Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 1057
In short, there is no place along the Great Route to which I am indifferent and many I love very much. And if I can do it most people can; and if everyone did there would be an end of most of our troubles.... There would be an end at least of patriotism and that would be a great help.
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It is a queer idea of serving his country that the patriot has. He loves his land. Therefore he proceeds to make himself as disagreeable as he can to every other land. When he has made himself sufficiently disagreeable to other lands they all fall upon his country and gore its gentle bosom with the shards of war. Patriotism doesn’t pay.... Did any other Nordic ever think of that?
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In any case there, to the faint strains of Giovinezza, I was on the wet deck, being drawn along past the extraordinary pageant of Provence and the Narbonnais.... Because it was an extraordinary pageant.
I have been carried along past other lands.... Spain, say, from Lisbon to Gibraltar; England, as the other day, from the North Foreland to the Land’s End; the East Coast from Portland, Maine, to Sandy Hook.... And they were just land.... Spain, piles of iron pyrites, rusted; England, wet, greenish water-colour; the United States the same but with more hardness and larger fringes of tossing white where the sea hits it.... But Provence is a living thing, tossing in a dance.... The Primavera of Botticelli.
You see, from high on the ship, you see right into the land — the foothills running up to the great Alps; the towns shining in the dawn sun; the mists rolling themselves together — and you see the whole of the country at once — from Aix to Perpignan. Because, of course, the Narbonnais and Provence only run from the sea to the foot of the Alps up the inverted V of the Rhone — so you see right over both lands.
And, I suppose, because of the motion of the ship or perhaps my state of mind, the whole land seemed to rush along, like a school of dolphins, at the feet of the mountains.... I don’t care what those young Jews may say.... Palestine was never so gay.... Not even when they took them the little foxes, the little foxes that eat the grapes.... And I charge you, oh, you daughters of Jerusalem and everywhere else, that you come and do homage at these shores...
That, of course, is patriotism.... Because Palestine from the sea exactly reproduces Provence and the Narbonnais; it is all one Mediterranean system; all part of one Great Route.
And I said: Damn it all one must try and do something to keep the gentle bosom of the Earth that is so beautiful from being gored with shards... which must be very unpleasant.
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So here I sit on the hard stone of a carved seat, in the white sunlight under the carvings of the most preposterous building to be found outside Coney Island... and release my Utopia.
Biala and the patient New Yorker are down on the harbour getting their pictures past the douane of the neighbouring Republic. It will take hours. Isn’t it preposterous — this Protection of your Country from civilizing influences? I wonder they do not put duties on the brazen strains of the New York key-bugled Giovinezza that is blaring from that unfortunate proletariat unit. Or measure our heads so as to tax the thought with which one may benefit their lands.... Taxation at the source that would be.... England indeed puts an income tax of 25 per cent on all thinkers that live in the foreign. It would probably be better protection for English Thought if she put a prohibitive tax on all brains above standard boys’ size.... Or the United States.... Or any country.... It might keep their races clean.
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But isn’t it a queer coincidence that I should have been driven by that key-bugle to take refuge in a tract of the world where my Utopia actually exists — where an autocrat without parliaments or politicians or protection or national barriers touches hands with a Republic, a limited monarchy — under a dictator — and a federal union of sovereign States, all of whose laws are subject to a referendum?... Because that is actually the fact. The boundaries of Monaco, France, the Helvetic Republic, and Italy lie here all so close that you could cover them with a man’s hat. Or at any rate you can go in and out of the lot of them between lunch and dinner.... And they have lived peacefully side by side for generations. The only group of people who have.... But to-day....
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It is curious — it is depressing to think that I shall probably never again see Siena... because a relatively Northern nation has decided to purge of the peculiar institution called slavery a nation living to the South of it. We have had no news on the boat and that is the news that reaches us here. It would apparently be dangerous for me to go even to San Remo where my uncle came out of the bathroom looking like a Moor, though from here I can see it at the bottom of that purple cliff.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.... And think of the endless reverberations of tragedy that will go on all over the world... when Africa takes her next revenge on humanity.
She will. And generations yet unborn will be gassed.... And more generations and more beyond them....
It won’t pay.... Anybody. Ever.
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I put that last reflection in for the sake of us Nordics. We have been made, apparently, middling honest by the reflection that honesty pays. We may divest ourselves of other of our vices if we can be assured of the fact that War does not.
And that all our virtue-vices are not profitable any more. Not courage; not endurance; not the pioneering spirit; not thrift. The only thing that could pay us would be for all of us to crowd into this Principality and spend our time for years over the green cloth.... The only thing that could save us is degeneracy. We must become lazy, shiftless, languid, disloyal, cowardly, unadventurous, undisciplined.
Our virtue-vices are all devoted to training us for acquisition.... Self-help they used to call it in Victoria’s spacious days. It was considered virtuous then to rob — deprive — your fellows. And all our training, all our idealism, since then has been devoted to making us more deft at robbing our fellows. For do not forget that every penny you make by your honesty, endurance, courage, cleanliness, technical instruction has been taken from a starving child.... It might have saved a child from starvation.... But you have it. There were last year 270,000 starving children roaming one country in bands.
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There is only one virtue-virtue — hundred per cent. It is charity. I did not, of course, invent that statement, and I do not mean exactly what you think I mean, though that is part of it.
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I was talking the other day to a worker in a Charity Organization Society. She assured me modestly that it was amazing the good that Society did in the great cities. She knew of ever so many families who had been thriftless, idle, unproducing, dirty.... And they had been helped and instructed until they had become self-respecting members of Society. They could stand on their own legs, they could earn; they could even save.... I said that she was making murderers out of them and breeding the wars of to-morrow and she was quite hurt. She said that she was sure that not a penny she had expended had gone into the hands of the thriftless.
... But it is not the thriftless that make wars. It is the acquisitive.
I shall probably die of starvation because I do not write books that people like. I do not say that I shall be proud of it.... But at least at the moment of dying I shall know that I have not lately taken the bread out of anyone else’s mouth.
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I wonder whether we progress more, or more degenerate towards savagery. Since the seventeenth century we have had no wars of religion and for the last two or three years it has been generally accepted that if a State permits citizens to be born it must provide for them.... Oh, bread and circuses. Not just bread. So we have arrived, after the collapse of the world in the Dark Ages, at about the civilization of the Roman Empire in its later days. I cannot see that in any other important division of human activities we have progressed at all and the Romans were at least spared the banking system.
On the other hand we have increased in ferocity and in the power of doing murder — to an incredible degree. On the whole the Romans were pacifists — at any rate they had the ideal of the Pax Romana which covered the whole world known to the Ancients and the bacillus of xenophobia furens never, as far as I know, spread throughout their dominions as it has spread through the whole of Christendom in the last five or six years. And the Romans were practically unacquainted with the Theory of Protection. They tried at one time rather listlessly to prevent the spread of the growth of the wine-grape from Italy proper into Provence — so as to protect the Italian wine-grower; but that was as far as they went and the effort was not very seriously pursued.
Yet the race-suicidal ideal of putting all people not of your county or shade of political thought up against the Wall is almost more a product of tariffs than of native malignity. If you like, Protection is a mortal sin, murder being only venal. That is to say that the Protective State of mind does not necessarily call for murder but it is the major cause of the murders of to-day.
Protection in the minds of its upholders seems to be a genteel way of killing a Chinese mandarin on the Hoang Ho and thus gaining a million. You are interested in the clay-pipe manufacturers of the State of Virginia and you impose a duty on clay pipes, hoping to starve the clay-pipe manufacturers of County Cork and the Gironde and so gain an extra million on your clay-pipes. The authorities of County Cork and the Gironde then in revenge place a duty on cork heels which are manufactured over a large district in the Deep South and in Provence. So numbers of people in the South and in Provence are starved. And all these starving people call for the blood of all the other starving people. And more and more duties are clapped on in more and more places and prices rise more and more.
Everywhere. And be-panicked mothers cry to the Lord for vengeance on all foreigners. And industries needing protection need it because their localities are not suited to the production of the protected article, so that the standard of living falls. And the brains of the citizens deteriorate because of the deteriorated standard of living. And the great ports are ruined because there are neither exports to cross the seas nor imports to be brought back. And processions of thousands of seamen join with processions of thousands of railwaymen, all starving and shaking their fists to heaven and calling on their authorities to murder millions of all kinds of foreigners so that their wives and children may have bread.... And crowd-manias and mass-frenzies rush in waves from end to end of Christendom. And the Asiatics catch the mania. And populations increase and increase because the citizens are starving; and country after country grows more and more overpopulated with starving crowds — crying also to Authority for the blood of millions of their neighbours... so that they and their wives may live. And the whole outside world is barred to them.
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It does not pay. It really does not.
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Now every individual of those crowds is not by nature a Sadist religious lunatic. It is crowd suggestion that makes them so — and the larger the crowd the more impetuously does the suggestion run through them — till every individual becomes a Sadist religious lunatic.
What, then, is the obvious cure?
The cure is to reduce your crowds and stop the suggestion being injected into those reduced crowds.
How will you reduce your crowds?
By spreading the individuals over larger spaces; by providing more centres of population.
How will you stop the suggestions from being injected?
By suppressing the orators who sway those crowds. That, you say, is mere opportunism. It is not, it is symbolism.
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No one believes that you can break up large populations and spread them about in little towns with corkscrewy, cobbled streets and only one weekly picture show... by law. It can’t be done. And if by law you suppressed orators, you would raise crop on crop of martyrs. There is only one way by which you can influence the world. It is by educating those that are susceptible of education.
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You say it takes a long time — generations — to educate the masses of populations. It does not. You can educate the whole world in a year.... By means of the afflatus. Peter the Hermit preached his sermon in Provence one year. The next the whole of Europe that could arm was moving against the Holy Land. The Mexican general set his Catholics five deep up against a wall — to the delight of the Technocrat. That was three years ago. To-day the whole world talks of nothing else but setting every one else but their own class up against walls. The mania of closed boundaries covered the whole world in a year. In November 1918 it was unknown. By the end of 1919 all the starving of the world were like rats each within their own traps. Seven years ago the mania of Protection swept across the world. In a year international trade had come almost to a standstill. Immediately came the World Crisis.
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It does not pay. It really does not.
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To-day two mass manias are flying across the world. You have the whole world threatened with war.... But not merely by war. By civil war.
That is because two manias — two afflati — are flying across the world, struggling in the air as they go. One is called Communism, the other Fascism. Both are the products of despair and both transcend all other passions. Even Patriotism cannot stand against them.
I was roundly taken to task a year ago for writing that Protection was a manifestation of a double hate. You hated the foreigner, so you hit him in the struggle with Protection; but you hated the classes in whose name you proposed Protection — you hated a section of your own countrymen more realistically than you hated the foreigner. You knew more about them. They, in turn, hated the foreigner, so they gave Protection their Suffrages. They hated you more. So they prepared War against you.
To-day we see traditional race barriers breaking down in favour of internecine war.... All over the world. In Spain at the moment Civil War is everywhere. In England and France the Right call for close union with Germany, the traditional Enemy — because Germany is Fascist; in the same countries the Left call for spiritual and armed union with the Soviet Republic. It can’t be long before Civil War breaks out in more of those countries — with the backing of one of those foreign countries. I heard last night a hint of a formidable plot that is to break out next Wednesday. That is to say I was invited for Thursday to visit one of my friends either in prison or in Another Place as they say of the House of Lords in England.
And then the contagion will spread.
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But it won’t pay. It will be bad for Business. Everywhere.
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How long are we going to stand it — we, the decent, quiet people who desire the goods of no man; who desire — in millions and millions — nothing but to be left in peace on our two or three acres of garden land, and to think our thoughts, and go on producing whatever it is we produce? How long?
You say the afflati of evil fly faster across the world than those of good. It isn’t true. We are so frightened to-day that if any really salient good thought could be put into salient and flaming words it would fly across the world faster than any black magic.
You say; How is it to be done?
Ah, I am not a constructive thinker.... This evening I shall be sowing in my own garden my first row of green peas. It is July 13th. In four days’ time the first green, living things will be throwing up the earth. To-day week they will all be up three inches. On August 12th I shall eat my first dish of peas. By September 13th I shall be in a position, should war cut off my financial supplies, to support my family indefinitely.... Until the War chooses to stop and I can get paid for this book. So I am safe.... Why should I bother about you?... You have only to do the same thing. And tell your five best friends to do the same thing and tell each one of his five best friends to do the same thing.... You know what a chain-letter is?... In two months’ time all the politicians in the world will be shaking on their thrones. In a year they will all be gone.
... And you won’t have any more to fear us Nordics who for thousands of years every fifty years or so have had to make raids into the lands of you of the Route. You have only got to get it into their heads that Self Help and Thrift and Courage and Endurance and the Wars and Civil Wars and Public Disasters and Protections that are caused by those vices... that they are Bad for Business.... And in a month you will have them all round you, on their knees, begging you for a few of your superfluous acres and a hoe. For you don’t have to think that we Nordics are intrinsically evil... not even those of us who were born in Penn’s State. It is merely that we lack the afflatus; that we live in mists; that we worship false Gods.... And when the half Gods go the Gods arrive.... I don’t know whose that saying is.
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And take care that, above all, you get rid of the professional politician. It is as abhorrent that you should abandon your share of responsibility to a paid prostitute as that you should abandon your conscience to a hired lawyer. It is the professional politician who is responsible for all group ills; for Protection as for Wars. Get rid of him.
You will probably have to have a Federal Council. I should choose them by going up to the top of the Empire State Building or any high place above a city and letting drop a number of parachutes labelled: “President,”
“Tsar,”
“Secretary” and so on and anyone who got one would have to take the unpleasant job.... Then they would all be shut up in Monaco. They could play at the tables until the rare job of proposing and arguing out a law came along. There would be hardly any laws. You would have to regulate wave-lengths for the radios; airways for planes. Very little else. Possibly the Federal Council, to keep them busy, might settle the price of rare postage stamps... in units of commodities. Then you would vote. By elaboration of the mechanism of the U.S. Census you ought to be able to take a referendum of the whole Route in twelve hours.... In that way you would have done your duty to the Republic and the world.
