LEST WE REGRET

by

Douglas Reed

published: 1943

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Author's Note

Part One

Great Argument

Chapter:01 02

Part Two

Freedom Lost!

Chapter:01 02 03

Part Three

Freedom Regained?

Chapter:01 02 03 04 05

Part Four

Battle In England

Chapter:01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Kind Friends, Adieu!

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AUTHOR'S NOTE

I was forced to choose between continuing to write books or entering into a correspondence so great, that it would have occupied all my time. Most of these letters share a common theme - anxiety for the future, however our victory in this war may appear - and this book is a joint reply to them. The clear road beyond victory, for which we long, is still not visible.

That is why I chose for my title the words Battle in England, from a letter written by a young officer who served far away from this, his native island. The letter was not sent to me; it was quoted in the House of Commons. One sentence vividly expresses the thought that prompts this book:

'We still feel out here that the ultimate battle is being won or lost in England.'

And so it is. With victory, the battle for our future will only begin. The years 1919-39 are close enough for us to remember that.

My publisher thought that the title I chose would confuse readers, who would expect from it a book about the military battle of Britain. The cover, therefore, bears another title: Lest We Regret. The theme of the book, nevertheless, is that 'Battle in England' which will have to be fought and won in this island, after the war, if our future is not to be lost.

I have interpolated in the text several quotations from letters to me; they were so apt to my theme that I have used them to illustrate it.

PART ONE

GREAT ARGUMENT

Chapter One

TO FRIENDS AND FOES

It is the land that freemen till
That sober-suited-Freedom shows;
The land where, girt with friends or foes,
A man may speak the things he will. - TENNYSON

(But neither rejoice nor lament too soon, gentle reader. If you will allow me a moment to change my literary clothes, I shall soon reappear before you in another guise.)

Of its kind, alone, is this book the last. It is the end of my modest foresight saga, which I began in 1938 with a book called Insanity Fair. Great were my expectations then. Foreseeing this war, I thought I might avert it - with a book. O young man in a flurry! I foresaw then that little time remained before a thing might happen, which would leave this country the choice between capitulation without a fight and a war began in the worst imaginable circumstances for itself, and this thing was, the abandonment of a little country far away, called Czechoslovakia. Many chances to avert the war, were already gone; this one remained.

To-day, those thunders of yesteryear dwindle, and Insanity Fair and its three children go their rounds, soon to be joined by this, the fourth and last. I did not guess, when I began, that I should write more than one book, or suspect how much personal satisfaction I should reap, in spite of the disappointment of the hope which inspired the original book.

For the first time in my life, excluding the war service which I shared with millions of others, I cast from me thoughts of money, security, a career and the future, and acted from a patriotic impulse too strong to be thwarted. Yet the financial calamity I feared, like Shaw's disasters, never happened: in place of the calling I reluctantly gave up, I gained a better; and I surprise myself by the pleasure I still derive from having punched on the nose the craven imp, 'Safety First', and said the thing I would and the thing I knew. In that listless England, I 'did something', the most I could, and if this was but a book which has now joined the legion of others it was mine own. If I could plant the seed of adventure and the ideal of upholding what you think right at all costs, in any youngsters' minds to-day, by writing this, I should be glad, for I know that they would gain by it.

Enough is enough. I gather that I do not bore others, but refuse to bore myself. Not for me, to outstay my encores (and I once saw even that happen, at the Scala in Berlin, when an English band leader was so clamantly applauded that he gave an encore, then two, five, ten encores, turning between each to ask 'Do you want more?' until the audience became silent, then restive, and finally called 'No, no more!')

Prognostication is the thief of time, and I have other things to do. Because I believe our future salvation can only come from, through, or be taken from us by our Parliament, which robbed us of the last victory, I shall try to enter that building, where voices for England speak so seldom and so often for all else. When peace comes, I want also to go abroad and write of what goes on there, in the hope that the people of this country, if they are accurately informed, will not let themselves be hoodwinked again.

But first, this book, the last of it's line. It is a fitting finish to the logical sequence. Insanity Fair was an urgent warning of the imminent outbreak of war. Lest We Regret is an urgent warning of a greater danger, the approaching outbreak of peace.

This statement was greeted as a jest when I made it to a luncheon audience in London. The English take their leisure sadly and like to beguile it by listening to a speaker with whom they disagree while eating food which disagrees with them. Between indignation and indigestion, they have a grand time. They pay much for a bad meal and nothing for a good speaker (the odd belief prevails that the hotel-keeper deserves payment for his wares but not the speaker).

But this was no joke! To-day millions of people have their every want cared for; to-morrow, they will need to fend for themselves. To-day all have work; to-morrow, each will have to seek it. To-day the young people take no thought for the morrow; to-morrow, they must think hard for the day. To-day, all clearly see their task, to win the war; and think they see clearly how to accomplish it, by serving. To-morrow, they will wish to live in peace, found families and prosper, but will they see the way to achieve that? To-day is filled with the adventure of war; to-morrow will be filled with humdrum.

Such, at least, was the last peace. It was not peace. It was worse than the last war, worse than this war. These words protest against being written, yet they are true. The last peace, which was to endure for ever, held for twenty years. Twenty years of mass unemployment, derelict areas, a decaying countryside, growing disbelief and despair; twenty years, during which the men who came back from the last war saw their victory wantonly thrown away, while the rising generation lost faith in the future and the new war approached.

That was the peace of 1919-39. That is the world to which the boys and girls will return unless they make it different.

That is where I and this book come in:

Having a son, a fighter pilot who got his wings at the age of eighteen, and a daughter who, after serving as an A.T.S. private in a mixed anti-aircraft battery for twelve months, now has a commission, I have come in contact during the past three years with a great number of the ordinary rank-and-file of the young generation. I feel convinced that these intelligent, deep-thinking boys and girls are not going to leave the making of the new world to anyone but themselves, when the war is won. Because I feel this - having listened for hours to their endless talks and discussions about the things that matter (freedom, simplicity, beauty, love, and, above all, right thinking) - I wish with all my heart that you would write something to show that we have a belief in, and an appreciation of them and all they are doing.

From a woman of Glastonbury.

The generation of the last war may thus come into its own - by telling its sons and daughters what to do and what to beware of and by saving them from another twenty years of creeping and paralytic disillusionment.[1]

Ever since we first went on two legs, mankind has been divided into those who seek to learn from yesterday's disasters, and those who cry, let to-morrow take care of itself. If we were not born with organs of procreation, the wise men would be those of the second group, but as we produce children, I think them fools. True, Horace taught men to avoid inquiring what is to be to-morrow, Cicero thought ignorance of future ills more useful than knowledge, and the wisdom that Omar found in the wine cup was, not to fret about to-morrow. But the empires these busy thinkers lived in declined: their philosophy is that of the slave; its fruits are the knout, the galley and the concentration camp. For tomorrow becomes so quickly to-day, and we live twenty-four thousand days!

I prefer a modern philosopher, by name Winston Churchill, who said, 'the use of recriminating about the past is to enforce effective action at the present', and 'we cannot say the past is past without surrendering the future'. If only his practice kept to that precept! He now says, 'the past is past', but his first thoughts were better ones. For our future was surrendered once, by saying 'the past is past', and we were only saved as a man might be who is cut down from the gallows before he chokes.

Our future can be surrendered again for that very reason. The present odds are, that it will be surrendered. None of the bad things that caused this war has been changed. 'The past is past,' said the culprits, and they surrendered our future.

That is the first thing to have in mind when you start off, best foot foremost, down Civvy Street. Without understanding that, you can accomplish nothing because you do not know where you are going. You may be intelligent and deep-thinking, you may be greatly resolved 'not to leave the making of the new world to anyone else', but your resolve will be vain.

You need not make a new world, anyway, but only a better one of this delightful planet, which offers everything a man could wish, and in particular of this beloved island. Your best years will be before you, if you make them so; they will be your worst if you surrender them to others. Youth, in my experience, is not a happy time. The best years are after thirty-five, when achievement begins. But the most galling bitterness is, to fight a good fight, to shape your career, your family, and your contribution to immortality, and then to find everything you have built destroyed by others.

Down Civvy Street, lie 1950 Corner and 1960 Square, and they can be blacked-out, fear-stricken, and bombed, or gay, busy, and full of light and life. The one certain way to come to another Slough of Despond, is to say 'the past is past' and to surrender the future.

So I now set out to make a map of Civvy Street, compiled from experience, for those who do not remember what befell before or know what to beware of. Will it avail?

To me and a lot of other people you appear to have a lot of what are known as the right ideas. But it is perfectly useless merely to keep pouring books out about it all, for the very reason that you yourself have stated; that a certain freedom does still exist so far as the matter which may be published in books is concerned. The result is that much 'controversial' language may be used and the effect on the public is made less as the years go by. You may have conquered the book world, but it really counts for little. A nice juicy book on sex would probably do the same. The pen is not mightier than the sword. The right voice in the right place might be. Why don't you make a bid to go into Parliament?

From a Gunner officer.

Keep on. You are doing more good than you think. You sometimes suggest that you feel a sense of wasted effort, in spite of the great circulation of your books. It is not true. The truth is taking root and spreading, and you have helped more than you know.

From a woman assistant in a chain store.

For now, implacably, peace - with all its horrors, if it is to be the peace of 1939 - moves towards us. When it will reach us, none can tell, as this war is being waged. I think we could have knocked out our enemy in 1941, at that cataclysmic moment when the Germans were thrown back from Moscow in the middle of an appalling winter, and in every German mind tolled, like a double knell of doom, the thoughts of 1813 and Napoleon and 1918 and the Kaiser. If I could see any way by which we now might lose, I would hedge, but, short of an invincible resolve not to win, I can see none. Somehow, somewhen, seemingly much later than need be, we shall prevail, and then will come peace. What the end of that will be, if the 'intelligent and deep-thinking boys and girls' relapse into the apathetic indifference of 1919-39 I have foreshadowed in another book.[2] The question now is, how shall we avoid that?

Our men in the Middle East are thinking and talking about their families at home, of what sort of post-war world there will be and what place they will occupy in it.

From a broadcast by Mr. R. G. Casey,
British Minister, of State in the Middle East.

It is meant to be a Baedeker of 1943-63, an itinerary of the coming twenty years drawn in the light of those other twenty years. I want to take the reader step by step, through the years after this war, showing him as he goes the pitfalls into which we fell in the past. In future, far more people than before, because of bitter experience, will closely watch foreign affairs; here is a handbook for them. It is designed as a chart for constant reminder of the rocks and shoals which, between 1919 and 1939, they did not suspect; or a road-map of these coming years, with the signs now in place (DANGER - CONCEALED TURNING - LEVEL CROSSING, - and the like) for lack of which the last peace was wrecked.

'Freedom, simplicity, beauty, love, and above all, right thinking.' None of these things will be waiting in Civvy Street. They do not thrive in wartime, they droop. They can be regained by people who are ready, not only to die for England, but even to live for England; by people who long for something more invigorating than a lotus-eater's paradise of 'peace and prosperity', but also something less wasteful and stupid than war and austerity, every twenty years.

The battles of this war, unhappily, are nothing. Think of the battles of the last; what do they mean to-day? The battle that means something, the battle in England, will begin when the boys and girls return to Civvy Street.

When they have won freedom, once again, from the menace of foreign conquest, they will find much less of freedom at home than there was when they went away. Will they even fight to recover what has been filched? Politicians, leader writers, professors, magnates and managing directors begin to murmur, No, and to make plans accordingly. The letter from which I have taken my text, says Yes. If they do not fight, how ludicrous were these two wars.

For Freedom's battle, once begun,
Bequeathed by bleeding Sire to son,
Though baffled oft, is ever won

Enough of freedom remains in England still for me, in beginning to tell of this battle in England, to borrow Byron's couplet:

Without or with offence to friends or foes
I sketch your world exactly as it goes.

Chapter Two

'SOMETHING CONSTRUCTIVE!'

The Gadarene swine (which animals I hereby thank on behalf of generations of writers) were accosted during their headlong rush by a swineherd, who said, 'Er, wouldn't you be helping the peace effort better if you turned about and went the other way?', to which their leader, accelerating, squealed in reply, 'You are a destructive critic; can't you sometimes suggest something constructive?'

Transform the swine into chargers, put British cavalrymen on their backs, send them galloping into the Valley of Death, and you have - what? An imbecile mistake, and a court martial of the senior officers responsible? No: that would be destructive criticism and recrimination. Instead, you say 'the past is past', surrender the future, and call it Glory.

This is idiotic, and as a method, applied to the affairs of a great nation, it palls.

... I was terrified of war, because first of our son and secondly of every other mother's son. I believed Chamberlain and his party were doing all they could to prevent war - infuriatingly stupid of me and mentally lazy too, but few people had your opportunities of knowing and plenty of dope was given to us, but I swallowed the dope because I wanted to. I know that now. I would not face up to the sin and folly of 'appeasement'. I hoped and hoped and hoped it would work and at the Munich time I honestly believed that Chamberlain's effort was wonderful. I still think you are not fair to him. I said, thank God for Chamberlain. Lots of mothers and wives and sweethearts did.

From an officer's wife in India.

Anyhow, having said all that when everyone was applauding, now that he is dead, a brokenhearted and discredited man, when it would be so easy to heap blame on him I know I was an insignificant one of the millions who made it possible for him to carry on his appeasement policy, and I shoulder the blame with him and say 'Please, no recriminations'. Churchill and Co. said 'no recriminations' a little bit because the old school tie code says 'Don't kick a man when he is down'. But I add, please tell us what we can do afterwards. I am sure there will be an afterwards of construction in Britain, though things are looking black enough out here and some of us may never see England again....

From the same letter.

How is anything to be 'constructed' if the foundations which were rotten are not to be repaired? The same men who smugly said after Munich, that 'the humpty-dumpty Czechoslovakia, once knocked over by Hitler, could not have been set up again even after a victorious peace', now tell us we fight for Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece, Holland, Poland, Belgium and Norway, and promise that all these nations shall be free. A jellyfish might as well hope to grow a spine, as this island to reach a secure future while such standards of loyalty and truth prevail in our public life.

The condition of mind revealed in the letter I have quoted is our most dangerous enemy. Wishing will not make it so; thinking might, but such people refuse to think. They ask for 'something constructive', but really mean: Tell us that all will be well if we jog along in the old rut. It will not.

Yet these people love England, and want what we all want: a better England and an enduring peace.

You are very scornful of the old and we are old, but we are desperately anxious if and when we win this war that we should put all the energy, brains and goodwill left to us to make no mistake this time about winning the peace, and we know a good many others of like mind, if we could find someone to suggest a constructive policy that might help to make Britain a happier, more comfortable and less ugly place for ordinary men and women to live in.

Incidentally, I am not 'scornful of the old'. I have always been resolved to grow old one day, and should be foolish to abuse my to-morrow's self from respect for myself of to-day. The oldness I dislike is a habit of mind, something given to men in their cradles in England. They are born old, these people. The damage is done a few weeks after conception, when father says, 'Are you really, Joyce? By Jove, I must put him down for Manchester'.

In that moment, another good man is lost, and a few months later another veteran enters the world. Hopelessly handicapped before he was born, he begins that long travail of qualifying for a pension which will take him, by way of a public school, a University, Parliament and the Cabinet, to the implacable oblivion of Westminster Abbey, where he will never be heard of again.

Parental and pre-natal influences will ruin him. As soon as his aged mind begins to work, he will comprehend that, with or without merit, he will always move up because he was put down, for Eton. In the illusion that he is having a grand life, he will be hostile to all who were not put down for Eton because he will fear that they might raise claims for unmoneyed ability. Being taught from the start that his own upward progress could only be retarded if he were to annoy those above him, he will never kick anyone who is up.

Such are the old men of all ages, who led us in the inter-war years, and still hold us in the grip of the machine they have devised, for monopolizing the machinery of government.

To attack age as counted in years, is stupid, for the spirit is a sword which stays bright, if it be tended, no matter how shabby the scabbard becomes. Lloyd George's last great speech, when he demanded the retirement of Chamberlain just before Dunkirk, was made at the age of seventy-seven; Shaw's imaginary conversation between the King, the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time of the abdication, was written at eighty; and both of these reached the highest peaks of ability and intellectual vigour.

True, we grow older as a nation, and should mend this, but an aged state of mind, not one of physical decrepitude, holds us in thrall. It is as prevalent in the young as the elderly. The three words, 'fear of change', best define it, and it is as common in the slums as in the mansions. But in the mansions it is more dangerous, for there the weal or woe of the slums is made.

Consider Richard Hillary, a handsome young man who did not fear death, yet feared 'change'! One of the few to whom so many owe so much, he rode gaily into the Battle of Britain, was badly burned in his aeroplane, as by chance was I in the last war, and has since been killed. One of our best, he wrote a good book about the war (The Last Enemy, Macmillan, 1942). A man of wit and valour. A man enlightened enough to make fun of the intellectual standard required of our rulers: he went to the university, he said, determined, without over-exertion, to row himself into the government of the Sudan, that country of blacks ruled by Blues, where his father spent many years.

And yet! What a gulf was fixed between this man and his fellow Englishmen! 'Apart from the scholars', he said, he and his generation at Oxford came from the 'so-called better public schools'. They were held together by 'a somewhat self-conscious satisfaction in their ability to succeed without apparent effort'. (Given the pre-natal entry for Eton, neither ability nor effort are necessary for success.) To 'the scholars' (unless these came from Eton) they scarcely spoke; 'not, I think, from plain snobbishness, but because we found we did not speak the same language'. Through force of circumstances, the scholars had to work hard and were 'conversationally uninteresting - not that, conversationally, Trinity had any great claim to distinction'.

How can a man's conversation prove uninteresting if you do not speak to him? 'The scholars' conversation', adds Hillary, 'might well have been disturbing.' His attitude, and his friends' 'might seem reprehensible and snobbish', but he believed it basically to be 'a suspicion of anything radical - any change, not a matter of class distinction'.

You perceive, gentle reader, what the awful thing was that this brave, good looking and witty young man feared, what he meant by 'anything, radical, any change'. He feared and meant an unmoneyed man at a university! The secret of our decline, which we have yet to arrest, is contained in these words.

Hillary's generation 'knew that war was imminent', and were convinced they had been needlessly led into the crisis 'not by unscrupulous rogues, but worse, by the bungling of a crowd of incompetent old fools'.

Yet the thing they feared more than death was 'any change' in the exclusive order which made such bungling not so much possible as inevitable! Then what do the survivors think to-day, when the same 'crowd' rules? Is dislike of 'the scholars' still their overriding obsession? Are they still too suspicious of anything radical, any change, to save the peace? The 'crowd of incompetent old fools' were but the men who, a few years before their own time, similarly rowed their way into the seats of the mighty from the same colleges, who also did not speak to 'the scholars' because they feared 'anything radical, any change'. Is this war radical enough for them? Would the collapse of the Empire or the conquest of this island seem radical to them?

'Mr. H. G. Wells', wrote Mr. Winston Churchill once, was born in humble circumstances into an island community where great statesmen had broken down the barriers of privilege and caste, and where wise laws enforced by vigorous Parliaments kept open the paths that offered careers to talent.'

A strange statement! How many of the 'open paths that offer careers to talent' led men with talent, but without money and the public school and university qualifications, to office in Conservative governments between the two wars? The fingers of one hand would be enough to count them. How many such sit in Mr. Churchill's own government (apart from the Socialist hostages)?

Short of a governmental ban, which exposes you to that same ridicule which you invite the world to bestow on Hitler, you cannot keep down great writers, great artists and great composers. These are careers for which talent equips, which money will not buy, into which public schools and universities cannot force you. Men born to money seldom excel in these callings, and I think this is the reason for the English detestation of artists. True, suppression has been tried, by some of those wise governments: Mr. Churchill was banned in his day, a government veto was put on the 'broadcasting of a dinner given to Shaw on his seventieth birthday, and for many years the Lord Chamberlain suppressed one of our greatest playwright's plays, Mrs. Warren's Profession, in the London which now flocks to see rape on the stage. However, only imprisonment or hanging can prevent a pauper, with pen and paper, from writing his thoughts, and Mr. Churchill probably accorded too much praise to 'wise statesmen and vigorous Parliaments' when he suggested that, but for these, Mr. Wells's novels would not have been successful.

'Something constructive!' How difficult to offer anything constructive to minds so solidly cast in this mould, to minds which wish a building to be made secure while perpetuating the defects which made it collapse.

I do want to ask you if your next book could be constructive for a change. Can't you, with your enormous knowledge of the world and of the men and women in it, suggest how we may build up all our tomorrows on a happier and a better scale. I have read your last book with the greatest interest and with piercing amazement that such a state of things can exist - but it leaves you shattered, disillusioned, despondent. Is everything rotten? Surely there must be some good thing somewhere, some sound cornerstone on which we can start to build again?

From a woman of Tadworth.

For I have made all the constructive suggestions in their day. The two constructive suggestions, when I first wrote, were that we should avert this war by a military alliance with Russia and the most urgent and most substantial increase in our armaments. Either would have sufficed. Both were the official policy of His Majesty's Government, repeatedly proclaimed by its leaders from the front of the stage; both were opposed and thwarted behind the scenes. That is the darkest mystery of our times and the greatest danger to our future.

The many suggestions in this book all merge into that greater and paramount theme: the need to find a way to prevent future governments, secure in a great majority obtained by promising the people one thing at an election, from doing another after the electors' vote has been given.

The words in italics contain the riddle of our past and the key to our future. I beg you, gentle reader, to study them; they are few and simple and both our to-morrows depend on your understanding them.

After the last war, which left the graves of our dead 'girdling the world', to quote King George V, an Imperial War Graves Commission was set up. Its latest Report contains an eloquent sentence:

Reports have been received of family or private graves where the first burial was the father killed in the last war and the second burial a son killed in the present war.

On this, our companionable journey down the years to come, we may meet, at 1960 Corner or thereabouts, the grandson of that father, the son of that son. I hope we may find him in good heart, and going cheerfully towards a secure future; I do not mean secure in the sense of so much a week or even of eternal peace, but of release from disillusionment, cynicism and trust betrayed, of faith in his time, his country and his leaders. I hope we may find that he has recovered the belief in honour, humanity, the dignity of man and the high motives of his native land which were taken from his father and grandfather, and that we may have helped to that.

I was born in a Liverpool slum and spent six years in Canada. Age thirty, married, factory hand in Civvy Street, and the possessor of a burning desire to help improve conditions as I know them. I have followed fairly closely the situation that you describe and have a maddening feeling of impotence when realizing how little so many of us were interested in the powers that were shaping the things to come. I believe enthusiasm would not be lacking if enough people could be led to realize the greatness that could be Britain. I know of many who would gladly do all in their power to make or help make Britain really great, in the truest sense. The spirit of adventure is not dead among the English. Dormant it may be, but a lead in the right direction would resurrect the spirit of the pioneer.

From an R.A.F. aircraftman in India.

This strange conglomeration of imbecility, genius, futility, achievement, paganism, Christianity, beauty and hideousness known as England. England! The very word is a poem, but how sadly and badly the metre has gone wrong and how truly the poets can rewrite it if only they wake up and apply their eyes, brains and hearts to organize success.

From a woman of Reading.

PART TWO

FREEDOM LOST

Chapter One

GOD'S ENGLISHMAN

What sort of people have we become in 1943, as we prepare again to return to Civvy Street? 'This happy breed', Shakespeare called us, in his inspired and enraptured panegyric about 'This precious stone set in the silver sea, which serves it in the office of a wall, or as a mote defensive to a house, against the envy of less happier lands'. The events of 1940, when we waited in baffled surprise for the invasion which never came, show how precisely he told the truth even in his most lyrical moments.

Because of his accurate portraiture, he must have been right, when he wrote that we were a happy breed. I think this was a happy land, when the lads and lassies danced round the maypole or gaily brought the harvest home, when the countryside was common to all and water pageants enlivened the Thames.

The words do not fit to-day. Staunch, dour, dogged, suffering much and complaining little if you like, but 'a happy breed' we are not. The machines destroyed much of the beauty of our country and our way of life, and we have not yet found the means to revive it in spite of the machines: to make the motor-tractor and the garage and the factory as much part of a pleasant English symphony as were the plough, the barn and the mill. That is the goal we should set out to reach, in Civvy Street.

We shared with the French the brunt of the first world war, and have borne ourselves the brunt of the second. Some fathers and sons already share one grave. The avid picture papers, those chattering parakeets in our dark jungle, show us other fathers, who survived that war, and their sons, serving together in this one. 'Fighting for freedom', we become daily more enchained by the bans and taboos which men who sit at desks devise because this 'work of national importance' is the industry by which they live, and they know no other way but this to feed their self importance, multiply their subordinates, puff out their authority, increase the paper mountain and prolong their sway. We move with dull resentment towards the Servile State, of forty million ciphers regimented by a million Bumbles.

And yet the stock endures. After one hundred and fifty years of relentless misgovernment and two world wars, it is as sound as ever, and this depressing picture could be changed, by the wand of patriotic revival, as quickly as the transformation scene in a pantomime.

With twenty despondent years behind them, their beliefs and ideals shattered by the contradictory words and deeds of a generation of politicians, with no light to guide them but their inherited idea that this island and the empire built by their forefathers should keep together and remain unconquered, these islanders, outarmed, outnumbered, ill-equipped, have fought a fight that should astonish the world when all the figures can be counted and all the stories told.

Backward through Norway, Belgium, France, Greece, Crete, Malaya, Burma and Libya, always backward but never beaten; manning a bleak outpost in Iceland and garrisoning tropical Madagascar; holding the seas; smashing down the enemy in the air; it is a fantastic story, for these islanders are not very many and they have borne the brunt.

Within a few months of Dunkirk, while our island still slowly repaired its defencelessness, the armies of General Wavell in Libya, and of General Platt and General Cunningham in East Africa, fighting always against vastly greater numbers, smashed the Italian empire and captured some 350,000 men. The decision to reinforce our armies out there, while this island was in such plight, appears staggering in retrospect. (Writing in an earlier book I gave too large a share, as good friends from the desert told me, to the Imperial troops, in those astonishing victories. When our own men return they will find that, since the Ministry of Information was set up, our information is meagre. Only long afterwards were the excellent official accounts published which showed the part played by men from this island.)[4]

They are tough, these islanders. Not even the age of prosperity, the last century, which has so defaced and disfigured our land and warped our physique, has broken them. I remember them in the last war, in my own platoon - miners, bow-legged and squat from their labour, undersized, scarred by the coal-chips, dour and bitter in their slavery to 'old King Coal, men whose forefathers were driven by theft from the good land they tilled and the good air they breathed. Their spirit should have been broken. They were unbreakable - and they were volunteers.

To-day again the spirit of these men 'wrests prodigies of valour from the wronged flesh', as C. E. Montague wrote, who with relentless eyes described them: battalions of colourless, stunted, half-toothed lads from hot, humid Lancashire mills; battalions of slow, staring faces, gargoyles out of the tragical-comical-historical-pastoral edifice of modern English rural life.

Between the wars even worse things were done to these men, so that the travelled Englishman was shocked by their appearance when he came home. The young Germans were physically far better: these were the 'starving German babies' of which we heard in 1919 (and shall hear again in coming years). The babies which really starved, from malnutrition of the mind, were the English babies; of them, a writer in The Times just before this war, who took the then fashionable view that much was admirable in 'The Things' which we now ostensibly fight against, said: 'The contrast in physique between Englishmen and Germans between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five is amazingly in Germany's favour.'

Of these British heirs of the years 1919-39 (the pitfalls of which we now strive constructively to avoid as we go through the Civvy Street of to-morrow) William Shirer wrote: 'These prisoners were a sad sight. What impressed me most about them was their poor physique.'

Or go back to 1912, when an American, Price Collier, said in England and the English (a most sympathetic book about this country): 'Look at the people who swarm the streets to see the Lord Mayor's show and where will you see a more pitiable sight? The beef-eating, port-drinking fellows in Piccadilly, exercised, scrubbed, groomed, they are well enough to be sure; but this other side of the shield is distressing to look at. Poor, stunted, bad-complexioned, shabbily dressed, ill-featured, are these pork-eating, gin-drinking denisons of the East End. Crowds I have seen in America, in Mexico, and in most of the great cities of Europe; of India and China I know nothing. Nowhere is there such squalor, such pinching poverty, so many undersized, so many plainly and revoltingly diseased, so much human rottenness as here. This is what the climate, the food and the drink, and man's rule of the weaker to the wall, accomplish for the weak. It is one of England's ugly problems add deserves a chapter to itself.'

I could long continue with such quotations. They present a true picture, though long training for battle in this war has made an improvement in physique. These conditions were the result of bad housing, bad feeding, bad education in matters of health, and lack of opportunity for fresh air and physical exercise.

Could anything be more constructive than the resolve, at the beginning of Civvy Street, to alter this? It is unworthy of us. We stand, at this moment, on a high peak in our history. Our reputation in the world was never so great. The prodigies these men have wrested from the wronged flesh have wiped from the minds of mankind the memory of Munich and everything that went before.

Once more mankind looks to us as their hope in years to come, their only hope for a free life. French peasant women run to open the doors and let the light stream out, when they hear the R.A.F. (I remember looking down from my aeroplane on November 10th, 1918 and seeing the Belgians wave long-hidden flags to us.)

The Serbs would not fight in their mountains, but for us. The Greeks, who with hatred in their hearts watch the Germans and Italians strutting about Athens, put their hope in us. The Hollanders rejoice when a British bomb destroys their factories. The Norwegians exult when a British aeroplane attacks Gestapo headquarters in Oslo. South American Republics loosen their relations with Germany and Italy because of us. Germany's satellites, Hungary, Roumania, and Bulgaria, grope towards the safety-exit - renewed communications with us. 'England', they tell themselves, 'will listen when we say, we could not help it, Germany made us fight.'

Never was such opportunity ours. Fresh from Germany, Howard K. Smith, in Last Train from Berlin (Cresset Press, 1942), says: 'It is true to say that England has never been more popular on the European continent than she is to-day.'

Five years ago, at the time of Munich, it would have been true to say that England was never more unpopular. The change has been brought about, not by the politicians but by the fighting man from this island - the man, or his son, who after the last war was turned into the street when magnates closed the shipyards to eliminate competition, the man whom absentee mineowners threw out of the mines, the man who was paid thirty shillings a week for labouring from dawn to dusk on the land, the officer who was axed, the ex-officer who was forced to peddle vacuum cleaners.

Is the opportunity they have won to be wasted again? At home, in this island, everything points to this. It is 'constructive' to demand that this should not happen and to propose how it can be prevented from happening.

In Retreat in the East (Harrap, 1942), 0.D. Gallagher says: 'I would like to say now, talking as a South African, that in the eleven theatres of war where I have worked as a reporter in the past seven years I have seen no troops show such courage of various types as the troops from Great Britain. Whether it was fighting a hopeless offensive against impossible odds of men or material; whether it was fighting a disheartening, long delaying action without prospect of a single victory; whether it was in the mad heroism of a smashing attack to force a victory; whether it was courage in private matters, not allowing themselves to be worn down by nagging anxiety about wives or sweethearts left to their own devices at home thousands of miles away - whatever courage the war called for, these men found it within themselves. Courage is their birthright. The rather uninspiring man in drab clothes who filled the cities of Great Britain, who breathed air contaminated by industry, who nervously said, 'O I beg your pardon!' if he accidentally brushed against you in a crowd, is not the man he was. He is a tough guy now ... see the square-jawed men of the Commandos, the sunburned men of the desert, the confident men of the air forces, and the men of the sea. They are the men of Britain reborn ... their day comes!'

A tribute true in every word save the last ten. Their homeland has not been reborn. The contrast between their fighting achievement in foreign fields and the spiritual anarchy in this island remains as incongruous as it was in the last war. At home, the spirit is still that of 1919-39. No single thing has changed, and Mr. Churchill, like all his predecessors, has denied the need for change by saying 'the past is past'. Their day will not come unless they claim their heritage and fight a battle in England for it when they return.

The shabby body they inherited, the tortured flesh, has improved through service. They can see to it that their children are not thrust back into that poor flesh-and-blood tenement which shocked visitors to this island.

The men who bore the brunt, and who will return, are their own worst enemies. For the healthier flesh is still inhabited by the downcast spirit bred in the inter-war years. The antics of our statesmen in those years, the repeated breach of promises made to our own people, have left these men bewildered and loath to think or talk about 'politics' - a word which only means the nation's housekeeping, their own welfare, and their children's future. The two new forms of adult education which the last quarter-century has brought, and which none escape, though all should now train themselves to resist them, greatly helped to produce this spiritual ailment. If The Decline and Fall of the British Empire should yet come to be written, broadcasting and the films would deserve a long chapter in the story of the blame. These two have become instruments of mal-education and may do much to make the returning men yield themselves slavishly to another twenty years of delusion ending in a new war. Their reform, their liberation from alien and meretricious influences should be a first objective of the battle in England.

This low state of mental health is a great menace to us in the coming journey through Civvy Street. If these men cannot nerve themselves to try and understand why the events of 1919-39 came about, they will surrender their own future, degrade themselves into voting-donkeys to be duped by the dangling of any carrot at election time, and plant the seeds of the war after this.

The women of England could do much to rouse their men, when they return to Civvy Street, from the obscene apathy of the inter-war years and from the passion for being gulled which caused them to put on a performance of Idiots' Delight at the time of Munich and even to produce more babies.

A war correspondent, Philip Jordan, writing from Tunisia about the British infantryman, said: 'He is the greatest soldier in the world. In this war I have seen, among others, British, German, Russian, American, French and Japanese at war, and I have not the slightest doubt who is the best ... the British soldier is the best, and best of all is the often forgotten infantryman ... a lot of them are stupid men because of the environment in which they have been brought up, and their vocabulary must be the most limited in the world ... they are men on whom the waves of twenty years of political unrest have broken and who, even though their average standard of intelligence is a disgrace to the rich country which underfed and now conscribes them, know more than their fathers did and have the same innate shrewdness ... the modern soldier is a citizen, not always perhaps a very bright one'.

All who have moved among our troops know the truth of this. The cult, or habit of ignorance is discreditable to men who fight so well, and will make them, when they return to Civvy Street, fair game and sitting shots for the unscrupulous, unless they can be moved to attempt the greatest adventure of all - the adventure of thinking, learning and understanding a little about their own affairs.

I do not like the nationalization of the deity and am usually repelled by talk about 'God's Englishman'; Germans speak of 'God's German', in Liberia people probably talk about God's Liberians, and we are all supposedly God's chillun anyway, Eskimos, Hottentots, and all, whether we wear shoes or not.

But at the threshold of the future, let us give the name, for once, to an Englishman, Adam Wakenshaw. A good name and a good man. Take him as typical of the man England produced in these last twenty years, the man whose spirit even that England could not kill.

After that last war, when the land for heroes was receiving its returning sons, Adam Wakenshaw ran about in Newcastle and sold newspapers. He wore no shoes, because he owned none. Later he became a miner, and when he was at work, lived with his wife and child just round Starvation Corner. When he was out of work, since he would neither draw the dole nor get into debt, he hawked things about the streets. When this war came he was called up, sent to Libya and, when his arm was blown off, continued to fire his gun at the enemy until he died. For this he was awarded the Victoria Cross. When the Lord Mayor of Newcastle went to inform his widow, she was out, being gone to the Town Hall to ask help of the authorities in obtaining shoes for her seven-year-old son.

The perfect short story! Like father, like son; England, from war to war! It even has a sequel. When the officers of Wakenshaw's regiment announced that they would supply coupons and cash for some shoes, an official, that is, a man sitting in an office, announced that this would be An Offence.

About 1955, we shall meet this boy in Civvy Street. He will be about twenty. I hope we shall find that he has always worn shoes, because they are necessary, in town life; that he has something in his head and never lacked something in his stomach; and that he enjoys, not so much 'security', but the feeling that his country likes him and that if he works hard he can get ahead.

God's Englishman! He is no picture-book hero, and unhappily he is better when he is told what to do than when he is left to himself, that is why he is good in war, ineffective in peace. He is the exact opposite of the independent-minded Englishman of legend.

He has now a better chance than ever before, to make his own country, that sorely misused and misled land, worthy of the things he has done for it and of the almost divine renown he has won for it again in the eyes of all other Europeans. If he relapses into indifference when he sets foot in Civvy Street and we sink back to the depths we touched between 1919 and 1939, we shall not rise again.

He can prevent that by becoming as good and combative a citizen as he is a warrior.

Chapter Two

WHERE ENGLAND STOOD

This was at the height of the London Blitz, a word which the Londoners borrowed from the Germans to describe the air assault. They were apter than they knew. Indeed, they were as wrong as they habitually are in the use of foreign phrases or the description of foreign things, for they took it from Blitzkrieg, and this term, which means war conducted with the speed of lightning, was only apt until Dunkirk. By the autumn of 1940 the war was clearly not to be a Blitzkrieg, and the Germans, ruefully realizing this, were already coining a mouth-to-ear jest to mock their leaders: 'Es kommen sieben Jahre Blitzkrieg', or 'We are going to have seven years of lightning war'. But as the word Blitz by itself denotes not only rapidity, but also something stabbing and striking from the sky, the Londoners chose the perfect name for their ordeal. 'The Blitz' cannot be bettered.

The great city was partly depopulated, so many people were gone. The theatres were closed, and the restaurants that remained open were half-empty at night. By day, the sirens sent flocks of frightened people running in all directions. I shall not forget the afternoon when I walked through Hyde Park and an infernal din of guns and bombs suddenly shattered the air, and, before me, a man huddling a child to his breast dashed madly across the road to take shelter beneath - a tree! Overhead, twenty-two German bombers passed, slowly, low and in formation, and the barking guns rabidly strained to reach them like a pack in full cry after a fox, but they flew on, not one within my vision was hit.

London still struggled vainly to cope with the destruction. The débris lay about for days, the streets were shut where unexploded bombs lurked. The blessed change which the spring would bring, was impossible to foresee; only increasing desolation lay ahead, you felt, and what would London look like in six months more?

And in all minds, unspoken but clear to read on every face, was the thought: as soon as dusk falls, the sirens will sound, and then we shall hear that humming sound, and the first bombs, and the guns, and then the fires will bite into the sky, and the fire-fighters will go by, with their clanging bells, through the empty streets - we must get home before it starts! So; in the afternoon, the trek would begin, the great queues would form at the bus-stops, and others at the underground stations, and soon London would be empty as the grave. Life would stop and death would take its place.

The sun shone on my native city, which thus waited for its nightly ordeal, as I drove through St. John's Wood and Golders Green and Tally-ho Corner, and Barnet, which I remembered as a place still rural, whither I went bicycling in my boyhood, to spend rapturous hours at the ancient Horse Fair. I found again that London has no end. No matter how far I went, I thought, I would only come to more houses and more shops.

Then I reached a place where the road ran between two old inns. One faced towards London, and by it I left my car. Then I walked across the road to the other. It turned its back on London, and on the further side was a little courtyard, with a great oak tree to shade it, and below that a rough bench, where the gaffers, once upon a time, would sit, with their mugs of beer, and talk, their day's work done.

None stirred. One moment, I was among the millions, the next, I was alone in the world. I sat on the bench and looked in astonishment at the scene before me. London was cut off as by a knife. Here, some super-human power might have intervened to say, 'Hold, enough: London shall go no further'. The green land fell away in quiet meadows and woods heavy in the heat, to a hazy and shimmering horizon, many miles distant. Not a bungalow, not a chimney; only, among the dark curves of a far-off copse, the hard cone of a steeple, a landmark which the men from these parts, through the centuries, took with them in their mind's eye when they marched away to follow Marlborough, or to fight Napoleon, or to be shipped, peasants driven from their acres, to Australia, or to seek freedom in Canada, or to trudge through the morass of Passchendaele. Clattering into the silence, like coins into a plate, came the immemorial sounds of the countryside: a hen clucked, a rook cawed, a dog barked.

Perfect peace. The contrast between what lay behind my back and what lay before me cut so sharply into the imagination that it hurt. I felt like a man who sat on the edge of one world and looked into another. This could not be real: it was a vision. I would have liked to get up and walk into that vision and keep on walking and never turn back.

The warmth of the old bench seeped into my legs, the gnats danced beneath the oak, and the film that town life draws over human eyes cleared from none as they refreshed themselves in that lovely scene. Here was a little fragment of the lost poem, England, not spoiled by man, not reached by war. During a century and a half, these fragments have become fewer and fewer, and further between. Sitting by the inn, for an hour, sunk in warmth and beauty and quiet and thought, I tried to reconstruct the poem from its fragments, to recapture the metre and the lilt....

*

That much was better in England, we prove by our books and advertisements and calendars. If we wish to show a foreigner what we understand by the word England, which stirs something deep within us, we seldom show him anything that England has produced since 1800 - unless it is a battleship, a tank, or an aeroplane. We take him back to what remains of 'unspoiled England' - to the old cathedrals and village churches, the manors and oast houses, the views which have not been ruined, and even (save for a few masterpieces about the genteel villadom which grew up during the last century) to the old poets and painters. We do not show him a factory, coalmine, derelict area, slum, a litter of inter-war Council homes, or a multi-storeyed apartment house. We built better then, before we somehow went wrong. England was merrier, and the breed happier.

Where was that wrong turning? Among many causes which combined around 1800, to produce the things we see to-day, the greatest was the Enclosure of England, which altered our whole way of life for the worse, depopulated our countryside, bred our overcrowded cities, and changed a race of people, rooted in the land, to one of narrow-visioned townsmen who have lost their native lore.

To-day, few people know what the word 'Enclosure' even signifies, though the thing it means has warped the life and fortunes of their land. The well-disciplined school-books tell them little. They are unconscious of something which affects every moment of their being.

I did not realize it until I began to travel. Then, when I returned from abroad, I was baffled by the hedged-aboutness of England. I saw nothing like it elsewhere. Each time I came back, it puzzled me more.

I could not tread my native heath, or go anywhere save by road - unless I travelled long distances to some spot yet free, like the New Forest or Dartmoor. In other countries I could strike out whither I would, right or left, when I left the town behind me. Here, barbed wire, railings, fences, hedges, walls, and trespassers-will-be-prosecuted boards met me at every turn. I lived, once, deep in the countryside, and for miles around was no field or wood which I might enter. On all sides was derelict land, but it was guarded as if it were Eden itself; I might not use it.

'Freedom' is a jewel of many facets, and an important facet, though not the greatest of all, is a man's freedom to roam and know his own country. That the road is so often called 'the open road' in England, is something of deep meaning. Only because all else is shut, do we need to lay stress on the openness of the road. In this matter, England is the least free country I know.

This is the fruit of Enclosure. That anything so monstrous could be done to a country, at the very time when enlightenment and the lowering of barriers were in the universal air, with so little resistance then and so little realization of it now, is bewildering. Tennyson was out of date, or dealt in-dreams, when he wrote, about 1850, of 'the land that freemen till, the land that sober-suited freedom chose', for freemen no longer tilled it then. They were driven from it, by Parliament-sanctioned pillage, and those who protested were often sent to Australia as convicts!

The rich men who did this hardly foresaw that factories would rise like mushrooms from the earth, during the century that lay ahead, or that these would rapaciously demand hordes of despondent men, uprooted from their native acres, to toil in them. They acted only from immediate greed.

Yet they could not, had they known, by any one other stroke have done so much to produce that unhappy throng, crowding towards the towns, the coalmines and the areas subsequently to become derelict. They made the man of the tortured flesh and retarded mind, who nevertheless has given back to England, if England will but grasp and keep it, the leadership of the world in 1943; the man who soon will come back to the native land he may not own, unless he be rich, or till, save as a tenant.

The same kind of people govern us now that governed us then. Their own governing motive is 'deep suspicion of anything radical, any change'. Yet they brought about the most radical change in our history and the most disastrous in its effects; the face of England bears the scars, the breed the wound.

The pretext, 150 years ago, was that Enclosure would redeem the English countryside from decay. The result, in 1939, was described by a British Minister of Agriculture. During a 200-mile tour of derelict farms, which left him 'amazed' (for, although his job was to know about the land, he did not know 'that such a thing could happen in England to-day'), he saw hundreds of acres of one-time fat meadows and well filled barley fields choked with nettles and thorn bushes; he was told of fifteen thousand derelict acres in Suffolk alone; he saw the site of 'a pleasant seven-bedroom mansion, where the owner once lived, but which has now disappeared, nobody quite knows how or where. People have taken it away piecemeal in motor cars, hand carts and perambulators'. On the other hand, he saw, during that tour, many more thousands of enwalled acres, empty parklands, reserved for the use of owners often absent and seldom active, where once were busy cottagers and thriving smallholders.

To-day people become a little interested in their country and eager to know what has happened to it. They should study the story of Enclosure. When the whole trend of Europe and of the young American Republic was to liberate the masses of mankind from serfdom, when this universal impulse even brought about Revolution in France, a revolution in the opposite direction was accomplished in this country with the connivance of Parliament. It did not greatly stir the surface of the times, and has left hardly a ripple on the conscious mind of Britain!

At the very moment when enlightenment was dawning, this kind of argument was used to support the theft of the land: 'The use of common land by labourers operates upon the mind as a sort of independence ... when the commons are enclosed, the labourers will work every day in the year, their children will be put out to work early, and that subordination of the lower ranks, of society which in the present times is so much wanted, would be thereby considerably secured.'

More than half the cultivated land of England, before Enclosure, was farmed on the common-field system, and the landless farm labourer was hardly known in the villages of England. Compare what these men, whose land was to be taken from them, themselves thought about it, and the picture they painted of the future, with the arguments advanced in excuse of it and with the actual results:

The Petitioners beg leave to represent to the House of Commons that a more ruinous Effect of this Inclosure will be the almost total Depopulation of their Town, now filled with bold and hardy Husbandmen, from among whom, and the Inhabitants of other open Parishes, the Nation has hitherto derived its greatest Strength and Glory, in the Supply of its Fleets and Armies, and driving them, from Necessity and Want of Employ, in vast crowds, into manufacturing Towns, where the very Nature of their Employment, over the Loom or the Forge, soon may waste their Strength, and consequently debilitate that great Principle of Obedience to the Laws of God and their Country, which forms the Character of the simple and artless Villagers, more equally distributed through the Open Countries, and on which so much depends the good Order and Government of this State.

From a petition against enclosure by the inhabitants
of a Northamptonshire village, 1797.

About a fifth of the total acreage of England was enclosed between 1760 and 1840, and the old village community of freemen (freeholders, tenant farmers, cottagers and squatters) all sharing rights to common land, which went back to our earliest history in this island and which neither Romans nor Normans destroyed, was broken up. Until that time, any man might hope, by his own labour, to acquire property and rise in his village. From that time, we inherit the most unhappy of beings, the landless farm labourer.

What was Enclosure? Often it was simply a petition to Parliament bearing the signature of one big landowner for authority to put a fence round some piece of land until then shared by all. For long, he was not obliged even to inform his neighbours of their impending eviction!

Thus was Westcote in Buckinghamsire, enclosed in 1765 on petition of the most noble George, Duke of Marlborough; Waltham, Croxton and Braunston, in all five thousand six hundred acres, in Leicestershire, by the Duke of Rutland and the local parson in 1766; and hundreds more. The smallholder's only hope of succour was to reach and move the heart of a Parliament packed with great landowners and as distant from and daunting to himself as the Court of the Last Judgment.

In Parliament these petitions were laid before Committees of Members from the districts where Enclosure was proposed - the cronies of the petitioner! Often, petitions affecting the enclosure of thousands of acres, and the fate of hundreds of freemen, were rushed through in a week or two. Parliament passed an Act giving the Duke of Leeds power to work mines and get minerals, from the land thus to be confiscated; how ignoble, in view of that beginning, was the indignant debate in the House of Lords in May 1938, when the proposal was made to reconvey to public ownership the coal that lies beneath our once fair countryside. In that debate, a noble Marquess, complaining of 'disadvantages in the democratic principle, one of which is apparent now', fervently upheld 'the sanctity of private property'!

'Sanctity', the dictionary says, means 'purity, inviolability, holiness, sacredness, solemnity.'

Thus did dukes and squires put fences round commons or waste land, a vast expanse containing villages and cottages and land formerly shared by all. What remains of the English village of old shows that it was the flourishing home of a thriving and hopeful community. When the land was enclosed, 'consent' was only needed from proprietors! The cottagers and squatters who did not own, but yet enjoyed freemen's rights to the land from days before the Druids, were overridden roughshod and evicted.

Indeed, this was, a hundred years before its time, the Soviet system of confiscation, used by big landowners (instead of officials calling themselves 'the State') against the 'freemen who tilled the soil'.

It was not infrequent to decide upon the merits of a Bill which would affect the property and interests of persons inhabiting a district of several miles in extent, in less time than it takes me to determine upon the propriety of issuing an order for a few pounds by which no man's property could be injured.

Lord Thurlow, Lord Chancellor of England, in 1781.

Thus were men who, like their forefathers, for a thousand years, enjoyed the right to till and use the land, driven overnight from it by Act of Parliament. Very rarely, and then usually by chance, a Member tried to check the worst abuses. For instance, Sir William Meredith in 1772 proposed that the assent of a Committee of the whole House should be made necessary before a clause was put in any Bill to make 'an offence' punishable by death: he accidentally overheard the lord of the manor and his friends, in a Committee room of the House, unanimously agree to insert in the Bill, which would make law of their own pet petition, a clause making opposition to it a capital offence!

The real motive behind the Enclosure Acts (as distinct from the professed ones of patriotic concern for the future of English agriculture and the welfare of the countryfolk) is vividly revealed in the Carlisle Papers.

This publication contains the letters of one George Selwyn, M.P. He was Chairman of the House of Commons Committee which considered, and reported in favour of a petition for the Enclosure of King's Sedgmoor, in Somerset, in 1775. This land, said the selfless petitioners, was of little value in its then state, but could be greatly improved by enclosure and drainage. A Bill was accordingly prepared by a Mr. St. John, brother to that Lord Bolingbroke who coveted the land in question, and it was approved by the Committee of which Mr. Selwyn was chairman.

The truth of the transaction is exposed in Selwyn's public letter to Carlisle: 'Bully has a scheme of enclosure which, if it succeeds, I am told will free him from all his difficulties ... I cannot help wishing to see him once more on his legs.' And again: 'Stavordale is also deeply engaged in this Sedgmoor bill, and it is supposed that he or Lord Ilchester, which you please, will get two thousand pounds a year by it. He will get more, or save more at least, by going away and leaving the moor in my hands, for he told me himself the other night that this last trip to town has cost him four thousand pounds.'

Faro was played for high stakes in those days. The letter shows clearly that Selwyn was as little interested in the salvation of Sedgmoor by drainage, as he was in ploughing up the moon. He meant to help his friends, who would help him if he needed help, or were in debt to other friends; for Bully was in financial trouble and Stavordale owed money to Fox, who owed money to Carlisle.

Thus were the common lands of England shared out round the gaming tables of Piccadilly and St. James's. Thus were the high walls and tall fences built, which meet the wayfarer's eye when he leaves the English village in search of the English countryside to-day. The Parliament was one of landlords; its permanent officials pocketed about £120,000 in fees in fourteen years for assisting the Enclosure Bills through; where, at Westminster, was the English freeman to find a friendly care 'The sacred rights of property' counted for nothing when the property was the poor man's mite. Said the despoiled English countryman: 'Parliament may be tender of property; all I know is, I had a cow and an Act of Parliament has taken it from me.'

The 'freeman who tilled the soil', the man who inherited from immemorial times the right, if he could buy, build or rent a cottage, to enjoy the use of commonly-held land, the small farmer, cottager and squatter with a title, unwritten but rooted in antiquity, to a share in his native soil: all these were left the choice between becoming hired farm labourers, seeking work in the towns, or emigrating.

Go to an alehouse kitchen of an old enclosed country, and there you will see the origin of poverty and poor rates. For whom are they to be sober? For whom are they to save? For the parish? If I am diligent, shall I have leave to build a cottage? If I am sober, shall I have land for a COW? if I am frugal, shall I have half an acre for potatoes? You offer no motives; you have nothing but a parish officer and a workhouse! Bring me another pot![5]

But this first consequence was not the worst consequence'. The ultimate result was still more disastrous. Enclosure killed the spirit of a race. The petitions against it which are buried in the Journals of the House of Commons are the last voice of village independence. The unknown commoners who braved all threats and sent their vain protests to the House of Commons that obeyed their lords, were the last of the English peasants. Such as they were in Gray's mind when he wrote of 'some village Hampden that with dauntless breast the little tyrant of his fields withstood'.

Thus was merry England killed and joyless England born. How sardonic a jest that the house called 'of Commons' should have destroyed the English commons! And how mocking a paradox that John Yeoman, when he went to fight 'for freedom' against Napoleon, should already have lost the second cornerstone of freedom: the right to enjoy his native land. (Of the first cornerstone we will talk in the next chapter, gentle reader.)

Alone among the men he fought with or against, he was deprived of that. The French and the Germans both have it to this day and are never likely to lose it. (The Germans under Hitler passed an Act making farm-holdings hereditary and inalienable and no future German government, unless it be one under alien influence, is likely to tamper with this.)

Thus John Yeoman was, in this respect, the least free of all the men who fought Napoleon. (In 1854 he was sped to the far Crimea with talk of giving back his commons. 'Commons for Heroes!' When he returned, no more was heard of that. By the time John Yeoman, clerk, mechanic, unemployed miner, came to fight for freedom in 1914 and 1939, he no longer remembered that he ever was a yeoman, and this kernel of freedom was not even mentioned among 'The Things' he fought for.)

Thus the year after Waterloo saw bread riots and the firing of ricks and barns. The English began to emigrate, and the enclosing squires began, in Parliament, to pass laws against poaching. The common lands became the stupendous game preserve which they now are. About the time John Yeoman was told that he would be enslaved if Napoleon landed in England, Parliament fixed the penalties for poaching at hard labour, flogging, or transportation. In the year following Waterloo, when freedom was made safe for a century, a Bill went through Parliament, without debate, which imposed the maximum penalty of transportation for seven years on any person found unarmed but with a net for poaching in enclosed land; and in some of the subsequent years one in seven of all criminal convictions in England were convictions under these Game Laws!

In my council-school days, in London, I was mistaught that Australia was first colonized by British 'convicts', and consequently regarded the first Australians I met, in France, with awe and respect. So subtle is the poison which still runs in our veins from those times. For what was the crime for which many of those men who were shipped oversea were convicted? That they sought to defend their ancestral right to live, work and eat! By no twisting of the human code did they do wrong. They were of our best.

Because that spirit lives on in their descendants of to-day, these are freer in their being and bearing than we. Because of that inherited passion for freedom, they spring so quickly to our side when we are in danger. They still are freemen of the land; they may go or farm where they will. They think they inherit this from us and love us for it. They do not realize that we have lost something so precious, or that this loss causes the caged, restrained, inhibited manner which the Englishman has come to wear.

Just after Waterloo, thousands of these dispossessed husbandmen were sent to Australia, many of them boys under eighteen, and some of these for life. Who sent them? The enclosing squires, jealous of their pheasants, were also magistrates and sentenced them. Of these benches Lord Brougham said, 'There is not a worse constituted tribunal on the face of the earth, even that of the Turkish Cadi'. Any who used arms in their defence, when attacked by gamekeepers, were hanged.

Ah, that was an England, when, midway between Trafalgar and Waterloo, Romilly carried a Bill through the Commons to abolish the death penalty for the theft of five shillings - and in the House of Lords the Archbishop of Canterbury and six other bishops helped to reject it! But no doubt that archbishop was strong on the subject of Sabbath observance. (The Son of Man, should He come to earth again, would often fail to recognize his disciples.)

In 1943 we fight again 'for freedom'. England is a great enclosed park sprinkled with suburbs - for the villages, bereft of their 'bold and hardy husbandmen', have become small samples of the big towns. All the other peoples who fight with us have the thought of their land, their native acres, at the core of their motives, and all will return there. John Yeoman alone will not.

In 1942 an all-wise government admonished us to 'spend our holidays at home', and since we might go hardly anywhere else, the advice was easy to follow. For many people this meant confinement to the kitchen parlour, for if they might not go to Blackpool or Southend, only the street, the pub, or the berailinged local park remained. The countryside, even if they could reach it, was closed, save for our dear open road.

The patriotic stop-at-homes, however, were promised as reward, 'ample facilities for out-door recreation'. But that very thing has been lacking since Enclosure. So the Minister of Agriculture 'appealed' to landowners, and particularly to 'owners of mountains and moorlands', to 'permit reasonable access to their property'. The modest man's life, limb, property and family were at the unrestricted disposal of the Government. Only this humble request could be made to the present-day successors of the squires who enclosed. Whether any Englishman trod a mountain or moor as a result, we may safely doubt.

For fifty years, in this free country, a Bill to gain for the descendants of John Yeoman 'access' to his native mountains was regularly thrown out by Parliament. In 1939 it was suddenly allowed to become law - but in such a form that in practice nothing has been changed; and during the war enclosure and restriction have been carried even further.

The emperors of Austria were also archdukes and counts of so much else that their titles filled a page. The grandees of Spain decked themselves in flowery chains of titles. Oriental potentates call themselves the Son of God, Daughter of the Moon, Lord of this, that and the other. I know no title so grandiloquent and arrogant as, 'Owner of Mountains and Moorlands'.

In this country you may ask an ordinary looking man his calling, and he may reply, 'Oh, I own mountains and moorlands'. And if you then say, 'Sir, what of that humble, forlorn, impoverished and sickly looking fellow over there? Would you permit him briefly to use one of your mountains - not a big one, of course, but one of your smaller and partly worn mountains?' he will answer, 'Not on your life, Sir. I am putting a railing round it'.

When the South Africans may not climb Table Mountain, or the Australians be forbidden to use Sydney Beaches, they may realize how confined we have become since Enclosure. Consider this picture of conditions near two of our greatest cities, from an article on the Access to Mountains Bill by Professor Joad:

A person visiting the Central Station at Manchester on a sunny Sunday morning might well suppose that the city was in fear of invasion, and that an exodus of refugees was in progress. He would be wrong. Looking closely, he would see that all the supposed refugees were reasonably young and vigorous; in fact, they were not refugees at all, but only ramblers escaping from Manchester. From 7.30 onwards the station is alive with them. Rucksacks are piled on the platforms; hobnails clink on the stone; sandwiches bulge from the pockets of tweed coats. By half-past nine the station is empty; the trains have taken them away to Edale and Chinley for a day on the Derbyshire moors. From each of the great northern towns there is a similar exodus. It is, I submit, impossible not to regard this exodus with approval. Taking them by and large, our northern industrial cities are the ugliest agglomerations of brick and mortar with which mankind has ever defaced the surface of the earth, fitting monuments to the mean spirit of trivial profit-making which engendered them. For a hundred years men and women stayed in these places because they must, worked in them, played in them, and on Sundays, when piety forbade games, lounged in their streets and waited for the pubs to open. To-day biking has replaced beer as the shortest cut out of Manchester.

Between Manchester and Sheffield there are some 215 square miles of moorland. A great belt of spacious country, empty save for a few moorland villages. Some parts, as where Kinderscout raises its ugly head some two thousand feet above sea level, are grim and bleak: others are a spread of bracken and purple heather cleft by deep valleys with fast-running streams. This country is in the highest degree exhilarating; it tones up both spirit and body and, appropriately, it lies in the heart of the most thickly populated area in England - stretching on the east to the gates of Sheffield and the urban agglomerations which sprawl over the south of Yorkshire, on the west almost to Manchester and the teeming populations of the cotton towns. It would be difficult to imagine a more admirable playground for these close-penned city folk, as invigorating as their towns are depressing, as wide as they are cramped, as beautiful as they are ugly.

Yet of the total area all but 1,212 acres is closed to the public; 109,000 acres are in private ownership and sacred to the preservation of grouse; 39,000 acres are owned by local authorities some of whom mysteriously debar the citizens whom they are supposed to represent, from access to the land of which, as citizens, they are owners. Over all this stretch of country the hand of the keeper lies heavy. Walkers are frowned at by notice boards and everywhere trespassers will be prosecuted. On Sundays hundreds of walkers are carefully shepherded along the public footpaths. In the whole district there are only twelve of these which are over two miles in length, and on fine Sundays you will see a continuous file of walkers following one behind the other for all the world as if they were a girls' school taking the air in 'crocodile'.

Enclosure has produced results worse even than those which the 'bold and hardy husbandmen' foretold. Nowadays this dog-in-the-manger disease is not confined to the group with which it began. It has spread through the whole community. Every little local Bumble's ambition is to put a railing round something; it makes him feel important, and he encloses the pieces of greensward, the public parks, which alone remain to the English from their great heritage of commonly-shared land. Hence our fortified parks, an English monopoly; anywhere else it would be thought mad to put a hideous iron fence round that which is meant for all. Consider this ludicrous picture from the daily press:

Though railings surrounding Ashton Park, Preston, have been removed for war purposes, the gates are locked at night. Boys collect at closing time and tell the park keeper not to lock himself in. But it is no joke. It is a formality that must be carried out so that the town does not lose its rights of closure when the park is enclosed again.

But the thing goes even further. It leads to the enclosure of the little squares in which London abounds, places which might relieve much of the surrounding ugliness. They, too, were imprisoned, and behind a curtained window a watchman, the representative of the 'Committee of Management', kept jealous watch to see that no child played on the grass or puppy on the paths.

Came the war, and the railings were removed. New the Committees, resolved to have these monstrosities restored immediately peace breaks out, complain in the newspapers of the affront done to those who 'pay for the upkeep' (a shilling a week from each householder) by the sight of citizens using the paths or sitting on the seats in a warm noonday hour.

The mania has infected the very descendants of those who were driven from the land. The Englishman's ambition seemingly is to acquire a little house and garden and enrail it. The railing keeps nothing out and nothing in. The dog jumps over or squeezes through; the burglar steps across. But the sight of his railing apparently makes the Englishman feel, in a small way, like those who benefited from the great Enclosures, like a little lord of the manor. 'Freedom' is come to mean, to him, the liberty to imprison himself.

Enclosure, I wager, is chiefly to blame for the way the Englishman has enclosed his spirit. He moves through the old books and tales as a man, forthright, plain-speaking, independent, intolerant of petty oppression. Nowadays he encloses himself; he immures his spirit; his instinct is to repress his emotions and his thoughts; he hedges. And 'to hedge' is the precisely apt word. He is enclosed.[6]

Such are the effects of Enclosure, and they grow ever worse. The few who profited claim that all has been for the best. The Marquess of Salisbury, in propounding Post-War Conservative Policy, affectionately quotes another peer, Lord Stamp, as 'showing' that 'the average man at the end of the nineteenth century had become four times as well off as his predecessor at the beginning, and the same development has continued into the twentieth century, including the decade before the present war'.

Medical records, certainly, show that we are far healthier than we were. But the argument collapses when the infallible test is applied. We have ceased to multiply. Englishmen no longer wish, as their forefathers wished, to bring many children into a world in which they will be four times as well off. For many years, even after Enclosure, we increased exceedingly. Belief in the world, and faith in the future, were hardy plants, not easily discouraged. Now, they droop.

Does any sign offer that, after this new world war for freedom, a spirit of freedom will prevail; that the land will be liberated, at least that part which once was commonly shared; that an Englishman will be free to climb a mountain? For Enclosure only works one way. The small man's fence will not avail him if the squires wish to hunt across his acre. Remember the Devonshire man who twice asked the fox hunters to keep off his poultry farm, where he sought to make a living. 'Silly, futile and unreasonable', his request was called, and when he shot a hound he was prosecuted and heavily fined.

To-day, under the threat of starvation, the English countryside thrives again within its Enclosure. No scrap of land that will grow food must be wasted, we are told.

The fox destroys much food. It could be quickly exterminated. Hunting has never exterminated the fox. It is not meant to. It is the pastime of the wealthy and the foxes are jealously preserved for it. The Minister of Agriculture was asked 'whether he was satisfied that foxes were being as rapidly and economically exterminated by foxhunting as they could be by any other method; and, if not, whether he would instruct masters of foxhounds that they must either show better results or cease to operate during war time?'

Listen to the reply: 'The answer to the first part of the question is, Yes; the second part therefore does not arise.'

The history of Enclosure shows that the English squires were the first Bolshevists. They were Reds. They seized the land of others. It was the most galling and debilitating thing ever done to the English spirit. It is vain to think of 'constructing' a better England after this war unless the causes of our present plight are first realized. This is foremost among the things that should be changed.

Of our two great parties, the Labour Party behaves towards this paramount question as a tame elephant might behave to a wild tiger. The other Party, which alone is politically vigorous, is directly descended from the enclosing squires, with their faro debts, and has not changed its mind since 1800.

The Marquess of Salisbury's Post-War Conservative Policy puts its heaviest veto on 'the nationalization of agriculture'. Well, this Party took the land which was not theirs. That part of England, if they could ever look beyond class, they would liberate; they would still hold enough, the bulk. That would not be 'nationalization' but restitution and the amendment of a criminal misdeed.

The Minister of Agriculture grew quite heated when he was urged to check staghunting in war time.

It is a monstrous paradox. If freedom exists at all in the minds of men, this country is the home of it, and men who love it are unitedly on our side to-day, because they know they cannot win or regain it, save with us and through us. When we win, they will get this freedom. The bold and hardy husbandman of France will blithly work on his plot, liberated from the watch of alien masters. Even our enemy, the bold and hardy husbandman of Germany, rid of the interference of Nazi officials, will gladly till his freeman's land again. The bold and hardy husbandmen of Serbia, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Greece, Norway, Poland, will re-enter into the enjoyment of their fields. We alone are shorn of this, the half of freedom.[7]

*

I needed to go, because soon dusk would fall, and the blackout, and the sirens, and the noise in the air would follow, and I must be back before then. First, I went for a moment into the little church hard by. The most utter peace I ever knew filled its cool nave. I looked at the memorial to the dead of the last war; beneath it lay a few fading flowers. I read the long list of vicars stretching back far to Thomas de This and Wilfrid de That in Norman times. Then I noticed that one part of the old church was newly restored, and different from the rest. I found a tablet which told that in the last war a Zeppelin bomb fell on this very spot and brought down part of the ancient tower.

Even here! Even in this peace! These two wars, I thought, would follow you into the deepest glade of the darkest forest; you would find an unexploded bomb there, or a crater.

I took the car and drove back, still musing on the enchanted scene I thus discovered. As I came into the town the crowded buses were hurrying to their suburban destinations, the people streaming into the underground stations, or going, with their bundles, to some vault or cellar. Emptier and emptier were the streets. With the thickening dusk, the traffic lights took on a jewel-like brilliance. I reached Portland Place and, while I waited for the red light to change, the sirens called. I put the car away, and as I walked home the first bombs fell.

Another day was over, and a daylight dream of England.

Chapter Three

WHERE ENGLAND STANDS

Shall the colours peel from that picture again, as we walk down Civvy Street? Shall we find it, marked '2s.6d.', in a tarnished gilt frame in some dusty junk shop at 1960 Corner, as we go through the years?

Just before the German invasion of France, I went to the Imperial War Museum. Here was a Haunted House, a place where the ghosts of a million men and countless million hopes walked. Banished to oblivion in Lambeth, it was an eerie place, the shabby sepulchre of an idealistic generation. Here, in pictures that attracted great crowds in 1919, were 'the boys' going over the top on the Somme or floundering in the mud at Ypres, the Royal Flying Corps pilots setting out in Morane Parasols, the old uniforms and equipment - things as dead and meaningless as battle-axes and arquebuses.

To-day again this little island has saved the way of life on this planet as we know it. Our world may be small; if you consider the universe and the planets as a limitless sea with a few fish in it, it is indeed a very small plaice. But it is important for us. This island vanquished, and neither the decapitated empire nor America would have escaped conquest. That would have meant a new order in this world and by no stretch of imagination which we can reach, a better one, whatever our present lot.

Where do we stand now, who live in this insignificant and supremely important fragment of earth, the British island? 'The boys', when they come back, may see in some little local picture theatre, if it then still goes the rounds, a film Mrs. Miniver, which will show them their island during the siege. It was made far away and the players do not speak the English of this land. Hollywood, which showed Vienna during the last impoverished years of its decline as a place of gay uniforms, countesses, wine, song and lilac, now shows them England besieged: a place where well-poised feudal squires and squiresses emerge from their Enclosures to deal firmly, tactfully and kindly with the Blitz and with a chorus of half-witted yokels.

How sick am I of this picture! While our islanders fought all over the globe, the Ministry of Information produced in their honour a series of short films called Into Battle. The first was about friendly aliens in a non-combatant unit! Among some fine types of men in it, I recognized one who followed, in a certain foreign city, the second oldest calling in the world. By no standard, can such a picture deserve pride of place in this island.

The means of implanting the suggestion that we are second-rate are now so great, and the films and radio so subtly spread it, that the native character, already sorely injured by Enclosure, may be further undermined. Two American soldiers once asked the Brains Trust what thing they might take back with them to America, which could count as typically English'. The answers were: 'A bottle of English beer'; 'Some crumpets; 'Mr. Winston Churchill, but we can't spare him'; and, 'the English word, "quite".'! Such was the distillation of English culture.

A piece of an English railing might be an answer. Only one real answer exists, and all those lips should promptly have given it: a set of Shakespeare. Because Shakespeare is the greatest writer living or dead, and you might, in a book, describe everything England means to us, and to the world, in this present climacteric of the world's history, by borrowing from his words.

It is sinister that this is the only answer we can make. A Frenchman, a German, a Hollander, a Norwegian could offer many answers even to-day. We have lost so much that we have nothing else that is typically English. True, by diving into the past we might find something: a Sheraton chair or a Chippendale cabinet, a picture by Constable or Crome, pewter, homespun. But to-day? A piece of Wedgwood, perhaps, or a bulldog? Certainly not a film about England during the siege; that, we import! We cannot export an enclosed estate or a derelict area. No, the only answer is Shakespeare, who lives to-day as he lived centuries ago.

We might offer the world the voice of England, but it is silent. This voice we hear is not the voice of those who toil, or fight, or serve, and long to better our island lot.

Since this great new thing, broadcasting, was made the monopoly of the politicians of the day - after the war, a Free English broadcasting station should be set up somewhere abroad - only the mealy-mouthed and the tongue-in-cheeked may enter there. That hour in the week, after the Sunday evening news, when more people than at any other time settle themselves to listen, was once filled with broadcasts that sought to invigorate and stimulate, to contribute to an improvement in our affairs. Now we rarely hear any but those who know how to speak long and say little, to embroider verbiage with flowery compliments to men in office; it is like the uttermost hell, where sinners are condemned to listen for all eternity to interminable aldermen.

Compensation for the lack of anything to listen to, at this upward end of the broadcasting scale, was offered when 1943 began. We were permitted by the grace of the song pluggers to hear, at its lower extremity, the sound of gastric wind being expelled from the human body, or a lifelike imitation.

The song (of whom or what was it typical?), was broadcast often enough for listeners to accustom themselves to this new level of taste and public enlightenment. Then second thoughts seemingly set in at broadcasting headquarters, for 'Right in der Fuehrer's face' was broadcast with silent gaps in the places which this sound previously occupied. The Press, which overlooks nothing of importance, indignantly told its readers that the B.B.C. was now refusing 'to blow Hitler raspberries'. Came the dawn, and another day in the life of England. I love to picture the ladies and gentlemen of the Board of Governors banning questions about Enclosure, for instance, while raspberries are blown across the overladen air.

With all this sealing of lips, save for the purpose of blowing raspberries, the spirit of England at home is astonishingly different from that which our fighting men show in action and which the world now salutes again. Outside the fortress, are staunchness, dogged endurance, valour and resolve; within, are repression, self-seeking, babel and trivial talk. The broadcasting monopoly, which is enormously wealthy, entrenched in privilege, and commands the entire talent of the country, should be the spokesman of the nation, because it speaks to the whole world. How can we give of our best, from within the island fortress, save through it?

Once the Brains Trust was asked, 'If you had six months to live, how would you spend them?' One Brain said he would gather round him choice wines and food and fill himself with them. Another said he would spend the time 'in a mortal funk'. This at a time when our men, on land, on all the seas and in the air, face death as their daily lot!

The Brains Trust itself grew restive in the shackles that were put on it and some of its members clamoured for the raising and widening of the debate. At that, another member complained that 'the highbrows' were trying to ruin the Brains Trust, that we were fighting, after all, for 'low-brows' and democracy, and that the Brains Trust must be kept 'lowbrow'. This diverting argument was most typical of our island to-day. The brain lives behind the brow, and lowness of brow was a chief characteristic of the first men who went on two legs. It may be studied in any monkey house. I love to picture the perfect Brains Trust, completely browless and simian, discussing questions of freedom, honour, culture, art, and civilization.

The contrast between the British achievement in the world, during the last three years, and the spirit of the home island, as it is evinced in the only way it can express itself, through our broadcasting, is staggering in its incongruity. It shows that the worthiest battle remains to be fought when this battle is done: the battle for the spirit of England.

The beginning and end of that battle is, Freedom. A battle for anything else, in England, would be worthless. But a man must understand what he strives for. How would a simple man define Freedom, the thing we have not?

Freedom is a thing of innumerable facets, but split it, and it has but two halves. The first is the half we have lost, the freedom to enjoy and use a part of our native land. The second half is the greater half, because the first half rests on it.

It is, freedom from wrongful arrest and wrongful imprisonment.

Given these two things, a man is as free as he need wish to be on this planet; the rest is for him to make. Freedom of speech, assembly, religion, contract, and the rest, are smaller facets. These are the two halves of the jewel.

The first half was taken from us through Enclosure. The second half, the only basis on which freedom can be built, we kept through thick and thin. Now it has been taken from us, with the connivance of the same Commons which enclosed the free lands, by men who say they will give it back when the war is over.

We should not rest until that first half of the jewel is taken from the safe and restored to us, and then we should set out in search of the second half.

The danger is, that few realize the worth of this priceless thing. Everywhere I went before this war, I found that, while the English reputation sank like a declining sun, from China to Abyssinia, from Austria to Czechoslovakia, this thing still gave the Englishman a feeling of superiority over others. They shared that feeling. Here, they thought, walks a free man.

In no other country I knew obtained, in our full measure, the law that no man might be arrested and held without immediate publication of the charge against him, or imprisoned without open trial. In France, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Italy, Roumania, Greece, Bulgaria and Germany, the policeman, magistrate or judge, in greater or lesser degree, might detain and intimidate men, and delay or falsify the processes of the law, so that no man felt free. Cash and corruption entered largely into the system, and often justice and the police were but instruments of victimization wielded by persons in office.

In the Scandinavian countries, Holland and Switzerland, which seemed to me the happiest and best-run in Europe, an order akin to ours prevailed. But I hope to do them no injustice in saying that this priceless right existed, in the same degree, in no country but ours.

It gives the poorest man a feeling of ultimate dignity; he is not quite an outcast. It was envied in us, far beyond wealth and possessions, by people in other lands. Until 1939, we might promptly and proudly have told any stranger, who asked what he might take away that was typically English, 'Take a copy of the Habeas Corpus Act'. He would immediately have understood and agreed.

Wrested from tyrants during centuries of struggle, this became the half of our jewel of Freedom, and we kept it even when we lost the other half. If the legendary Englishman looked the whole world in the face, this was why: he neither owed nor feared any man; and this was his chief title to the respect which awaited him when he went abroad. Simple people often do not know the value of old heirlooms and cast them away. If they understood, they would not agree, even in a world war, to yield this right, save under the most stringent safeguards. These do not exist to-day.

For centuries we kept that half of Freedom, but only by dint of a battle in England that seldom paused for long. Those who fought for it, fought for all mankind, for Freedom went out from here; but for them, the serfs and slaves would not have been liberated, and the other facets of Freedom, which were presently added to the rough stone, would never have been cut. One after another, they fought for this through the centuries, and when they died, saw that the Battle in England still went on. Without them, we should have lost it long ago.

Consider William Cobbett, who for forty-five years strove, with raging anger, against the things which were to be done to England between 1800 and 1943. He saw them all before they happened. With Enclosure going on around him, he rode his Rural Rides and clamoured against the spoliation of the countryside which he foresaw as clearly as if the future opened to him, against the human hives which were being allowed to sprawl and straggle over the land, and particularly against 'The Wen', his prophetic name for London. His was a lone voice; but he never ceased to cry, and was heard. But for him, we might have lost the greater half of freedom a century ago.

Cobbett was not merely an angry and antiquated old farmer who thought the country must be going to the dogs because the whole world was not given up to the cows. Cobbett was not merely a man with a lot of nonsensical notions that could be exploded by political economy; a man looking to turn England into an Eden that should grow nothing but Cobbett's Corn. What he saw was not an Eden that cannot exist, but rather an Inferno that can exist, and even that does exist. What he saw was the perishing of the whole English power of self-support; the growth of cities that drain and dry up the countryside, the growth of dense dependent populations incapable of finding their own food, the toppling triumph of machines over men, the sprawling omnipotence of financiers over patriots, the herding of humanity in nomadic masses whose very homes are homeless, the terrible necessity of peace and the terrible probability of war, all the loading up of our little island like a sinking ship; the wealth that may mean famine, and the culture that may mean despair; the bread of Midas and the sword of Damocles. In a word, he saw what we see, but he saw it when it was not there. And some cannot see it - even when it is there.[8]

This man, the son of a small farmer ('who, when a little boy, drove the plough for twopence a day, and these, his earnings, were appropriated to the expenses of an evening school'), became a great master of the English language, wrote incessantly and insuppressibly, and commanded a huge audience. When he was twenty he enlisted in a regiment of foot, and before he was thirty, jumping over many heads, became its sergeant-major during service in Nova Scotia. On his discharge, having gained knowledge of what went on in the regiment, he accused some officers of peculation from regimental funds, but then, suspecting the court of connivance, fled to France, and afterwards to America. When he returned, eight years later, he was famous, through his writings; he was wooed by a Tory government and offered the editorship of a government newspaper so that he might, for a comfortable salary, laud all that was done by authority and lampoon all who protested.

He refused, and began to publish the weekly Political Register, the most famous independent journal of the next thirty-five years. Sometimes the politicians, sometimes the mob, attacked him. He was fined for criticizing the Government's treatment of Ireland. His windows were smashed.

Half-way between Trafalgar and Waterloo, Cobbett angrily protested against the public flogging of British soldiers under a guard of German mercenaries. The things that happen in England! He was fined a thousand pounds and imprisoned for two years. In prison, and after he came out, he continued to write, for another seven years, as a fierce and independent critic who could neither be corrupted nor cowed.

Then came the crisis. The Government took powers of wrongful arrest. It suspended the Habeas Corpus Act and introduced the Regulation 18B of its day. Cobbett, the chief prey, escaped to America.

He returned a popular hero, and until he died maintained his robust and independent criticism of public affairs, when he thought this necessary. When he was nearly seventy, the Government tried once more to break him by bringing him before the Court of King's Bench on a charge of inciting rural disorders. He defended himself and the charge collapsed, covering the Government with ignominy. During his last years, when he was an Independent Member of Parliament for Oldham, they abandoned hope of intimidating this honest and turbulent Englishman, who would not suppress the fears he felt for England as he saw the seeds of decay being planted.

But for such a man, and his like, we would not for so long have kept our peerless right of freedom from malicious arrest and wrongful imprisonment.

To-day Cobbett's fight has to be fought again, if we are to check the retreat from Freedom and win the battle in England. Even the gods might hesitate to claim the power now wielded by one man, to imprison others; and its great danger is that none ever knows how it may be used to-morrow. The Minister who employs it to-day is not ruthless; but he himself, before he received it, laid stress on this peril. He does not know how any successor may use it, yet refuses to relinquish it. Ah, the difference between words and deeds, between opposition and Office!

Once this power is used, the extremists are avid for its continuance, because they hope to wield it to-morrow. The Dai1y Worker, released from suppression, calls for 'the rats to be put behind bars', that is, for people whom it dislikes to be put away. Two other London newspapers, so swiftly does this rot spread, now currently recommend that all sorts of persons unsympathetic to them should be imprisoned. The disease infects the middle parties, those which abjure us to 'fight for Freedom'. In the Commons and in the Press, lickspittles and lackeys 'call the attention of Mr. Morrison' to the activities of someone they do not like. Put this man away, they mean: I dislike his views. They call themselves Conservatives, Socialists, Liberals, Democrats.

The present Minister has reduced the number of people thus detained from the original 1,817 to about 500. We know now that many innocent people were put away. In our parlous plight of 1940, when good reason offered to suspect treachery, but among persons much higher placed than these obscure individuals, the gaoling of hundreds of people without charge or proof may have been excusable. Now that we are invulnerable it is inexcusable. Some of them have been imprisoned. for years uncharged. They should be charged and tried, or released.

The unanswerable argument against this thing is that every time an arrest under it has been tested at law it has been found wrongful in some way. These tests have been few, because they can only be applied when a man has been released and is free to use them, and then only if he has money enough for enormously expensive actions. But the result has always been the same.

We now know that the Home Secretary, who is required to have 'reasonable cause' for believing a prisoner to be of hostile associations, may consider the statement of some secret informer enough, who will not be punished for perjury, if his information later be found false, because his testimony was not made 'on oath'. The anonymous letter-writer is thus promoted to the status of a servant of the Crown!

Consider those few cases. Mr. Ben Greene, after nearly two years' imprisonment, succeeded at great cost in obtaining from the Home Secretary the statement that the allegations against him 'might be regarded as withdrawn'. When his solicitor, by threatening a question in Parliament, elicited the name of the secret informer, who immediately withdrew his allegations, this proved to be a German subject. He is immune from retribution.

Remember Cobbett, and the flogging of the British soldiers at Ely under German guard!

Then, Mr. H.S.L. Knight. When he claimed damages for wrongful dismissal, he was an R.A.F. aircraftman whose commanding officer was 'completely satisfied of his loyalty' and who recommended him for a commission. Mr. Knight was put away for six months and summarily dismissed, in result, by his employers. After his release, when he was in the R.A.F., he was only able to make his case public by using the 'wrongful dismissal' issue to bring it before the courts.

He was denied damages, the Court finding that his employer was 'frustrated' by his arrest from fulfilling the contract. But Mr. Justice Hilbery said that Mr. Knight was completely cleared of any misconduct that would have justified his dismissal and that his arrest was due to 'tittle-tattle'!

Consider the facts. He was put away on suspicion of Nazi sympathies. The 'evidence' against him consisted of (1) a letter referring to his 'appalling Communistic views' from a colleague whose testimony the judge 'rejected completely'; (2) some scraps of conversation reported by a woman typist who said in court that she was 'irresponsible and temperamental', broke down, and ran out weeping; and (3) a statement (contemptuously dismissed by the judge) from 'Mr. W.'. We may not know who Mr. W. was. He was a Jewish refugee from Germany and thus entitled to this new privilege of laying anonymous information, with impunity, against British citizens!

Mr. Justice Hilbery's judgment in this case was either ignored or given inadequately by the British Press, which claims to speak for British citizens. It is to my mind one of the most excellent in our recent history, and reveals one of the most flagrant injustices committed in the name of national interests in our time. The judge ironically referred to the unnamed enemy alien informer 'whose name has not been stated because we know that the giving of such names may lead to all sorts of very dreadful consequences to innocent persons who may remain behind in Germany' - but who was privileged with impunity to denounce and have imprisoned an innocent British subject! The testimony of this anonymous poltroon, said the judge, 'amounted to absolutely nothing'; 'I can find absolutely nothing at all in that evidence which even slightly savours of any sort of misconduct'. Of the evidence of a woman who boarded at the same guesthouse as Mr. Knight, he said 'Her evidence resulted in absolutely nothing'. Of the evidence of the hysterical woman clerk (who said Mr. Knight had made a motor-car journey over a road built by Hitler in Bavaria, which happened to have been built by an Austrian Republican Government in Austria!) he pointed out that she broke down in the witness box, and said her evidence, 'riddled as it is with inaccurate statements of fact, when examined has nothing in it'. The evidence of another secret informer, when it was now tested in open court, he 'rejected without the least hesitation as unreliable'; he was 'satisfied that this witness had a wholly warped and perverted view of the plaintiff'. Of the wrongfully imprisoned man himself, the judge said, 'The Plaintiff gave his evidence like an honest man and I think he gave his evidence to the best of his ability accurately'. The plaintiff's dismissal, he said, was not justified. What then of his imprisonment?

This fantastic case would have moved the members of a decent Parliament to wonder how many other unknown people are detained through anonymous slander and to demand reform, but no. Five days after this a Mr. Watkins of Central Hackney declared in the House that 'these hundreds of people ... are all guilty in varying degrees'.

Then a Mr. Thomas Wilson, who was put away for eighteen months and ruined by this imprisonment and the cost of his attempts to gain justice. He, too, found a way to bring his case into court after release, and stated that he 'raised the matter in an attempt to maintain some of the few rights remaining to a citizen'. (Under the Bill of Rights every citizen has the right to appeal to the King's Bench Division, but a petition which he sent was prevented from reaching the Court. He applied for the Home Secretary who imprisoned him, Sir John Anderson, to be committed for contempt of Court.)

This is what Mr. Justice Humphreys said:

There is no more important duty attaching to the Judges of the King's Bench Division than that of looking after the liberties of British subjects, and where one of those subjects has been committed to prison not by an order of a court of law but as the result of the opinion of a Secretary of State in the peculiar circumstances referred to in Regulation 18B, which only apply in war time, he has an inalienable right to ask that his case should be considered by that Court, and the Court is bound to consider whether he was being detained in custody legally or illegally. If any case should be brought before me hereafter in which any person - I care not how high his position or how great his fame - be found to have interfered with the right of one of His Majesty's subjects, I think that I should have no difficulty in putting into force, with the assistance of other members of that Division, the great powers of the King's Bench Division of imprisoning such a person for contempt of Court. Sir John Anderson himself knew nothing about the matter. But something happened for which Sir John has thought it his duty to apologize to the Court because it was done by an official of the Home Office, and the Court is glad to have that apology. The applicant chose to send an application to the Court himself. The document is irregular in form, but is a clear request to the Court from a person in custody to have his case considered. It is a perfectly proper document, in respectful language, desiring that if it was thought that he had done anything wrong as a servant of the Crown, he should be put on trial in the ordinary way and should not be detained indefinitely without a possibility of proving his innocence. That document was not dealt with at the prison. It was sent to another department where it was the duty of somebody to censor it. I cannot conceive any reason why such a document should not see the light of day. There is nothing improper in it. Someone, whose name the Court has not got, and whose position it does not know, intercepted that document and 'did not forward it to that Court to whom it was addressed. That official thought that it was not the proper way for the case to be put before the Court. It was no business at all of that official to form such a conclusion. It certainly was a piece of great impertinence on his part to take on himself to do what he did.

This judgment may make a man cry, 'There are still judges in England'. For in other lands, all know arrest or imprisonment without trial; but few know such peremptory rebuke as this to official misusers of authority. The pity is that the judge limited his warning to 'next time'.

In this case again you see the anonymous poltroon. This man, whose name not even an English Court of Justice could wrest, was an official. Such as he, when they are criticized, are protected by Ministers in Parliament with the words 'The honourable Member is attacking men who cannot defend themselves'. Yet these men may secretly denounce British citizens, or deny them their rights, and with impunity.

These few cases already make a grave indictment against Regulation 18B and the way it has been administered, and an uncorrupted House of Commons would by now have compelled a change. Add to them the memorable judgment of Lord Atkin who in the House of Lords dissented from four other Law Lords to say:

I view with apprehension the attitude of judges who, on the mere question of construction, when face to face with claims involving the liberty of the subject, show themselves more Executive-minded than the Executive ... it has always been one of the principles of liberty for which, on recent authority, we are now fighting, that the judges are no respecters of persons and stand between the subject and any attempted encroachment on his liberty by the Executive, alert to see that any coercive action is justified in law. In this case I have listened to arguments which might have been addressed acceptably to the Court of the King's Bench in the time of Charles I. I protest, even if I do it alone, against a strained construction put upon words with the effect of giving an uncontrolled power of imprisonment to the Minister ... I am profoundly convinced that the Home Secretary was not given unconditional authority to detain.</