A Thousand Years Hence/Chapter 9
Reed would sketch out the National Church of the future.—Author, chap. i.
One of Yellowly's great aims was the institution of a permanent representative National Trades Union, as a High Court of Appeal in union life.—Ibid.
There was a grand material progress in this twentyfirst century, which excelled that of the twentieth as much as the twentieth excelled the nineteenth, and the nineteenth the centuries that preceded it. But leaving that to be understood or estimated by the reader from the allusions in preceding chapters, I shall devote the present chapter rather to certain national institutions, and their condition as characteristic of the times; and I would begin, as a good Churchman ought, with—
Just up to the twentieth century, the prominent idea of a national Church, in popular estimation, was that of a bundle of privileges. The environing warmth of privilege seemed to be of the very life's essence of the Church. To possess and maintain distinctively for her members, privileges—pecuniary, political, ecclesiastical—which others of the community, outside her religious pale, had not, seemed the main triumph of good churchmanship. I have already alluded to the first great blow, happily and successfully struck, and, to the Church's great credit, struck from within her own body, at this very low system. The success of this first step, on behalf of the Church's standing and influence, was so remarkable, that others afterwards followed, in the anti-temporalities war of those times, until the Church could at length claim that she stood upon her own inherent strength, with no privilege whatever that was not equally attainable by any other religious body of the common country. This lofty and independent position prepared her for a further movement, which proved of the highest importance for her future extension and usefulness.
Many questions had been accumulating for the Church in those times, arising, on the one hand, out of advanced science and biblical criticism, and, on the other, out of the old contention as to Tradition versus Scripture. Protestantism arose to replace the latter in supremacy; while historical research over the ground of Church and Episcopate had latterly shown that, however convenient and suitable as a human development, these must not take precedence of "The Word of God." Was our national Church, therefore, truly Protestant in this sense; or, abhorring the very name, as her very "High" section would express it, did she contradictorily follow suit with her cast-off progenitor at the Vatican, in placing the Church's authority above that of Scripture, and thus committing herself to an independent highway of her own?
If, then, the Church, with Scripture in one hand, and her Prayer-book in the other, must needs revise her position, might she not invite the whole Christian people to her help? While we still called ourselves the National Church, yet, from one cause and another, one-half of the nation, or more, was outside our pale. Here was a grand opportunity; and the large-minded primate of that day fully appreciated all its possibilities, when he made his memorable national appeal for the reconstruction of a national church upon the sole basis of Scripture. There was, to begin with, a frank acknowledgment, in the interests of historic truth, that the original "Episcopus" of the earlier church was not what time and society's developments had afterwards made him.
This national appeal was not made in vain. The tendency of the new movement was towards collecting all the steady religious elements into a great national church. If the old distinctive sects still survived, they were comparatively dwarfed in numerical membership and influence, resembling a narrow but varied border to the great central floor of society. These small but zealous bodies were ever attacking and denouncing the central mass; but even still more were they at eternal strife with each other. There was, as one remarkable feature, a large accession of the "Liberal Catholic" element, a section which had latterly been at increasing variance with the Ultramontane extremes of the Roman Church. We shall again meet with our reconstituted National Church further on, and see how she then also fared.
Ere the great Yellowly had quitted the world, he had succeeded in a chief object of his life, namely, the creation of a great permanent, national, representative trades union. It was by means of such a body—created out of, and representing, all the other like bodies—that he hoped best to reform all the latter, and rid them of all the erroneous or vicious tendencies, which had heretofore limited their membership, and weakened their influence. Success followed his efforts, and when he finally closed a long and busy life, he had left behind him a system that promised to work to the credit and well-being of his order and of his country. One hundred years had rolled over since that time, and it was now the duty of the great union president of the day to celebrate the first centenary of the death of the honoured founder. In abridged form I give some few of his more striking observations.
The president remarked that there were three different subjects to notice in this proposed retrospect. First, he would look at their own advance, which, as a representative union, they had accomplished by following the lines laid down for them by their illustrious founder. Next, he would consider the progress of their country as to certain leading questions, in which they were interested on behalf of the great body of the people, and as to which they had been able to intervene with decided and beneficial effect. And, lastly, he would extend his view to the general aspect, alike of his own country, and of the world at large, in all that enlivening race of progress upon which both were now surely embarked.
Yellowly's prime rule ever was, that union principles and union action should be unchallengable. Besides being the right thing in itself, this was almost even more for them, as the sure and only highway to that influence and power which ought to be, and which might be, wielded by a section of society so indispensable and numerically so great as theirs. The president then pointed out, in his comparative sketch, the narrow, selfish, and altogether unworthy aspect of many of the union rules and practices, as they stood in the nineteenth century. But as their order had long since emerged from all this mass of inferiority and weakness, there was the less need to sacrifice much time and thought upon it now. Yellowly had especially set his face against every kind and form of union coercion; and, by his persistent efforts in this direction, he had altered the entire union constitution, so as to convert membership into a valued privilege, instead of a coercive inclusion. His effective lever in all his high class reforms was this great representative National Trades Union, which, as his own special creation, now remains the monument of his sagacious foresight, to fulfil the duties of a High Court of Appeal in all union life.
This intervention, under all the circumstances, was altogether inevitable. Public questions of the most vital kind came up to the front in quick succession, towards the close of the nineteenth, and during the twentieth century. The settlement of these questions, in directions most favourable to progress, and to the well-being of the masses of the people, was only one part of the case. Another part, not less important, was that there should be prompt settlement, so as to give the benefits of victory, and of the new order of things, to the generation which fought the battles. As regarded legislation in particular, this expediting work had been rendered possible to us by the "Special Hansard" facilities, which Parliament had latterly adopted, and of which mention has already been made.
This authoritative intervention on our part in these questions, remarked the president, opened quite a new era to the great body of the working classes. When they had successfully set their own house in order, their views as to the great edifice of the nation were given with the more self-confidence, and listened to with the more attention and good-will. It must be remembered, too, that the vast union membership consisted now, throughout, of well educated and fairly well-off persons; and that, as the rule, the unions possessed considerable funds, which were, in most cases, wisely used.
One of our earliest and hardest battles was to secure to the whole people the facilities and benefits of the decimal and metric system. The strain in the first step was ever the block in the way here; and but for our imperative intervention, the hesitation of the country might have indefinitely postponed that preliminary crisis, which each year's delay in the advancing society was only to render of the greater dimensions. With our unsystematic and confused moneys and weights and measures, we resembled a man with all his limbs out of joint, but who stood shivering and hesitating over the indispensable preliminary wrench, which was to set him to rights. The "permissive" system having failed, the compulsory must be resorted to. The general diffusion of education, by the time our successful action opened in this case, had a decided effect, alike in mitigating first difficulties, and abbreviating the trying interval of transition from the old to the new system. In thus practically superseding multiplication and division in the daily arithmetic of the people's life and business, we appreciably unhandicapped the entire industrial front, and thenceforth sent the country onwards at a goodly increase of pace.
In fiscal policy, again, we held successfully for two leading principles. Public revenue, in countries so settled, populous, and wealthy as ours, should by this time be levied, mainly if not indeed wholly, from only two sources, which ought to prove always sufficient. First, from realized property, seeing that the costly fabric of government was substantially for the protection and interests of property; and, second, out of that continually advancing value of the country's real estate, of which the people, as a whole, should thus enjoy some share or small percentage, seeing it is mainly due to their increasing numbers and industrial wealth-creating attainments.
The great and varied Land Question opened early upon us, and our union was able to bear with decided and beneficial effect upon its settlement. The concurrent Irish Land Question had a certain confusing effect, which we were useful in dissipating. In the exceptional Irish measure, the principle was "Justice to the people;" in the other and more ordinary case it was "Justice to the land." The land must yield its greatest and best return by passing freely to the hands that could best use it. The court to settle "fair rent" must therefore, as the rule, continue to be, as in every other industrial direction, the court of open competition. If John Smith can't get £500 a year out of the land, and John Jones can, Jones must, of the two, have the farm, if we mean justice to the land; otherwise we are back to "protection," in its most injurious form of artificially restricted production. There are exceptions, however, to every general rule, and we had repeatedly to back the "crofters'" case, when it reached the character and magnitude of a public question, and when, as being thus akin to the Irish case, it claimed some like dealing. When the question is the forcible expulsion of multitudes of our people from cherished ancestral homes, the possibility of some other arrangement should not be beneath public concernment, and accordingly the Trust System found on occasion its genial application here, to the content and comfort of multitudes of homes. But keeping in view, as our main principle, this said justice to the land, it was comparatively easy to attain suitable land measures.
There was no long battle over primogeniture, entails, and the other remnants of an old feudality, which had admittedly fallen out of consonance with modern sentiment and social conditions. The public law, at any rate, must not deal injustice in family inheritance, whatever may be allowed to private authority. And, again, the dead hand must be entirely lifted off the living world. Those who quitted the world must not hamper and trammel those left in its charge. And, again, the vicious habit of provision-making for heirs and descendants, instead of allowing them the healthful stimulus of fighting their own way in the world, must be further checked by strict limitation to persons actually in life. This form of injustice to the country's future, as well as to the individual himself, must not be perpetrated upon the unborn.
While we in the mother country were still in the throes of vexations and interminable discussions over our complex land title, after repeated failure of permissive and tentative measures, our colonial children were already in the full enjoyment of public registry of title, and the consequent prompt and inexpensive land dealing. Our suggestion that the State should undertake, and at once, to clear the title for the whole country was adopted. The State was duly at work, "clearing and registering title" everywhere, with all the promptitude possible to so huge a work, to the boundless advantage of the country, and satisfaction of the people; and the State was afterwards readily and fully reimbursed by a small fee upon the countless land transfers that followed.
For many preceding years a theoretical jangle had been kept up as to how far such facilities would promote small landholding, and as to the advantage of such landholding, and so on. But the State's chief concern and duty in the matter was simply to remove obstruction. The marked and prompt result of this removal was, that the land fell freely to those hands which could use it to most purpose, and that the whole country acquired, in consequence, a decided impetus to its forward pace and prosperity.
Other great questions did beset us, continued the president. Should there be nationalization of the land, or even, as a less extreme alternative, a coercive limitation of landholding, in our comparatively narrow and crowded area? Provocation for intervention was not wanting, more especially in that partial and hugely unequal landholding and distribution of wealth, which the public law had still fostered, long after the circumstances of society had belied it. The ancient baron, on his great estate, had five hundred retainers, ready to turn out with their lordly head to the battle-field. But the modern lord had turned all these into domestics, who, in their modern emasculation, kept their master's palace and kitchen gardens, and cooked his dinner. But now the entire abolition of the law's injurious fostering restrictions was deemed sufficient. He was happy to record the moderation and good practical common sense with which his co-unionists opposed all extreme and upsetting propositions. The nationalization project, in particular, which they rejected, got no support from the example of countries which, like Switzerland, had long freed themselves from old traditional land conditions, or which, like the United States of America, had never been subject to them. Two conditions, however, were successfully contended for on behalf of the whole people. First, that every requirement of land that could reasonably claim a public interest or object, must be allowed; of course, on due and full compensation. Second, that all land, while still in its natural unimproved state, must be, or continue to be, open to the public. It was intolerable that, for instance, a handful of proprietary should, on any consideration whatever, fence out the people from the wild mountains and glens of their native land. No plea should be allowed here, any more than to the ordinary thief, on the ground of time and non-disturbance. And even if fancy values, at times and places, did suffer somewhat under this open commonage, the whole people might fairly plead, per contra, their gift of that unearned increment of value, which was admittedly so effective everywhere in the other direction.
Rank was to be on personal basis, the hereditary to die out.—Author, chap, i., etc.
The altered conditions of society had brought upon us, by this time, a decided change in the national sentiment in respect to social precedence and public rank. Alas! that it must no longer be that "England loves a lord," if there be nothing else than the title in his lordship. In the old times, when the mass of the people existed in ignorance, poverty, and degradation, the headship of the country, and its property as well, were easily secured by a comparative few, who formed a hereditary monarchy and nobility. But the people have since advanced to more equality of condition with those thus originally and hereditarily above them; and the tendency has consequently been to disparage the hereditary element, and advance that of real and personal quality.
A somewhat odd mixture, arising out of the past combination of the new with the old idea, now presented itself to the reforming mind of the country. The Public Bank of the time might be viewed as of four distinguishing kinds. First, there were those who stood solely and entirely upon personal deserts, who mostly led the world's business and the world's science, but whose rank was usually of the humblest. Indeed, the energetic and commanding minds, by which the world's progress was mainly carried on, were usually the least of all represented there. Second, those who, although not conspicuous in the personal element in particular, were of noticeable wealth, or had bestowed some of their means upon some noticeable public object. Third, those who had the happy luck to be in prominent office on the occasion of national events, such as a royal visit or birth or marriage, or the opening of a park, a bridge, a railway, or other chance-medley of the progress of their time. And lastly came the culmination of rank in those who had no concernment whatever with personal quality or services or national progress, who simply inherited their status, and who, if personal merits happened to be originally in their case, accounted themselves all the higher in rank the further they were removed from such originating and raw personality.
Here, then, was a royal medley of rank, which, with every succeeding year, was less in accord with the common-sense of the day, and beginning at last to be suggestive of the ludicrous. The greatest intellects and chief moving spirits of the time stood in the same rank with nobodies; or the latter, as it chanced, might be the men of rank, and the former not. When these former began very generally to decline to enter such indiscriminate company, the time had come for sweeping away the entire old fabric. A great national order of merit was instituted in its place, whose positions were the fruit solely of personal qualities and deeds, and whose gradations constituted the sole public rank of the country. And, again, when the progress in countries outside of us, taking the same direction as our own, had also followed us in the like new institution of public rank, there succeeded an international agreement, by which the great minds of each country were marshalled forth into international prominence, and were thus constituted into an international nobility.
Yellowly was a strong advocate of woman's rights.—Author, chap. i.
In the more delicate needs of life, the one sex being exposed to the other was never without sacrifice.—Ibid, chap. i.
We had inherited from our founder, continued the president, a care for the honour and the interests of woman, and a charge to give to her all possible help, in her battle with society for equality of rights with the man. Well, the woman has fought her battle, and has gained it; and society is all the better for the victory, in the interests alike of its business, its science, and its higher social concernments. He went on to say that, if the moral fibre of society had been distinctly strengthened by that reformed university life, to which allusion has been already made, yet further and yet more directly was this the case in all those educational and other arrangements, which now freely permitted the ministration of woman in all the delicate duties of her own sex's needs. The husband of to-day would as soon think of exposing the grace and purity of his young wife, in the honours and pangs of her maternity, to the indiscriminate gaze of the streets, as of exposing her to any one not of her own sex within the hallowed precincts of her chamber. In this direction alone there was thus an appreciable step of moral elevation along society's entire line.
We look back, continued the president, upon more than a century of the life of an universally educated people. What wondrous advance since the end of the nineteenth century! Then, indeed, was the day of small things compared with now. But probably our great grandchildren, a century hence, may find equal cause, in their own still greater progress, to speak alike disparagingly of our day. Comparing the actual present with the actual past, no feature is more striking, or more inspiring, than the great increase of our population. On this question much speculative guess-work of the past has been set entirely at rest by the facts of the present. We do not starve in England, although our country is already far on to being covered with human beings and dwelling houses, instead of presenting the open fields of preceding centuries. America and Australasia pour in upon us ample food supply, conveyed quickly and cheaply in the huge shipping of our time.
A vast and busy mass steps now to the front of society. There is no longer the feature of a hereditary poor class or hereditary lower class, any more than of a hereditary upper class. The lower class of to-day is the aggregate of individuals who fall comparatively short in ability, industry, and character. The universal activity, alike of hand and mind, in our great populations, gives us our unprecedented pace of progress. That progress takes remarkable directions, as, for instance, in our practice, now extending over all the country, of interposing the protection of a glass roof between us and our too often wet, cold, and inhospitable skies. And this practice, which is extending also outside of us, is already mitigating the conditions and increasing the resources of life in the world's higher latitudes. There is already, in fact, the promise of population literally from pole to pole. We have long ago found our way, in mere geographical progress, to either pole, and countless travellers have poised themselves in imagination exactly upon either axial extremity beneath their feet. The question approaches of even a crowded permanent residence in such regions, when our race, in years or centuries to come, has been still more crowded out of the more temperate latitudes.
Another remarkable direction of modern progress is that of the land into the sea. We have, most effectually, in this respect, turned the tables upon our old enemy. We are now everywhere busy filling up our foreshores, estuaries, and ocean shallows. Already we have, in this way, added thousands of square miles to too narrow Old England. Already the spacious and once troublesome and dangerous sandbanks of the Thames' mouth are our national terra firma, and are being covered with warehouses and shops, mansions and small gardens. Already we have bridged the comparatively shallow water between south-west Scotland and north-east Ireland. Already our great neighbours of Germany and France, extending now, as they respectively do, over little Holland and little Belgium of old time, co-operate powerfully with us towards a future land junction, by filling up the North Sea shallows. Already, in this way, have we a broad dam, with its multiple-lined railway, connecting Dover and Calais; while the multitudinous shipping of all countries, propelled now with the quiet rapidity of electric energy, is diverted through the great inter-ocean canal of France on the one side, or our own great Thames and Channel canal on the other.
The recent discovery of cross-electric power has precipitated us, said the president, into quite a new world of science and resource. Just when we seemed threatened with an increase of population that is to leave no room upon the world's surface for natural food-growing, this great discovery comes to our help, to turn out the required food, rapidly and cheaply, from the narrow quarters of our chemical laboratories. The cross-electric, further, in creating the great modern diamond factory (for any coal, shale, or cinder rubbish may now be rapidly and cheaply converted into hardest and purest diamond), has advanced powerfully alike our scientific, artistic, and material life. The ladies, indeed, under this new tide of cheap and boundless supply, at once turned up their fair noses in contempt for what they now designated as the vulgar flare of their previously most prized of jewels; but telescopic and microscopic science secured their great advance, while our window-light, and countless other necessities, aids, and comforts of life, came in, more or less, for the same.
Is a future Gibbon to illustrate another " Decline and Fall"?—Author, chap. ix.
There arises, said the president, in conclusion, but one shade over the general brightness of this picture. The great British Empire, of which, covering, as it did, one-ninth part of the habitable globe, our ancestors of the nineteenth century were so justly proud, is now, so far, at least, as regards the whole of this grand area and its advanced population, a thing of the past, and alive only in the page of history. Seeing, however, that all international war has long ago come to an end over the world, the break up of a power that might have been unchallengeably the greatest on the earth, has happily, on that account, proved the less dangerous to its people, and in that view also, possibly, the less mortifying. Nevertheless a pang of national agony shot through us all, during the past century, when we did actually realize, albeit too late for remedy, that, as the result of long-previous easy-going political negligence, the grand old empire had gone to pieces. Indeed, but for the self-condemning conviction that all parties and classes amongst us had been much alike to blame for the national disaster, there might not have been wanting, to the intensity of first regrets, a revolutionary tendency towards other forms of government which had happily proved so much more successful in banding firmly and permanently together the component sections of another great empire of the English race.
As we still embrace great India, as well as many various other places of the like mixed dependency character over the world, which, with that world's general advance, give us collectively already a population and commerce far beyond those even of the undivided empire at its highest united attainment, we are fain to gather crumbs of comfort, and to dwell upon the greatness still left to us. But we have definitively lost the vast areas of Northern America, Southern Africa, and Australasia. They all remain perfectly friendly to us, as indeed does all the rest of the world; and at, and for long after, the time of parting, there was a profuse outpouring of loyal allegiance to the old associations and memories, with vows of eternal brotherhood, and so on. But none the less the substance has departed from beneath the shadow, and the great nationality is dissipated.
The untoward event happened in this way. Our colonies, as they became important and self-supporting, during the nineteenth century, demanded, and were cordially conceded, the constitutional or self-government of the parental type. They were then perfectly satisfied, and perfectly loyal, and nothing seemed wanting to harmony on either side. But separative elements and causes gradually arose, with the many differing circumstances of all these remote and practically self-governed societies. While they were still respectively, and even collectively, small, as compared with their overshadowing parent, and still moved by home rather than by local or colonial influences and remembrances, there were no great difficulties in sufficiently preserving at least an entire legal unity to the empire; for in all important colonial questions, having imperial bearing, the home decisions were then always cordially acceded to. But as the colonies grew to greatness, they were ever less and less disposed to be thwarted by the imperial check in independently pursuing what seemed to them their suitable course. They had secured, from the first, the free disposal respectively of their own tariffs. But afterwards they began to seek inter-tariff and other independent arrangements, foreign as well as colonial, outside of them; and in various other ways their tendency was ever to trench more and more upon imperial treaty arrangements, and imperial rights, and legal and political consistencies.
What had been wanting all through this undermining process, and what had not been timely considered and remedied while still possible, was a firm and equal political union, by the due representation of all parts of the empire. This being wanting, any exercise of the imperial check upon a colony had always, of necessity, rather the untoward aspect of the command of a superior to the subject, than that of the decision of a whole united nationality; and thus the larger colonies, as though by an inevitable instinct, began to indicate resistance. When at length one of the greatest of these "dependencies," as we were still ominously calling them, in a vital question of imperial policy and consistency, declined flatly to be "coerced" by the home decision, it was seen that the cord had at length snapped asunder.
We had already, at this time, passed into the twentieth century. Up to the end of the nineteenth unity seemed still possible, and a Bismarck hand might still have secured it. But the English Bismarck was not then forthcoming, and so the great empire fell. We had to content ourselves with having enriched history on behalf of some future Gibbon, who was to describe the decline and fall of yet one more of the world's great empires. We had no longer indeed the dreads of war to cause us to regret that the powerful co-operating arms of our colonies were lost to us; but, in other respects, our shorn condition came home but too plainly to our national pride. The greatest and most ]progressive empire of modern times had crumbled to pieces in our hands, and with additional disappointment were we aware that our transatlantic cousinhood were now indisputably topass us, in assuming the first position in the English speech. In short, we had been trifling with the grandest position in the world, and we had irrevocably lost it.