England and the English from an American point of view

Contents

Page

I. First Impressions 1

II. Who Are the English ? . . . 37

II Who Are The English ?

IF this question : Who are the English ? were asked, either of the average Englishman, or of the average American visitor to England, the answer would probably be both inaccurate and confusing. The average Englishman knows little of the origins of his race, and is not of the mental make-up that sets much store by such matters in any case; and the American pays little heed to anything except to what comes directly under his notice as he travels about . to and from London as his centre.

London itself is a city of some four million six hundred odd thousand inhabitants. It is a small nation in itself. The total population of the Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland is only 43,660,000 (1906). But London is not England. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland is not England, with its total area of 121,000 square miles. No, what the world knows as England is the British Empire, which includes the above, and, in addition, some 11,400,000 square miles, and a population of about 410,000,000. The known surface of the globe is estimated at about 55,000,000 square miles — its total population is believed to be v/ about 1,800,000,000. The British Empire, therefore, occupies more than one-fifth of the earth's surface, and its population is also more than one-fifth, or about twenty-two per cent, of the inhabitants of the globe.

That is England! In Asia they have a population of some 237,000,000; in Africa, a population of some 31,000,000; in America, a population of some 60,000,000; in the West Indies, some 2,000,000; in Australasia, some 5,500,000, and so on. When you walk the streets of London, therefore, you are in the capital of some- ^ thing over one-fifth of the world. These gentlemen in clubs, and offices, and in the streets, are the masters of the world. There must be a great many of them, and they must be very wonderful men, one says to oneself. No, the population of Great Britain and Ireland is, as we have seen, only about 43,500,000, and what of them ?

It is stated on trustworthy authority that the aggregate income of these 43,000,000 of people is $8,550,000,000. Of this total, 1,250,000 pecpie have $2,925,000,000, these are the rich; 3,750,000 people have $1,225,000,000, these are the comfortable class; the other 38,000,000 have $4,400,000,000, to divide, and if we do the dividing for them, we see that these 38,000,- 000 have nearly one hundred and sixteen dollars apiece. Not a large income by any means. But we are not Socialists, these figures are not put down here to bolster any argument for or against the distribution of wealth, but to call attention to quite another matter. It is evident from these figures that we may deduct 38,000,-

000 from the 43,000,000 of population and still have in the 5,000,000 that remain the sum total of those who do the real governing, the real ruling, of this enormous Empire. The other 38,- 000,000, with their average income of $116, have in all probability neither leisure nor ability to look after anybody but themselves, and they even do that precariously. We may go still further, and say that out of these 5,000,000 certainly not more than 1,000,000 are male adults.

1 know very well the admirable phrase of Walter Bagehot that "there are lies, damned lies, and statistics" ; but I may claim for this analysis that it is a matter of facts, and not of statistics. It requires no juggling with figures, no poetic exaggeration for the petty purpose of making a v/ point, to arrive at this rather startHng conclusion: that about 1,000,000 Englishmen of the ruling class control one-fifth of the known surface of the globe, and one in every five of all the inhabitants thereof.

Out of the various wars and invasions of the island of Great Britain, from the time of Caesar's first landing in 55 B.C., there has percolated down a million men who rule the world.

This is sufficiently interesting to make it worth while to find out who these Englishmen are. We can, any and all of us, make our notes about them as we see them, here and now. According as our eyes differ, our tastes differ, our education and experience differ, we come to different conclusions. Personally, I am inclined to think that the Englishman is an acquired taste, but for the moment that is neither here nor there. When any comparatively small number of men come to play such a role as this in the world, one must begin further back to study them. This is not a sociological or psychological freak, this maintenance of superiority over the world — not a matter that can be explained by snippity chapters written at short range about the Englishman's religion, his Parliament, his clubs, his home life, his sports, his clothes, and so on, indefinitely. These are merely the outside trappings, which are interesting enough in their way and well worthy of the reporter and his camera, because there are plenty of people about who only want to know what the great man looks like, and what he smokes, and what he drinks, and whether he wears a turned-down collar or not — and some of them, perchance, will make themselves great in his likeness by copying his wardrobe, his diet, and his potables.

But we are so superficial as to believe that in these two thousand years, since Caesar's day, there must be, here and there, interesting and important documents dealing with the origins, the ancestry, the lineage, and training of this superb band of a million men who hold the world in their hands.

We know the misty moist island in which they have lived all this time. We know that even Tacitus wrote that its climate was repulsive because of its rains and continual mists. Caesar and his Romans did not go there for a holiday on account of the charms of the climate. No Roman, of those days, or these, would choose this island as a place of residence. The Roman invasion was merely to control the resident Britons, and to prevent their sending aid to the Gauls who were fighting Rome. The Romans stayed there for three hundred and fifty years.

They built two great walls across the land to check the invasions of the Britons; they built roads for the passage of the legions; they constructed intrenched camps, which are the origin of many of the names of places ending in cester, or Chester, from the Latin word castrum, and when the legions were called away in 408 a.d. to check the invasion of the Barbarians on the Continent, they left the island as British as it was before, with no trace of their language, their customs, or their laws. Though both English and American jurisprudence is based upon Roman law, this came later. England is not, therefore, in any sense Roman.

These Britons of Caesar's time were a mixed race of Iberian stock — Iberian meaning of south-western Europe — at the present time the Basque is the last and best representative. But as there is no Roman, so there is no Briton, or very little, in the English ancestry. From north-western Germany came Saxons, Engles and Jutes who, from time to time, invaded the England of the Briton, and finally crowded him out. By 829 the Germanic tribes had poured in, and completely invested England, or what we now know as England. But of these tribes the one that really made the England of to-day, the one from which England, and the English, get their chief characteristics, was the tribe of the Saxons. Sussex, Essex, Middlesex, the familiar names of English counties, are nothing more nor less than South Saxony, East Saxony and Middle Saxony. They were not of the marauding or piratical type. They came in the first instance as companions of their neighbors the Jutes. But while the Jutes came for adventure and for booty, the Saxons came because they wanted land to settle on. They came because their own country was becoming overcrowded. They were an agricultural people of the peasant class. There was no trace of feudalism amongst them. They were landowners with equal rights, who gradually pushed their way over the land, taking more and more territory; beating back the Britons, and securely occupying the territory they had won. The conquered Britons finally fled to the Welsh mountains where some of them remained, while others passed over in large numbers to the other side of the Channel to Armorica, and the Brittany of to-day is the land of this body of exiles from England.

These Saxons were independent farmers; they acknowledged no chief, no king, and when they were called upon to fight together, they answered the call of the leader or answered it not as they chose. When King Alfred called upon them the first time to join him in driving out the Danes, they refused to aid him. Finally they came to his aid, but at a time of their own choosing. When they came together to discuss questions of common and general interest, their meeting or assembly was not one of subjects, or followers, but of freemen. They had apparently little taste for public meetings, and those of them who were much occupied with their own estates and their own affairs, got into the way of staying away altogether. Those who had leisure, or talent for such matters, went. Finally what was then known as the Witenagemot, or the Meeting of Wise Men, and what has since become the English Parliament, took over the settlement of these questions, and left the farmers free to attend to their own affairs. Even in matters of justice and punishment each group appointed one of their number richer or more expert in such matters to choose juries and to preside over such cases. Finally the sovereign got into the habit of naming such persons, already marked out as fit for such duties by their neighbors, as magistrates, and in this, as we should call it, free and easy fashion, the business of government was carried on. You may go to the Bow Street Police Court and see the business of the day carried on in much the same fashion now. The magistrate is a wise gentleman dealing with the problems of his less fortunate neighbors. That is all. They were people with little aptitude for public affairs, and with a rooted distaste for overmuch government, and so law-abiding, and naturally industrious and peaceable, that they needed and need less machinery of government than other peoples. They wanted independence on their own estates, and they wanted not to be meddled with.

It is not my intention to provide origins for the English people in order to trace later, and thus easily from my own hypothesis, the development of their present characteristics.

"They are the finest of all the German tribes, and strive more than the rest to found their greatness upon equity." "A passionless, firm and quiet people, they live a solitary life, and do not stir up wars or harass the country by plunder and theft." "And yet they are always ready to a man to take up arms and even to form an army if the case demands it." Thus writes Tacitus of them.

This tribe of Saxons had, by accident or wise leadership, happened upon the very country best suited to them. A fertile island, cut off from the rest of the world, and with room for all so that each one might with his family have a kingdom of his own. This with as Httle machinery of government as possible, and yet all ready to combine as equals in self-defence. But as they made their land productive, as they became rich, they became the prey of other peoples from north-western Germany, and what is now the Scandinavian peninsula, and were forced to defend their possessions and their customs against Angles, Danes, and Normans.

It is a curious feature of the abiding, unrelenting purpose of these Saxons to govern themselves, and to be let alone, that though they were conquered in turn by Angles, Danes and Normans, they swallowed up all three in the end, and imposed their customs, their language, their habit of mind, and their institutions upon each of the invaders in turn. They would have nothing to do with the half-developed feudalism of Angles and Danes, or with the fully developed feudalism of William the Conqueror and his followers. The Conqueror claimed that the land was his and that every holder of land owed fealty to him personally. It took just about an hundred years for the Saxon idea to prevail over this feudalistic notion, and the result was Magna Charta. The Magna Charta, wrested from King John by the Norman barons, was in reality the shaking off of personal allegiance to a chieftain by the Norman barons, aided by the Saxon gentry, who had finally imbued them also with their own love of independence and a free government. They insisted then, and have maintained ever since, that they derived their rights, their liberties, and their laws, not from a king, but from themselves. In the days of William the Conqueror their king was elective, though chosen from the reigning house. As late as 1689 the Commons voted that King James had abdicated and that the throne was vacant! They chose their own rulers, and no doubt would do so again to-day if necessary. It is much too long a story to go, step by step, through the recital of this development. It concerns us here only to note these unchanging characteristics of the race, maintained and strengthened through centuries of war, tumult, and conquest.

The present House of Lords itself is the direct result of the Saxon's unwillingness to bother with government, and his willingness to leave such matters to those of most leisure and most wealth, and therefore, in all probability, to those of most capacity and most experience in such matters. It was, and is, the common-sense view of government, as over against the theoretical view. The danger in such a view of government, of course, lies in the fact that the governors, whether kings, or nobles, or statesmen, may grow to feel themselves paramount, and undertake to demand from the governed what they have no right to demand ; such as taxation without representation, or a full purse for the king by unjust requirements, and without rendering an account. But these peaceable Saxons, on each and every occasion when their independence has been threatened, have risen in a mass, asserted their liberties, and then left their kings or gentry again to govern. The Magna Charta, and the revolt led by Simon de Montfort, and the head of Charles the First, are all warnings to whom it may concern that the Saxons are not to be meddled with, and are not to be anybody's subjects. Thus began the history, and the fact, of democratic government. Love of the land, industry, privacy, personal liberty; these were sought and found in this island by the Saxons, and they have been preserved there ever since.

The London policeman with his hand uplifted, who has become part and parcel of the rhetorical stock in trade of American ambassadors, is the symbol of the Saxon's willingness to abide by the law, so long as the law is of his own making, and facilitates his getting about his business quickly and with a modicum of friction. That policeman is simply the embodiment of the spirit of the race which has fought off Jutes, Angles, Danes and Normans; which has broken nobles, and beheaded kings in order to be let alone to attend to their own affairs in their own way. They are not jealous of the law as are the French, because they make the law for their own convenience, and because they know that it applies with equal force to all. They do not disregard the law as do we Americans who are overrun with amateur law-makers, because they realize that they can and do make the laws, and that to disregard rules of their own making makes either sport or government a nuisance. The coster-monger's cart and the coroneted carriage in London streets have equal privileges, no more, no less, the one than the other. You may see both dealt with, with imperturbable impartiality by the police any day in the streets. The poisonous philosophy of socialism, whether it be eleemosynary socialism, or predatory socialism, which would make the State a distributor of the surplus of the strong for the propagation of the weak, makes its way but slowly among those of Saxon blood. "If I were to be asked," says Montesquieu, "what is the predilection of the English, I should find it very hard to say: not war, nor birth, nor honors, nor success in love, nor the charms of ministerial favor. They want men to be men. They value only two things — wealth and worth."

No State can make men men. No State can produce wealth and worth. These three — men, and wealth, and worth — are produced, and produced only, where men measure themselves against men for the mastery over the fruits of the earth, without adventitious aids of any kind, and under the protection of laws that all make and all obey.

In these modern days, when so many strive to become members of Parliament, and when all sorts of pressure, financial and otherwise, is brought to bear to secure a peerage, it is interesting to remember that both the House of Lords and the House of Commons owe their existence to the fact that the Saxons did not wish to be bothered by attendance at their assemblies. Somebody must go, and so one or two were chosen by each community to represent the rest ; and the wise men of the Witenagemot of old, together with the heads of the great church establishments, gradually came to be looked upon as the King's counsellors, and were called together to confer upon such questions as concerned the whole commonwealth.

It is by no means a good sign at the present time that, instead of wishing to attend to their own business, so many butchers and bakers and candle-stick-makers are eager to enter Parliament, to attend to other people's business. It is not the good old Saxon way.

In America, as in other democracies, our mistakes and our political troubles have mostly arisen from a wrong interpretation of "government by the people." It has never meant, and can never be successful when it is interpreted as meaning, that each individual shall take an active part in government. This is the catchpenny doctrine, preached from the platform by the demagogue. The real spirit of "government by the people" is merely that they should at all times have control, and keep control, of their governors, as these Saxons have done.

No one would dream of harking back to the primitive days when every man sewed together his own skins for clothes and for foot-wear, made his own hut, caught his own fish, killed each for himself his meat, and picked each for himself his berries, and was his own priest, his own physician, and his own policeman. We now know that this was waste of time and energy. We find it more convenient, and more conducive to a long life, and a comfortable life, to divide ourselves up into bakers, and butchers, and tailors, and berry pickers, and priests, and policemen, and physicians. It is only in politics that we grope blindly amongst primitive methods for a solution of the problem of government. France, with her fantastic theories, and what proved her horrible fiasco, influenced our beginnings, and followed by that have come the Irish with their hatred of England and the English; and the mating of the French philosophy, and the Irish fact, have turned us aside from, and made us hesitating in, our allegiance to the only form of free government which has ever been successful in the world, and which is ours by ancestral right. It must be a poor race which cannot throw up from the mass of men a certain number whose wealth, leisure, and ability fit them for the work of governing ; just as others amongst us are best fitted to bake or brew, or teach or preach, or make clothes or hats, or to dig in the fields. To say that every man is fitted to govern is to hark back to the days when every man was his own huntsman, fisherman, cook and tailor.

We have millions in America who are just learning the alphabet of free government, and they are still flattered by political parasites with loud voices and leather larynxes. Our parliaments and assemblies have too large a proportion, not of the brawn and brains that have made America a great nation in fifty years, but the semi-successful, the slippery and resourceful who live on the people, and by the people, and for themselves.

He is but a mean American who believes that this will last. The time approaches when Americans will slough off this hampering political clothing, put upon them by Latin and Celtic parasites, and insist upon being governed by the best amongst them, by the wisest amongst them, by the successful amongst them, and not by those whose living is derived by governing others, because they cannot govern themselves. It is not because we are fools that the present condition continues, it is because we are weighed down with the responsibilities of nation making. We have succeeded commercially and in all material ways marvellously. In fifty years we have become the rival of the strongest, and the commercial portent to which every finger in Europe points. Let this same energy be turned upon setting our domestic political affairs in order and the change in government will be as complete, and come as quickly, as in other matters. We have allowed our idlers to govern, with a splendid honor-roll of exceptions ; we shall ere long insist that our ablest shall take their places in the good old Saxon way.

Strangely enough, however, the House of

Lords still remains the most democratic institution in England. It may still claim for itself to be the Witenagemot, or gathering of wise men, and one wonders why it does not defend itself along those lines.

It is not a house of birth or ancestry, for it is composed to-day to an overwhelming extent of successful men from almost every walk in life. No one cares a fig what a man's ancestry was in this matter-of-fact land if he succeeds, if he becomes rich and powerful.

William the Conqueror himself was a bastard, and his mother was the daughter of an humble tanner of Falaise.

The mother of the great Queen Elizabeth was the daughter of a plain English gentleman.

A pot-girl of Westminster married the master of the pot-house. After his death she consulted a lawyer named Hyde. Mr. Hyde married her. Mr. Hyde afterward became Lord Chancellor, ^ with the title of Lord Clarendon, and his wife, the former pot-girl, bore him a daughter. This daughter married the Duke of York, and became the mother of Mary and Anne Stewart, both afterward queens of England.

It is evident that if queens of England may have a barmaid for grandmother, lesser mortals need not fret on the subject of ancestry.

The Englishman would not be what he is, nor would he in the least be transmitting his very valuable Saxon heritage, if he gave up his democratic custom of an aristocracy of power for the feeble continental custom of an aristocracy of birth. What the one and the other is to-day answers the question as to the relative merits of the two systems without need of discussion. The English, though nowadays many of them do not know it themselves, are the most democratic of all nations.

William the Conqueror divided England among the commanders of his army, and conferred about twenty earldoms; not one of these exists to-day. Nor do any of the honors conferred by William Rufus, 1087-1100; Henry the First, 1100-1135; Stephen, 1135-1154; Henry the Second, 1154-1189; Richard the First, 1189-1199; or John, 1199-1216.

All the dukedoms created from the institution of Edward the Third, 1327-1377, down to the commencement of the reign of Charles the Second, 1649, except Norfolk, and Somerset, and Cornwall — the title held by the Prince of Wales — have perished.

Winchester and Worcester, the latter merged in the dukedom of Beaufort, are the only marquisates older than George the Third, 1760-1820.

Of all earldoms conferred by the Normans, Plantagenets and Tudors, only eleven remain, and six of these are merged in higher honors.

The House of Lords to-day does not number among its members a single male descendant of any of the barons who were chosen to enforce Magna Charta. The House of Lords does not contain a single male descendant of the peers who fought at Agincourt. There is only a single family in all the realm, Wrottesleys, which can boast of a male descent from the date of the institution of the Garter, 1349.

In a word, the present House of Lords is conspicuously and predominantly a democratic body, chosen from the successful of the land.

Seventy of the peers were ennobled on account of distinction in the practice of the law alone.

The Dukes of Leeds trace back to a clothworker; the Earls of Radnor to a Turkey merchant ; the Earls of Craven to a tailor ; the families of Dartmouth, Ducie, Pomfret, Tankerville, Dormer, Romney, Dudley, Fitzwilliam, Cowper, Leigh, Darnley, Hill, Normanby, all sprang from London shops and counting-houses, and that not so very long ago.

Ashburton, Carrington, Belper, Overstone, Mount Stephen, Hindlip, Burton, Battersea, Glenesk, Aldenham, Lister, Avebury, Burnham, Biddulph, Northcliffe, Nunburnholme, Winterstoke, Rothschild, Brassey, Revelstoke, Strathcona and Mount Royal, Michelham, and others, too many to mention, have taken their places among the peers by force of long purses gained in trade.

Lord Belper, for example, created in 1856, is the grandson of Jedediah Strutt, who was the son of a small farmer, and made wonderful ribbed stockings.

" Wealth however got, in England makes Lords of mechanics, gentlemen of rakes. Antiquity and birth are needless here: 'Tis impudence and money makes the peer.

Great families of yesterday we show;

And lords whose parents were the Lord knows who."

The Saxon system still prevails. Those who push themselves to the front, those who accumulate a residue of power in the shape of leisure, are called upon to govern so that the others need not be bothered by such matters. It has been harder in some ages than in others for the man, unassisted by birth, to rise. But there has been no time in England when it has been wholly impossible. As a consequence of this, there is probably no body of men in the world who combine such a variety of experience and knowledge amongst them as the House of Lords. There are one or more representatives of every branch of human industry and professional skill.

Strange as it may seem, there is no assembly where a man could go — granted that all the peers were present — where he would be more certain of getting sound advice upon every subject, from higher mathematics and abstruse law down to the shoeing of a horse or the splicing of a cable.

Why the English themselves, or, at any rate, certain of their number, wish to abolish this assembly of the picked brains and ability in every walk in life, from literature and chemistry to beer-brewing and railroad building, I, as an American, cannot understand. It is the culmination of the essential philosophy of Saxondom. This is what the race has been at for two thousand years, not to be too much governed by, but to permit to govern, those who have proved themselves most capable of doing so.

The average number of barons summoned to Parliament by Edward the Second was 74; the average of the reign of Edward the Third was 43. At the beginning of the reign of Henry IV the lay members of the House of Lords consisted of 4 dukes, 1 marquis, 10 earls, and 34 barons. Henry VIII only assembled 51 peers in his Parliament ; while only 82 sat in the first Parliament of James the First; and 117 in the first Parliament of Charles the First. At the end of the reign of Charles the Second there were but 176 names on the roll of the Lords. The roll was increased to 192 peerages before the death of William the Third; to 209 before the death of Anne; to 216 before the death of George the First; to 229 before the death of George the Second ; to 339 at the death of George the Third ; to 396 before the death of George the Fourth; to 456 at the death of William the Fourth; to 512 in 1881; to 541 in 1892; and the total number at the present time (1908), including Spiritual and Law Lords, is 853, 200 of whom have been created since 1882, and nearly half of them since 1830.

Ah, but some one answers, suppose these men govern badly, or suppose they cease to represent the nation, or suppose the sons of these men are not of the calibre of their fathers. The last supposition is easily answered. We have seen already what a mushroom assembly it is from the point of view of ancient lineage. They are by no means all gentlemen, in the technical sense of that word; and by no means without exception worthy. But that only adds the necessary human factor of fallibility.