Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 20th century; Great Britain -- Social conditions; World War, 1914-1918
In 1833 Carlyle's Teufelsdröckh had written: "Two men I honour,
and no third. First, the toil-worn Craftsman that with earth-made
Implement laboriously conquers the Earth, and makes her man's.
Venerable to me is the hard Hand; crooked, coarse; wherein
notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue, indefeasibly royal, as of
the Sceptre of this Planet. Venerable, too, is the rugged face,
all weather-tanned, besoiled, with its rude intelligence; for it
is the face of a Man living manlike. O, but the more venerable
for thy rudeness, and even because we must pity as well as love
thee! Hardly-entreated brother! For us was thy back so bent, for
us were thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed: thou wert our
Conscript, on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so
marred." In 1850 the fear of Chartism had purged Carlyle's mind
of this veneration, pity and love for a man living manlike, a
hardly-entreated brother and a conscript who had been marred in
fighting the battles of others. "Consider, in fact," he exhorts
his readers, "a body of Six-hundred and fifty-eight miscellaneous
persons set to consult about 'business' with Twenty-seven millions
mostly fools assiduously listening to them, and checking and
criticising them--was there ever since the world began, will there
ever be till the world end, any 'business' accomplished in these
circumstances?"
For fifty years, from Carlyle to Kipling, this scorn for a
deliberative assembly and this contempt for an electorate which had
hitherto been sedulously denied all political education frustrated
all attempts to modify the old machine of government and to
assimilate the new rulers to the old. "Bigots," said Macaulay, "...
never fail to plead in justification of persecution the vices which
persecution has engendered. England has been to the Jews less than
half a country; and we revile them because they do not feel for
England more than a half patriotism. We treat them as slaves, and
wonder that they do not regard us as brethren...."
With little change of language, the disabilities of the Jews
could be paralleled by the disabilities of labour; and both were
defended by the same spirit of blatant intolerance which rose in a
self-satisfied _crescendo_ during the second half of the nineteenth
century, till a cynic might have said that, as there had been no
class-antagonism, it would become necessary to create one. Of
the present conflict between classes and of any conflict in the
immediate future the seeds were sown in the last years of Queen
Victoria's reign.
IV
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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