Essentially he was simple. Generally speaking, he hated and despised in
equal measure whatever seemed to suggest that he personally was not
the most perfect human being conceivable. He hated all education after
fifteen because he had had no education after fifteen, he hated all
people who did not have high tea until he himself under duress gave up
high tea, he hated every game except football, which he had played and
could judge, he hated all people who spoke foreign languages because he
knew no language but Staffordshire, he hated all foreigners because he
was English, and all foreign ways because they were not his ways. Also
he hated particularly, and in this order, Londoner's, Yorkshiremen,
Scotch, Welch and Irish, because they were not “reet Staffordshire,” and
he hated all other Staffordshire men as insufficiently “reet.” He wanted
to have all his own women inviolate, and to fancy he had a call upon
every other woman in the world. He wanted to have the best cigars and
the best brandy in the world to consume or give away magnificently, and
every one else to have inferior ones. (His billiard table was an extra
large size, specially made and very inconvenient.) And he hated Trade
Unions because they interfered with his autocratic direction of his
works, and his workpeople because they were not obedient and untiring
mechanisms to do his bidding. He was, in fact, a very naive, vigorous
human being. He was about as much civilised, about as much tamed to the
ideas of collective action and mutual consideration as a Central African
negro.
There are hordes of such men as he throughout all the modern industrial
world. You will find the same type with the slightest modifications in
the Pas de Calais or Rhenish Prussia or New Jersey or North Italy. No
doubt you would find it in New Japan. These men have raised themselves
up from the general mass of untrained, uncultured, poorish people in a
hard industrious selfish struggle. To drive others they have had first
to drive themselves. They have never yet had occasion nor leisure to
think of the state or social life as a whole, and as for dreams or
beauty, it was a condition of survival that they should ignore such
cravings. All the distinctive qualities of my uncle can be thought of as
dictated by his conditions; his success and harshness, the extravagances
that expressed his pride in making money, the uncongenial luxury that
sprang from rivalry, and his self-reliance, his contempt for broad
views, his contempt for everything that he could not understand.