i
when a man enlisted during the war he found himself living the life of the common man in a communist state. once inside he had no more choices to make than a russian under the soviet. his work, his pay, his food, his place and mode of living were fixed from on high. he might not even decide whether he should remain a soldier or be turned, say, into a miner. if the wisdom that sat up aloft put him down for a draft to a tunnelling company, to earth he went. he had ceased to be economic man, the being whom we were brought up to regard as causing the world to go round by making a bee-line to the best pay available. now he was ex-economic man, or economic man popped off all the hooks that had fastened him into a place in the system called capitalistic by those who least admire it. no one was left to say of a job any longer that you might "take it or leave it," for leaving was barred. you could not be called a wage-slave, for you got no wages to speak of. you had become a true "proletarian" under a pretty big-fisted dictatorship. it might not be a dictatorship of the proletariat, but a dictatorship smells about as sweet by one name as another when it levers you out of bed before dawn or ties you up to the wheel of a gun for cutting a job that irks you. dr. johnson declined to attempt to settle degrees of precedence between a flea and a louse. it is as hard to decide between the charms of a "sanitary fatigue" when done for our war office and when done for mr. lenin.
in a sense, no doubt, the average man liked it all—the sense in which men like to break the ice in the serpentine for a swim. he had willed it. he felt that when it was over it would be a good thing to have done. but he also saw, perhaps with surprise, that there were many men who liked it wholly, without any juggling with future and pluperfect tenses. they liked to have their hours of rising and going to bed settled by colonel or soviet rather than face for themselves this distracting problem in self-government. they liked meals which they did not choose, and which might not be good, but which came up of themselves, in their season, like grass. they liked quarters which they might perhaps have to share with brethren too weak to carry their liquor and not too wise to essay great feats of the kind, but which, anyhow, did not have to be sought for, rented, furnished, and, on every monday, paid for with a separate pang. they liked, at any rate as the lesser evil, work which was no subject of either collective or individual bargain, but came out of the sky, like the weather, usually open to objection, but sometimes not.
perhaps you concluded, after a time, that there must be some temperaments communistic or socialistic by nature, like the "souls christian by nature" of the theologians. you might even have suspected that in all this wide field of dispute the most fundamental difference is not between the intrinsic and absolute merits of the individualistic and of the communistic state, but between two contrasted human types—the type which is actually happiest in communal messes and dormitories and playgrounds and forced labour and state-fixed pay in a state-chosen career, and the type which exults in even the smallest separate cottage and garden, as a lion rejoices in his own den; the type which cooks its mutton with a special rapture in an exclusive oven, however imperfect, and sallies forth rejoicing, as the bridegroom goeth out from his chamber, to angle for the dearest market for the labour of its hands and the cheapest for its victuals. so that the only ideal solution might be to cut up the world, or each of its states, into two hemispheres, as trains are divided into "non-smoking" and "smoking." a little difficult, perhaps; but then it is difficult to make either breed be happy in the other's paradise.
ii
other speculations were apt to visit your mind if, later on in the war, as a new army officer, you watched, open-mouthed, the way that much of the regular army's business was done. in civil life you might have had wild dreams of what business life would be like if its one great, black, ruling, quelling possibility were for ever removed, if the last official receiver had gone the way of the great auk, and the two-handed engine of bankruptcy stood no longer at the door, its place being taken by a genie carrying countless treasury notes and ready to come in and "make it all right" as soon as you gave the slightest rub to the electric lamp on your desk. how nobly free you would be from the base care of overhead charges! how pungently you would keep in his proper place any large customer whose tone displeased you! how handsomely, when in a generous mood, you would cast away the sordid preoccupation of getting value for money and indulge yourself with a sight of the smile-wreathed face of a friend to whom you had given the bargain of a lifetime! how dignified a leisure you would enjoy after all those years of answering letters on the day you got them! or, if that were your line, how high you would wave the banner of an ideal precision, stooping to none of the slavish, supple complaisances of competitive commerce, but making everyone who wrote a letter to you mind his p's and q's, and do the thing in form, and go on doing it until he got it right, as long as the forests of scandinavia held out to supply you both with stationery!
in the throes of a great war, and within sound of its guns, the genius of our race achieved, at any rate in some minor departmental edens, this approach to a business man's heaven. to the rightful inhabitants of these paradises the intrusion of an ordinary fallen business man, with his vulgar notions of efficiency, gave something of a shock. he seemed cold and clammy—a serpent in the garden. "at the war office," an old staff officer plaintively said to one of these kill-joys, "we never used to open the afternoon letters till the next day." he felt that life would lose its old-world bloom if he had to do things on the nail. "after all, it won't kill the british taxpayer"—that was another golden formula.
iii
returned from these illuminating experiences the victorious soldier finds the british taxpayer—not, indeed, killed, but rubbing his wounds and groaning and being advised by several different kinds of friends to try if a hair, or perhaps the whole skin, of the dog that bit him will make him feel better. "put your trust," say the august political authoritarians, "in your natural rulers, from lord chaplin and the duke of northumberland down to about as low as sir eric geddes; scrap all the outworn and discredited humbug of democracy and parliamentarism; recognize that only a governing class with ample traditions of skill and devotion can govern to any effect."
"rats!" observe the extreme left; "all that ramp was exposed long ago—ruling class and parliament, and all of it. turn down aristocracy and democracy, too, and put your money on the dictatorship of the proletariat and——" at which the poor tax-paying proletarian looks up with a gleam of hope and asks if he may begin dictating now. with a pitying smile the extreme left explains that it is to be named his dictatorship, but that it will be exercised not by him but by the proper persons. will he elect them? he asks. oh, no; that would be mere bourgeois liberalism, quite out of date. well, he asks, how is he to feel sure that they will do what he wants? can he doubt it?—he is reproachfully asked. does he not see that men ruling only as dictators for the whole nation, men serving only their country and no grubby individual employer or caucus, will and must be fired, at once and for ever, with a new spirit of devotion, wisdom, purity, humanity, and love such as was never yet seen on earth—indeed, could not be seen on it while its surface was defaced with houses of parliament and joint-stock mills?
at this point the demobilized business man is likely to go out sorrowfully, reflecting that thanks to the war he has known, in turn, what it is to be one of the rulers, and what it is to be one of the ruled, in a community where the people below have no hold on the people above, and where the people above are pricked by no coarser spur than their own pure zeal for the best of causes in the sorest of its straits. communism delights him not, nor toryism either.
nor, indeed, any other political creed of all those that he knows. liberals he has, perhaps, come to figure as sombre and dry, all-round prohibitors, humanitarians but not humanists, people with democratic principles but not democratic sympathies, uncomradelike lovers of man, preaching the brotherhood of nations but not knowing how to speak without offence to a workman from their own village. the labour party, indeed, he may feel to be, as yet, not wholly damned, but chiefly because it has never been tried at the big job. its leaders have not, like the liberal and conservative chiefs, to answer for any grand public triumphs of incapacity like the diplomacy that gave bulgaria and turkey to germany. labour has not the name of gallipoli to wear on its party colours; the goeben and the breslau did not escape with it at the admiralty; none of its leaders intrigued with any general against his superiors; it did not turn ireland's offered help into enmity in the hour of need. what of that, though? liberals and conservatives, too, might not have failed yet if they had not been tested. as likely as not that the labour chiefs, too, would show, at a pinch, the old vice of the others—live and act in a visionary world of their own, the world as they would have liked to have it, not the world in which rough work and fighting and starving go on and the people who make it go round are not politicians.
iv
a century of almost unbroken european peace—unbroken, that is, by wars hugely destructive—had built up insensibly in men's minds a consciousness of an unbounded general stability in the political as well as in the physical world. the crust of the political globe seemed to have caked, on the whole, almost as hard and cool as that of the elderly earth. it felt as if it were so firm that we could safely play the fool on it, as boys jump on the ice of a pond and defy it to break under them. so an immense tolerance of political rubbish had grown up. on decade after decade of indulgence the man of booming phrases and grandiosely noble professions had swelled into a marvel of inflation surpassing any barking frog at the zoo. that doing of hard and plain work well, which is the basis of all right living and success in men or nations, had grown almost dull in the sight of a people who took too seriously the trumpetings and naggings of the various fashionable schools of virtuosi in political blatancy. it would not be common sense to suppose that no psychological change of any moment would, in any case, have been wrought by a passage from that substantially stable world into a world in which the three great empires of continental europe have been ground to dust like ypres. anyhow, the adventure of finding our cooled and solid earth turning once more into a ball of fire under the foot would not have left the state of our minds quite as it had been. they are all the more changed now that most of us feel we have pulled through the scrape, scorched and battered, by our own sweat, and not by the leadership of those to whom we had too lazily given the places of mark in that rather childish old world before the smash came.
some of the chief ingredients in the new temper are a more vigilant scepticism; a new impatience of strident enunciations of vague, venerable, political principles; a rough instinctive application of something like the new philosophy of pragmatism to all questions; and an elated sense of the speed and completeness with which institutions and powers apparently founded on rock can be scoured away. great masses of men have become more freely critical of the claims of institutions and political creeds and parties which they used to accept without much scrutiny. it is not a temper that need be regarded with terror or reprobation. in itself it is neither good nor bad. it is the raw material of either good or evil, accordingly as it is guided—of barren destruction or of bold repair and improvement. but it is formidable. for men who have seen cities pounded to rubble, men who with little aid or guidance from their own rulers have chased emperors from their thrones, are pretty fully disengaged, at last, from the englishman's old sense of immutable fixity in institutions which he may find irksome or worthless. "there's comfort yet. they are assailable." if the holy roman empire has been knocked into smithereens, what public nuisance need remain?
