The Proud Tower (70 page)

Englishmen were increasingly conscious of the threat of Germany. “The danger now is,” wrote Lord Esher to a friend in 1908, “that in Europe we have a competitor the most formidable in numbers, intellect and education with which we have ever been confronted.” The necessity of facing that danger was one more blow to the Liberal creed. Traditional pacifist Liberalism was violated when Asquith and his fellow Imperialists in the Cabinet, who controlled foreign policy, agreed to give Sir John Fisher four new Dreadnoughts. Conservatives, dissatisfied, shouted the slogan, “We want eight and we won’t wait.” Haldane’s Territorial Army was equally resented by the pacifists of his party, who claimed that it would cost too much and drain money from social reform. With the King’s strong support it was enacted over their objections. “We are certainly living in hard times,” mourned King Edward, “but yet I hope that peace may be maintained—but only because Europe is
afraid
to go to war.”

The topic of invasion occupied both the official and the public mind. The Committee of Imperial Defence appointed an Invasion Inquiry in 1908 and summoned the ex-Prime Minister to give his views on the evidence it had collected. Balfour spoke for an hour in a closely reasoned and “luminous” exposition, “quite perfect in form and language,” which according to Esher, a member of the committee, so “dumbfounded” Asquith, Grey, Haldane and Lloyd George that none of them could think of a single question to ask him. “The general opinion was that no finer exposition of this question has ever been made.”

The Committee’s conclusion that a successful invasion could not be mounted was not known to the public, which felt an awful fascination in the topic. Erskine Childers had raised it in an absorbing novel
The Riddle of the Sands
, in 1903 and William Le Queux more emphatically if less artistically in a novel called
The Invasion of 1910
which ran as a serial in the
Daily Mail
in 1906 and was advertised through London by sandwich-men dressed in Prussian blue uniforms and spiked helmets. In 1909 Guy du Maurier’s play
An Englishman’s Home
, which dramatized an invasion by the forces of “the Emperor of the North,” opened at Wyndham’s Theatre and played to packed houses for eighteen months. The idea of invasion became almost a psychosis. Living at Rye on England’s south coast Henry James felt “exposed,” as he nervously wrote a friend in 1909. He worried that “when [he did not say ’if] the German Emperor carries the next war into this country, my chimney pots, visible to a certain distance out at sea, may be his very first objective.”

The prospect of war negated everything that orthodox Liberalism stood for, yet the Government had to adapt to it. Meanwhile the sex war raged at home. The Suffragette movement, which Charles Masterman believed to be an “outlet for suppressed energy,” released a curious surge of sex hatred, a mutual “blaze of antagonism,” as H. G. Wells called it, which fitted the other strangely violent quarrels afflicting England in the first decade of the Twentieth Century. Wells thought the main impulse of the Suffragettes—that swarm of “wildly exasperated human beings”—was “vindictive,” an outburst against man’s long arrogant assumption of superiority. Their open warfare followed almost immediately upon the advent of the Liberals, prompted by repeated postponements and refusal of the Government to introduce a bill of enfranchisement. Unable to obtain any satisfaction by legal means, the women resorted to tactics which were essentially “propaganda of the deed” and, like their prototype, anarchic in spirit. They turned up at every political meeting despite all doorkeepers’ precautions and drowned out the speakers by ringing bells and shrieking for the vote. They besieged the Houses of Parliament and offices of Whitehall, attacked ministers on their doorsteps, in one case knocking down Mr. Birrell, the Minister of Education, and kicking him in the shins, broke department-store windows with hammers, set fires in mail boxes, penetrated the House and stopped proceedings by chaining themselves to the grill of the Ladies Gallery and keeping up the incessant shout, “Votes for Women!”

In 1909 under the Liberal Government occurred the first forcible feeding of imprisoned Suffragettes, a peculiarly revolting process in which both the victims, who invited it by hunger strikes, and the officials who performed it, writhed like animals. It was accomplished by means of rubber tubes passed through the mouth, or sometimes the nostrils, to the stomach. While the prisoner was strapped in a chair and held down by guards or matrons, liquid food was forced down the tubes by stomach pumps. Outside in the streets Suffragettes marched with placards proclaiming, “Stop Forcible Feeding!” and one threw herself at the King’s feet in the midst of a court reception crying, “Your Majesty, won’t you please stop torturing women!” Inside the prisons the Suffragettes persisted in the hunger strikes which provoked the treatment. The irrational was gaining ground.

Put off again and again by Asquith’s promises to carry through Enfranchisement, which he made to secure quiet and never kept, the feminists in the years after 1909 slashed pictures in the National Gallery and set fires in cricket pavilions, race-course grandstands, resort hotels and even churches. They interrupted services in St. Paul’s and Westminster, forced petitions on the King at court, engaged in “painful and distressing” struggles with police, forcing their own arrest and imprisonment. They endured starvation and pain with mad fortitude, invited humiliation, brutality and finally, when Emily Davidson threw herself under the hoofs of the horses in the Derby of 1913, even death. Although these extremes were not reached until the period 1910–14, the practice and the spirit were already strong by 1909.

Men, otherwise decent citizens, reacted in the ugly spirit of a Saturday night drunkard beating his wife. When a meeting addressed by Lloyd George in the Albert Hall in December, 1908, was broken up by militants who, shouting “Deeds not words!” tore off their coats to reveal themselves dressed in prisoner’s gowns, the stewards, according to the
Manchester Guardian
, “went mad with fury and rushed upon the women, ejecting them with nauseating brutality, knocking them against seats, throwing them down steps, dragging them out by the hair.” In other instances of the kind they were deliberately struck in the breast. Possibly the fury was provoked by woman’s abandonment of feminine lures and her substitution of attack as a means of gaining her desires, which seemed to unsex her. It touched fundamentals. “These termagants, these unsexed viragoes, these
bipeds
!” thundered a Nonconformist minister, expressing more than all the editorials. The strange physical fury generated by the women’s struggle for the vote was the most unsettling phenomenon of the Liberal era.

By 1909 a gathering pessimism converged upon the Liberals and those allied with them. “A thousand sad and baffling riddles” had somehow replaced the simple verities of politics, wrote Masterman, now a member of the Government as Under-Secretary of the Home Office. In 1909 he published
The Condition of England
, a book of profound discouragement. He saw the world divided vertically “between nation and nation armed to the teeth” and horizontally between rich and poor. “The future of progress is still doubtful and precarious. Humanity at best appears as a shipwrecked crew which has taken refuge on a narrow ledge of rock beaten by wind and wave; we cannot tell how many, if any at all, will survive when the long night gives place to morning.”

Around him Masterman saw a complacent society reposing in an illusion of security but “of all the illusions of the opening of the Twentieth Century perhaps the most remarkable is that of security.” Instead of security he saw “gigantic and novel forces of mechanical invention, upheavals of people, social discontents … vast implements of destruction placed in the hands of a civilization imperfectly self-controlled” in which “material advance has transcended moral progress.”

James Bryce, another member of the Liberal Government as Chief Secretary for Ireland and since 1907 as Ambassador to Washington, found discouragement in the central theme of his life, the democratic process. In a series of lectures he delivered at Yale in 1909 on “Hindrances to Good Citizenship,” he admitted that the practice of democracy had not lived up to the theory. The numbers who could read and vote had increased twenty times in the last seventy years but “the percentage of those who reflect before they vote has not kept pace either with popular education or with the extension of the suffrage.” The “natural average man” was not exhibiting in public affairs the innate wisdom which democracy had presumed he possessed. He was more interested in betting at the races than in casting his vote. Old evils of class hatred, corruption, militarism, had recurred and new evils emerged. Although the world was undeniably better off than it had been, the faith of the Nineteenth Century in the ultimate wisdom of government of the people, by the people, had met “disappointment.” For the man who once described himself as “almost a professional optimist,” the Yale lectures were a painful confession.

The philosophers of Liberalism, looking around them, were making the equally painful discovery that laissez-faire, essence of the Liberal creed, had not worked. It had produced the evils of sweated labour, unemployment and destitution which Liberalism, unready for the wholehearted state intervention of the Fabian dream, could not cope with. In three years of office the Liberal Government, after coming to power in a new century with the greatest mandate in party history, had not been able to give shape to the great promise of 1906. By 1910 the number of men involved in strikes was the highest for any year since 1893. “We began slowly to lose what we had of the confidence” of working people, admitted Haldane, and “this gradually became apparent.” J. A. Hobson and L. T. Hobhouse, the economic and moral philosophers of social planning, had come to the conclusion that neither man nor society was operating properly. In
The Crisis of Liberalism
, published in 1909, Hobson wrote that if Liberalism could not transform its role into a more positive one, then “it is doomed to the same sort of impotence as has already befallen Liberalism in most continental countries.”

Hobhouse and a number of other investigators were concerned with man’s curious refusal to behave rationally in what seemed his own best interest. The low level on which the populace reacted politically, the appeal of the sensationalist press and the new phenomenon of mass interest in spectator sports were disturbing. Henri Bergson’s idea of man as moved by a force which he called
élan vital
had stimulated a new science of social psychology to probe the role of emotions and instinct as the basis of human conduct. One of the most influential of English studies of the mental processes at work in public affairs was Hobhouse’s
Democracy and Reaction
, published in 1904. An Oxford don whose deep interest in the labour movement led him to leave the University for the staff of the
Manchester Guardian
, Hobhouse found that the average man “has not the time to think and will not take the trouble to do so if he has the time.” His opinions faithfully reflect “the popular sheet and shouting newsboy.… To this new public of the streets and tramcars it is useless to appeal in terms of reason.”

This was the public which had shouted “Pigtail!” and the phenomenon of herd behavior suddenly was recognized as an entity. The Columbus of this discovery was a surgeon, Wilfred Trotter, who named the phenomenon, gave it status as a subject for scientific study and quietly concluded his first voyage in sociology with a sentence as pessimistic as any ever written. “A quiet man,” as a friend described him, with a wide variety of interests in philosophy, literature and science, Trotter, who was 36 in 1908, was to be judged thirty years later “the greatest surgeon of the present century in this country.” He had “the head and face of a scholar redeemed from austerity by a smile of great charm and sincerity.” In his two essays on “The Herd Instinct” in the
Sociological Review
in 1908 and 1909 he found man’s social behavior springing from that same dark and sinister well of the subconscious whose uncovering marked the end of the Victorian age. He saw the subconscious as a force lacking “all individuality, will and self-control.” It was “irrational, imitative, cowardly, cruel … and suggestible.” Because of man’s innate desire for group approval, he is at the mercy of this irrational force and vulnerable to the herd reaction. Unlike Kropotkin who in
Mutual Aid
assumed the herd instinct to be benevolent, Trotter considered it a factor for danger because its operation was unconscious and irrational. “It needs but little imagination to see,” he concluded, “how great are the probabilities that after all man will prove but one more of nature’s failures.”

The herd instinct occupied two other investigators in 1908, William McDougall in
Social Psychology
and Graham Wallas in
Human Nature in Politics.
Wallas’ life and thought were directed toward
The Great Society
, the title of a book he published in 1914. With Shaw and the Webbs he was the fourth of the Fabian junta until he resigned in 1904 in protest against its support of Tariff Reform. A member of the LCC, chairman of the London School Board, a founder of, and professor of political science at, the London School of Economics, Wallas in his own words was “a working thinker.” He was described by Wells as a “rather slovenly, slightly pedantic, noble-spirited man” in moustache and pince-nez whose lectures, though slow and fussy, were “penetrating and inspiring.” To another student, G. D. H. Cole, he was “the most inspiring lecturer I have ever heard.” In
Human Nature in Politics
he examined the evidence showing that man did not act according to rational assumptions. His hope was that the new methods of psychology and sociology would light the way toward more enlightened behavior in humanity’s self-interest.

Wallas did not want to accept the implications of Darwinism which seemed to condone and accept as inevitable the native aggressiveness of human nature and to condemn mankind to ruthless struggle as a condition of progress. Yet he foresaw that, unless the irrational was controlled, nations would engage in a series of inter-empire wars until only England and Germany or America and China remained, and then finally, after a “naval Armageddon in the Pacific, only one Empire will exist” and the inhabitants of the globe, reduced by half, would have to begin all over again. Already the process seemed to be on the way with “Germany and ourselves marching towards the horrors of world war” merely because, having made entities of Nation and Empire, “our sympathies are shut up within them.”