The Crimes of England by G.K. Chesterton
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7 THE CRIMES OF
ENGLAND
BY
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON
MCMXVI
1916
_CONTENTS_
CHAPTER I
SOME WORDS TO PROFESSOR WHIRLWIND
The German Professor, his need of Education
for Debate--Three Mistakes of German
Controversialists--The Multiplicity of
Excuses--Falsehood against Experience--
Kultur preached by Unkultur--The Mistake
about Bernard Shaw--German Lack of
Welt-Politik--Where England is really
Wrong.
CHAPTER II
THE PROTESTANT HERO
Suitable Finale for the German Emperor--Frederick
II. and the Power of
Fear--German Influence in England since
Lather--Our German Kings and Allies--
Triumph of Frederick the Great.
CHAPTER III
THE ENIGMA OF WATERLOO
How we helped Napoleon--The Revolution
and the Two Germanics--Religious
Resistance of Austria and Russia--Irreligious
Resistance of Prussia and England--Negative
Irreligion of England--its Idealism
in Snobbishness--Positive Irreligion of
Prussia; no Idealism in Anything--Allegory
and the French Revolution--The Dual
Personality of England; the Double Battle--Triumph
of Blucher.
CHAPTER IV
THE COMING OF THE JANISSARIES
The Sad Story of Lord Salisbury--Ireland
and Heligoland--The Young Men of
Ireland--The Dirty Work--The Use of
German Mercenaries--The Unholy Alliance--Triumph
of the German Mercenaries.
CHAPTER V
THE LOST ENGLAND
Truth about England and Ireland--Murder
and the Two Travellers--Real Defence
of England--The Lost Revolution--Story
of Cobbett and the Germans--Historical
Accuracy of Cobbett--Violence of the English
Language--Exaggerated Truths versus
Exaggerated Lies--Defeat of the People--Triumph
of the German Mercenaries.
CHAPTER VI
HAMLET AND THE DANES
Degeneration of Grimm's Fairy Tales--From
Tales of Terror to Tales of Terrorism--German
Mistake of being Deep--The
Germanisation of Shakespeare--Carlyle and
the Spoilt Child--The Test of Teutonism--
Hell or Hans Andersen--Causes of English
Inaction--Barbarism and Splendid Isolation--
The Peace of the Plutocrats--Hamlet
the Englishman--The Triumph of Bismarck.
CHAPTER VII
THE MIDNIGHT OF EUROPE
The Two Napoleons--Their Ultimate
Success--The Interlude of Sedan--The
Meaning of an Emperor--The Triumph of
Versailles--The True Innocence of England--
Triumph of the Kaiser.
CHAPTER VIII
THE WRONG HORSE
Lord Salisbury Again--The Influence of
1870--The Fairy Tale of Teutonism--The
Adoration of the Crescent--The Reign of
the Cynics--Last Words to Professor
Whirlwind.
CHAPTER IX
THE AWAKENING OF ENGLAND
The March of Montenegro--The Anti-Servile
State--The Prussian Preparation--The
Sleep of England--The Awakening of
England.
CHAPTER X
THE BATTLE OF THE MARNE
The Hour of Peril--The Human Deluge--The
English at the Marne.
THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND
I--_Some Words to Professor Whirlwind_
DEAR PROFESSOR WHIRLWIND,
Your name in the original German is too much for me; and this is the
nearest I propose to get to it: but under the majestic image of pure
wind marching in a movement wholly circular I seem to see, as in a
vision, something of your mind. But the grand isolation of your thoughts
leads you to express them in such words as are gratifying to yourself,
and have an inconspicuous or even an unfortunate effect upon others. If
anything were really to be made of your moral campaign against the
English nation, it was clearly necessary that somebody, if it were only
an Englishman, should show you how to leave off professing philosophy
and begin to practise it. I have therefore sold myself into the Prussian
service, and in return for a cast-off suit of the Emperor's clothes (the
uniform of an English midshipman), a German hausfrau's recipe for poison
gas, two penny cigars, and twenty-five Iron Crosses, I have consented
to instruct you in the rudiments of international controversy. Of this
part of my task I have here little to say that is not covered by a
general adjuration to you to observe certain elementary rules. They are,
roughly speaking, as follows:--
First, stick to one excuse. Thus if a tradesman, with whom your social
relations are slight, should chance to find you toying with the coppers
in his till, you may possibly explain that you are interested in
Numismatics and are a Collector of Coins; and he may possibly believe
you. But if you tell him afterwards that you pitied him for being
overloaded with unwieldy copper discs, and were in the act of replacing
them by a silver sixpence of your own, this further explanation, so far
from increasing his confidence in your motives, will (strangely enough)
actually decrease it. And if you are so unwise as to be struck by yet
another brilliant idea, and tell him that the pennies were all bad
pennies, which you were concealing to save him from a police prosecution
for coining, the tradesman may even be so wayward as to institute a
police prosecution himself. Now this is not in any way an exaggeration
of the way in which you have knocked the bottom out of any case you may
ever conceivably have had in such matters as the sinking of the
_Lusitania_. With my own eyes I have seen the following explanations,
apparently proceeding from your pen, (i) that the ship was a troop-ship
carrying soldiers from Canada; (ii) that if it wasn't, it was a
merchant-ship unlawfully carrying munitions for the soldiers in France;
(iii) that, as the passengers on the ship had been warned in an
advertisement, Germany was justified in blowing them to the moon; (iv)
that there were guns, and the ship had to be torpedoed because the
English captain was just going to fire them off; (v) that the English or
American authorities, by throwing the _Lusitania_ at the heads of the
German commanders, subjected them to an insupportable temptation; which
was apparently somehow demonstrated or intensified by the fact that the
ship came up to schedule time, there being some mysterious principle by
which having tea at tea-time justifies poisoning the tea; (vi) that the
ship was not sunk by the Germans at all but by the English, the English
captain having deliberately tried to drown himself and some thousand of
his own countrymen in order to cause an exchange of stiff notes between
Mr. Wilson and the Kaiser. If this interesting story be true, I can only
say that such frantic and suicidal devotion to the most remote interests
of his country almost earns the captain pardon for the crime. But do you
not see, my dear Professor, that the very richness and variety of your
inventive genius throws a doubt upon each explanation when considered in
itself? We who read you in England reach a condition of mind in which it
no longer very much matters what explanation you offer, or whether you
offer any at all. We are prepared to hear that you sank the _Lusitania_
because the sea-born sons of England would live more happily as deep-sea
fishes, or that every person on board was coming home to be hanged. You
have explained yourself so completely, in this clear way, to the
Italians that they have declared war on you, and if you go on explaining
yourself so clearly to the Americans they may quite possibly do the
same.
Second, when telling such lies as may seem necessary to your
international standing, do not tell the lies to the people who know the
truth. Do not tell the Eskimos that snow is bright green; nor tell the
negroes in Africa that the sun never shines in that Dark Continent.
Rather tell the Eskimos that the sun never shines in Africa; and then,
turning to the tropical Africans, see if they will believe that snow is
green. Similarly, the course indicated for you is to slander the
Russians to the English and the English to the Russians; and there are
hundreds of good old reliable slanders which can still be used against
both of them. There are probably still Russians who believe that every
English gentleman puts a rope round his wife's neck and sells her in
Smithfield. There are certainly still Englishmen who believe that every
Russian gentleman takes a rope to his wife's back and whips her every
day. But these stories, picturesque and useful as they are, have a limit
to their use like everything else; and the limit consists in the fact
that they are not _true_, and that there necessarily exists a group of
persons who know they are not true. It is so with matters of fact about
which you asseverate so positively to us, as if they were matters of
opinion. Scarborough might be a fortress; but it is not. I happen to
know it is not. Mr. Morel may deserve to be universally admired in
England; but he is not universally admired in England. Tell the Russians
that he is by all means; but do not tell us. We have seen him; we have
also seen Scarborough. You should think of this before you speak.
Third, don't perpetually boast that you are cultured in language which
proves that you are not. You claim to thrust yourself upon everybody on
the ground that you are stuffed with wit and wisdom, and have enough for
the whole world. But people who have wit enough for the whole world,
have wit enough for a whole newspaper paragraph. And you can seldom get
through even a whole paragraph without being monotonous, or irrelevant,
or unintelligible, or self-contradictory, or broken-minded generally. If
you have something to teach us, teach it to us now. If you propose to
convert us after you have conquered us, why not convert us before you
have conquered us? As it is, we cannot believe what you say about your
superior education because of the way in which you say it. If an
Englishman says, "I don't make no mistakes in English, not me," we can
understand his remark; but we cannot endorse it. To say, "Je parler le
Frenche language, non demi," is comprehensible, but not convincing. And
when you say, as you did in a recent appeal to the Americans, that the
Germanic Powers have sacrificed a great deal of "red fluid" in defence
of their culture, we point out to you that cultured people do not employ
such a literary style. Or when you say that the Belgians were so
ignorant as to think they were being butchered when they weren't, we
only wonder whether _you_ are so ignorant as to think you are being
believed when you aren't. Thus, for instance, when you brag about
burning Venice to express your contempt for "tourists," we cannot think
much of the culture, as culture, which supposes St. Mark's to be a thing
for tourists instead of historians. This, however, would be the least
part of our unfavourable judgment. That judgment is complete when we
have read such a paragraph as this, prominently displayed in a paper in
which you specially spread yourself: "That the Italians have a perfect
knowledge of the fact that this city of antiquities and tourists is
subject, and rightly subject, to attack and bombardment, is proved by
the measures they took at the beginning of the war to remove some of
their greatest art treasures." Now culture may or may not include the
power to admire antiquities, and to restrain oneself from the pleasure
of breaking them like toys. But culture does, presumably, include the
power to think. For less laborious intellects than your own it is
generally sufficient to think once. But if you will think twice or
twenty times, it cannot but dawn on you that there is something wrong in
the reasoning by which the placing of diamonds in a safe proves that
they are "rightly subject" to a burglar. The incessant assertion of such
things can do little to spread your superior culture; and if you say
them too often people may even begin to doubt whether you have any
superior culture after all. The earnest friend now advising you cannot
but grieve at such incautious garrulity. If you confined yourself to
single words, uttered at intervals of about a month or so, no one could
possibly raise any rational objection, or subject them to any rational
criticism. In time you might come to use whole sentences without
revealing the real state of things.
Through neglect of these maxims, my dear Professor, every one of your
attacks upon England has gone wide. In pure fact they have not touched
the spot, which the real critics of England know to be a very vulnerable
spot. We have a real critic of England in Mr. Bernard Shaw, whose name
you parade but apparently cannot spell; for in the paper to which I have
referred he is called Mr. Bernhard Shaw. Perhaps you think he and
Bernhardi are the same man. But if you quoted Mr. Bernard Shaw's
statement instead of misquoting his name, you would find that his
criticism of England is exactly the opposite of your own; and naturally,
for it is a rational criticism. He does not blame England for being
against Germany. He does most definitely blame England for not being
sufficiently firmly and emphatically on the side of Russia. He is not
such a fool as to accuse Sir Edward Grey of being a fiendish Machiavelli
plotting against Germany; he accuses him of being an amiable
aristocratic stick who failed to frighten the Junkers from their plan of
war. Now, it is not in the least a question of whether we happen to like
this quality or that: Mr. Shaw, I rather fancy, would dislike such
verbose compromise more than downright plotting. It is simply the fact
that Englishmen like Grey are open to Mr. Shaw's attack and are not open
to yours. It is not true that the English were sufficiently clearheaded
or self-controlled to conspire for the destruction of Germany. Any man
who knows England, any man who hates England as one hates a living
thing, will tell you it is not true. The English may be snobs, they may
be plutocrats, they may be hypocrites, but they are not, as a fact,
plotters; and I gravely doubt whether they could be if they wanted to.
The mass of the people are perfectly incapable of plotting at all, and
if the small ring of rich people who finance our politics were plotting
for anything, it was for peace at almost any price. Any Londoner who
knows the London streets and newspapers as he knows the Nelson column or
the Inner Circle, knows that there were men in the governing class and
in the Cabinet who were literally thirsting to defend Germany until
Germany, by her own act, became indefensible. If they said nothing in
support of the tearing up of the promise of peace to Belgium, it is
simply because there was nothing to be said.
You were the first people to talk about World-Politics; and the first
people to disregard them altogether. Even your foreign policy is
domestic policy. It does not even apply to any people who are not
Germans; and of your wild guesses about some twenty other peoples, not
one has gone right even by accident. Your two or three shots at my own
not immaculate land have been such that you would have been much nearer
the truth if you had tried to invade England by crossing the Caucasus,
or to discover England among the South Sea Islands. With your first
delusion, that our courage was calculated and malignant when in truth
our very corruption was timid and confused, I have already dealt. The
case is the same with your second favourite phrase; that the British
army is mercenary. You learnt it in books and not in battlefields; and I
should like to be present at a scene in which you tried to bribe the
most miserable little loafer in Hammersmith as if he were a cynical
condottiere selling his spear to some foreign city. It is not the fact,
my dear sir. You have been misinformed. The British Army is not at this
moment a hireling army any more than it is a conscript army. It is a
volunteer army in the strict sense of the word; nor do I object to your
calling it an amateur army. There is no compulsion, and there is next to
no pay. It is at this moment drawn from every class of the community,
and there are very few classes which would not earn a little more money
in their ordinary trades. It numbers very nearly as many men as it would
if it were a conscript army; that is with the necessary margin of men
unable to serve or needed to serve otherwise. Ours is a country in which
that democratic spirit which is common to Christendom is rather
unusually sluggish and far below the surface. And the most genuine and
purely popular movement that we have had since the Chartists has been
the enlistment for this war. By all means say that such vague and
sentimental volunteering is valueless in war if you think so; or even
if you don't think so. By all means say that Germany is unconquerable
and that we cannot really kill you. But if you say that we do not really
want to kill you, you do us an injustice. You do indeed.
I need not consider the yet crazier things that some of you have said;
as that the English intend to keep Calais and fight France as well as
Germany for the privilege of purchasing a frontier and the need to keep
a conscript army. That, also, is out of books, and pretty mouldy old
books at that. It was said, I suppose, to gain sympathy among the
French, and is therefore not my immediate business, as they are
eminently capable of looking after themselves. I merely drop one word in
passing, lest you waste your powerful intellect on such projects. The
English may some day forgive you; the French never will. You Teutons are
too light and fickle to understand the Latin seriousness. My only
concern is to point out that about England, at least, you are invariably
and miraculously wrong.
Now speaking seriously, my dear Professor, it will not do. It could be
easy to fence with you for ever and parry every point you attempt to
make, until English people began to think there was nothing wrong with
England at all. But I refuse to play for safety in this way. There is a
very great deal that is really wrong with England, and it ought not to
be forgotten even in the full blaze of your marvellous mistakes. I
cannot have my countrymen tempted to those pleasures of intellectual
pride which are the result of comparing themselves with you. The deep
collapse and yawning chasm of your ineptitude leaves me upon a perilous
spiritual elevation. Your mistakes are matters of fact; but to enumerate
them does not exhaust the truth. For instance, the learned man who
rendered the phrase in an English advertisement "cut you dead" as "hack
you to death," was in error; but to say that many such advertisements
are vulgar is not an error. Again, it is true that the English poor are
harried and insecure, with insufficient instinct for armed revolt,
though you will be wrong if you say that they are occupied literally in
shooting the moon. It is true that the average Englishman is too much
attracted by aristocratic society; though you will be in error if you
quote dining with Duke Humphrey as an example of it. In more ways than
one you forget what is meant by idiom.
I have therefore thought it advisable to provide you with a catalogue of
the real crimes of England; and I have selected them on a principle
which cannot fail to interest and please you. On many occasions we have
been very wrong indeed. We were very wrong indeed when we took part in
preventing Europe from putting a term to the impious piracies of
Frederick the Great. We were very wrong indeed when we allowed the
triumph over Napoleon to be soiled with the mire and blood of Blucher's
sullen savages. We were very wrong indeed when we allowed the peaceful
King of Denmark to be robbed in broad daylight by a brigand named
Bismarck; and when we allowed the Prussian swashbucklers to enslave and
silence the French provinces which they could neither govern nor
persuade. We were very wrong indeed when we flung to such hungry
adventurers a position so important as Heligoland. We were very wrong
indeed when we praised the soulless Prussian education and copied the
soulless Prussian laws. Knowing that you will mingle your tears with
mine over this record of English wrong-doing, I dedicate it to you, and
I remain,
Yours reverently,
G. K. CHESTERTON
II--_The Protestant Hero_
A question is current in our looser English journalism touching what
should be done with the German Emperor after a victory of the Allies.
Our more feminine advisers incline to the view that he should be shot.
This is to make a mistake about the very nature of hereditary monarchy.
Assuredly the Emperor William at his worst would be entitled to say to
his amiable Crown Prince what Charles II. said when his brother warned
him of the plots of assassins: "They will never kill me to make you
king." Others, of greater monstrosity of mind, have suggested that he
should be sent to St. Helena. So far as an estimate of his
historical importance goes, he might as well be sent to Mount Calvary.
What we have to deal with is an elderly, nervous, not unintelligent
person who happens to be a Hohenzollern; and who, to do him justice,
does think more of the Hohenzollerns as a sacred caste than of his own
particular place in it. In such families the old boast and motto of
hereditary kingship has a horrible and degenerate truth. The king never
dies; he only decays for ever.
If it were a matter of the smallest importance what happened to the
Emperor William when once his house had been disarmed, I should satisfy
my fancy with another picture of his declining years; a conclusion that
would be peaceful, humane, harmonious, and forgiving.
In various parts of the lanes and villages of South England the
pedestrian will come upon an old and quiet public-house, decorated with
a dark and faded portrait in a cocked hat and the singular inscription,
"The King of Prussia." These inn signs probably commemorate the visit of
the Allies after 1815, though a great part of the English middle classes
may well have connected them with the time when Frederick II. was
earning his title of the Great, along with a number of other territorial
titles to which he had considerably less claim. Sincere and
simple-hearted Dissenting ministers would dismount before that sign (for
in those days Dissenters drank beer like Christians, and indeed
manufactured most of it) and would pledge the old valour and the old
victory of him whom they called the Protestant Hero. We should be using
every word with literal exactitude if we said that he was really
something devilish like a hero. Whether he was a Protestant hero or not
can be decided best by those who have read the correspondence of a
writer calling himself Voltaire, who was quite shocked at Frederick's
utter lack of religion of any kind. But the little Dissenter drank his
beer in all innocence and rode on. And the great blasphemer of Potsdam
would have laughed had he known; it was a jest after his own heart. Such
was the jest he made when he called upon the emperors to come to
communion, and partake of the eucharistic body of Poland. Had he been
such a Bible reader as the Dissenter doubtless thought him, he might
haply have foreseen the vengeance of humanity upon his house. He might
have known what Poland was and was yet to be; he might have known that
he ate and drank to his damnation, discerning not the body of God.
Whether the placing of the present German Emperor in charge of one of
these wayside public-houses would be a jest after _his_ own heart
possibly remains to be seen. But it would be much more melodious and
fitting an end than any of the sublime euthanasias which his enemies
provide for him. That old sign creaking above him as he sat on the bench
outside his home of exile would be a much more genuine memory of the
real greatness of his race than the modern and almost gimcrack stars and
garters that were pulled in Windsor Chapel. From modern knighthood has
departed all shadow of chivalry; how far we have travelled from it can
easily be tested by the mere suggestion that Sir Thomas Lipton, let us
say, should wear his lady's sleeve round his hat or should watch his
armour in the Chapel of St. Thomas of Canterbury. The giving and
receiving of the Garter among despots and diplomatists is now only part
of that sort of pottering mutual politeness which keeps the peace in an
insecure and insincere state of society. But that old blackened wooden
sign is at least and after all the sign of something; the sign of the
time when one solitary Hohenzollern did not only set fire to fields and
cities, but did truly set on fire the minds of men, even though it were
fire from hell.
Everything was young once, even Frederick the Great. It was an
appropriate preface to the terrible epic of Prussia that it began with
an unnatural tragedy of the loss of youth. That blind and narrow savage
who was the boy's father had just sufficient difficulty in stamping out
every trace of decency in him, to show that some such traces must have
been there. If the younger and greater Frederick ever had a heart, it
was a broken heart; broken by the same blow that broke his flute. When
his only friend was executed before his eyes, there were two corpses to
be borne away; and one to be borne on a high war-horse through victory
after victory: but with a small bottle of poison in the pocket. It is
not irrelevant thus to pause upon the high and dark house of his
childhood. For the peculiar quality which marks out Prussian arms and
ambitions from all others of the kind consists in this wrinkled and
premature antiquity. There is something comparatively boyish about the
triumphs of all the other tyrants. There was something better than
ambition in the beauty and ardour of the young Napoleon. He was at
least a lover; and his first campaign was like a love-story. All that
was pagan in him worshipped the Republic as men worship a woman, and all
that was Catholic in him understood the paradox of Our Lady of
Victories. Henry VIII., a far less reputable person, was in his early
days a good knight of the later and more florid school of chivalry; we
might almost say that he was a fine old English gentleman so long as he
was young. Even Nero was loved in his first days: and there must have
been some cause to make that Christian maiden cast flowers on his
dishonourable grave. But the spirit of the great Hohenzollern smelt from
the first of the charnel. He came out to his first victory like one
broken by defeats; his strength was stripped to the bone and fearful as
a fleshless resurrection; for the worst of what could come had already
befallen him. The very construction of his kingship was built upon the
destruction of his manhood. He had known the final shame; his soul had
surrendered to force. He could not redress that wrong; he could only
repeat it and repay it. He could make the souls of his soldiers
surrender to his gibbet and his whipping-post; he could 'make the souls
of the nations surrender to his soldiers. He could only break men in as
he had been broken; while he could break in, he could never break out.
He could not slay in anger, nor even sin with simplicity. Thus he stands
alone among the conquerors of their kind; his madness was not due to a
mere misdirection of courage. Before the whisper of war had come to him
the foundations of his audacity had been laid in fear.
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