Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 736
With this change in the art of war came also a great change in the ordered life of the people. The Great Plague known as the Black Death came out of Asia, a hideous germ disease, brought by the caravans in fleas among the bales of goods. It swept across Europe, with nothing to stop it in an ignorant and filthy world. It was accepted as the scourge of God. There was no remedy but prayer. It reached Weymouth in Dorsetshire in 1340. It raged for two years. One and a half million in a population of 4,000,000 died of it. Then it died down, but for three hundred years it never left England. It flared out again in the Great Plague of 1666. It was never killed till enlightened democracy took it by the throat with the sanitation and public health that was the nineteenth century’s answer to the prayers of the fourteenth. But the Plague is still ready to leap again out of the filth of Asia, if we carry destruction far enough and cast down humanity low enough. Such forces never sleep. There is much in the history of the Plague that gives us food for thought. It helps us to realize how great have been the triumphs of enlightenment, education and free government.
The changes effected by the Black Death were profound. Beyond doubt the dearth of labour was one great effect. “Sheep and cattle,” says a chronicle, “went wandering over the fields with none to go and drive them ... many perished for lack of herdsmen.”
As a result, the labour population that was left broke away from its fixed serfdom. In spite of attempts to hold the labourer in his place by acts of parliament, the old system of villeinage, of people tied to the soil, came to its end. “Labour” was henceforth free, if only free to be “out of work.” Even after this the law for a long time attempted to keep labourers from leaving their own parishes, to prevent them becoming a charge on another. But with the Black Death the feudal mould was broken. The consequences were not all good. Change seldom is. With liberated labour appear in history the familiar “sturdy beggars,” and “idle vagabonds,” who vexed the Tudor times. Many of these were to figure later, willing or unwilling, as emigrants to America and builders of empire — patriots who left their country for their country’s good.
Thus the structure of feudalism underwent a double dilapidation. Military science knocked off the stones above — the dearth of labour undermined the courses below.
Nor was this all. Culture, as well as arms and industry, moved forward. The art of printing, from engraved wooden blocks and then from movable type cast from melted lead, came to Europe about the end of the fourteen hundreds.
William Caxton, England’s first printer, printed a hundred different works (1476-91). Hence the “rolls” and “scrolls” of antiquity, painfully copied and recopied, were replaced by books. The scriptorium gave place to the press room. The machine began its mock servitude to man.
This could have meant the education of the people. But no one yet dreamed of that. Printing did, however, spread, and increased knowledge, and aided the Revival of Learning. It helped also to unify language, to create a national speech to overtop national dialects and thus to enlarge the area of government. England under the Tudors, France under the Bourbons, and Spain under the union of Castile and Aragon, now appear as national states. The feudal castles soon turned into the windmills attacked by Don Quixote. Feudalism was “laughed off” as is each phase of our history by the generation that outlives it. Feudalism, indeed, had outlived its time. In many aspects it had run to seed. Knightly honour and chivalry towards women had degenerated into sickly make-believe sentimentality that took love-sick vows, carried round a lady’s scarf like a terrier with a rag, and held “courts of love” among billows of silk. Knightly adventure still made its pilgrimages and sauntered to the Holy Land. But the exchange of a crusade for a saunter speaks volumes. Such knights and their everlasting vows to their lady now excite a smile. They suggest to us the embittered Republicans or Democrats who vow never to shave till their party is elected. No doubt these Knights of the Unshorn Locks are the lineal descendants of the age of chivalry.
So feudalism, as a political system, ended. In that aspect little remains of it except a few quaint survivals. A feudal tenant “in petty sarjeantry” still presents the King yearly with a pair of dead birds. The Hudson Bay Company holding “in soccage” paid a similar tribute to the King in Canada in 1939. There is still a Norrey King at Arms, and a Pursuivant Lion and other officials suggesting a full house at poker. Socially, feudalism, till only a little while ago, still left its mark across English life in the abiding “gentleman” and the survival of “birth.” Historically it ended with the new era of printing, of revived learning, national states, the discovery of the New World of America and the Old World of Asia. This brought an expansion and a rivalry among European powers in which no small feudal state could find a place.
This epoch of national states that began in 1500 with the age of the Tudors, maintained its impetus three hundred years and reached its climax in the eighteenth century. It built up powerful monarchies. But these were tempered at first by the surviving feudal rights of great lords, and the ancient customary rights of the people, and later by new popular forces. For the British people these checks were always strong. They were strengthened further by the conflict in arms of England’s Civil War (1642-49). Hence there grew up in Great Britain a sort of consciousness of popular rights, not meaning the equality of all the people but meaning, as it were, the right to be left alone, not to be called upon for new taxes, for unknown duties, and not to lose privileges long enjoyed.
The England from which sailed the Pilgrim Fathers and the migrating Massachusetts Bay Company was far from being a land of equality. Hereditary rights — of rule, of property and of privilege — were everywhere embedded in it. Religious tolerance was a hard doctrine to grasp in a day of conflicting creeds for whose adherents salvation depended on a formula, eternal happiness on a text. The farewell call of the Pilgrims to “dear England” shows how mingled were the thoughts of the time, how much there was to cling to, how much to seek elsewhere. Yet at least the atmosphere was there in which liberty, and presently democracy, might grow.
The passion to be left alone, if only to one’s own foolishness, lies deep rooted in British character, a product of centuries far away, a cell-memory from a bygone life, on northern seas and isolated coasts, hard and lonely and self-dependent. Thus an Englishman’s house became a castle, his home inviolate, and with his house his mind. It was all his, even if he wanted to keep it empty.
Williams-Ellis and Fisher, History of English Life. 1936.
Statute of Labourers, 1351.
e.g. The Court of Love of the Comtesse de Champagne, 1181-87.
G. M. Trevelyan, History of England. 1926.
THE GROWTH OF POPULAR RIGHTS
HERE, THEN, IN the British Isles was the setting and the atmosphere in which modern democracy could come to life. In France circumstances entirely different worked towards the same end. In the one case liberty came by evolution, in the other by catastrophe; in England by growing up, in France by smashing down.
In France a great gulf widened more and more between those in power and the general mass of the people. In France, as feudalism ebbed away, it had left the nobility stranded on an island of silk. They had no part, as in England, in national parliament. They still led in war in the royal armies of the king, with quarterings in keeping with their noble blood and their rank as officers. But in peace, the gloom of their country chateaux drove them to the new sunlight of the Palace of Versailles that Louis XIV. had built in 1682. Thus in France the lack of anything intermediate, as civil authority, between the power of the king and the powerlessness of the individual man, was opening a chasm that seemed to invite a downfall.
More than that, the way to popular liberty was being prepared in both countries by the rise of what is called the middle class or the bourgeoisie, meaning to a large extent, “business men.” Economic power and privilege began to replace military and political power. The “business man” had been long in coming into his own. The Greeks had despised merchants as “crooks.” The Middle Ages regarded them as cheats and their money interest as theft. “To be in trade” was disdained by people whose blood was too blue for it. Yet the great mercantile fortunes and the vast growing apparatus of trade and commerce that handed on to Europe the wealth of the Indies and the produce of America, had by the eighteenth century already raised up both in Britain and in France a new element in the nation. As it became more and more influential, it helped to break by its very expansion the mould in which the rigid world of privilege was cast.
Ed. Lowell, The Eve of the French Revolution. 1895.
W. Bowden (and others), Economic History of Europe since 1750. 1937.
REACTION OF AMERICA ON EUROPE
A FURTHER INFLUENCE making towards the new ideal of individual liberty was the reaction of America on Europe. The discovery and settlement of America had enormous effect on the life and character of the peoples of Western Europe. The history of the three centuries from Columbus to the Independence of the United States is often written as if to show the New World as the prize of the old, America as the booty of Europe, the spoil divided by conquering kings and rival empires. Such a view neglects the deeper effects that were being produced on the character and outlook of the people to whom America was thus laid open.
Most of all this effect was exercised on the people of the British Isles. The discovery of America reawoke them to the maritime life that had been slipping away from them. Courage that seemed falling asleep in quiet farmsteads took to the sea again. The Viking came back in the new seamen of the Western Ocean. The nation quickened to new thought and new life. The winds of change and chance ruffled to new movement the waters that the long, still years had threatened to stagnate. The sleep of the Middle Ages woke to the songs of Elizabethan England.
Thus maritime enterprise itself was potent in its power to revivify a nation. Equally potent was settlement in America, the vision of an empty world, the recapture of the most ancient kind of liberty, the natural liberty of the man whose very isolation makes him free, whose very danger makes him vigilant. Such a quickened sense of the liberty of a new country came back to England from America.
New it may have seemed, but in a sense it is the oldest liberty of all, and its appeal was an echo of a remote past, found again. At its extreme is complete isolation, the melancholy liberty of Robinson Crusoe, monarch of all he surveyed. Such an extreme compels us to realize that man is a social animal, meaningless by himself, a voice without an ear, an ear without a sound. But short of such extremes a partial isolation, for one strong enough to stand alone, carries a measure of natural liberty. For all primitive races, for isolated tribes, for all pioneers in the forest, circumstance makes for freedom. The very simplicity of their way of living, gaining their support from nature by their own labour and contrivance, sets them free. Where there is little, if any, associated effort, every man is for himself. The buried memory of such a liberty is in each of us. It reveals itself in every boy who ever longed for a desert island. It has been the lure that has led the pioneer farther and farther from the settled countryside. It was this liberty, refound in America, that came back to Europe, and above all to England, to sing into willing ears like the song of the sea.
Stephen Leacock, Our British Empire. 1940. (Lane.)
NATURAL LIBERTY AND JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
AS THE DOCTRINE of natural liberty grew in its attraction, as the surge towards it strengthened, it often assumed an exaggerated form, as if to assert that all isolated men were heroic men, and all dwellers in the cities crafty and degenerate. We see this in the poetry and the stories of the eighteenth century. The famous English poet, Alexander Pope (1688-1744), had never been in America, and had never seen savages in the wilderness. Yet he wrote in his Essay on Man:
“Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutored mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;”
This noble savage turned into a sort of a stock character.
It became the fashion to praise simple people, poor people, humble people. In his famous Elegy in a Country Churchyard Gray talked of the “rude forefathers of the hamlet” as spending their lives “far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife.” He pleaded that “grandeur” would not “hear with a disdainful smile, the short and simple annals of the poor.” Compare Oliver Goldsmith’s
“Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain,
Where health and plenty cheered the labouring swain.”
This idea of the merits of native simplicity, of natural ways of living as opposed to artificial, had a great influence in Europe. The eighteenth century was an age of increasing hope, of an increasing aspiration for liberty. New forces were working to make liberty under independence in America and to promote the great upheaval of the French Revolution that began in 1789. No doubt the doctrine which exalted the natural and simple man helped to swell the current.
This doctrine found its highest expression and exercised its greatest influence in the writings of the Frenchman, Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Few people have had more influence on mankind than this man, whose own life was that of a wanderer and a sponge, whose heart was as dry as his tears were wet. For he had the supreme gift of gathering up and expressing the ideas which thousands of others felt but could not express. There is no message so effective as to tell people what they know already, to hold a mirror to their face and a sound board to their voice. So it was with Rousseau. He wrote a book called Emile, to show how a natural child could be educated in a natural way. The mothers of the new age, perplexed with its increasing artificiality, caught from Rousseau’s mind their own thought. He wrote a book called the Social Contract, to show how a natural society could be made of natural men, surrendering liberty only to receive it back again. As from a magician’s touch, out leaped from the pages “the individual,” the liberated man, entering into his own, the man only half recognized by the Greeks, scourged by the Romans, lost in the dungeons in the Middle Ages, and surviving only among noble savages, his existence nowhere assured except on the sands of a desert island, or by the freedom of a mountaineer, too high up to catch.
C. W. Hendel, Rousseau, 1712-78. 1937.
AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT
THE THEORY OF liberty and equality formulated by Rousseau and others was a part of the new “age of reason” of the eighteenth century. It is often referred to as the period of the “enlightenment,” and to many at the time it seemed as if a flood of light had appeared to illuminate all things human with the beams of plain reason. The light shone clear because the darkness of bigotry, the mists of prejudice, and the heavy fog of error and authority were being driven away.
Many of us still feel that this is largely true. Theorists tell us that we cannot judge things in a general and abstract way, as the enthusiasts of the enlightenment were apt to do. We must take each case as we find it. Every country and every epoch, they tell us, has its peculiar circumstances, not only of physical surroundings but of institutions which have come down as a part of its history. Social inequalities and hereditary privileges, monarchies and all that went with them, established churches with powers and privileges ... all these things we must accept as we find them as part of a “going concern,” or what the biologists call “an organic life.” We may alter them gradually and helpfully, but always and only at a certain pace, for fear that alteration will spell destruction. We cannot, it is argued, set up one single code of law, one simple framework of rights that will apply to all people in all places. Such things as “slavery” may be proper and even indispensable in certain stages of society. The hereditary rights of the few may aid the salvation of all, and an established church, by its very wealth and power, may be able to maintain offices of piety and pity, to succour the poor, to encourage learning and to do such things as in a rude and cruel age would otherwise pass undone. This view of society is commonly called a historical or relative view. The more some people think of it, the more they find it true, the wider they find its application. The more other people think of it the worse they hate it. It would always seem as if there were here a general division of human minds into two classes. It would appear to justify the jest of the Gilbert and Sullivan opera that “every boy and every gal that’s born into this world alive is either a little Liberal or else a little Conservative.” Most of all have the historical theorists attacked Rousseau’s doctrine of liberty under a social contract. It has indeed long since been declared “exploded,” a favourite process of theorists who fail to drive a thing away by argument. It is of course ridiculous to say that men enter society by a “contract” since we are all born into it without choice. Indeed we have little meaning, singly, without our fellowmen; speech needs ears to hear it; a child implies a parent. Our thought, our very merriment, are things we share with others. Laughter is the happiest of all human emotions, but only a Scotsman cares to have a joke all to himself.
Yet the more utterly we cast out the social contract doctrine, the more it insists on coming back, or at least making its appeal. It is like the Arkansas mule that refuses to die. The truth is that there lies at the basis of the social contract doctrine an insistence on individual rights which is worth keeping if only as a metaphor.
