| The Main Players:
William Hazlitt
OF PERSONS ONE WOULD WISH TO HAVE SEEN 1826 Charles Lamb
Lamb captured turned into Fawkes Thomas Carlyle on Fawkes: Carlyle,
Thomas, Historical Sketches of Notable Persons and Events in the Reigns
of James I and Charles I.,Chapman and Hall, 1899. (1844) p.66-71. Chapter
VI Guy Faux and the Gunpowder Plot Click
here
George Bernard Shaw-The Famous Socialist/Facisist tells us why he things Guy should have been more successful. Novermber 1932 In Praise of Guy Fawkes Click here To read more on the effigy study page click here To return to the main index click here To learn more about the Center for Fawkesian Pursuits click here For Information about Hutman Productions click here |
| William Hazlitt
1778-1830
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| Charles Lamb
1775-1834
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Thomas Carlyle 1795-1881
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| Guy Faux
The Examiner., November 11,18 and 25, 1821. Hazlitt, William,"Guy Faux."1821, In: The Complete Works of William Hazlitt., Ed: P.P. Howe, Volume Twenty, J. M. Dent and Sons,London, 1934. p. 96. Guy Faux is made into the figure of a scare-crow, a fifth of November bug-bear, in our history. Now that Mr. Hogg's Jacobite Relics have dissipated the remains of an undue horror at Popery, it may seem the time to undertake the defense of so illustrious a character, who has hitherto been the victim of party-prejudice and national spite. Guy Faux was a Popish Priest in the reign of James I., and for his unsuccessful attempt to set fire to the House of Lords, and blow up the English Monarchy, the Protestant Religion, and himself, at one stroke, has had the honour to be annually paraded through the streets, and burnt in effigy in every town and village in England from that time to this--that is, for the space of two hundred years and upwards. It is sometimes doubtful, indeed, from the coincidence of dates and other circumstances, whether this annual ceremony, accompanied as it is with the ringing of bells, the firing of guns, and the preaching of sermons, is intended more to revive the formidable memory of "poor Guy", or in celebration of the glorious landing of William III, who came to deliver us from Popery and Slavery a hundred years afterwards--two things which Mr. Hogg treats as mere bagatelles in his Jacobite Relics, though they do not appear so in the History of England; and to which the same writer assures us, as an agreeable piece of court-news, that the present Family are by no means averse in their hearts! Guy Faux was a fanatic, but he was no hypocrite. He ranks among good haters. He was cruel, bloody-minded, reckless of all considerations but those of an infuriated and bigoted faith; but he was a true son of the Catholic Church, a martyr and a confessor, for all that. He who can prevail upon himself to devote his life for a cause, however we may condemn his opinions or abhor his actions, vouches at least for the honesty of his principles and the disinterestedness of his motives. He may be guilty of the worst practices, but he is capable of the greatest. He is no longer a slave, but free. The contempt of death is the beginning of virtue. The hero of the Gun-Powder plot was, if you will, a fool, a madman, an assassin; call him what names you please: still he was neither knave nor coward. He did not propose to blow up the Parliament and come off, scot-free, himself: he shewed that he valued his own life no more than theirs in such a cause--where the integrity of the Catholic faith and the salvation of perhaps millions of souls was at stake. He did not call it a murder, but a sacrifice which he was about to achieve: he was armed with the Holy Spirit and with fire: he was the Church's chosen servant and her blessed martyr. He comforted himself as "the best of cut-throats." How many wretches are there that would have undertaken to do what he intended for a sum of money, if they could have got off with impunity! How few are there who would have put themselves in Guy Faux's situation to save the universe! Yet in the latter case we affect to be thrown into greater consternation than at the most unredeemed acts of villainy, as if the absolute disinterestedness of the motive doubled the horror of the deed! The cowardice and selfishness of mankind are in fact shocked at the consequences to themselves (if such examples are held up for imitation,) and they make a fearful outcry against the violation of every principle of morality, lest they too should be called on for any such tremendous sacrifices--lest they in their turn should have to go on the forlorn hope of extra-official duty. Charity begins at home, is a maxim that prevails as well in the courts of conscience as in those of prudence. We would be thought to shudder at the consequences of crime to others, while we tremble for them to ourselves. We talk of the dark and cowardly assassin; and this is well, when an individual shrinks form the face of an enemy, and purchases his own safety by striking a blow in the dark; but how the charge of cowardly can be applied to the public assassin, who, in the very act of destroying another, lays down his life as a pledge and forfeit of his sincerity and boldness, I am at a loss to devise. There may be barbarous prejudice, rooted hatred, unprincipled treachery, in such an act; but he who resolves to take all the danger and odium upon himself, can no more be branded with cowardice, than Regulus devoting himself for his country, or Codrus leaping into the fiery gulf. A wily Father Inquisitor, coolly, and with plenary authority condemning hundreds of helpless and unoffending victims to the flames or to the horrors of a living tomb, while he himself would not suffer a hair of his head to be hurt, is to me a character without any qualifying trait in it. Again; the Spanish conqueror and hero, the favorite of his monarch, who enticed thirty thousand poor Mexicans into a large open building, under promise of strict faith and cordial good-will, and then set fire to it, making sport of the cries and agonies of these deluded creatures, is an instance of uniting the most hardened cruelty with the most heartless selfishness. His plea was keeping no faith with heretics: this was Guy Faux's too; but I am sure at least that the latter kept faith with himself: he was in earnest in his professions. His was not gay, wanton, unfeeling depravity; he did not murder in sport; it was serious work that he had taken in hand. To see this arch-bigot, this heart-whole traitor, this pale miner in the infernal regions, skulking in his retreat with his cloak and dark lanthorn, moving cautiously about among his barrels of gunpowder, loaded with death, but not yet ripe for destruction, regardless of the lives of others, and more than indifferent to his own, presents a picture of the strange infatuation of the human understanding, but not of the depravity of the human will, without an equal. There were thousands of pious Papists privy to and ready to applaud the deed when done:--there was no one but our old fifth-of -November friend, who still flutters in rags and straw on the occasion, that had the courage to attempt it. In him stern duty and unsahaken faith prevailed over natural frailty. A man to undertake and contemplate with gloomy delight this desperate task, could not certainly in the first instance, be a man of tender sensibility, or over-liable to "the compunctious visitings of nature"; but he would so far only be on a level with many others, and he would be distinguished from them by a high principle of enthusiasm, and a disinterested zeal for truth. Greater love than this has no one, that he shall give up his life for the truth. We have no Guy Fauxes now:--not that we have not numbers in whom "the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." We talk indeed of flinging the keys of the House of Commons into the Thames, by way of a little unmeaning splutter, and a little courting of popularity and persecution; but to fling ourselves into the gap, and blow up the system and our own bodies to atoms at once, upon an abstract principle of right, does not suit the radical skepticism of the age! I like the spirit of martyrdom, I confess: I envy an age that had virtue enough in it to produce the mischievous fanaticism of a Guy Faux. A man's marching up to a masked-battery for the sake of company, is nothing: but a man's going resolutely to the stake rather than surrender his opinions, is a serious matter. It shews that in the public mind and feeling there is something better than life; that there is a belief of something in the universe and the order of nature, to which it is worth while to sacrifice this poor brief span of existence. To have an object always in view dearer to one than one's-self, to cling to a principle in contempt of danger, of interest, of the opinion of the world,--this is the true ideal, the high and heroic state of man. It is in fact to have a standard of absolute and implicit faith in the mind that admits neither of compromise, degree, nor exception. The path of duty is one, the grounds of encouragement are fixed and invariable. Perhaps it is hardly possible to have such a standard, but where the certain prospect of another world absolves us from a miserly compact with this, and the contemplation of infinity forms an habitual counterpoise to the illusions of time and sense. An object of the highest conceivable greatness leads to unmingled devotion: the belief in eternal truth embodies itself in practical principles of strict rectitude, or of obstinate, but noble-minded error. There was an instance that happened a little before the time of Guy Faux, which in a different way, has something of the same character, with a more pleasing conclusion. I mean the story of Margaret Lambrun; and as it is but little known, I shall here relate it as I find it:-- "Margaret Lambrun was a Scotchwoman, and one of the retinue of Mary Queen of Scots; as was also her husband, who dying of grief for the tragical end of that princess, his wife took up a resolution of revenging the death of both upon Queen Elizabeth. For that purpose she put on a man's habit; and assuming the name of Anthony Sparke, repaired to the Court of the Queen of England, always carrying with her a brace of pistols, one to kill Elizabeth, and the there to shoot herself, in order to avoid the hands of justice; but her design happened to miscarry by an accident, which saved the Queen's life. One day, as she was pushing through the crowd to come up to her Majesty, who was then walking in her garden, she chanced to drop one of the pistols. This being seen by the guards, she was seized in order to be sent immediately to prison; but the Queen, not suspecting her to be one of her own sex, had a mind first to examine her. Accordingly, demanding her name, country, and quality, Margaret replied with an unmoved steadiness, --"Madam, though I appear in this habit, I am a woman; my name is Margaret Lambrun; I was several years in the service of Queen Mary, my mistress, whom you have so unjustly put to death; and by her death you have also caused that of my husband, who died of grief to see so innocent a queen perish so iniquitously.. Now, as I had the greatest love and affection for both these persons, I resolved at the peril of my life to revenge their death by killing you, who are the cause of both."--The Queen pardoned her, and granted her a safe conduct till she should be set upon the coast of France. " Fanaticism expires with philosophy, and heroism with refinement. There can be no mixture of skepticism in the one, nor any distraction of interest in the other. That blind attachment to individuals or to principles, which is necessary to make us stake our all upon a single die, wears out with the progress of society. Sandt--(the last of that school)-- was a religious fanatic--a reader of the book of Maccabees, a repeater of the story of Jael and Sisera, a chaunter of the song of Deborah. What lighted up the dungeon-gloom in which Guy Faux buried himself alive? The face of Heaven open to receive him. What cheered his undivided solitude? The full assembly of Just Men made perfect, the Glorious Company of Apostles, the Noble Army of Martyrs, the expecting Conclave of Sainted Popes, of Canonized Priests and Cardinals. What nerved his steady hand, and prepared it, with temperate, even pulse, to apply the fatal spark? The Hand of the Most High stretched out to meet him and welcome him into the abodes of the blest--"Well done, thou good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord!" In his face we see an anticipated triumph that "no dim doubts alloy"; he hears with no mortal ears the recording angels "quiring to the young-eyed cherubim"; a light flashes round him, a beatific vision, from the wings of the Shining Ones: he sits, wreathed and radiant, in the real presence! What need he fear what men can do unto him? To a hope like his, swallowed up in fruition, the shock that is soon to shatter his mortal frame plays harmless as the summer-lightning: the flames that threaten to envelope him are the wedding-garment of the Spouse. "This night thou shalt sup with me in Paradise"--rings in his sleepless ears. On this rock he builds his faith, and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it! --Guy Faux (poor wretch!) was as sure within himself of the reward of his crime in the eternal salvation of his souls as of his intention to commit it: he no more doubted of another world than he doubted of his own existence. A question whether his whole creed might not be a delusion had never once crossed his mind. How should it? He had never once heard it called in question. He believed in it as he believed in all he had ever seen or heard, or thought or felt, or been told by others--he believed in a future state as he believed in this, with his senses and his understanding, and with all his heart. Poor Guy--that miserable fifth-of-November scarecrow, that stuffed straw figure, flaunting its own periodical disgrace—never once dreamt (oh! glorious inheritance!) that he should die like a dog. Otherwise, James and his parliament would have been in no jeopardy from him. He was not a person of that refinement. He thought for certain that he would go to Heaven or Hell; and he played a bold, but (as he fancied) a sure game, for the former. With such objects at stake, and with his own blinded reason, and a Mother Church on his side, and a fixed hatred of heresy and of all that belonged to it, as a strange birth in nature, that made his flesh creep and his brain reel, and a disregard of his own person, as "dross compared to the glory hereafter to be revealed, " he acted up to his belief: the man was what he preached to others to be--no better, no worse. Without this belief supporting him, what would he have been? Like the wretched straw-figure, the automation we see representing him, "disemboweled of his natural entrails, without a real heart of flesh and blood beating in his bosom, " a modern time-server, an unimpassioned slave, a canting Jesuit, a petty, cautious, meddling priest, a safe, underhand persecutor, an anonymous slanderer, a cringing sycophant, promoting his own interest by taking the bread out of honest mouths, a mercenary malignant coward, a Clerical Magistrate, a Quarterly Reviewer, a Member of the Constitutional Association, the concealed Editor of Blackwood's Magazine! The diffusion of knowledge, of inquiry, of doubt (or what Lord Bacon calls "the infinite agitation of wit") puts an end to "the soul of goodness" that there is in bigotry and superstition, and should to its evil spirit at the same time. There is nothing so intolerable as the union (which we see so common in modern times) of religious hypocrisy with literary skepticism. The real bigot is a respectable as well as enviable character. Not so the affected one. Downright, rooted, rancorous prejudices are honest, hearty, wholesome things. They keep the mind in breath. Not so the whining, hollow, designing cant, which echoes without feeling them. The barbarous cruelties of savage tribes are partly atoned for by the keen appetite for revenge in which they originate: but we do not extend the same excuse to those who poison for hire. The fires of Smithfield were kindled by a zeal that burnt as bright and fierce as they. Our contemporaries, who are in the habit of throwing firebrands and death, do it without malice; and laugh at those who do not understand the jest. The multiplication of sects dissipates and tames down the range of martyrdom. The first grand defection indeed from an established and universal faith, creates a shock and is assailed with a violence proportioned to the firmness with which the parent-belief has been rooted in the public mind: but the subsequent ramification of different schisms and modes of faith from the first enormous heresy, tires out and neutralizes the spirit of both persecution and fanaticism. Religious controversy is a war of words, and no longer a war of extermination. There may be the same heart-burnings, the same jealousies of difference of opinion; but they do not lead to the same fatal catastrophes or the same heroic sacrifices. We cannot burn or hang one another for differing from the Catholic faith as a crime of the most dreadful import, when hardly any two men can be found to agree in the interpretation of the same text. All opinions, by constant collision and attrition, become, if not equally probable, equally familiar. Men's minds are slowly weaned from blind idolatrous bigotry and intolerant zeal, by the continually increasing number of points of controversy and the frequency of dispute. Then comes the general question as to the grounds and reasonableness of the doctrines of religion itself; and a skeptical dispassionate, Epicurean work, like Bayle's Dictionary or Hume's Essays, gives the finishing blow to what little remains of dogmatical faith in established systems. After that, a zealot is another name for an imposter. The reasons for belief may be as good or stronger than ever; but the belief itself, as it is more rational, is less gross and headstrong. The closest deductions of the understanding do not act like an instinct, or warrant a mortal antipathy; and let the philosophical believer's convictions be what they will, he cannot affect and ignorance that is possible for others to differ with him. A violent and overstrained affectation of Orthodoxy is, after a certain time, a sure sign of insincerity: the only zeal that can claim to be "according to knowledge," is refined, calm, and considerate. I do not speak of this sort of mitigated, skeptical, liberalized, enlightened belief, as "a consummation devoutly to be wished:" (in my own particular, I would rather have held opinions with Guy Faux, and have gone or sent others to the Devil for that opinion)--I speak of the common course of human affairs. I remember once observing to Wilkie, the celebrated artist that Dr. Chalmers (his old friend and schoolfellow) had started an objection to the Christian religion, in order to have the credit of answering it. The Scottish Teniers said, that if the answer was a good one, he thought him right in bringing forward the objection. I did not think this remark savoured of the acuteness one would expect from such a man as Wilkie, and only said, I apprehended those opinions were the strongest which had been never called in question. Reasoning is not believing--whatever seeing may be, according to the proverb. A devoted and incorrigible attachment to individuals, as well as to doctrines, is weakened by the progress of knowledge and civilization. A spirit of skepticism, of inquiry, of comparison, is introduced there too, by the course of reading, observation, and reflection, which strikes at the root of our disproportionate idolatry. Margaret Labrun did not think there was such another woman in the world as her mistress, Queen Mary; nor could she, after her death, see any thing in it worth living for. Had she had access to a modern circulating library, she would have read of a hundred such heroines, all peerless alike; and would have consoled herself for the death of them all, one after another, pretty much in the same manner. Margaret was not one of those who argue, according to Mr. Burke's improved political catechism, that "a king is but a king; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and that not an animal of the highest order." She had more respect of persons than this. The truth is, she had never seen such another woman as her mistress, and she had no means, by books or otherwise, of forming an idea of any thing but what she saw. In that isolated state of society, people grew together like trees, and clung round the strongest fore support, "as the vine curls its tendrils." They became devoted to others with the same violence of attachment as they were to themselves. Novels, plays, magazines, treatises of philosophy, Monthly Museums, and Belles Assemblees, did not fly in numbers about the country and "through the airy region stream so bright," as to blot out the impression of all real forms. The effects of habit, of sense, of service, of affection, did not find an ideal level in general literature and artificial models. The heart made its election once, and was fixed till death: the eyes doated on fancied perfection, and were divorced from every other object afterwards. There was not the same communication of ideas; there was not the same change of place or acquaintance. The prejudices of rank, of custom, strengthened the bias of individual admiration; and it is no wonder, where all these circumstances were combined, that the presence of a person, whom we had loved and served, became a feeling, an appetite, and a passion in the mind, almost necessary to existence. The taking our idol away (and by cruel and treacherous means) would be taking away the prop that sustained life, and on which all the pride of the affections leant. Its loss would be the loss of another self; and a double loss of this kind (as in the instance alluded to) could seek for no solace but in the death of her who had caused it. Where the mind had become riveted to a certain object, where it had embarked its all in the sacred cause of friendship and inviolable fidelity, it would be in vain to offer the consolations of philosophy when the heart owned none. Other scenes, new friends, fresh engagements, might be proper for others; but Margaret Lambrun's wounded spirit could find no relief but in looking forward to a full revenge for a murdered mistress and husband. You might as well think of wedding the soul to another body, as of inspiring her with other hopes and thoughts than those which she had loved so well and long, and she was ready to die for them. Life becomes indifferent to a mind haunted by a passion of this sort. Death is not then a choice, but rather a necessity. We cannot live, and have the desire nearest to our souls. To play the hero, it is only necessary to be wound up to such an unavoidable interest in any thing, as reflection, prudence, natural instinct, have no power over. To be a hero, is, in other words, to lose the sense of our personal identity in some object dearer to us than ourselves. He may purchase any thing he pleases, who is ready to part with his life for it. Wherever there is a passion or belief strong enough to blind us to consequences, there the mind is capable of any sacrifice and of any undertaking. The heroical is the fanaticism of common life: it is the contempt of danger, of pain, of death, in the pursuit of a favorite idea. The rule of honour, as of conscience, is to contemplate things in the abstract, and never as affecting or re-acting upon yourself; the hero is an instrument in the hands of fate, and is himself impassive to its blows. A man in a passion, or who is worked up to a certain pitch of enthusiasm, minds nothing else. The fear of death, the love of self, is but an idea or motive with a certain habitual strength. Raise any other idea or feeling to a greater habitual or momentary height, and it will supplant or overrule the first. Courage is sometimes the effect of despair. Women, in a fit of romance, or on some sudden emergency, have been known to perform feats of heroic daring, from which men of the stoutest nerves might shrink with dismay. Maternal tenderness is heroic. Affection of any kind, that doats upon a particular object, and absorbs every other consideration in that, is in its nature heroic. 1 Passion is the great ingredient in heroism. He who stops to reflect, to balance one thing against another, is a coward. The better part of valour is indiscretion. All passion is a short-lived madness, or state of intoxication, in which some present impulse or prevailing idea gets uncontrolled possession of the mind, and lords it there at will. A man may be (almost literally) drunk with choler, with love, with jealousy, with revenge, as he may with wine or strong drink. Any of these will overpower his reason and senses, and put him beyond himself. The master-feeling will prevail, whatever it is, and when it once gets the upper hand, will rage the more violently in proportion to the obstacles it has to encounter. Women who associate with robbers are cruel, as soon as they get over their first repugnance: some of the bravest officers have been the greatest Martinets. A man who is afraid of a blow, or tender of his person, will yet, on being struck, feel nothing but the mortification of the affront, and the fear of discomfiture. The pain that is inflicted, after his blood is once up, will only aggravate his resentment, and be diverted from the channels of fear into those of rage and shame. He whose will is roused and holds out in this way, whose tenaciousness of purpose and inflammability of spirit are proof against the extremity of pain, of fatigue, and disaster, is said to have pluck. So a man may not be able to reason himself into coolness at the commencement of a battle; but a ball whizzing near him does it, by abstracting 1There is a common inversion of this opinion, which is desperation; or the becoming reckless of all consequences, poverty, disease, or death, from disappointment in some one thing that the mind is set upon, no matter what. A man who has been jilted of his first choice marries out of spite the first woman he meets. A girl, whose sweetheart goes to sea, because she will not have him, as soon as he is gone, and she is baulked of her fancy, runs a-muck at ruin and infamy-- "As men should serve a cucumber,
his imagination from a thousand idle fears, and fixing it on his immediate situation and duty. The novice in an engagement, that before was motionless with apprehension or trembling like a leaf, after being hit, loses the sense of possible contingencies in the grief of his wound, and fights like a devil incarnate. He is thenceforward too busy to think of himself. He rushes fearlessly on danger and on death. A man in a battle is indeed emphatically beside himself. He "bears a charmed life," that in fancy disarms cannon-balls and bullets of their power to hurt. They are mere names and apparitions from which astonishment and necessity have taken out the sting: the sense of feeling is seared and dead for the time to "all mortal consequences." The mind is sublimated to a disregard of whatever can happen, and tempted to rush without provocation on its fate, purely out of bravado, and as the triumph of its paramount feeling, an exasperation of its temporary insanity. Courage is in many such cases only a violent effort to shake off fear, a determination of the imagination to seize on any object that may divert its present dread. A soldier is a perfect hero but that he is a mere machine. He is drilled into disinterestedness, and beaten into courage. He is a very patriotic and romantic automaton. He has lost all regard for himself and concern for others. His life, his limbs, his soul and body, are obedient only to the word of command. “Set duty in one eye and death in the other, and he can look on death indifferently." "Set but a Scotsman on a hill,
They then go at it with bayonets fixed, eyes inflamed, and tongues lolling out with heat and rage, like wild beasts or mad dogs panting for blood, and from the madman to Mr. Wordsworth's "happy warrior" there is but one step--The true hero devotes himself in the same way, but he does it of his own accord, and from an inward sentiment. The service on which he is bound is perfect freedom. He is not a machine, but a free agent. He knows his cue without a prompter. Not servile duty-- "Within his bosom reigns another lord,
Thus a knight-errant going on adventures, and following out the fine idea of love and gallantry in his own mind, without once thinking of himself but as a vessel dedicated to virtue and honour, is one of the most enviable fictions In the whole world. Don Quixote, in the midst of its comic irony, is the finest serious development to be found of this character. The account of the Cid, the famous Spanish hero, of which Mr. Southey has given an admirable prose-translation where scarcely a word could be changed or transposed without injuring the force and clear simplicity of the antique style he has adopted, abounds with instances to the same purpose. His taking back the lion to its den, his bringing his father "the herb that would cure him," his enemy's head, and his manner of reclaiming a recreant knight from his cowardice by heaping the rewards and distinctions of courage upon him, are some of those that I remember as the most striking. Perhaps the reader may not have the book by him; yet they are worth turning to, both for the sentiment and the expression. The first then in order is the following:-- "At this time it came to pass that there was strife between
Count Don Gomez the Lord of Gormaz, and Diego Laynez the father of Rodrigo
(the Cid); and the Count insulted Diego and gave him a blow. Now
Diego was a man in years, and his strength had passed from him, so that
he could not take vengeance, and he retired to his home to dwell there
in solitude and lament over his dishounour. And he took no pleasure
in his food, neither could he sleep by night, nor would he lift up his
eyes from the ground, nor stir out of his house, nor commune with his friends,
but turned from them in silence as if the breath of his shame would taint
them. Rodrigo was yet but a youth, and the Count was a mighty man
in arms, one who gave his voice first in the Cortez, and was held to be
the best in the war, and so powerful, that he had a thousand friends among
the mountains. Howbeit, all these things appeared as nothing to Rodrigo,
when he thought of the wrong done to his father, the first which had ever
been offered to the blood of Layn Calvo. He asked nothing but justice
of Heaven, and of man he asked only a fair field; and his father seeing
of how good heart he was, gave him his sword and his blessing. The
sword had been the Sword of Mudarra in former times, and when Rodrigo held
its cross in his hand, he thought within himself that his arm was not weaker
than Mudarra's. And he went out and defied the Count and slew him,
and smote off his head, and carried it home to his father. The old
man was setting at table, the food lying before him untasted, when Rodrigo
returned, and pointing to the head which hung from the horse’s collar,
dropping blood, he bade him look up, for there was the herb which would
restore him to his appetite; the tongue, quoth he, which insulted
1 you, is no longer a tongue, and the hand which wronged you is no longer
a hand. And the old man arose and embraced his son and placed him
above him at the table;
1It has been suggested whether this phrase "insulted"
is not too modern.
saying that he who brought home that head should be the head of the house of Layn Calvo."--Chronicle of the Cid, p. 4. The next is of Martin Pelaez, whom the Cid made of a notable coward a redoubtable hero:-- "Here the history relates, that at this time Martin Pelaez the Asturian came with a convoy of laden beasts, carrying provision to the hosts of the Cid; and as he passed near the town, the Moors sallied out in great numbers against hi; but he, though he had few with him, defended the convoy right well, and did great hurt to the Moors, slaying many of them, and drove them into the town. This Martin Pelaez, who is here spoken of, did the Cid make a right good knight of a coward, as ye shall hear. When the Cid first began to lay siege to the City of Valencia, this Martin Pelaez came unto him: he was a knight, a native of Santillance in Asturias, a hidalgo, great of body and strong of limb, a well made man and of goodly semblance, but withal a right coward at heart, which he had shown in many places where he was among feats of arms. And the Cid was sorry when he came unto him, though he would not let him perceive this; for he knew he was not fit to be of his company. Howbeit, he thought that since he was come, he would make him brave whether he would or not. And when the Cid began to war upon the town, and sent parties against it twice and thrice a day, as ye have heard, for the Cid was always upon the alert, there was fighting and tourneying every day. One day it fell out that the Cid and his kinsmen and friends and vassals were engaged in a great encounter, and this Martin Pelaez was well armed; and when he saw that the Moors and Christians were at it, he fled and betook himself to his lodging, and there hid himself till the Cid returned to dinner. And the Cid saw what Martin Pelaez did, and when he had conquered the Moors, he returned to his lodging to dinner. Now it was the custom of the Cid to eat at a high table seated on his bench at the head. And Don Alvar Fannez and Pero Bermudez and other precious knights ate in another part, at high tables full honourably, and none other knights whatsoever dared to take their seats with them, unless they were such as deserved to be there; and the other who were not so approved in arms ate upon estrados, at tables with cushions. This was the order in the house of the Cid, and every one knew the place where he was to sit at meat, and every one strove all he could to gain the honour of sitting to eat at the table of Don Alvar Fannez and his companions, by strenuously behaving himself in all feats of arms; and thus the honour of the Cid was advanced. This Martin Pelaez, thinking that none had seen his badness, washed his hands in turn with the other knights, and would have taken his place among them. And the Cid went unto him and took him by the hand and said, You are not such a one as deserves to sit with these, for they are worth more than you or than me, but I will have you with me; and he seated him with himself at table. And he, for lack of understanding, thought that the Cid did this to honour him above all the others. On the morrow the Cid and his company rode towards Valencia, and the Moors came out to the tourney; and Martin Pelaez went out well armed, and was among the foremost who charged the Moors, and when he was in among them he turned the reins, and went back to his lodging; and the Cid took heed to all that he did, and saw that though he had done badly, he had done better than the first day. And when the Cid had driven the Moors into the town, he returned to his lodging, and as he sate down to meat, he took this Martin Pelaez by the hand, and seated him with himself, and bade him eat with him in the same dish, for he had deserved more that day than he had the first. And the knight gave heed to that saying, and was abashed; howbeit, he did as the Cid commanded him: and after he had dined, he went to his lodging and began to think upon what the Cid had said unto him, and perceived that he had seen all the baseness which he had done; and then he understood that for this cause he would not let him sit at board with the other knights who were precious in arms, but had seated him with himself, more to affront him than to do him honour, for there other knights there better than he, and he did not show them that honour. Then resolved he in his heart to do better than he had done hitherto. Another day the Cid and his company and Martin Pelaez rode towards Valencia, and the Moors came out to the tourney full resolutely, and Martin Pelaez was among the first, and charged them right boldly; and he smote down and slew presently a good knight, and he lost here all the bad fear which he had had, and was that day one of the best knights there: and as long as the tourney lasted, there he remained fighting and slaying and overthrowing the Moors, till they were driven within the gates, in such manner that the Moors marveled at him, and asked where that Devil came from, for they had never seen him before. And the Cid was in a place where he could see all that was going on, and he gave good heed to him, and had great pleasure in beholding him to see how well he had forgotten the great fear which he was wont to have. And when the Moors were shut up within the town, the Cid and all his people returned to their lodging, and Martin Pelaez full leisurely and quietly went to his lodging also, like a good knight. And when it was the hour of eating, the Cid waited for Martin Pelaez, and when he came and they had washed, the Cid took him by the hand, and said, My friend, you are not such a one as deserves to sit with me henceforth, but sit you here with Don Alvar Fannez and with these other good knights, for the good feats which you have done this day have made you a companion for them; and from the day forward he was placed in the company of the good." --p. 199 * * * * * "There was a lion in the house of the Cid, who had grown a large one, and strong, and was full nimble; three men had the keeping of this lion, and they kept him in a den which was in a court-yard, high up in the palace; and when they cleansed the court, they were wont to shut him up in his den, and afterwards to open the door that he might come out and eat: the Cid kept him for his pastime, that he might take pleasure with him when he was minded so to do. Now it was the custom of the Cid to dine every day with his company, and after he had dined, he was wont to sleep awhile upon his seat. And one day when he had dined, there came a man and told him that a great fleet was arrived in the port of Valencia, wherein there was a great power of the Moors, whom King Bucar had brought over, the sons of the Miramamolin of Morocco. And when the Cid heard this, his heart rejoiced and he was glad, for it was night three years since he had had a battle with the Moors. Incontinently he ordered a signal to be made, that all the honourable men who were in the city should assemble together. And when they were all assembled in the Alcazar, and his sons-in-law with them, the Cid told them the news, and took counsel with them in what manner they should go out against this great power of the Moors. And when they had taken counsel, the Cid went to sleep upon his seat, and the Infantes and the others sate playing at tables and chess. Now at this time the men who were keepers of the lion were cleaning out the court, and when they heard the cry that the Moors were coming, they opened the den, and came down into the palace where the Cid was, and left the door of the court open. And when the lion had ate his meat, and saw that the door was open, he went out of the court and came down into the palace even into the hall where they all were: and when they who were there saw him, three was a great stir among them: but the Infantes of Carrion showed greater cowardice than all the rest. Ferrando Gonzalez having no shame, neither for the Cid nor for the others who were present, crept under the seat whereon the Cid was sleeping, and in his haste he burst his mantle and his doublet also at the shoulders. And Diego Gonzalez, the other, ran to a postern door, crying, I shall never see Carrion again! This door opened upon a courtyard, where there was a wine-press, and he jumped out, and by reason of the great height could not keep his feet, but fell among the lees and defiled himself therewith. And all the others who were in the hall wrapt their cloaks around their arms, and stood round about the seat whereon the Cid was sleeping, that hey might defend him. The noise which they made awakened the Cid, and he saw the lion coming towards him, and he lifted up his hand and said, What is this?... and the lion hearing his voice stood still: and he rose up and took him by the mane, as if he had been a gentle mastiff, and led him back to the court where he was before, and ordered his keepers to look better to him from time to come. And when he had done this, he returned to the hall and took his seat again; and all they who beheld it were greatly astonished" --p. 251. The presence of mind, the manly confidence, the faith in virtue, the lofty bearing and picturesque circumstances in all these stories are as fine as any thing can well be imagined.--The last of them puts me in mind, that that heroic little gentleman, Mr. Kean, who is a Cid too in his way, keeps a lion "for his pastime, that he may take pleasure with him when he is minded so to do." It is, to be sure, an American lion, a pumah, a sort of great dog. But still it shews the nature of the man, and the spirited turn of his genius. Courage is the great secret of his success. His acting is, if not classical, heroical. To dare and to do are with him the same thing. "Masterless passion sways him to the mood of what it likes or loaths." He may be sometimes wrong, but he is decidedly wrong, and does not betray himself by paltry doubts and fears. He takes the lion by the mane. He gains all by hazarding all. He throws himself into the breach, and fights his way through as well as he can. He leaves all to his feelings, and goes where they lead him; and he finds his account in this method, and brings rich ventures home. In reading the foregoing accounts of the Spanish author, it seems that in those times killing was no murder. Slaughter was the order of the day. The blood of the Moors and Christians flows through the page as so much water. The proverb uppermost in their minds was, that a man could die but once, and the inference seemed to be, the sooner the better. In these more secure and civilized times (individually and as far as it depends upon ourselves) we are more chary of our lives. We are (ordinarily) placed out of the reach of “the shot of accident and dart of chance"; and grow indolent, tender, and effeminate in our notions and habits. Books do not make men valiant, --not even the reading the chronicle of the Cid. The police look after all breaches of the peace and resorts of suspicious characters, so that we need not buckle on our amour to go to the succor of distressed damsels, or to give battle to giants and enchanters. Instead of killing some fourteen before breakfast, like Hotspur, we are contented to read of these things in the newspapers, or to see them performed on the stage. We enjoy all the dramatic interest of such scenes, without the tragic results. Regnault de St. Jean Angely rode like a madman through the streets of Paris, when from the barricades he saw the Prussians advancing. We love, fight, and are slain by proxy--live over the adventures of a hundred heroes and die their deaths--and the next day are as well as ever, and ready to begin again. This is a gaining concern, and an improvement on the old -fashioned way of risking life and limb in good earnest, as a cure for ennui. It is a bad speculation to come to an untimely end by way of killing time. Now, like the heroic personages in Tom Thumb, we spread a white pocket handkerchief to prepare our final catastrophe, and act the sentiment of death with all the impunity to be desired. Men, the more they cultivate their intellect, become more careful of their persons. They would like to think, to read, to dream on for ever, without being liable to any worldly annoyance. "Be mine to read eternal new romances, of Marivaux and Crebillon," cries the insatiable adept in this school. Art is long, and they think it hard that life should be so short. Their existence has been chiefly theatrical, ideal, a tragedy rehearsed in print--why should it receive its dénouement in their proper persons, in corpore villi?-In another point of view, sedentary, studious people live in a world of thought--in a world out of themselves-and are not very well prepared to scuffle in this. They lose the sense of personal honour on questions of more general interest, and are not inclined to individual sacrifices that can be of no service to the cause of letters. They do not see how any speculative truth can be proved by their being run through the body; nor does your giving them the lie alter the state of any one of the great leading questions in policy, morals or criticism. Philosophers might claim the privileges of divines for many good reasons; among these, according to Spenser, Exemption from worldly care and peril was not the least in monkish lore: "From worldly care himself he did esloine,
Mental courage is the only courage I pretend to. I dare venture an opinion where few else would, particularly if I think it right. I have retracted few of my positions. Whether this arises from obstinacy or strength, or indifference to the opinions of others, I know not. In little else I have the spirit of martyrdom: but I would give up anything sooner than an abstract proposition. To return to the top click here
A VERY ingenious and subtle writer, 1 whom there is good
reason for suspecting to be an ex-Jesuit, not unknown at Douay some five-and-twenty
years since (he will not obtrude himself at M ----- th again in a hurry),
about a twelvemonth back set himself to prove the character of the Powder-Plot
conspirators to have been that of heroic self-devotedness and true Christian
martyrdom. Under the mask of Protestant Candour, he actually gained admission
for his treatise into a London weekly paper 2 not particularly distinguished
for its zeal towards either religion. But, admitting Catholic principles,
his arguments are shrewd and incontrovertible. He says --
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OF PERSONS
ONE WOULD WISH TO HAVE SEEN
""Come like shadows—so depart." Lamb it was, I think, who suggested this subject, as well as the defence of Guy Fawkes, which I urged him to execute. As, however, he would undertake neither, I suppose I must do both, a task for which he would have been much fitter, no less from the temerity than the felicity of his pen— "Never so sure our rapture to create
Compared with him, I shall, I fear, make but a commonplace
piece of business of it; but I should be loath the idea was entirely lost,
and, besides, I may avail myself of some hints of his in the progress of
it. I am sometimes, I suspect, a better reporter of the ideas of other
people than expounder of my own. I pursue the one too far into paradox
or mysticism; the others I am not bound to follow farther than I like,
or than seems fair and reasonable."...
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From: The Plain Speaker., William Hazlitt, Ed. Duncan
Wu, Blackwell Publishers, 1998 p.104,
How loath were we to give up our pious belief in ghosts and witches, because we liked to persecute the one, and frighten ourselves to death with the other! It is not the quality so much as the quantity of excitement that we are anxious about: we cannot bear a state of indifference and a ennui: the mind seems to abhor a vacuum as much as ever matter was Supposed to do. Even when the spirit of the age (that is, the progress of intellectual refinement, warring with our natural infirmities) no longer allows us to carry our vindictive and headstrong humors into effect, we try to revive them in description, and keep up the old bugbears, the phantoms of our terror and our hate, in imagination. We burn Guy Faux in effigy, and the hooting and buffeting and maltreating that poor tattered figure of rags and straw makes a festival in very village in England once a year. Protestants and Papists do not now burn one another at the stake: but we subscribe to new editions of Fox's Book of Martyrs; and the secret of the success of the Scotch novels is much the same- they carry us back to the feuds, the heart-burnings, the havoc, the dismay, the wrongs and the revenue of a barbarous age and people-to the rooted prejudices and deadly animosities of sects and parties in politics and religion and of contending chiefs and clans in war and intrigue. We feel the full force of the spirit of hatred with all of them in turn. To return to the top click here
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Chapter VI Guy Faux and the Gunpowder Plot (1605) Carlyle, Thomas, Historical Sketches of Notable Persons and Events in the Reigns of James I and Charles I.,Chapman and Hall, 1899. (1844) p.66-71. What is singular, the Dovetail Papers contain no account, or almost none, of the celebrated Gunpowder Treason. A curious proof, wonderful and joyful, how all dies away in this world, --battles as well as covenanted love, and how the bitterest antagonisms sink into eternal silence, and peaceably blend the dust of their bodies for new corn soil to the succeeding generations. Punic Hannibal and Roman Scipio are a very quiet pair of neighbours now. Guy Faux, who had nearly sent the British Solomon and all his Parliament aloft into the infinite realms by chemical explosion, has become like Solomon himself, little other than a ridiculous chimera. " I was gratified," says Dovetail, "on the 5th of November last, to meet an enormous Guy in the New Cut; 2 2. A street in London, joining the Waterloo and Blackfriar's Roads. got up with an accuracy of costume, in which this generation may surely pride itself. He seemed in stature about twelve feet or upwards; he was seated in a cart drawn by idle apprentices and young miscellaneous men, who shouted deep but not fiercely as they drew. The face, of due length, was axe-shaped as it were, all tending towards one enormous nose; the wooden eye looking truculently enough in its fixed obduracy from its broad sleek field of featureless cheek. Flood of black horsehair shaded this appropriate countenance, streamed copious over back and shoulders, and gave a tragic impressiveness to the figure. The white band was not forgotten; nor square, close coat, with its girdle of black leather. The hat, about the size and shape of a chimney-pot, set in a pewter trencher, I considered to be of blackened pasteboard. To such length has useful knowledge extended among us; down even to the apprentices and burners of Faux. Thus traveled Faux in appropriate costume through the New Cut, few pausing to glance at him, still fewer offering any coin for the support of him. If here and there some passenger regarded him with a brief grim smile, it was much….I passed along, musing upon many things. To such chimerical conditions do the sublimest Forms in History come at last; no bloodiest truculence can continue terrible forever; how in this all-forgetting world do Angels of Doom, at which every heart quailed, dwindle into pasteboard Bugaboos; and does Thor, the Thudergod, whose stroke smote out Valleys of Chamouni, the angry breath of whose nostrils snuffing through his red beard, was once the whistling of the story-blast over heaven, become Jack the Giant Killer. My Lord Montague of Boughton left 40l.1 to keep alive the memory of this great mercy, while Time endured; and in a space of 240 years it has come to what we see!---There is no contest eternal but that of Ormuzd and Ahriman; the rest are all, except as elements of that, insignificant." 1 Collins. Well, and are there in History many sterner figures than Guido, standing there with his dark-lantern beside the six-and-thirty barrels of gunpowder in Whinniard's cellar under the Parliament? 1 To such length has he, for his part, carried his insight into the true interests of this world. Guido is a very serious figure; has used reasonable effort to bring himself to the stickingplace and Hercules' choice of roads. No Pusey Dilettante, poor spouting New Catholic or Young England in white waistcoat; a very serious man come there to do a thing, and die for it if there be need. Papal Antichrist, the Holy Father, whom Fate has sent irrevocably towards chaos and night-empire, this Guido will recall again to light, --if not by Heaven's aid then by Hell's. He is here with his six-and-thirty barrels of gunpowder in Whinniard's cellar; to blow up King and Parliament.-It is remarkable how in almost all world-quarrels, when they came to extremity there have been Infernal Machines, Sicilian Vespers, Guido Powder-barrels and such like called into action; and worth noting how hitherto not one of them in this world has prospered. 2 No, my desperate friends, that is not the way to prosper. Can the Chariot of Time be stopt or hastened by clutching at its wheel-spokes in that mad manner? You may draw at the Chariot itself or draw against it; but do not meddle with its wheel-spokes. Besides, in all cases, I consider the Devil an unsafe sleeping-partner, to be rejected, not to be admitted at any premium; by whose aid no cause yet was ever known to prosper. A changed time truly, since Guido Faux was a figure of flesh and blood steering his wild way between Heaven and Hell; instead of a pasteboard one traveling the New Cut to collect Anticatholic pence for fireworks! A most truculent fact that of Guido, if we will mediate it. Gentlemen of 1 The cellars under the House were let to coal dealers
etc.
honour, of what education, reflexion, breeding and human culture there was going, have decided after much study to solve the riddle of Existence for themselves in this manner. "Heard are the Voices," speaking out of the Eternity to man that he shall be a man; and it is in this way that Guido Faux and Company interpret them. They have communed together by word of mouth and glance of eye; have clubbed money, sworn on the Evangels; and Jesuit Garnet, 1--many looking askance on the business, has said, "Well-done." And so King and Parliament are to fly aloft, and papal Antichrist is to be recalled again to light.-Reader, it was not a Drury Lane scenic exhibition to be done by burnt cork, bad Iambics, and yellow funnel-boots, this of Guido's; but a terribly pressing piece of work not to be got done except by practical exertion of oneself! I have a view of the renting of Whinniard's cellar; the landing of those six-and-thirty casks of gunpowder there. Living Guido stands there, a tough heart beating in him, dark-lantern and three matches in hand;2 and there will be a fireblast and peal of Doom, not often witnessed in this world; and one Parliament at least shall end in an original manner! And Papal Antichrist, the Holy Father, shall resume his old place, and England unite herself with the old Dragons, instead of the new-revealed Eternal God. Had not his Majesty, seemingly again by special inspiration, detected in this dark mystery the faintest light-chink ever seen,--an ambiguous phrase in a letter, 3 fit for such a pair of vigilant quick-glancing goggle-eyes; and, pressing forward, torn out the whole fiery secret of it--to the wonder, the terror, the horror and devout gratitude of all men. Flagging imagination, in this new element of ours, can do no justice to it, need not try to conceive it; imagination even of Shakespeare cannot. Faux lies in stern durance; austere, lynx-eyed judges round him, with their racks and interrogatories, their feline lynx- 1 Henry Garnet, Provincial of the Jesuits in England
eyes, as it were all pupil together, dilated into glow
of rage and terror; able to seek in the dark. Three-score1
Apostolic young gentlemen ride with the speed of Epsom through slumbering
England into Warwickshire, designing as they profess to hunt there.
The Warwickshire "hunt" ascertaining how the matter is, swiftly dissipates
itself again; with terror lest they themselves prove cozened foxes, and
experience not what the hunter but what the chased fox in these circumstances
feels. The three score Apostolic young gentlemen have to gallop again
for life, for life; the Warwickshire Posse Comitatus galloping at their
heels. And "on" the edge of Warwickshire at Stephen Littleton's house,"
O Heavens, while the poor fellows dried their gunpowder, it caught fire,
scorched two of them almost to death, or into delirium. And the others
"stood upon their guard," as hunted human truculences chased into their
last lair might; and Sheriff and Posse had a deadlift effort to make; and
their faces are grimed with powder-smoke, bathed in sweat; and faces lay
grim, minatory in the last death-paleness in Stephen Littleton's house
there;--and they were all killed or else taken wounded, and then hanged
and headed. And horror, wonder, and awe-struck voice of thanksgiving
rose consentaneous from broad England, and the Lord Montague founded "an
endowment of 40l l. (annually) that the memory "of the deliverance might
be celebrated, in all time to come, in the town of Northampton."
And in English History there was never done a thing of graver tragic interest
than this which Dovetail now sees reduced to pasteboard in the New Cut.
What dust of extinct lions sleeps peaceably under our feet everywhere!
The soil of this world is made of the dust of Life, the geologists say;
limestone and other rocks are made of bone dust variously compounded.
1 State Trials, ii. 211. going off in a flash of hell-fire? One would have thought his Majesty had got enough of Papism;--England, in general, thought very heartily so. His Majesty had no hatred of the Pope, except as a rival to King's Supremacy; had at one time wanted a Scotch Cardinal. His Majesty did find good, when a certain old negotiation with the Pope came to light, to lay the blame of it on Secretary Elphinstone, the Lord Balmerino;1 to have Balmerino condemned to die, and then pardon him again. A scotch Cardinal would have been a sort of conveniency, he thought. Kings are peculiarly circumstanced; especially kings that know not the heart of their Nation, Ormuzd from Ahriman. 1. Sir John Scott of Scotstarvet says that Elphinstone (Lord Balmerino) was in such favour with King James, that he craved the reversion of secretary Cecil's place, at the king's coming to the Crown of England, which was the beginning of his overthrow; for the said secretary Cecil wrought so that, having procured a letter which had come from King James, wherein he promised all kindness to the Roman See and Pope, if his holiness would assist him to attain to the Crown of England;--this letter the said secretary Cecil showed in the king's presence in the Council of England; whereupon King James, fearing to displease the English nation, behoved to disclaim the penning of this letter, and lay the blame thereof on his secretary, whom a little before that he had made Lord Balmerino: to whom he wrote to come to court; where being come, for exoneration of the king, he behoved to take on him the guilt of writing that letter." The Staggering State of the Scots Statesmen (Edin., 1754), 59-60. The King took immense pains to prove that he had no hand
in writing this letter; that the signature to it had been got surreptitiously;
and there is evidence, independently of Balmerino's confession which might
have been a forced or bribed one, to prove pretty certainly that James
was, technically at least, innocent of this particular charge. The
king, however, had written compromising letters to the Cardinals and Italian
Princes; and in his "Premonition to all the most mighty Monarchs, Kings,
Free Princes, and States of Christendom," which appeared some time afterwards,
he does not even mention Balmerino's Confession. Professor Gardiner
(History of England, ii, 34) says: " It is possible that, by the time that
book appeared, James had remembered that the signature of the letter to
the Pope was but a small part of the charge against him, and had become
unwilling to call attention to the fact that, at all events, he had ordered
letters to be written to the Cardinals.
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Lamb as Fawkes 1848 It was the same thorough-going enjoyment of a joke which made him submit to have his personal identity merged into that of the persecuted Guy Fawkes. One evening, it was the 5th of Novemn- her, he was with some old friends, who, particu- larly struck with the large flapping brim of his round hat, pinned up the sides. Lamb made no objection, but stuck it on his head, and sauntered towards his home in the Temple. On his way, he was met by a party of young men, “flushed with insolence and wine,” who exclaimed, “A Guy ! a veritable Guy! no man of straw !“ and, making a chair of their hands, carried him in triumph into St. Paul’s church-yard, where they seated him on a post and left him, there to await the fagots of traditionary patriotism and juvenile anti-catholicism. Lamb quietly enjoyed the proceedings. It was an historical joke; it threw him, by a humorous iden- tification, back into the past he loved so well, and he always told the story with immense relish. "Charles Lamb his Genius and Writings" The Living Age., Volume 17, Issue 214, June 17, 1848. p. 533.
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| "In Praise of Guy
Fawkes"
Lecture given on November 25, 1932; reprinted in Where Stands Socialism
Today, London, 1933.
I rise to address you with a reluctance which has been growing on me for a long time past. For forty-eight years I have been addressing speeches to the Fabian Society and to other assemblies in this country. So far as I can make out, those speeches have not produced any effect whatever. In the course of them I have solved practically all the pressing questions of our time; but as they go on being propounded as insoluble just as if I had never existed, I have come to see at last that one of the most important things to be done in this country Is to make public speaking a criminal offence. I do not know why it is that you are assembled here tonight. I suspect that a great many of you are what I call public-speaking addicts. Public speaking is a sort of drug which you take to make you feel that when you have heard somebody talking about an important subject you have done your duty and disposed of that subject. I am inclined to think that a still greater proportion of my audience has not come to hear me at all. I wonder how many of you believe me to be the Reverend Ira D. Goldhawk, the worthy pastor of Kingsway Hall. I should not be at all surprised if quite a large number of you did. Now, what is Parliament in this country? It is the central engine of public speaking from which the tradition of public speaking spreads through the community. I do not know whether you ever heard anybody ask a question as to the qualifications of a parliamentary candidate for the work of legislation and governing the country. I never did. But there is one question which you may sometimes hear asked. Is he a speaker? Is he a good speaker? If it turns out that he is a good speaker, or is believed by a certain number of people to be a good speaker, then that is considered a sufficient qualification. And I think it is. I think that the real function of Parliament in this country is to prevent anything being done by endlessly talking about it. Parliament reminds me of a locomotive engine, but a locomotive engine made in a peculiar way. You know a modern locomotive is attached to seventy-five trucks with ten tons of coal in each, and it has to move the lot. In order to do that, there must be an enormous pressure of steam in the cylinders to make the wheels go round with all that weight against them. To prevent that pressure from blowing the boiler to bits there is a hole in the boiler which is closed with a spring strong enough to resist the pressure needed to move the train; but if the pressure goes beyond that the spring lifts and the steam evaporates. This contrivance is called a safety-valve. Now, the only difference between the parliamentary locomotive and the engineers' locomotive is that the safety valve in the parliamentary locomotive is made so extremely weak that it blows off in hot air before there is the slightest possibility of the train moving at all. It is interesting to notice the effect of public speaking on audiences. I have been watching audiences now for fifty years, including this Fabian audience, which is believed, for some reason which I have never been able to ascertain, to be an especially intelligent audience. Perhaps it is. But I, having seen it come to this hall year after year, listening to the same sort of thing without anything happening, regard the presence of any person in this hall as being a sign of a weak intellect. For instance, take my friend Mr. [A.L.] Rowse, who delivered and admirable lecture here a fortnight ago. He interested me especially because it became plain shortly after he began that he is actually a Socialist, and is actually in earnest about it, which is not invariably the case even when the person on the platform is nominally a Socialist--you cannot depend upon anything of the kind nowadays. But Mr. Rowse, among other quaint things, is a member of All Souls College, Oxford, which is such an entirely unreasonable and amazing academic institution that when it is described to foreigners they fall down speechless and never smile again. It is not possible for Mr. Rowse, sound Socialist as he is, to go and dine at that extraordinary place without picking up a few of its habits of speech. Consequently, when we were all following his lecture with the greatest attention, he suddenly, by reflex action, said that the English workman was the best workman in the world. Immediately there was the beginning of an enthusiastic response to him. He crushed it and went on. But as I sat there, there came into my head suddenly those lines written by the poet Keats in which he condenses the whole of the first chapter of Marx's Das Kapital into a single stanza. You may perhaps remember his poem of Isabella, in which he describes how the workers of the world enriched Isabella's commercial brothers: For them the Ceylon diver held his breath,
in search of pearls. Simultaneously with that vision there came into my head another of a London policeman plunging in full uniform to the hungry shark and bringing up in his helmet twelve outsize pearls to show the barbarous Cingalese how very much better an Englishman could do their work if he set his mind to it. I do not think Mr. Rowse meant exactly that; and yet, upon my honour, if he did not mean it, I do not quite know what he did mean. The next time he dines at All Souls, he might put the point to the Fellows, and see what they can make of it. Now, suppose Mr. Rowse had not been Mr. Rowse, but a popular parliamentary orator-- say Mr. Lloyd George or the Prime Minister [J. Ramsay MacDonald]--what would he have done? He would immediately have made a note in his mind, "That's got em"; and then he would have proceeded to get you. He would have said passionately, "Can you show me in the world the equal of the English plumber?” He would then have gone on through the whole range of industries, more and more vehemently asserting the superiority of the Englishman in every one of them. With each succeeding challenge the enthusiasm of the audience would have risen to its culmination in thunders of triumphant applause; and everybody would have declared the meeting the most successful the Fabian Society had ever held. That is how the world is ungoverned at present. That is the way to prevent its being governed. No meaning is attached to these speeches which are received with so much enthusiasm. They are forgotten in five hours, and often contradicted flatly, either by events or by the speaker himself, within five days. And nobody notices the discrepancy. Looking back on my now rather too long career, I can remember instance after instance of the most sensational kind. I can remember the assurances given us in Parliament before the war by the Prime Minister [Herbert Asquith] and the Foreign Secretary [Sir Edward Grey], that we were entirely wrong in suspecting that there was any treaty between France, Russia, England, and Belgium with regard to a contemplate war on Germany. After that, when it turned out that, though there was no formal treaty, not only was there a war with Germany in contemplation, but that our share in it had been carefully arranged by the Liberal Imperialists in the Cabinet, for many years beforehand, nobody seemed conscious of having been humbugged. On the contrary, the tendency to speak of the Liberal Imperialists as typical straightforward English gentlemen, entirely incapable of making a statement that was not strictly true, increased notably as our militant patriotism kindled. Early in the war we were all registered. I still have my ticket, with its number. The people were numbered like the people in the Bible. There was some uneasy suspicion that this must be a preliminary to Conscription. Accordingly, the Prime Minister hastened to make a speech, in which he assure the nation that not the slightest idea of such a violation of British liberty had ever entered into the minds of the Government, the registration being a mere question of rationing. I forgot the exact number of days--I think it was inside a week--which elapsed between that statement and the announcement of Conscription. But nobody noticed any sort of discrepancy between the speech and the announcement. Quite recently Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, once our colleague, now the Leader of the Opposition to us, defended the Gold Standard with an eloquence which so touched our hearts that we wiped out the Labor party at his command and gave him such a majority as Gladstone never dreamed of. He told you that so long as you stuck to the Gold Standard, the trade of England was safe, and her position in the world impregnable. The next thing that happened was that the Bank of England broke--at least that is what they would have called it if it had been I who suddenly announced to my creditors that I was only going to pay them 13s. 6d. in the £. But the papers said that all the Bank of England had done was to come off the Gold Standard; and Mr. MacDonald, who had just been hailed as the man who, in a dreadful crisis, saved the nation by keeping it on the Gold Standard, was now hailed as the man who saved the nation by knocking it off the Gold Standard. Unbounded prosperity was promised as a result of that. It has not come yet, but Mr. MacDonald is as popular as ever. I have gone all through this rigmarole about public speaking because I want to impress on you the fact that nothing is going to be done as long as you are all satisfied with hearing public men talk about it. This continual talk, talk, talk in Parliament that never comes to anything has provoked reactions in other countries which have made public speaking there a capital crime, and we are within sight of the same reaction here. The art of fooling the public as been cultivated to such perfection as an election nowadays is not an election at all, but a stampede. The stampede of the Zinovieff letter 1 has been improved upon by the stampede of the Gold standard. Both were eclipsed the other day by the really magnificent stampede of the presidential election in American. Never was such a thing seen on the face of the earth. You saw in the papers the white map and the black map, and how the white suddenly became black. The whole of America was swept in one headlong rush to substitute Mr. Roosevelt for Mr. Hoover. The substitution will not make the slightest difference to any American. What the people of America thought they were voting for I do not know, but I suppose they were tired of Hoover and thought they would try Roosevelt; and when they are tired of Roosevelt they will try somebody else. On each occasion they will have a vague idea that something is going to happen in consequence; but nothing will happen in consequence except, of course, a noisy escape of hot air through the platform safety valve. 1 A forgery, published in 1924 in several English newspapers,
which purported to be a secret letter written by Grigori Zinovieff, then
head of the Russian Comintern, containing instructions for a Communist
uprising in England. It proved effective in bringing about, in British
elections that year, the defeat of Ramsay MacDonald and the Labour party,
and resulted in a strain in British-Russian relations.
All this guff and bugaboo, all this deception, all this stampeding, all this perpetual talk, talk, talk, with the central talk machine blowing off noisily and wasting the national steam, is supposed to be Democracy. What is the effect of it? It keeps Congress and the State Legislatures in countenance in America. It keeps copies of them in countenance in Europe. In this country it keeps Parliament in countenance. What is the historical function of Parliament in this country? It is to prevent the Government from governing. It has never had any other purpose. If you study the constitutional history of this country, you will see that Parliament has grown up out of the old struggle against tyranny. The Englishman, being a born Anarchist, always calls government tyranny. The result of that generally is that the Government does become a tyranny, because its subjects cannot interfere intelligently with it: they can only riot and get their heads broken. Parliament was not in the first place an English institution: it was introduced into this country by a Frenchman named Simon de Montfort, whose father was concerned with the Parliament of Toulouse in France. Its object was to resist and disable the King; its use--the only use it has ever had--was to ventilate grievances, to give the people it represented an opportunity of complaining of how they were being made uncomfortable. But it never forgot its object of delaying, defeating, and if possible destroying whatever power happened to be governing the country at the time, whether it was the King, the Church, the Barons, or the Cromwellian Majors-General. Bit by bit it broke the feudal Monarchy; it broke the Church, and finally it even broke the country gentlemen. Then, having broken everything that could govern the country, it left us at the mercy of our private commercial capitalists and landowners. Since then we have been governed from outside Parliament, first by our own employers, and of late by the financiers of all nations and races. Of all madness which afflicts this country politically, I should think the worst is to expect that this instrument called Parliament, made and developed for the express purpose of checkmating government, and of unrivaled efficiency for that purpose, can possibly be an instrument of Socialism or Fascism, or any modern system which requires a continuous positive governmental activity. Such a government must keep its hand not merely on law and order in the Police sense, but on industry, on foreign trade, on the accumulation and investment of capital, on education, on public health, on religion, on all our most vital interests. And the hand must be a controlling and swiftly-acting hand, not a checking, delaying, thwarting, defeating hand, always negative and inhibitive, but a positive and powerful organ of national welfare. Now you will see why [in the title of this lecture] I simply mentioned Guy Fawkes. Guy Fawkes wanted the Government to do something, and saw that the first thing to enable the Government to do anything was to blow up Parliament. I think it is very much to be regretted on the whole that he failed, because, ever since he failed, the whole history of Parliament has been a triumphant vindication of his grasp of the situation. It has been a continual demonstration that you not only defeat government by entrusting it to Parliament, but in a far more complete way you defeat Democracy; for you cannot defeat government altogether, because, as some degree of it is absolutely necessary to the life of the country, a certain minimum of it must by mere force of circumstances force itself on the country, whether Parliament likes it or not. But as to Democracy, Parliament can defeat that every time and describe the process as carrying out the will of the people. Now, how are we to get out of this mess? Not only we who are Socialists, but everybody who really has any sort of grasp of what is happening at the present time, and what is inevitably going to happen pretty soon, whether we are Socialists or Conservatives, Fascists or Communists, realizes that the Government of the future has to be a powerful, active, and positive Government. Therefore they all have a common interest in getting rid of Parliament, and they will finally get rid of Parliament because they have a life-or-death pressure of necessity behind them. When they get rid of Parliament, what are you likely to get in its place? Let me start with the democratic foundation of the new positive Government; because such a Government, if it is to take root, must have some touch with the people. It must have continual opportunities of learning the effect of its measures on the common citizen. A real Government is sort of national shoemaker. It has to make the political shoe in which the nation is to walk; and it is very necessary that it should have the means of knowing where the shoe pinches; because if it makes the shoe in the air, on theoretical principles, without knowing the actual effect on the bunions and corns of the population, it may end by producing a misfit which, even if it can be forced on for a moment, will be violently kicked off. The more you develop your Government in the direction of Socialism, Fascism, or whatever you like to call your positive State, the more necessary it will be for the Government to keep touch with the people. In the experiments which have been made in Italy with its new Corporate State and in Russia with its new Communist State we see, to begin with, the people electing representatives. Now, there are certain conditions which must attend the election of representatives if the representatives are to be really representative. In the first place, the candidate must be known to the electors. That is obviously the first requisite. He must also belong to the same class as the electors. And he must have no interest in being elected except the satisfaction of his own taste and faculty for doing public work. He must, of course, be paid for his work like other people, but beyond this his work must be its own reward. As you know, that mysterious force in Nature that we call Providence produces a certain percentage of persons born with a taste for public work, just as it produces a percentage of poets and composers of music. Call such persons, for want of a better term, Fabians. The born Fabian is a person who, instead of going to the pictures, or playing golf, or doing all the usual things that non-Fabians do in their spare hours, attends meetings and reads Karl Marx, or Bernard Shaw, or Sir Oswald Mosley-- a very interesting man to read just now: one of the few people, who is writing and thinking about real things, and not about figments and phrases. You will hear something more of Sir Oswald Mosley before you are through with him. I know you dislike him, because he looks like a man who has some physical courage and is going to do something; and that is a terrible thing. You instinctively hate him, because you do not know where he will land you; and he evidently means to uproot some of you. Instead of talking round and round political subjects and obscuring them with bunk verbiage without ever touching them, and without understanding them, all the time assuming states of things which ceased to exist from twenty to six hundred and fifty years ago, he keeps hard down on the actual facts of the situation. When you pose him with the American question, "What's the Big Idea?" he replies at once, "Fascism"; for he sees that Fascism is a Big Idea, and that is the only visible practical alternative to Communism--if it really is an alternative and not a halfway house. 1 The moment things begin seriously to break up and something has to be done, quite a number of men like Mosley will come to remind you that Mussolini began as a man with about twenty-five votes. It did not take him very many years to become the Dictator of Italy. I do not say that Sir Oswald Mosley is going to become the Dictator of this country, though more improbable things have happened: for instance, Mr. Ramsay MacDonald became Prime Minister, which was very much more improbable when Ramsay was Sir Oswald's present age. However, I must return to my theme. You will see that the conditions I have laid down for securing really representative representatives are all violated by our present system of election. What happens is that somebody sets up in my district as a candidate to represent me in Parliament. I do not know him. None of my neighbors know him. We have never seen him. We can only judge of his personal appearance by an election address photograph which is thirty years old. We read the address, which he probably has not written, his election agent having compiled it from the current political phrases of the day, which do not mean anything. He evidently has plenty of money, which means that he is either a used-up tradesman in retirement or a parasitic landowner. He is socially ambitious: otherwise why should he want to get into the House of Commons? In short, he is either worn out and untrained or hostile to my interests. Yet my only choice 1 For evidence, however that Shaw essentially was not sympathetic to the political views and activities of Mosley, see Bernard Shaw, "I am not a Fascist, but…." Sunday Referee, London, 21 July 1935, and Richard Nickson, "GBS: Mosleyite?" The Shavian, London, September 1960. is between him and some other person equally ineligible.
Also, in the case of the great majority of us, he does not belong to our
class. If his son proposed to marry our daughter, he would cut him off
with a shilling.
In that way you can conceive the new State getting a basic representative democratic Congress to keep it in touch with its subjects. This Congress would have sufficient local knowledge to elect the local chiefs of industry throughout the country. These local chiefs can elect provincial chiefs who can elect national chiefs. These national chiefs--you may call them if you like a Cabinet--in their turn have to elect the national thinkers; for a nation needs two Cabinets: an administrative Cabinet and a thinking Cabinet. Of course, this would be an unheard-of idea in the British Empire. The notion that anybody connected with politics need ever have time to think, or capacity to think if he had one time, or any intention of thinking or sense of its necessity, is something so staggering that I really feel that most of you are shaking your heads and saying: "Look here, Shaw: you are going too far this time. This is beyond anything. The country will never stand this." Nevertheless, a thinking Cabinet is one of the political organs that has to be evolved if we are going to get out of our present mess. So, you see, it is possible to have a Government which is in touch with the common people and must satisfy them--that is, a Democratic State-without the mock-democratic folly of pretending that the intellectual and technical work of Government can be dictated, or its ministers directly chosen, by mobs of voters. The state will be a hierarchy, like the Corporate State of Italy and the Communist State of Russia; but Heaven knows what we shall call the new State here, when we build it up. Probably we will call it the Conservative State, or the Nationalist State, or the British Imperial State, or perhaps the King Georgian State: why not? it would not commit you to anything. It can claim to be a democratic system because it is a voting system, with votes for everybody--that is, for the mass of nobodies--at the base, and votes for somebody all the way up. But the voters will not enjoy their present unlimited opportunities of making fools of themselves by electing sentimentally popular generals, actors, and orators to do work for which they are unfitted. The basic Congress will consist of representatives with some turn for politics and taste for history, some public spirit and some relevant knowledge, simply because the work will not attract any other sort of candidate. They will be to that extent self-elected; and self-election, provided you eliminate all corrupt inducements, is the best sort of election, for the willing worker is the best worker. For the higher grades the most efficient persons will come to the top by sheer gravitation: the command will force itself on them even if they are platonically reluctant to assume it. They will be the only ones able to deliver the goods. There will be, of course, a sifting out, as even the most capable people may break down. Also you must bear in mind that you never quite know what a man is until you have given him power. Revolutionists always seem to have noble characters because they never have power, but when the Revolution becomes the Government a wholesale removal of its heroes may be the first step towards stable conditions. And there is another thing that you must remember. When a man gets absolute power, he goes more or less mad. Sometimes, like Nero or Paul the First of Russia, he becomes a horrible homicidal maniac, and has to be slaughtered by his courtiers. A Washington or a Lenin will come through with credit. An Elizabeth or a Catherine will keep her wits about her to the end. The two Napoleons could not keep their crowns, but they died fairly sane. The capacity for leadership carries with it a sense of reality that saves its possessor from being too much deluded by it; and the hereditaries are brought up to exercise their personal power conventionally and leave the rest to their ministers. A democratic leader is always a beggar on horseback, and the only real security against abuse of his powers is to establish in his mind a certainty that if he does not prove himself a capable rider he will be thrown off ignominiously. Our notion is to set the horse to govern with a curb in its mouth and a whole House of Commons on its back to pull all the reins as hard as they can, all shrieking for Liberty and protesting against dictatorship. In a really going concern every ruler, from the humblest foreman or boatswain to the most distinguished chief of staff, must be a dictator. The persons known to the public may be parliamentary dummies, but there is a dictator somewhere if anything real is being done. The pretense that there are no dictators increases their power by concealing it. The choice is not between dictators and no dictators, but between avowed and therefore responsible dictators and hidden irresponsible ones. Mussolini is the most responsible ruler in Europe because he gives his orders with his own voice and not through an imaginary megaphone called "The Voice of the Italian People." Mr. MacDonald's voice is a National Voice. When he says one thing on Tuesday and the contrary on Friday, don’t blame him: it is only the nation changing its mind. In such a system as I have sketched for you, the ruling hierarchy culminates in a Cabinet of Thinkers. The leading spirit in that Cabinet will be as nearly a head dictator as you can very well get. I repeat, you need not be alarmed at the name. You have never had anything else than dictators governing you although you did not call them so, and most of them were routineers who could not dictate. The system is not, as many people imagine when they talk of Stalin in Russia, of one dictator at the top. It is a hierarchy of dictators all through. There is no opposition, no obstruction, no talking out of Bills. The dictators do their job with their counselors about them as best they can; and they are really responsible because there is no reason for leaving them there or putting them there except that they do the work better than the next best. The moment they fail to do it they go; for there is nothing to keep them there. They have no power to hold on and nobody wants them to hold on, because the moment they cease to do their work well they become nuisances. Up to this point the political structure I have sketched is just as necessary for Fascism or for Communism as it is for that doubtless extremely superior British version of it which we will produce in course of time. We can walk hand in hand with Stalin and Mussolini up to this point, because the Government of the future, whatever else it may be, will have to be a positive governing government and not an organization of Anarchism flying the flag of Liberty. And all positive and stable governments must have the same contact with the governed at the base and organ of pure constructive thought at the apex. Now, that being so, where will the division come? That
question drags in the apparently irrelevant and personal subject of my
age. You notice that I am an old man, exhibiting very distinct symptoms
of second childhood. I go back like a child to the ancient simplicities,
the old Fabian simplicities. In the early Fabian days there were
certain things that we hammered continually into the public mind.
One of them was that the existing system is in essence nothing but a gigantic
robbery of the poor. What is the matter with society is that the legal
owners of the country and its capital are getting for nothing whatsoever
an enormous share of the wealth produced from day to day in this country.
You are all probably shrinking and saying, "Now Shaw is getting ungentlemanly."
But in the '80s and '90s we were shouting this all over the place; and
it was by insisting on it in season and out of season that we counted for
something in politics. Since we ceased mentioning it and took to
glorifying the Labor party, which means trusting to Parliament, we have
ceased
to count, and we shall never count again until we go back to the old shout. Why did we not raise it at the last general election? Mr. Ramsay MacDonald would have raised it loudly enough if he had been in Socialism instead of being in Parliament. The question at issue was how to balance the Budget. That was the great thing. . Now, in the old Fabian days the duty of the Labor party, if it was a Socialist party, would have been clear. There was, as a matter of fact, no ambiguity whatever about it. The process of balancing the Budget or of forming a Budget in England was simply this: how much money can we get out of the people? At the present time balancing the Budget means collecting 850 millions a year. A Capitalist Chancellor of the Exchequer has to ask himself: "Where can I get the money? There is the rent of the Crown lands; there is the interest on the Suez Canal shares; but they do not amount to a row of beans. There is indirect taxation: customs and excise and stamps and motor licenses and entertainment duty. There is inflation, always popular with debtors but quite the reverse with creditors. But these will not suffice: there is a shortage which I fear I must extort from the propertied class by income tax, surtax and death duties; and they will never consent to pay unless I can convince them that I have screwed the last farthing from the people by indirect taxation first, and that the balance is the inevitable ransom of their possessions." The attitude of a Socialist Chancellor is clearly just the contrary. Mr. MacDonald's line at the last election, as it would have been if he had been the old Fabian he once was, was plain. He was ostensibly a Socialist Prime Minister without a Socialist majority. Logically he should have said: "Now that we have come to the balancing of the Budget I must resign. You gentlemen of the Capitalist majority will have to take this Budget in hand yourselves. I know perfectly well that you will do everything you can to get the money without coming down on the owners of property. You will put every farthing you can on wages and as little as you can on unearned incomes. My business is to put the boot on the other leg, and rub into the public that while you are pretending that the Empire must perish if the seventeen and ninepence a week to the unemployed is not cut down to fifteen shillings you are subsidizing the idleness of the rich to the tune of four hundred millions a year ripe for taxation." Mr. Ramsay MacDonald quite forgot that figure. He
had got out of his old Fabian habits. Nobody else mentioned it. Is
it a hidden figure? Is it a recondite matter that has been kept so secret
that the ordinary citizen cannot be expected to know it? Nothing of the
sort. It is in Whitaker's Almanack. The mischief of throwing
away money like this is that its recipients take out of our proletariat
an enormous mass of workers who might be producing positive wealth and
wasting their labor on pressing idle gentlemen's trousers, cleaning idle
ladies' shoes, and doing all the other things that idle people want done
by their retinues of servants and tradesmen. Huge industries are
built up to produce elaborate and expensive nothings for them: things that
nobody wants, but which they purchase to present to one another.
Incidentally we have learnt in their service to produce real conveniences
and comforts which everyone will enjoy some day; but after all deductions
for these, our waste of capital and demoralization of labor in supplying
the unreal or mischievous wants of the parasitic rich is so great that
a nation which tolerates it loses all excuse for making a poor mouth about
trifles of twenty or thirty millions and cutting the seventeen and ninepence
of the involuntarily unemployed poor down to fifteen shillings.
Let me deal with the question of why it has ever been possible to induce intelligent men to acquiesce in the levy of this enormous tribute on industry. I have not told you the whole of it. Incomes derived from business amount to more than a thousand millions in addition to the four hundred millions. Some of this business income--I cannot disentangle it--I cannot tell you how much--is a reasonable remuneration for work but a good deal of it is made up of salaries, profits, and commissions big enough to bear additional taxation without any such personal privation as must follow a cut of a few shillings in weekly wages. Why do you leave all this mass of rent, interest, and profit in private hands, and treat it as so sacred that we must all tighten our belts sooner than touch it? The only reason that pretends to be an economic reason is this. To develop the resources of the country requires a constant supply of fresh capital to start new industries. With the march of science you not only have to start new industries but to provide entirely new machinery for old industries. How are you going to provide for the accumulation of that capital? The accepted commercial answer is that you must throw an immense mass of wealth into the hands of a small class of people. You must throw so much of it into their hands that they cannot consume it. After stuffing themselves with every luxury that can be imagined on the face of the earth they still have millions which save themselves because they cannot be spent. That is the argument for having an enormously rich class amongst you. Well, what have we Fabians to say to that? We have to say several things. In the first place, it is ridiculous waste to overfeed a handful of idle people and their millions of hangers-on before you can save money when no money need pass through their hands at all. No sane nation which could accumulate its capital in any other way would choose that way. Well, what on earth is to prevent us from accumulating our capital in another way? Why not take its sources out of the hands of these gentlemen and accumulate it ourselves? They would then have to work for their living, but we should be all the richer and they all the happier. After all, though we let them plunder us so monstrously we plunder them back again by income tax, super-tax and death duties, only to waste the booty on unemployment benefit instead of organizing employment. Besides, what guarantee have you that these people will invest their savings for the good of the nation? As a rule they try to send it wherever labor is cheapest. Before the war they were steadily sending two hundred millions of English capital abroad to anywhere on the face of the earth except England. Here we are with our cities rotted out with slums and with the most urgent need for capital to do away with those slums and to improve the condition of our people, to give them better food, better clothing, better housing, and better education, for bringing our obsolete machinery up-to-date, organizing agriculture collectively, and introducing all the new scientific methods. We need capital for those things; but if there is a penny more in the way of dividend to be got by our capitalist class by sending money to the Argentine or to anywhere else they send it there. Consider the danger of living on foreign investments. The income from them is created in foreign countries by foreign labor. It is then sent here and spent here. Suppose the foreign nations go bankrupt! Already not one of them can pay twenty shillings in the pound. We ourselves can pay only thirteen shillings or less. Suppose they take to Communism or Fascism or something of that kind, and stop paying tribute! We should be starved out, and serve us right. A great deal of the starvation we are complaining at the present time exists because we have become much too much dependent on supplies from abroad and not enough on supplies from home. So you see, the one defense you can set up for the conspiracy of silence about unearned income is nothing but a silly excuse for shirking the great enterprise of Socialism. It is not true that wages must be cut, unemployment benefit must be cut, education must be cut, and public enterprise must be starved, and stopped in order that more hundreds of millions can be added to those which are being wasted at present on the idleness, extravagance, and corruption of labor which are ruining us. That is what I call the old Fabian simplicity which in my second childhood I go back to. I used to insist that the Government had no right to take a penny from the private capitalist until it was ready to use it productively. At that time income tax was twopence in the pound. I little thought that I should live to pay half my income to a nominally Socialist Chancellor or the Exchequer every January only to see it helplessly and foolishly wasted in doles. An intelligent Government would not let a single farthing go out of this country until we were quite saturated with capital, which is very far from being the case. Just consider the scaring and glaring fact that there are 100,000 people in London living in one-room tenements, some of them underground, at the present moment. Every human being, in my opinion, ought at least to have, as one of the first necessities of a properly equipped home, a private room always to himself or herself. I do not mean one room for everybody in the house except the husband and wife, and one room for them. I mean two rooms for them. I suppose I shall be denounced for a dastardly attack on the family, but I feel as a husband that I must have a room that I can lock my wife out of, and she has exactly the same view with regard to a room that she can lock me out of. Well, until you have the population properly housed to that extent we have no excuse for sending capital out of the country, and we need a positive Government to stop it and not a Cabinet of talkers and Laisser-fairists. I am not forgetting what is called the importance of foreign trade. The important thing is to get rid as much of it as possible as soon as possible. I want to point out to you, as one of the childish simplicities which I go back to, that trade is in itself an evil. I am quite aware that our private capitalist system has brought us into such a state of lunacy that all the City articles in the newspapers, all the speeches, all the assumptions made in the debates and underlying our legislation are that the more trade the country has the better. Also they insist that the balance of trade must be in favor or we are lost. King Charles the Second would have agreed with that. But he would not have believed his ears if he had been told that what they meant by a balance of trade in our favor is that we are sending more goods out of the country than we are getting in. He would have said, "You mean just the opposite, don't you?” But they really do mean it, though all the time they go on with their foreign investments, which must finally produce a continual stream of imports without any exports to balance them at all. To me it seems simply insanity, but I am an old man and my brain is failing; but I venture to suggest that a country which exports more than it imports is bleeding to death, and a country which imports more than it exports is being pauperized. No private trader cares which effect is being produced if he can make a profit on the particular private transaction which happens to come his way. That is why foreign trade should be taken out of private hands. And now, what about all this tariff business? A tariff is simply a method of disguised or indirect taxation, like currency inflation and the rest of our fiscal dodges. Let us, however, leave out that part of the tariff business which is for revenue purposes and let us go on to the question of keeping out the foreigner's goods and protecting native industries. I attach great importance to that. I believe that the present movement throughout the world to make every State self-supporting is not merely a healthy movement but an absolutely necessary movement. The old Cobdenite notion that every country produces the goods it consumes at a loss and produces what foreigners consume at a profit is not only, as Carlyle called it, heartbreaking nonsense, but is no longer even the partial matter of fact it was in Cobden's time. In his time England could manufacturer better than other nations, and it paid our capitalists to go in for their trade and let agriculture go to the dogs. Today all nations produce with the same machinery, and we are badly behind in harnessing the powers of Nature to that machinery. We are still only talking about our unused tidal water power whilst the Italians have not only covered their mountains with flumes, but bored through the earth to the central fires and are driving their machines by artificial volcanoes. I doubt that there is a single member of the Cabinet who is aware of this staggering advance, which will be copied in the volcanic countries where earthquakes are six a penny. They still bleat about revivals of irrecoverably lost trades, and pity the Italians for not being governed by them instead of by Mussolini. Let us look at the question of national self-support from the militarist point of view. Nowadays wars are won, not by fighting, but by blockade. The military experts know perfectly well that all those tremendous old-style infantry offensives which were launched on the western front between 1914 and 1918, at an appalling cost in slaughter and mutilation, were pure waste. The old style was to throw masses of infantry soldiers on other masses of them and let them fight it out with the bayonet. Our commanders, always doing what was done the last time, threw the masses on to barbed wire and machine-guns, and had them blown and torn to pieces. No doubt it was very heroic, meaning very bloody. The Germans were wonderful in their fighting. They won any amount of victories. So did we. But not one of our offensives and not one of the German offensives ever reached its objective. They were shot down by machinery on the wires before they got there. The whole affair was one of blockade and nothing else. I used to say that the war would last thirty years because I could not be persuaded that the Central Empires could not live on their own natural resources. I was wrong. Thanks to the capitalist system they did not know how to support themselves, and had to surrender when their foreign trade was cut off. That is why people who have any power of observation are beginning to feel that one of the first necessities of the present dangerous time is for a nation to become self-supporting, and are clamoring for tariffs. But tariffs will not do the trick. Taxing foreign trade is no use: you must prohibit it. Tariffs do not keep foreign goods out: they only raise the price of native goods with out regard to their quality. What we need is a Government which, with regard to those industries that we are determined shall grow up and be developed in our country so as to make ourselves self-supporting, will decree absolute prohibition of foreign trade by private speculators. What the Government should do in such cases, as it seems to me, is to prohibit private foreign trade absolutely, ad then if the native industry cannot produce a sufficient supply, itself buy the necessary supplementary foreign supply and put it on the market at a fixed price. In that way it can give all the protection that is necessary to the native industry whilst taking care that the native industry keeps itself up-to-date and is not trying to get trade by being lazy and behindhand under the shelter of a tariff. I must now deal with something that was said the other day in Parliament by my friend George Lansbury. It was very like what Mr. Rowse said here the other night about the English workman being the best in the world, only that George Lansbury's remark was a Marxist echo and not an echo from All Souls. He said in effect that all our social questions are now international questions, implying that we cannot do anything until everybody else in the world does it simultaneously. Well, that is not very cheerful. If you will not do anything until everybody else does it (although I know that is English morality in a nutshell), you will never get anything done at all. I wish I had my friend George here just to ask him in a friendly way why on the face of the earth we cannot carry out enormous installments of Socialism without caring one snap of our fingers whether they are simultaneously carried out in Paris, in Berlin, in Budapest, in Madagascar, and in Jerusalem. Take the case of that professional man whom I was with the other day. When he told me he was working up to half-past four for other people, I told him that I myself always have, before I can touch a penny of the money that I earn--not that I really earn it at all: a lot of actors and other people of that kind earn most of it for me--to pay about £ 500 a year to support somebody who does nothing for me in return but give me his gracious permission to live in London. Why should I pay him for permission to live in London? I am an ornament to London. London owes at least half its present celebrity to the fact that I live in it. Take the redistribution of income which is so urgently necessary as between the citizens of London at large and the ground landlords headed by the Duke of Bedford, the Duke of Portland, the Duke of Westminster, and Lord Howard de Walden; may I ask what person in Berlin, or in Paris, or in Jerusalem, or in Madagascar can do anything to prevent this country effecting such a redistribution? Absolutely nobody. Take the cognate question of the redistribution of leisure.
Millions of our people, some living on the dole and some on property, do
not work at all, whilst other people are working fourteen hours a day.
I assure you that quite a number of people are working fourteen hours a
day. Can anything be more ridiculous? one man unemployed and the
other man working fourteen hours a day! Surely the sensible thing
is to take the unemployed man and let him do seven hours of the work of
the fourteen hours man, and then see whether you cannot split it up a little
bit further. About four hours work a day all round, accompanied by
a sensible redistribution of income, would make us all much healthier and
happier than we are at present.
What influence from abroad can prevent us from doing that, if we like? What state would Russia be in if Stalin had waited for us to give him a lead? Suppose Mussolini had waited for us, where would Italy be? I suggest the time has come for us to give a lead now. The truth is that the redistribution of income, the redistribution of leisure, the municipalization and nationalization of land, the national control of industry, the accumulation of capital by the State, the regulation of foreign trade to make this country more and more self-supporting are things that we can do every single bit of without troubling our heads for one moment whether the rest of the world is going to be sensible enough to follow our example. You applaud, but faintly and depressingly. If this audience had two-penn'orth of political sense, it would have jumped up madly to cheer me, and request me to become the dictator of this country. You mistrust the old Fabian simplicities, the things which are really at the back of any movement worth counting in this country, and are the only considerations which will really change the minds of the people, which is what we want to do. All these things you have forgotten. You have gone slack about them: you have lost faith in the possibility of their being done. Well, unless you regain that faith, they will not be done; because after all, until you manage to produce the atmosphere which will make even parliamentary politicians feel that you want things to go in a certain direction, they will stick in their old ruts on the road to ruin. In conclusion, I must point out that to effect these changes there must be a genuine transfer of political power in this country. All through our agitation of the last fifty years we have been continually beaten by the fact that we cannot get hold of the children. Every fresh generation of children has been brought up in the old habits of thought which act as impregnable defenses for our system, which I have called the system of robbery of the poor, this enormous brigandage of privately-owned land and capital. I must not start at this time of evening on the Disarmament question; yet I will say that I do not care twopence about the Disarmament talky-talky at Geneva. The Disarmament question that concerns me is who is going to have control of the machine-guns in this country. The other day at the Marble Arch you had your heads broken in the old way by the sticks of the police. But Geneva has just set the example of substituting machine-guns for sticks on such occasions. I should simply be spitting in the face of history if I pretended to believe that the propertied classes in this country will give up their property without fighting for it if they control the machine-guns. They have a great deal of money; and as long as you leave them with money they will be able to pay men to fight for them. If you pay an Englishman to kill another Englishman and have the law at his back, he will do it in the most cheerful manner. Under our Capitalist class system every Englishman dislikes every other Englishman so much that it is hardly necessary to pay him to kill: you have to make severe laws to prevent him from killing. You must make up your minds that this question may not be settled in a pacifist manner. Once or twice Sir Stafford Cripps, and also Mr. Rowse, said that the catastrophe might be deferred. I do not want the catastrophe to be deferred. I am impatient for the catastrophe. I should be jolly glad if the catastrophe occurred tomorrow. But being an average coward, as most unblooded citizens are-especially people in my profession--I would rather that the catastrophe were settled without violence. But I am afraid our property system will not be settled without violence unless you make up your minds that, if it is defended by violence, it will be overthrown by violence. That is very depressing, but there is no use shirking it. You have to look final issues in the face. There comes a time in all human society when there is a certain constitution of society which a number of people are determined to maintain and a number of other people are determined to overthrow. Both have the conviction that the whole future of the world and civilization depends (a) on its being maintained, (b) on its being overthrown. The only way in which it can finally be settled, it seems to me, is by one party killing the other to the extent that may be necessary to convince the rest that they will be killed if they do not surrender. I do not think there is any use in burking that sort of fact by cherishing the old Liberal illusion that fundamental reforms can be affected by votes in Parliament. For thirty years the Irish question was left to Parliament, where it was carried at last by votes. Instantly the officers in the army mutinied, and the real settlement was by blood and fire. There is only one way of avoiding a repetition of the Irish experience here, and that is to get at the children and raise a new generation educated as socialists. That would give you a socialist movement in the country overwhelming enough to put out of countenance the propertied resistance. Without that the thing will be done by the forcible determination of a resolute minority, as it has been done in Italy and Russia. But make up your mind the thing has to be done one way or another: we cannot go on as we are much longer. I am past military age; but, still, I may be gassed or have my house burnt over me. The old are no longer exempt from the risks they thrust on the young; so I speak with a due sense of responsibility. Well, ladies and gentlemen, take my advice and do not
try to defer the catastrophe. Do everything you can to bring it about,
but do your best to let it be done in as gentlemanly a manner as possible.
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