GUV FAWKES, GUY!

New Zealand Tablet, 11 July 1918, Page 10

GUV FAWKES, GUY!

(By G. K. Chesterton in the New Witness )

If days like these left leisure for a literary exercise parallel to portrait-painting, it would now be possible, by touch after touch of contemporary incident, to make something like a portrait of the type of man who rules us to-day. lie is not merely the old parliamentary hack, who is rather his servant ; he is the man of the type of the Harmsworths and Hudson Kearleys, and may be recognised by the fact that all the papers fan him with daily flatteries, exactly like the flatteries offered to princes and patrons in the seventeenth century ; florid repetitions adorning him with imaginary victories and imaginary virtues. Dismissing all these, the will power, the organising ability, and the rest of the tags, it is possible to trace something of his true character in his acts. A curious confused attempt to combine the immunity and even anonymity of private life with the fame and applause of public life : a touchy self-import-ance which screams like a cockatoo when criticised ; a sheer mental break-down in the presence of any general principle ; an ignorance of history, an ignorance of humanity, a congested combination of the two stupidities, of thinking everybody like oneself and thinking oneself better than everybody ; and finally a complete failure of moral courage and an inability to face the music. These are Business Governments ; and there will be a great many more of them. But of all the examples of such futility the most striking and symbolic has been the last feature of the Harmsworth press. They and other journalists have actually begun to make the solidarity of the Irish bishops in the Irish unity an excuse for the old nonsense of No-Popery. They have actually begun to burn poor old Guy Fawkes in effigy : simply because they want some guy on which to get rid of their irritation at having made a very bad blunder ; the blunder about conscription for Ireland. Every sane person told them beforehand it would be a blunder. The case against it was purely patriotic, purely practical, and almost entirely military. Abstract arguments about whether the Empire might constitutionally do something, according to the schemes of Gladstone or Isaac Butt, do not touch this practical argument at all. Moral arguments about Ireland ‘‘bearing her share” are merely a relief to our own moral feelings ; they are based on premises the Irish do not admit. The brute fact is that lie Irish ,011 their own premises, will think themselves right to resist, either passively or actively. Their resistance could be crushed : but crushing it would quite certainly demand many more troops than we can spare. And throughout the dreary agony of crushing it, certain to abound in incidents in which we either are wrong or look wrong, we should feel, like the crumbling of a fretted cliff, the failing of our last hope, the sinking of the sympathy of America. Our Harmsworth rulers do this senseless thing ; then they stare in bewilderment at the ruin they have wrought; and then they bring out their Guy. The main mark of this sort of thing is weakness, both.moral and mental; the moral weakness of making" a mistake and blaming somebody else for it ; and the mental weakness of an ignorant and idiotic choice in the matter of the party to be blamed. Nothing is more certain or more self-evident than that the Irish people were against conscription, before there was even any question of the Irish priests. The common-sense way of stating the case is not to say that the bishops

are leading everybody, or leading anybody, in this matter; it is to say that everybody has moved in the same direction in this matter, even the bishops. It is a plain question of dates and facts; chronology and concrete history. Nobody moved more early or more eagerly in such directions than extreme anti-clericals. The clerical element moved if anything rather late; and its only effect on the movement would be to moderate it. It moved, hardly so much because it was national (though it naturally is) as because it could not be expected to be violently anti-national. If the Roman* Catholic bishops in Ireland had really blessed conscription, it would have been exactly as if the whole bench of Anglican bishops in the House of Lords had risera and pronounced a public benediction on Germany, the day after the invasion of Belgium. In other words, itwould be a raving impossibility; the sort of thing one would hardly believe if one saw it. The Irish bishops, in our view as in that of many Irish Catholics, have once or twice been unfortunately near to being antinational ; but they could not possibly be so anti-national as to be pro-conscriptionist. This has nothing to do even with whether conscription in Ireland is practical or unpractical, still less with whether it is right or wrong. It is simply a question of the psychological facts of modern Ireland ; and the tests which the Modern Irishman's moral sense does in fact apply to this problem. The causes of it are a long story and a sad one ; and the results of it, we most profoundly agree, are sadder still. But the facts of it are simply that the average Irishman, under the existing circumstances, looks on imperial conscription as a foreign invasion and conquest. And he regards it as a man does regard those things, whether he happens to be a priest or happens to be a pot-boy. Next comes, as we say, the ineffable silliness of the excuse selected. It is perhaps the dingiest object in the Early Victorian dustbin. " It is what the Rev. Charles Spurgeon called the Roman Image. The criticism of it, it is needless to repeat, has nothing to do with any sanctity or even dignity in the religious system or its representatives: such as some of us may recognise and some may not. It would be exactly the same if the individuals were of any other type or trade. The point lies in the weak-minded way in which you apparently deal with the situation, when you are a strong-minded organiser in a business government. You mismanage things so that a mob of millions roars like one man against you; and then, rolling your bewildered eyes over the crowd, you notice that it contains some particular sort cf persons such as it naturally might contain—say a professional organist or an amateur billiard champion. You then remember that your Nonconformist great-aunt had a prejudice against billiards and church music, and you say between your clenched teeth "The vile billiard-marker and organgrinder are re-asserting their horrid power." Nevertheless the diversion thus selected is interesting, because it indicates the type of culture among these men whom our papers flatter and our politicians obey. It is something not only stupid but stale like an attempt to attach a peramnent sanctity to pegtop trousers or crinolines. They do not even understand the intellectual fashions of their own day if they expect to frighten the world with a Jesuit for a Jack-in-the-box. That the Catholic theory, or indeed the whole Christian theory, will prove only a mighty myth and pass ; that it still held by able and sincere, though in our view mistaken, men. But that Roman Catholicism is only a horrible hole-and-corner heresy of that religion ; a dingy conspiracy the State need no longer "tolerate" ; a perverse local superstition at which English Christians have a historic right to hold up their hands in horror ; that view has neither history nor philosophy nor current and common talk behind it, and is less and less discoverable among educated men. To fight for it now is to fight against the light, and even against the light of scepticism. And this last aspect of the case happens to add a rather important comment to the current debates about education, and even the last Education Bill.

We have already urged other reasons for resisting that measure; the fact that it is made to fit the framework of the Servile State; the fact that it removes another essential section of human life from the natural affection and authority of the free family; the fact_ that it is the last of the long list of coercion acts which in practice coerce only the common people. But if anyone would understand fully why Catholics, and many who are not Catholics, reject its plausible plea for State education, let him consider that these vitally uneducated men are now our statesmen, and that this sort of clap-trap would be the culture of their State. It is easy in the abstract to see that everybody would be the better for reading Plato or Shakespeare; and yet not to be reconciled to receiving culture from a ruling class which draws its notions of a national movement from the novels of Mr. Joseph Hocking and the interior of Mr. Kensit’s shop. And if it be true, as some say, the religion there reviled is now the only effective barrier to such legislation, then an enlightened enemy of that religion could only say that circumstances have somehow forced it, for the moment, to be the last champion of the liberty of the mind.