIII. said that every human creature was necessarily subject to the Roman pontiff, each expressed authoritatively the inner hope, the ultimate aspiration, the soul of mediævalism.
This claim of the churchmen, however, was founded only in the temporary order of things, and to raise from the ground the broken sceptre of the Cæsars was in excess of their prescribed authority. For civil government is materialism in excelsis, and materialism is in no way the mission of the Church. Accordingly, this claim upon the allegiance of Europe called forth the resistance of the civil powers, and it was in the contest which followed that the second epoch of freedom began. For the civil authorities had to put forth every nerve, and strain every resource to win the favour of humanity against so tremendous an antagonist as the papacy. Thus were born those civil institutions, such as limited monarchy or representative parliaments, which, reputed modern, are originally mediæval. For if antiquity created the idea, the Middle Ages created the institutions, of freedom.
Nevertheless, as the Middle Ages went onward, it became increasingly apparent that the civil power was not equal to the papal. The latter, with its unique record of services accomplished, with its complete political organisation, with its universal language, with its legal system in full force, with its standing army furnished by the monastic orders of which the world was the parish, was too strong. In default, then, of a civil empire fit to cope with the ecclesiastical, the civilians of Europe began to create bodies which might be competent some day to hold up their heads against this overwhelming ecclesiasticism. So a whole cluster of novel organisations began to appear on the horizon like a group of Ionian or Balearic islands descried far out to sea. Some were insignificant as yet, like Austria, or full of energy, like France; some were monarchical, such as Castile, or republican, such as Florence; some Slavonic, such as Poland, or romance, such as Aragon, or teutonic such as Holland; some dependent on the decaying Empire, like the Forest Cantons, or only nominally dependent, like Bohemia; some dying, like the Arelate, or progressive like Brandenburg, or precarious like Hungary. What a bewildering scene! What a pilgrim's progress of nations setting out on the mission of humanity! or, perhaps, what a plundering and lawless caravan!
The third stage of freedom has been in modern times. The idea of mediævalism was to put the Church above the State: the idea of the succeeding epoch was to put the State above the Church. This modern idea, like the mediæval, has been fruitful of absolutism. Those who have opposed it, and have regulated the frontier between what is national and what is spiritual, have procured liberty.
For instance, the power which held the chief place in Europe at the opening of our own period, and long afterwards, was Spain. The internal policy of the Spanish monarchs, for which they were prepared to make the greatest sacrifices, was the control of religious opinion by the State. From the days of Ferdinand and Isabella onwards, they fought successfully to subordinate the Church and even ecclesiastical doctrine to themselves. It was for this that they established the Inquisition, that weapon used by the Spanish monarchy to regulate the religion of its subjects. It was for this too, that they drove out the dissenting Moriscoes with such slaughter that southern Spain has scarcely recovered it. They conquered Italy and put every indignity upon the Pope. Rather than not establish their religious views in the Flemish portion of their dominions, they forfeited the Netherlands. They abandoned their traditional friendship with England, and sent the Armada, when they realised that she barred the way. They sent their fire and their faggots across the ocean, the sworn tormentors of the world.
This characteristic feature at the opening of the modern period is equally observable in the history of France. There was one internal aim which the French government never abandoned from the time of Louis XI., at the close of the Middle Ages, to the reign of Louis XIV. and the eighteenth century; this was the mastery of religious thought by the State. The government had often to compromise its purpose, and often to patch up temporary truces with its enemy. But it never lost sight of this, the culmination and crown of its domestic authority. It mattered not whether Catholicism or Calvinism held up its head against the monarchy; both should kneel at its feet. As regards Catholicism, the authority of the French government was very early established, and this control was so complete that the monarchy could utilise without fear the services of its long line of sacerdotal statesmen, Richelieu, Mazarin, Fleury, Dubois, Brienne. Calvinism, however, was so powerful and combative that the government could not master it, until, by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, it was almost abolished by one of the severest blows ever dealt by a nation at worthy subjects.
These two instances illustrate what it is that has necessitated the third phase of the struggle for liberty. In antiquity there was the identification of Church with State, in the Middle Ages there was the ascendency of Church over State, in modern times there was the domination of State over Church, to be combated. It was the effort to reject this latter absolutism and its consequences, that first evoked the energies, the vigour, the greatness of the English people.
In the first place, the English people, simultaneously with the French and the Spanish, were themselves confronted at home with a prolonged and serious effort upon the part of the State to secure dominion over freedom of thought. For this tendency of the modern State to dictate to its subjects what opinions they were to form on the most important issues was not confined to the Continent, but was rife in England no less than elsewhere. Indeed, it is not too much to say that for four centuries the English government attempted to enforce its views upon its subjects by the severest measures. It began with the laws for exterminating the Lollards. It practically ended with that penal code for the extirpation of Catholicism which, inaugurated under William III., assumed its worst features under Anne, that code which Burke justly stigmatised as an "unparalleled code of oppression."
At first, that is to say during the earlier part of the sixteenth century, it must be admitted that Englishmen seemed ready to acquiesce in the claim by the State to create their convictions for them. But this was not for long. Their independence was soon organised, and their resistance eventually came to a head in the great Civil War, the fundamental cause of which was that the people of these islands declined to have their beliefs dictated to them by governmental authority. In a word, the tyranny so successfully exercised on the Continent did not succeed in this country, whose inhabitants, whether Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, or Independent, though in turn persecuted by the State, never failed to assert their liberty. And temporal followed inevitably upon religious freedom. For, obviously, in declining spiritual allegiance to the State, Englishmen had secured their civil liberties. If the State could not force them to think to its liking in one sphere, it had clearly no position from which to dictate to them in another. The fighters who had repelled the State's attack upon their religious, necessarily gained their civil, independence.
Thus was brought into being that liberty which has constituted one half of the greatness of England. Liberty is that spirit which, in politics, repudiates absolutism, respects the minority, and weighs the protest of a single conscience with care; which, in jurisprudence, favours the common, limits the canon, and rejects the civil, law, suspecting those iron maxims to be the weapons of imperial wrong; that spirit which, in the judgment seat, assumes innocency and gives the benefit of the doubt; which, in social life, sides with weakness against strength, with the outcast against the oppressor; and which, in all conflicts of authority against reason, inclines to follow the inner guide.
Such, then, is that emancipation of the individual from the undue authority of his fellows which England sought to secure. This is the first of the two factors of her past greatness.
But we have to fear the aggression of Nature no less than of our own kind, and we tread ground menaced by social forces and by natural forces too. In the war waged by modern industry against the latter, it was England again who showed the way.
Between the civil revolution, whereby England led the modern world to political liberty, and the industrial revolution whereby she initiated our emancipation, more completely than ever before, from the dominion of nature, there is an intimate, and even necessary, connection. For to live free was little, if life had no strength. Therefore, to grapple with nature, nay more, to renew and reconstitute it, now became her purpose. Every mechanical artifice, every novel form of power harnessed to man's service, every substance rendered chemically pure for manufacture, every race of plants or stock of animals bred up to be abnormally fertile or vigorous by human agency, is part of this new nature, this novel birth of time.
That this industrial revolution, which is still in process, began when it did in the eighteenth century, and began in England, is due to three converging causes, all referable to freedom. First, the definite failure of the State in the religious sphere had a notable reaction upon its civil policy. The mediæval Church had aimed at dominating the individual in all departments of life. The modern State, in succeeding to the authority of the Church, had been only too willing to prolong and perpetuate that ascendency, and, in this respect, the English government, in the earlier part of the eighteenth century was still mediæval in some respects. But now that the State was disclaiming the idea of ruling men in one all-important matter, its authority in matters less momentous was undermined and broken. The second cause that originated this movement when and where it did, was that, as liberty was ever in difficulties on the Continent, and ever conquering here, there arrived on our shores, and settled in our midst, for a space of two centuries, the very choicest workmen of Europe. The more the history of almost every trade, apart from some of the great staple trades, is studied, the more it is clear that in all that ministers to the convenience, the efficiency, the luxury, the amenity of life, we owe an incalculable debt to the refugees from continental despotism. But, after all, the third and main reason of the industrial revolution was that every Englishman had become aware that he had attained the stature and the rights of manhood. This liberated a force among us which in its practical result had till then no parallel in the world. Men turned to conquering nature with a zeal which to-day can best be understood by those who have breathed the air of an Australia, a Canada, a South Africa, or an United States, those homes of the English people where the energy of our eighteenth century is reproduced before our eyes.
Thus was it that an inventive genius which owed scarcely anything to science or education, produced, by an otherwise inexplicable marvel, those wonders that have so largely reshaped human life—the power-loom, the steam engine, the carding frame, the spinning frame, the furnace, the crucible, the open hearth, the steam hammer, the rolling mill, the hydraulic press, and the others of the long catalogue. Man became a cyclops. Our manufactures, our commerce, our shipping, our numbers, swelled to modern figures. We traded everywhere, we founded nations, we mastered nature. It was Prometheus unbound.
So, to one looking over the tortuous maze of London, the reason why we had risen thus far seemed clear. England had shaken man's authority and founded freedom. Free England had shaken nature's authority and founded industrialism. Hereby, in her morning and at her noonday, our revolutionary England had led the world. And now, as the afternoon widens before her, whither shall she lead it next?